{"id":5939,"date":"2023-08-15T08:27:09","date_gmt":"2023-08-15T13:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/?p=5939"},"modified":"2025-06-10T15:11:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T20:11:13","slug":"information-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/blog\/information-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Where’d You Get Your Information? (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Letter from 1993, with Unexplained Anachronisms<\/h2>\n
Tjinder Singh and his post-punk band Cornershop really, really care about information\u2014its technologies, its media, its creators, its consumers\u2014which, for the 1990s at least, is a little unusual. Why care about anything at all when punk has bequeathed them a license to lunge pell-mell down the abyss of heedless anger, smashing up everything and replacing it with nothing? Possibly because so much of Singh\u2019s music is about the bigotry of everyday life in England, and anger alone seems an inadequate response. Bigotry must be granted no quarter: \u201cThere\u2019s racists, sexists, homophobics; fight the powers that be!\u201d1<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n
Punk, in contrast, for all its sound and fury, discursively negated itself, ultimately signifying nothing. The true legacy of punk rock became visible as its DNA unraveled (ca. 1979), exposing a mess of internal contradictions, some of them quite nasty:<\/p>\n
\n
reaction \/ decadence<\/li>\n
right-wing \/ left-wing<\/li>\n
frenzy \/ sedation<\/li>\n
populism \/ elitism<\/li>\n
obscurity \/ celebrity<\/li>\n
working class \/ middle class<\/li>\n
DIY \/ EMI<\/li>\n
racism \/ liberalism<\/li>\n
streetwear \/ haute couture<\/em><\/li>\n
Sid Vicious \/ Vivienne Westwood<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Which isn\u2019t to say that Singh has not been influenced by punk, because he obviously has, but it\u2019s difficult to imagine how he could fully embrace an ethos riddled with so much terminal conflict. As the son of Sikh immigrants in 1980s England, racism was his daily reality: \u201c[racism] was always there, in the air, from being chased by motorbikes to being beaten up just for the sake of it. It was always there.\u201d2<\/sup><\/strong> Even the most generous possible view of punk must concede it is, in many respects, a form of white privilege, a lifestyle choice to which political radicalism is accessory (like a pair of Doc Martens) rather than essential, the best single piece of evidence for which is, ironically, the seminal Clash song, \u201cWhite Riot:\u201d<\/p>\n
White riot, \nI wanna riot; \nWhite riot, \nI wanna riot of my own.<\/p>\n
Black man got a lot of problems, \nBut he don\u2019t mind throwing a brick; \nWhite people go to school \nWhere they teach you how to be thick.3<\/sup><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This chorus is the tantrum of a spoiled child, covetous even to the point of coveting his black neighbor’s oppression, \u201cI wanna riot of my own,\u201d while the verse’s tetrameter (I think we have iambics here) will not scan\u2014it all sounds awkward, to my ear anyway, giving one of punk’s most famous songs a gawky, sophomoric dilettantism, or would have anyway had the song not been widely and fantastically misinterpreted as a neo-Nazi anthem. That so few could fathom any other interpretation does, it seems, point towards an embarrassing truth, that punk was something of a lifestyle choice: if the punks weren’t neo-Nazis, then what on earth were they so exercised over? The misinterpretation also eerily reinforced punk’s many connections with (and disconnections from) white supremacist movements.<\/p>\n
So while the anger and energy of punk must surely appeal to Singh emotionally, it would be surprising if he didn’t feel that the subjects of his songs call for more than the punk idiom can supply; if nothing else these subjects call for intellectual clarity, something quite beyond the limited and limiting capacities of punk’s ideological ambivalence. Even documenting his experiences of bigotry seems to interest Singh less than agitating for real change (the song \u201cChange\u201d is\u2014you guessed it\u2014all about the need for social change). Singh’s approach to songwriting must be influenced by his sense of being an outsider, a foreigner or alien, in Britain, a subject about which he has been quite open. The song \u201cEngland\u2019s Dreaming\u201d begins with a sample from what seems to be a science fiction film: \u201cPeople, we finally have to fight. We don\u2019t want to, but the people of Earth leave us no choice.\u201d4<\/sup><\/strong>\u00a0 At the same time, in interviews at least, he never seems entirely comfortable in the agitator role he has assumed; he embraces and then suddenly eschews its mantle.5<\/sup><\/strong> His early songs, however, belie that hesitance, and are fervently political. Critics generally regard Cornershop\u2019s debut E.P., In the Days of Ford Cortina<\/em>, as a call-to-arms, four-track masterpiece of early-nineties agit-punk.<\/p>\n
Singh’s breakthrough has been in recognizing that you can’t be effectively political without reliable information, and here he jumps leaps and bounds ahead of his contemporaries. One of his final punk-inflected songs cannily targets punk’s failure in this regard: \u201cClear all data, call all destroyer \/ Clear all data, call all destroyer.\u201d6<\/sup><\/strong> I have never before encountered a rock band so singularly preoccupied with a subject like information. Cornershop’s world is filled with information, and people are like sponges absorbing it.<\/p>\n
The most remarkable example of this preoccupation is their song \u201cWhere D\u2019U Get Your Information,\u201d the centerpiece of which is a fevered, hectoring chorus that simultaneously questions, challenges, and denounces, with knuckles-down vociferation:<\/p>\n
Where d\u2019u get your information \nWhere d\u2019u get your information \nWhere d\u2019u get your information \nWhere d\u2019u get your information.7<\/sup><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Not so impressive on the page, perhaps (I can better picture it spray-painted on a brick wall), but it sounds like sonic retribution, buzzing low-fi guitars that lurch and spark like downed power lines in a pool of rhythm section and vocals, shimmering depths of drama. Experience for yourself:<\/p>\n
[Audio recording removed for accessibility. The recording was the first 1 minute and 20 seconds of the song “Where D\u2019U Get Your Information” by the band Cornershop, \u21171993 Wiija Records]<\/p>\n
The chorus breaks upon you like a pulse thunderstorm, and makes me feel blindfolded-and-bound-to-a-wooden-chair like a political-prisoner-under-interrogation. Clearly, for Singh, the source of your information reveals something about your character. The song continues, sarcastically, \u201c& by the time we pull into Stockport \/ Well you\u2019re well informed in serial form,\u201d referring to the newsstand trash of working-class Lancashire, and to the readers whose opinions are synchronously serialized like ticker tape marching lockstep from a telegraph machine (\/ Or Stormtroopers boarding transport ships in Attack of the Clones<\/em>, final scene). And, of course, Singh named his band after the corner shops and newsstands where newspapers and magazines are displayed in dizzying density alongside comic books, lottery tickets, paperback novels, phone cards, postcards, street maps, and more. (For the reason Singh named his band Cornershop, see endnote 2<\/strong>):<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"http:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2023\/08\/1990_newsagent_GreatYarmouth_England_5660921948-e1691758693141.jpg\")
![\"Excerpt](\"http:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2023\/08\/MASS-OBS-1.jpg\" "\\"Excerpt")
![\"A](\"http:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2023\/08\/cornershop-review-scaled.jpg\")