BRIXTON INCIDENT (1981)

Thirty years ago, before social media would be bandied about the London riots as a weapon / counter-weapon / buzzworthy topic of Internet conversation, another kind of social media was helping to interpret the riots of another London.

In the Brixton riots of April 1981, police made 82 arrests amongst an estimated 5,000 rioters. No one was killed, but the record shows 280 police injuries and 45 injuries to members of the public. (Compare those numbers to the latest statistics from London: 2275 people have been arrested for the 2011 riots, in which a total of six civilians have been killed.)

The ever eye-opening dj / rupture points to the “high quality UK dub-reportage” of those earlier riots, via reggae MCs Raymond Naptali and Roy Rankin’s “Brixton Incident.” It’s a very good song.

Within, we find a familiar list: angry young people, terrible Council flats, “no work for the unemployed,” and a “riot caused by the cops.” Here is how Time Magazine described the inspiration for the song back then:

It was the kind of warm spring Saturday afternoon that draws all of London into the streets. As two bobbies pounded their beat in Brixton, a grimy, racially mixed neighborhood south of the Thames, they stopped to question a black youth. A hostile crowd gathered, and suddenly all hell seemed to break loose. Rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails began to fly. As police reinforcements rushed in, an orgy of burning and looting swept down Railton Road, a principal neighborhood shopping avenue, leaving automobiles gutted and shops in flames. Streets were littered with looted appliances, clothing and costume jewelry. At the peak of the violence, more than 1,000 police in riot gear, huddled like Roman legionnaires behind shields, battled some 600 black West Indian youths, interspersed with a few masked white rioters.

The reverberations thundered most notably through the UK’s reggae and sky communities. The Clash, with bassist Paul Simenon on lead vocals, had predicted the events two years before the bricks started flying with the fantastic ‘Guns Of Brixton’, which was nicely resurrected in 2005 by Diplo and Santigold on ‘Guns of Brooklyn’ (mp3 via Fader). Out of the ashes emerged the literal swan songs of 2-Tone bands The Specials (‘Ghost Town’ also came out beforehand, but topped the pop charts during the riots) and The Selecter, whose ‘Bristol and Miami’, also commemorated violence that broke out in Miami that year following the police beating of a young black man. It’s a capella ending is wonderful.

And then there’s dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘The Great Insurrection.’

The riots were also captured on film, thanks to a Brixton resident named Clovis Salmon. Director Rachel Currie’s 2001 documentary The Battle for Brixton, offered an authoritative video chronicle of the riots, for BBC’s First Edition program, by drawing heavily on his footage. You can watch the documentary below.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Writes rupture:

One useful strategy is to remember the enormous differences between this week’s widespread top-down economic violence (US debt idiocy, Eurozone crisis, etc) whose perpetrators are so shadowy and slippery and difficult to envision or grasp versus the EZ news spectacle of photogenic ‘riot porn’ violence that also happens to be obsessed with the bodies of those doing it (not so much the causes).

At times like these, I see a lot of value in actions that help make the former as tangible as the latter.

That’s the work not just of reporters, but of citizens and artists too. What kind of media will come out of these new riots? How will people in another thirty years remember what happened in London? (Perhaps videos like this recent curbside diatribe, captured on an iPhone.)

Musically, there will be much to say. In March, the reggae world was rocked by the stabbing death of legendary producer Smiley Culture during a police raid of his home. And yet, in the smoldering wreckage of the riots this time lies yet another needless loss: much of the (possibly uninsured) stock of the city’s independent music industry.

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Thanks to Dangerous Minds.