This Is His Testimony: Jon Langford of the Mekons
This is his testimony. In 1991, Jon Langford and his mates from Leeds, the Mekons, had just missed their opportunity as rock-n-roll’s latest last best hope. After almost 15 years of lineup changes, a bunch of classic albums with lousy distribution, countless raucous alcohol-soaked tours and stylistic shifts from punk to country, dance and back, the Mekons were on the verge of saving rock music from big hair and empty heads when fights with A&M Records left their newest record without an outlet in the U.S., just as Nirvana opened up the radio to so-called “alternative rock.” They called that record “The Curse of the Mekons,” but their contract problems and bad luck didn’t piss them off as much as the fall of the Soviet Union and the media’s declaration of the “death of socialism.” “How can something really be dead when it hasn’t even happened,” long-time lefty Langford demands in the album’s highlight, “Funeral,” which concludes, “This funeral is for the wrong corpse!”
Last year marked the Mekons’ 25th anniversary, and Jon Langford has continued to be busier than ever. His Pine Valley Cosmonauts assembled an impressive line-up of underground country artists – including Neko Case and Steve Earle – released a well-received anti-death penalty benefit album, “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” early last year, and later in the year, he brought back many of the same artists to record, “The Bottle Let Me Down,” a tongue-in-cheek children’s album that parents could stomach. His alt.country band, the Waco Brothers, just wrapped up a tour on which Langford pulled double duty, playing in support of the Waco’s sixth disc, “New Deal,” as well as playing with tour openers the Sadies, with whom he just released a collaboration titled, “The Mayors of the Moon.” And, last fall, the Mekons marked their silver jubilee not with a compilation looking back on their career, but with an album of new material, “Out of Our Heads,” and a world club tour.
The Mekons Story
Langford spoke with The Socialist from his home in Chicago, on the eve of the Mekons’ tour. The Mekons, he says, were formed in punk’s first wave, with the idea that, “Your favorite band didn’t have to be people you never meet.” Indeed, the band got its start when schoolmates Langford, Tom Greenhaigh and Kevin Lycett borrowed their favorite band’s (and good friends), the Gang of Four’s, instruments to practice and record their new songs. The art school punk scene in Leeds, centered on the Mekons and Gang of Four, was more political, more intellectual and more danceable than London’s.
In the early days, Langford, Greenhaigh and Lycett released a string of 7″ singles, recorded on simple two track equipment, using borrowed instruments and whatever friends they could rope into the session to fill out the band. Their first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was a piss-take on the Clash’s “White Riot.” Langford says he has always disliked the romantic outsider stance of punk and some of its thoughtless rhetoric. “When you say ‘smash the system,'” he asks, “what the fuck are you talking about? The national health system?” He found the same problem in parts of the organized left. “I was in the Socialist Workers Party for about half an hour,” quips Langford, who describes himself as a Welsh socialist and an “unaffiliated lefty.”
The Mekons’ early singles attracted the attention of Virgin Records, which released their first album in 1979. Its title, “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen,” a reference to that old axiom about a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters and a work of Shakespeare, was also a commentary on the band’s limited aptitude and everybody-pick-an-instrument-and-play style. Another album followed, but the band fizzled as England’s gig scene grew violent and they became financially dependent on a record label that didn’t know what to do with them. They broke up in 1982, and moved on to new projects. Langford even sold his drums to the goth band Sisters of Mercy, who painted them black.
However, “even when the band thought we split up,” says Langford, “we hadn’t.” The band members continued to hang out and work on art projects together. They even did a few live shows as the Mekons to benefit the striking miners. In 1985, the Mekons made a startling comeback as a country band. They added talented new members, such as Steve Goulding on drums, Susie Honeymoon on fiddle, and singer Sally Timms and released “Fear and Whiskey” on their own independent record label. The album was Hank Williams distilled through punk rock. “Country music struck quite a few chords at that point in our lives,” he says, as a string of broken relationships and too much hard drinking resulted in songs that were stark and personal, but also warm – not to mention musically accomplished.
Two more country albums followed, with better distribution in America, as did other sounds and influences. “Once we got past the first Year Zero days of punk,” he says, “we started to get into the idea of folk music, dance music, reggae.” Along with the new sounds came new members, who seemed to come and go at a rate that could populate several new bands a year, although Langford bristles at the idea that there have been that many personnel changes. “It’s kind of an open door policy, but there’s a core of people,” he says, although he likes the idea of adding younger members and having the band go on. “Here’s the Mekons,” he jokes, “with no one from the Mekons.”
The Curse of the Mekons
Their work in the 80’s made the Mekons critical darlings with a cult-like fan following, and brought them to A&M records. Their first album for A&M should have made them stars. “Destroy your safe and happy lives,” they demanded on the opening track of “The Mekons’ Rock and Roll.” The album was packed full of super-charged rock and rave-ups, but, ever the intellectuals, the band deconstructed their chosen art form throughout the album. One track offers a prostitution analogy for rock-n-roll; others use imperialism and consumerism. “The battles we fought were long and hard, just not to be consumed by rock and roll,” goes one refrain. Unfortunately, their second experience on a corporate record label proved to be more frustrating than the Virgin days. The album’s cover art, which incorporated a licensed image of Elvis Presley, tied the album up in lawsuits and delayed its release. When it finally hit record stores, it was poorly promoted.
More battles with A&M followed. The band wanted to release more albums. The label wanted fewer. Of course, the label also wanted more commercial material. A&M declined to release “Curse of the Mekons,” and it was available in America only as an import for a decade. The Mekons’ curse continued when they moved from A&M to Loud Records, a short-lived subsidiary of Warner Brothers, which tied them up in red tape for two years and never released a single note of music recorded by the band. When the Mekons were finally released from their contract, they immediately released the superb “I (Heart) Mekons” on the independent Touch and Go Records label and never looked back.
“I don’t work for major labels anymore,” Langford says today. Despite his own problems with the major labels over the years, he says he’s mostly uninvolved with the recent artists’ rebellion at the major labels. “There’s such a disparity between musicians,” he says, “that I don’t quite feel a part of that Don Henley struggle.” Still, he’s incredulous at the way the system is set up. “Somebody gives you some money,” he explains, “which you then owe them, to make something which they then own. I can understand why someone who sells three million records gets pissed off.”
Langford manages to eke out a living for himself through his art. “My wife will kill me if I do any more work for no money. For my next benefit album I have to do,” he jokes, “I promised her I’d embezzle all the money.” Working for indie labels, he says that he receives modest royalty checks about six months after a record is released, but that he would have to record about four or five records a year in order for that money to translate into a living wage. His biggest source of money recently was the use of two Waco Brothers songs in episodes of the HBO series “Sex and the City,” which, after repeats and DVD releases, translated in a “sizeable” royalty check.
Heaven and Back
These days, Langford, like the rest of the Mekons, no longer lives in Leeds. He moved to Chicago in 1992 to be with his then-girlfriend, Helen, who is now his wife. The couple has two children, 5-year-old Jimmy and newborn Tommy. He says that it’s because of his children that he finally became involved in U.S. political issues, most notably the campaign to end the death penalty. “I felt like it’s time I should step up,” he says, describing it as a “winnable fight.” On “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” Langford assembled over a dozen Chicago-area alternative country artists, along Nashville’s Steve Earle among others, to cover classic songs about murder and mayhem, with the proceeds benefiting the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Langford speaks very warmly of the Chicago music scene, which he feels has even more of a sense of community than the old punk days in Leeds.
“I’m a socialist because I believe in a sense of community,” he says. “I think a community needs to look after people, rather than rip them off. It’s as simple as that.” His sense of community is underscored by his strong identification with the three places he has called home over the years. “I feel like Chicago’s the only place I could live in America,” he says. Ten years in, Chicago (and America) are as much a part of his identity as Leeds and Wales, whose working class identity and “people got to work, people got to eat” ethos he credits for his socialist politics.
Jon Langford will continue to be an activist in the U.S. on his own terms, and despite his own ambivalence about the organized left. “A lot of people on the left seem to fear musicians and artists, for some reason, as being free spirits, or kinda sneer at them for not being intellectually rigorous,” he says. “Music reflects social change,” he explains. “I don’t think it instigates social change, but you can be a morale builder.”
This article was originally published in the March-April 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”
Rise of the Loompa Proletariat
In the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka employs in his factory Oompa Loompas, strange little orange men who seemingly work for free. The Oompa Loompas, who sing while they work, seem to be charged with much manual labor.
They mix the chocolate and other confections, carry out Wonka’s orders, manually power his personal yacht and otherwise do his bidding-all at the beck and call of his whistle. After seeing just one minute of the movie with the Oompa Loompas on the screen, one obsesses about this work arangement. Are these Oompa Loompas slaves, or indentured servants? Are they salaried employees? Is this some Stalinist work camp?
Wonka answers this question himself early on when several visitors on a tour of his factory raise these troubling issues. The Oompa Loompas, he explains, come from a far off place called “Lumpaland,” where, because of their diminutive size, they were in constant danger of being gobbled up by assorted “fierce creatures.” And so, in what he would have us believe was an altruistic gesture, he “freed” them from their native land and had them brought to his factory in the “greatest of secrecy,” where they could live in “peace and safety”…and become his new source of labor.
Were the pint-sized immigrants scabs? It is explained earlier in the movie that years ago Wonka had fired all of his employees, charging them with industrial espionage; trading secrets with his chief competitor, Slugworth, Inc. Wonka closed his doors and ceased production. Three years later, the factory began production again, but, mysteriously to the public, without hiring workers and without opening its doors. At this point, it seems clear that Wonka brought in the Oompa Loompas to solve his labor problems, and kept his doors closed to keep nosy government investigators out in order to keep his little sweat shop running.
The Oompa Loompas certainly seem to be property. In fact, one of the guests on the tour of the plant, bratty Veruca Salt, demands that her father buy her one. He complies and actually haggles with Wonka to purchase one of the little orange men. But Willy Wonka strangely refuses! Is this mere greed, a desire to keep all the hard working Oompa Loompas to himself? The answer comes shortly when Wonka takes his guests to his top secret laboratory. On the door is a large sign, clearly stating, “Top Secret: No Unauthorized Oompa Loompas Allowed Inside.” Behind the door toil dozens of Oompa Loompas. Clearly not your average slaves, they’re actually busy mixing and inventing new candies! These Oompa Loompas are skilled artisans, setting their own hours and work loads.
Evil slave-driver?
How is it that Wonka trusts the Oompa Loompas with such trade secrets as the formula of the “Everlasting Gobstopper,” but fired his human workers out of mistrust. Wonka openly fears that Slugworth will learn his secret formulas. Either international patent and copyright laws don’t exist here, or they don’t apply to these candies. (A third possibility that Wonka never thought to patent his creations seems too far-fetched.) In any event, the result is clear: in order to maintain the massive rent on his products, the kind of rent that makes new products and marketing schemes t.v. news and causes panics in candy stores when the supply “Scrum Diddlyumptious” bars has run out, Wonka must rely on secrecy. He shows that he will go to any length to
maintain secrecy. He has already displaced hundreds of factory workers.
He uses fear and intimidation on his guests on the tour, as well as the general public. And yet he trusts the Oompa Loompas with his trade secrets.
Abused worker?
This was doubtless part of his arrangement with the Oompa Loompas when
he brought them to work for him. Freedom from fierce creatures in exchange for labor. Labor in exchange for housing. And since the Oompa Loompas remain within the Wonka factory and on the Wonka property at all times, there was no way they could trade secrets with the enemy. Wonka, a true capitalist, had fully exploited the immigrant workers!
Or had he? There is a clear dichotomy between the unskilled Oompa Loompas who mix the candy, power Wonka’s yacht and otherwise toil away, and the skilled artisan Oompa Loompas who invent the candy, set their own hours and have the run of the place. These Oompa Loompas are clearly the intellectual superiors of the unskilled variety. Surely, they must appreciate their own situation. They hold in their minds and hands the very information that could ruin Wonka. If they were displeased with the pay or treatment they got from him, they could easily find work elsewhere. Slugworth would, in Wonka’s own words, “give his false teeth” to learn Wonka’s trade secrets, as well as double the pay and benefits of the Oompa Loompas who could be the key to a greater market share.
It would seem that these Oompa Loompas had come to appreciate their fortunate situation and made a deal with Wonka, a little “partnership between labor and capital if you will. And all they had to do was sell out their brother workers, the unskilled Oompa Loompas to achieve it. So, the skilled Oompa Loompas got the best pay, hours, and, one would assume, choice lodging, while the unskilled variety got the shaft.
And yet, they seem so happy. They actually sing while they work. They sing, in fact, about how great it is to work for Wonka and how everyone should be like the “Oompa Loompa doopity doo.” (Okay, they’re not the best songwriters in the world.) This is what gave the impression at first that Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory was a Stalinist work camp, that the workers believe their exploitation to be freedom. The Oompa Loompa’s songs could be characterized as agit-prop.
It isn’t Stalinist propaganda, but something very similar. The workers are singing about labor’s goals being the same as management’s. That’s how Wonka and the skilled Oompa Loompas got them to go along with the
agreement! You’re job security depends on the success of this company, they must have been told. Sacrifices had to be made for profits. After all, if the company made no profits, the Oompa Loompas would be out of a job, and thrown back to Lumpaland. Now that’s motivation!
There seems to be one thing missing from this whole scenario. I used the term “brother worker” intentionally. All the Oompa Loompas we see in the film are males. Discounting the possibility that Oompa Loompas are radically different from us anatomically, there must be female Oompa Loompas. Where are they? It may be safe to assume that this is the final part of the arrangement between Wonka and the Oompa Loompa overseers. It is, by this point, clear that they are salaried workers, paid, albeit unequally, in food, shelter, clothing and protection. These payments for their work is not only for them, but their families. Wonka only puts the adult males to work. The women and children do not have to work.
Now, let’s put on our econimist hats and put this little arrangement into perspective. From the little we see of the world outside the Factory, using Charlie (who doesn’t seem to have a last name) and his family as an example of the typical family, women and children had to work as well. Charlie has a paper route, and his mother took in laundry. These two incomes had to provide for six people: Charlie, his mother, and four bedridden grandparents. (All four in the same bed. Kinky.) There is no father evident in this family. He presumably had to leave town when Wonka closed his factory and the job market soured. But, assuming that the father was in the picture three years prior and worked at the Wonka factory, his earnings would not have to provide for seven people alone. That burden was shared with his wife and son. So, previously, Wonka was paying his human workers enough money necessary to produce and reproduce just themselves for another day of labor.
Given the population density of this area and its presumed saturation of the job market, the existence of a labor union is doubtful, and the wages doubtlessly depressed, so Wonka could easily pay his workers that little. Let’s use as the sum of the wages paid ten Wonka dollars per worker per day. This labor afforded Wonka a commanding share of the chocolate market, however, it was beginning to cost him his rent. So Wonka downsized his entire workforce.
Now, with the Oompa Loompas employed as labor, Wonka had to pay enough money to produce and reproduce each Oompa Loompa and his family.
Assuming a typical Oompa Loompa family of husband, wife and 2.3 children, and assuming that an Oompa Loompa, being half the size of a human worker needs only half the food, shelter and clothing, Wonka would be paying each Oompa Loompa 21 and a half Wonka dollars per day, or, its equivalent in food, shelter and clothing. This is also assuming that Wonka employed an equivalent number of Oompa Loompas as humans. For this increase of $11.50W per worker per day, Wonka gets serious increases in productivity.
For the human worker, Wonka got ten hours work for $10W pay. This is
assuming that Wonka is a fairly liberal employer in a rather Dickensian
atmosphere. Given that the Oompa Loompa worker lives where he works, and also given that the Oompa Loompa sees a personal stake in the success of the company, he obviously works harder and longer than the human worker. At this point, any speculation as to the amount of the increase in productivity would go way beyond merely bordering on absurdity, but sufficed to say, it would be substantial. And it would give Wonka a permanent edge over competitor Slugworth, whose human workers could never keep up.
The other edge it would give Wonka is the aforementioned rent. With workers that can not only be counted on to create new candies but to keep the formulas for said candies top secret, Wonka can retain his huge market share and status as a popular icon of confectionery capitalism, and leave Slugworth permanently in a distant second. The benefits to Wonka are obvious.
For the Oompa Loompas, they get the leave a country where they would have died. For the Oompa Loompas in charge, it means freedom, respect and the necessities of life for them and their families. The unskilled Oompa Loompas are duped into believing that this labor is gratitude and payment for their very lives and the lives of their families. With that artificial outlook, it’s easy to see why they would be so happy. Maybe Oompa Loompa ignorance is bliss.
[This article originally appeared in Vol. 6, issue #11 (April 1998) of Lumpen.]