STRATEGIC HAMLETS IN HELMAND

Remember Strategic Hamlets? It was the policy whereby the US took Vietnamese citizens away from the Communist influence of their villages and relocated them to new villages where they could become new model citizens and resist the Vietcong.



It backfired in Vietnam, but now apparently it’s back in Afghanistan. As NATO plans an assault on a Taliban-controlled town in Helmand Province, tens of thousands of residents are being told to move out before the attack begins. Indeed, they don’t have much choice – leaflets handed out by NATO forces warning of the attack told people “to leave the area or be killed”.

The policy to win hearts and minds will fail in Afghanistan too, because hearts and minds have already been lost. Residents of Marjah are alienated from the war that goes on around them. “There are Taliban all over the place and foreign troops around Marjah,” one says. “So I was scared that we might get hurt.” “Everybody is worried that they’ll get caught in the middle when this operation starts,” says another. People are caught in the crossfire of a war between two sides which don’t represent them. During the last six months, nearly 100 civilians have been killed in US air strikes for every two so-called insurgents killed (the US claims to have killed 25,000 insurgents in total).

No serious survey of Afghan civilian casualties has been carried out since the summer of 2002, when it was estimated that 10,000 civilians had been killed. That was nine months into the fighting; one can only guess how many have been killed after eight and a half years of occupation. And this distinction between civilians and insurgents is a false one, at least for the occupying forces: since they don’t really know who is an insurgent and who is not, the whole Afghan population has become the enemy.

At the end of 2008, British forces managed to transport a turbine through 180km of road from Kandahar to the Kajaki dam in Helmand Province. It was hoped that this would triple electricity production, but almost immediately NATO admitted that it might never be used, since Taliban domination of the area meant they could not guarantee the delivery of a second turbine. The obsessive – and, in a sense, rather heroic – British mission had enabled the Taliban to bed down in many towns along the Helmand River – towns like Marjah, in fact.



As Adam Curtis has described in his excellent series of blog posts on Afghanistan, the Kajaki Dam project has a surreal and ill-fated history. It began soon after the Second World War, when King Zahir Shah was looking for ways to re-invest the profits of the burgeoning Afghan fur trade. He hired Morrison Knutsen (the engineers who had built the Hoover Dam) to build a hydroelectric dam in Helmand which would irrigate the region and make agricultural more profitable.

In 1952, with aid from the US, the Helmand Valley Authority was set up along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority of the 1930s. Dams and canals were built, but they waterlogged the area and made the water cooler, which made the land unsuitable for viticulture and orchards. Helmand was forced to grow grain instead.

But the Afghan and US governments were undeterred. Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud oversaw the resettlement of Pashtun tribes into the area (the city of Lashkar Gah was built as a headquarters for the HVA in this period).

But the problems caused by the dam grew. Hard rock below the earth’s surface compounded the waterlogging, and when deep holes were bored into the earth to drain the water away, 10% of the land was removed from cultivation. When crop yields were found to be falling, Americans tried to revolutionise agriculture, which meant the Pashtun settlers had to be uprooted. They refused to go.

In 1969 there was a drought; the Helmand river and the new reservoir created by the dam dried up and wheat yields were the lowest in the world. The ensuing food crisis destabilised the king, and in 1973 Daoud ousted his cousin the King from power. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Helmand Valley Project ended, and the abandoned land was used to grow poppies.

In the 1990s, the Taliban built a hydroelectric plant to bring electricity to Kandahar. Finally, after 50 years in the making, the dam was completed. But in October 2001, the US bombed the dam’s powerhouse. Its future remains in question. The US, the USSR and various forms of Afghan government (including the Taliban) have, at different times, tried to use the dam as a way of regenerating or destroying Helmand Province, according to their own political goals. If the dam could speak, it would bear and ironic and despairing witness to Afghan politics over the last 60 years.

CANCEL HAITI'S DEBT

Here are links to two articles by Gary Younge and Richard Kim on the West's refusal to cancel Haiti's debt, a debt which is itself a result of historic demands and interventions by the West.

As Younge rightly says, "Haiti needs a bail out." But Western governments have been as slow in agreeing a just policy towards the people of Haiti as they were quick to bail out some of the biggest corporations and institutions in the world.

Without such justice, Haiti will be saddled with even more debt in years to come. The earthquake caused such destruction because its distant and recent history have left it in a uniquely vulnerable position.

Haiti became independent in 1804, after a victorious slave rebellion against colonial France. Within 20 years of independence, this infant republic had been forced to pay reparations to French slave-owners to compensate for loss of earnings (how does one begin to explain such repulsive hypocrisy?), and by the turn of the 20th century, it was spending 80% of its budget on repayments.

During the 20th century, both France and the US supported Papa Doc's dictatorship, and tolerated / sponsored the coup which deposed the democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the middle of the last decade. In the 1990s, the IMF's structural adjustment programme reduced Haiti's economic independence by slashing its tariffs (Haiti used to be a net exporter of rice, but is now forced to import most of its rice from the US).

And this year, two days after the earthquake hit, the IMF loaned Haiti $100m, to be added to its existing $165m debt. The conditions of this loan are that Haiti increases its utility bills and freezes wages.

The IMF must write off Haiti's debts, and other lenders (the Inter-American Development bank) must be pressurised to follow suit. As Younge says, this "would not be an act of charity, but reimbursement and reparation. This is not a hand out but a hand back. In terms of Haiti's needs, it would be the beginning not the end. The country needs investment in its social and civic infrastructure so that it can shape its own future. It needs the kind of long-term interest from honest brokers that does not arrive for a coup or disaster and then leave when the cameras are gone." Otherwise this will be disaster capitalism of the sickest kind.

OFF THE WAGON

My dentist prescribed me a week's course of metronidazole last Monday to get rid of a gum infection. The packet instructed me not to drink alcohol until at least 48 hours after I had taken the last antibiotic. Nine consecutive days of not drinking - this is by far the longest dry spell of my adult life.

So what have I learned?

- that I can get to sleep quite easily at night without alcohol (which may seem a worrying point to make, but I wasn't at all sure that I could before)
- that I can dance without alcohol (in normal circumstances this may have proved impossible, but in the Silent Disco room on Friday night, I mashed-potatoed rather effectively to a hip-hop remix of Ray Charles's "I've got a woman")
- that abstinence does not make you sleep any better, or make you feel any fresher the next day (not that I feel too bad anyway)
- that I am hopelessly besotted with, if not quite dependent on, decent lager and red wine (though Bitburger is by far the best of the non-alcoholic beers, and not too bad a substitute)
- that Kaliber beer is a pox upon the world of soft beverages - it tastes like a malted milk biscuit dunked in a pint of stale bitter, liquidised, and whizzed through a soda-stream.

Anyway, it is with some relief that I uncorked a bottle of Fleurie this evening. It represents the end of an educative, cleansing and rather self-righteous era, but at the same time a rather regrettable one, and not one which I wish to repeat.

Cheers!

MAKE BEAUBOURG BEND!

The streets of Paris have seen more revolutions and agitations than most, and after each one, the victors (the Jacobins in 1789, Cavaignac and the National Assembly in 1848, Thiers in 1871, the Gaullists in 1968) have re-built Paris to suit their political agenda. Haussman’s re-ordering of the city along the lines of political and capitalist power is the most notorious of these reconstructions, but in fact Haussmanisation continued well into the twentieth century, and is likely to exert itself again in the twenty-first.

Roger’s and Piano’s Centre Pompidou, built along the Rue Beaubourg, presents itself as a formal architectural exercise – a building turned inside-out, so that its skeleton (frame, joins, pipes etc) is exposed, and the distinction between its inner workings and outer facade becomes blurred. It is apparently as apolitical as the Eiffel Tower, and as supreme a feat of engineering (though altogether less awe-inspiring). Richard Rogers had come out earlier in the 1970s as embracing the non-ideological architecture of the USA, in contrast to the opaque theory of the European modernists and post-modernists.

But actually, the Pompidou is a conceit, both in its content and its context. First, the context. Following the shock of May 1968 to the political elite, successive governments and Mayoral Offices (most notably that of Jacques Chirac) looked to the urban fabric of Paris to see how it could be made less ripe for subversion and more amenable to the maintenance of state and corporate power. This was achieved via three principal methods: the gesture of ripping up the streets (the cobbles of the Latin Quarter, the paving stones under which the revolutionaries uncovered the beach, were paved over), the removal of unauthorised areas of assembly (such as the vegetable markets at Les Halles) and the construction of iconic buildings by big-name architects, which replaced real-life on the streets with a marvellous spectacle. Needless to say, the dispersal of undesirable people from the Fourth arrondissement to the banlieues naturally followed.

The sickly pocket of Beaubourg was sanitised in 1977 by the construction of the Centre Pompidou (a building which couldn’t be less Parisian if it tried). The Pompidou – the most iconic of buildings, by the biggest of big-named architects – could therefore never have been apolitical, and the decision to use the site as a cultural centre is highly significant.



And what of the content? Well, for all the hype of high technology, today it now looks bland and dated, like a very old, clunky IBM computer. Hi-tech is everywhere now – it is the genus of choice for the unimaginative constructor of offices and supermarkets all over the world. It is a superior example of the genre, granted, but its design was clearly chosen as a means of gentrification. It appears to have been flown into the Right Bank at random, a tokenistic nod to modernisation and globalisation (for there is little about the Pompidou that is in keeping with the local environment). Its concept, too, is shaky: those coloured tubes and elevators which seem to blast visitors upwards like atoms in the hadron collider are decorative rather than functional.

The Pompidou has succeeded in its main aims: of shifting dissent, drawing the masses into the Plateau Beaubourg, institutionalising culture, erasing the distinction between high and low culture (though, in so doing, replacing both with a smooth, smug middlebrow culture). Tourists come to look at the Pompidou (and no doubt the marketing men know for how long the average visitor stops to stare), and some venture inside (which we did not) to join others in an act of mass consumption. “What one comes to learn in a hypermarket – hyperreality of the commodity,” writes Baudrillard, “[...] is what one comes to learn at Beaubourg: the hyperreality of culture.”



One goes, one gazes, but one cannot make an imprint on the Pompidou (this is true of all cultural institutions). And since one cannot participate in such a space, the space ends up making its imprint on its visitors. “That,” says Baudrillard, “is mass production, not in the sense of a massive production for use by the masses, but the production of the masses. The masses as the final product of all sociality and, at the same time, as putting an end to sociality, because these masses that one wants us to believe are the social, are on the contrary the site of the implosion of the social.”

But this implies what Baudrillard describes as the “stockpiling of men” (analogous to a museum’s stockpiling of cultural artefacts), and it is in this inert assembly of bodies inside the Pompidou that he imagines its paradoxical downfall. The building will buckle if more than 30,000 people are inside at any one time, and this is the challenge that Baudrillard presents to the masses. “Make Beaubourg bend!” he demands. “If the masses magnetised by the structure become a destructive variable of the structure itself [...] then Beaubourg constitutes the most audacious object and the most successful happening of the century.”

Could even the canny Jacques Chirac ever have envisaged such an expression of people power?

'YOU REQUIRE A MALE HARE, KILLED IF POSSIBLE IN MOUNTAINOUS COUNTRY...'

My only regret of a wonderfully, whistle-stoppish weekend in Paris (my first ever, DV's first in a very long while) is that we couldn't get a table at La Pomponette, a classic bistro in Montmartre, where they serve Rabbit in Aspic as a starter. We managed to find a very jolly place down the road, less busy and quite a bit less expensive, and I managed to try frogs' legs for the first time (to my tongue, they taste like bony supermarket chicken, only blander ... to complete this cliched little picture, DV had snails for a starter and then we both wolfed down steaks, digested with the aid of good red plonk). But alas, neither rabbit nor hare passed my lips all weekend.

Next time we go back, I intend to find a restaurant that serves Lievre a la Royale, a truly absurd recipe devised by a Senator called Aristide Couteaux, and written up in his column in Le Temps in 1898 (the same year that Zola published "J'Accuse!" in defence of Alfred Dreyfus). It takes fully six and half hours to prepare cook, and is included in Elizabeth David's Book of Mediterranean Food.

In truth, it is less a recipe than a full-blown narrative, a travelogue around the hills of Poitou, a derive into the innards of a hare, and an expression of the excess and corruption of the Third Republic. It describes, in other words, a thoroughly immoral dish, which should be executed with merciless precision. If you have the stomach for it, there are pictures to accompany the excursion here:

'Ingredients

'You require a male hare, with red fur, killed if possible in mountainous country; of French descent (characterised by the light nervous elegance of head and limbs), weighing from 5 to 6 pounds, that is to say older than a leveret but still adolescent. The important thing is that the hare should have been cleanly killed and so not have lost a drop of blood.

'The fat to cook it: 2 or 3 tablespoons of goose fat, 1/4 pound of fat bacon rashers; 1/4 pound of bacon in one piece.

'Liquid: 6 oz of good red wine vinegar. Two bottles of Macon or Medoc, whichever you please, but in any case not less than 2 years old.

'Utensils: A daubiere, or oblong stewing pan, of well-tinned copper, 8 inches high, 15 inches long, 8 inches wide and possessed of a hermetically closing cover; a small bowl in which to preserve the blood of the hare, and later to stir it when it comes to incorporating it in the sauce; a double-handled vegetable chopper; a large shallow serving dish; a sieve; a small wooden pestle.

'The wine to serve: Preferably a St Julien or Moulin a Vent.

'Preliminary preparations:

'Skin and clean the hare. Keep aside the heart, the liver, and the lungs. Keep aside also and with great care the blood.

'In the usual way prepare a medium-sized carrot, cut into four; 4 medium onions each stuck with a clove; 20 cloves of garlic; 40 shallots; a bouquet garni, composed of a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, and some pieces of parsley.

'Get ready some charcoal, in large pieces, which you will presently be needing, burning fast.

'First Operation (from half-past twelve until four o'clock):

'At 12.30 coat the bottom and sides of the stewpan with the goose fat; then at the bottom of the pan arrange a bed of rashers of bacon.

'Cut off the head and neck of the hare: leaving only the back and the legs. Then place the hare at full length on the bed of bacon, on its back. Cover it with another layer of bacon. Now all your bacon rashers are used up.

'Now add the carrot; the onions; the 20 cloves of garlic; the 40 shallots; the bouquet garni.

'Pour over the hare (i) the 6 oz of red wine vinegar, and (ii) a bottle and a half of 2-year-old Macon or Medoc.

'Season with pepper and salt in reasonable quantity.

'At one o'clock. The daubiere being thus arranged, put on the lid and set the fire going (either a gas stove or an ordinary range). On the top of the lid place 3 or 4 large pieces of charcoal in an incandescent state, well alight and glowing.

'Regulate your heat so that the hare may cook for 3 hours, over a gentle and regular fire, continuously.

'Second Operation (to be carried out during the first cooking of the hare):

'First chop exceedingly finely the four following ingredients, chopping each one separately: (i) 1/4 lb of bacon, (ii) the heart, liver and lungs of the hare, (iii) 10 cloves of garlic, (iv) 20 shallots.

'The chopping of the garlic and the shallots must be so fine that each of them attain as nearly as possible a molecular state.

'This is one of the first conditions of success of this marvellous dish, in which the multiple and diverse perfumes and aromas melt into a whole so harmonious that neither one dominates, nor discloses its particular origin, and so arouse some preconceived prejudice, however regrettable.

'The bacon, the insides of the hare, the garlic, and shallots being chopped very fine, and separately, blend them all together thoroughly, so as to obtain an absolutely perfect mixture. keep this mixture aside.

'Third Operation (from four o'clock until a quarter to seven):

'At four o'clock. Remove the stewpan from the fire. Take the hare out very delicately; put it on a dish. Then remove all the debris of the bacon, carrot, onions, garlic, shallot, which may be clinging to it; return these debris to the pan.

'The Sauce. Now take a large deep dish and a sieve. Empty the contents of the pan into the sieve, which you have placed over the dish; with a small wooden pestle pound the contents of the sieve, extracting all the juice, which forms a coulis in the dish.

'Mixing the coulis and the hachis (the chopped mixture). Now comes the moment to make use of the mixture which was the subject of the second operation. Incorporate this into the coulis.

'Heat the half bottle of wine left over from the first operation. Pour this hot wine into the mixture of coulis and hachis and stir the whole together.

'At half past four. Return to the stewpan (i) the mixture of coulis and hachis, (ii) the hare, together with any of the bones which may be become detached during the cooking.

'Return the pan to the stove, with the same gentle and regular fire underneath and on the top, for another 1 1/2 hours' cooking.

'At six o'clock. As the excess of fat, issuing from the necessary quantity of bacon, will prevent you from judging the state of the sauce, you must now proceed to operate a first removal of the fat. Your work will not actually be completed until the sauce has become sufficiently amalgamated to attain a consistence approximating to that of a puree of potatoes; not quite, however, for if you tried to make it too thick, you would end by so reducing it that there would not be sufficient to moisten the flesh (by nature dry) of the hare.

'Your hare having therefore had the fat removed, can continue to cook, still on a very slow fire, until the moment comes for you to add the blood which you have reserved with the utmost care as has already been instructed.

'Fourth Operation (quarter of an hour before serving):

'At quarter to seven. The amalgamation of the sauce proceeding successfully, a fourth and last operation will finally and rapidly bring it to completion.

'Addition of blood to the hare. With the addition of the blood, not only will you hasten the amalgamation of the sauce but also give it a fine brown colour; the darker it is the more appetising. This addition of the blood should not be made more than 30 minutes before serving; it must also be preceded by a second removal of the fat.

'Therefore, effectively remove the fat; after which, without losing a minute, turn to the operation of adding the blood.

'(i) Whip the blood with a fork, until, if any of it has become curdled, it is smooth again.

'(ii) Pour the blood into the sauce, taking care to stir the contents of the pan from top to bottom and from right to left, so that the blood will penetrate into every corner of the pan.

'Now taste; add pepper and salt if necessary. A little later (45 minutes at a maximum) get ready to serve.

'Arrangements for serving:

'At seven o'clock. Remove from the pan your hare, whose volume by this time has naturally somewhat shrunk.

'At any rate, in the centre of the serving dish, place all that still has the consistency of meat, the bones, entirely denuded, and now useless, being thrown away, and now finally around this hare en compote pour the admirable sauce which has been so carefully created.'

Elizabeth David, following the senator's advice, notes that "to use a knife to serve the hare would be a sacrilege. A spoon alone is amply sufficient."

ASGER JORN, PARIS BY NIGHT

From Jorn's Modifications series, in which he detourned bad paintings he found in basements or flea markets with swirls and spatters and daubings of thick paint. The spectre hovering above the man's head is rather like those childish figures in paintings like Untitled, or in the Art Brut paintings of his CoBrA colleagues Constant and Appel. But as Claire Gilman points out in an essay about Jorn, whereas they took old paintings and completely covered them with paint, erasing the original image in the process, Jorn's swirls are more like notes in the margin of a book - commenting on the original, trying to deface it or add to it or improve on it, but ultimately "testifying to the impenetrability of the mute canvas and the failure of immanent deconstructive strategies."

"WHITE MEN DON'T LIE"

Just over a year ago, four hurricanes hit Haiti in 30 days. 800 people died. Yet, when the same storms passed over Cuba and hit just as hard, only 4 people died. Earthquakes of a similar magnitude to the one that has just devastated Haiti have hit other cities over the years, but none has been annihilated like Port-au-Prince has. How can this be? Its infrastructure may have become more fragile as a result of earlier storms and quakes, but make no mistake: this is not some unavoidable consequence of nature: the dire situation in Haiti is man-made.

Peter Hallward describes how the international community has blocked the UN from having anything other than a military role since the coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in 2004. 75% of the electorate had voted for Aristide, but he was considered too much of a threat by Haiti's tiny but all-powerful elite and was forced from power. Haitians are now angry, and desperately poor - more than half the population live on less than a dollar a day. Their economy and infrastructure has been decimated by structural adjustment. As Hallward says, "the city's basic infrastructure - running water, electricity, roads etc - remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil."

As k-punk says, the responses to Hallward's article suggest that talking about Haiti's history is Marxist, not to mention immoral. Some construct a false, straw man argument that accuses anybody who doubts the international community's intentions of refusing to give to the Disaster Relief Fund. Well, fuck 'em - these people are clearly poisonous. Even though one has no real idea whether one's contribution will ever get to Port-au-Prince (Hillary Clinton and Ban Ki-Moon can get in, but food packages apparently cannot), one should surely cross one's fingers and give anyway.

Peter Hallward interviewed Aristide in 2006, a couple of years after the coup that forced him out. It is fascinating, especially his insights on working with international partners who are racist ("There is a psychological legacy of slavery: to lie for the white man isn't really lying at all, since white men don't lie") and who still see his country as a colony ("the Americans demanded that I dismiss these senators, what was I supposed to do? What would happen if a foreign government insisted that the US President dismiss an elected senator? It's absurd. The whole situation is simply racist.")

Make your donation here.

PARISIAN OBLIVION

"It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de la Arbalete conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?"



Off to Paris tomorrow, so we will find out if Guy was right!

MODERN NATURE

On Saturday - a very dark, wet, leaden Saturday - we drove to Dungeness from Rye. The contrast couldn't have been starker. Rye is the destination of choice for tourists in search of cobbled streets, cake shops and windows full of antiques - a picturesque former coastal town which, over the years, has steadily receded away from the sea. Dungeness is a coastal headland, a dumping-ground for shingle, and home to two of Britain's biggest nuclear power-stations.

DV thought it felt like a border-town, a wild, dangerous place whose inhabitants carry shotguns and hold up unsuspecting drivers. The village of Dungeness, such that it is, is composed of shacks, prefabs, huts and a few brick houses, strewn randomly across the spit, each one apparently as far away as possible from its neighbour. There are two pubs, a couple of shops battered by the salt air, two lighthouses (once there were five), a railway and - of course - those two gigantic reactors.



And she's right - it does feel like a border town. But a border between where and where? Between the East Sussex coast and the sea I suppose, but it's more otherwordly than that, like a non-place, somewhere extraterrestrial like an Yves Tanguy landscape. Both spatially and temporally, one feels like one is about to step off the end of the world.

But for all this, Dungeness has become a peculiarly desirable residence. Houses and shacks sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds; it is a haunt for the bohemians in nearby Hastings. Derek Jarman once owned a house here - a tidy little place made of jet-black timber with bright-yellow window-frames - and his serene garden is still open to the public.

Not much else in Dungeness feels public, or in any way hospitable. Tours around the power stations - only one of which now generates power - have been stopped for security reasons, and ecologists fear that the unique ecosystem which is a result of the by-products of nuclear power (rare birds thrive in the warm waters that are pumped into the sea from Dungeness B, and a third of all the species of plant native to Britain can be found on the headland) will be washed away by climate change, including the stations themselves.



The sound mirrors built at Greatstone, just along the coast, to detect First World War airplanes before the days of radar can also no longer be visited, except by arrangement. Designed to pick up and absorb sound waves from approaching aircraft, it was claimed that one could also hear trains leaving Paris if one stood close by. They have been saved - underpinned and repaired - by more than half a million pounds worth of investment from English Heritage and the local county and district Councils. But they are now stranded on an island, isolated by a man-made lagune, and are inaccessible to the trespasser. Nevertheless, they are beautiful and ghostly - relics of a science that has been consigned to history - and the match of anything to be found on my very favourite of Nesses.

NICEST OF THE NOUGHTIES V - THE FINAL INSTALLMENT

Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse (2004)



"Imagine Bare Trees-era Fleetwood Mac jamming with Jealous Again-era Black Flag," announced Sonic Youth upon the release of their 19th album, and the comparison holds up pretty well. Although nominally the third in SY's NYC trilogy, Sonic Nurse is altogether more bucolic: loose, rumbling and (for them) unassumingly artless. It cuts back on the feedback and the elongated guitar work-outs, it references BB King and Johnny Winter (no beatniks here), and it's something of a relief to report to no song lasts more than seven-and-half minutes. The best track is the shortest, "Unmade Bed," a somnolent ballad by Thurston Moore which boasts three "All allong the watchtower"-type guitar solos. This straightforward, rockist path came at a price: SY's follow-ups have gone further down it, and are two of the least inspiring records they have released. But this is the best of their major label records, Dirty included.

Streets, Original Pirate Material (2002)



I'm with Woebot - Skinner works better when there's some distance between him and what he's saying. The blank delivery of "Turn the page" and "Has it come to this" is what this record's all about - "bravery in the face of defeat." He became overlooked when that defeat turned to success (the follow-up was largely horrible; I didn't bother with 3 and 4) - bravery in the face of success is rarely an edifying prospect, and never when the success becomes a Nuts pin-up boy. But that line about the Underground ("from Mile End to Ealing, from Brixton to Bounds Green") still sends a warm quiver down my spine. As with other journeys in my life, I made that one back-to-front - but when I did live in Bounds Green, that line made me feel like I belonged.

Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson & D.O.E., "The way I are" (2007)



Romance ain't dead! More bravery in the face of defeat here - "I don't got a huge ol' house, I rent a room in a house ... I ain't got a motorboat but I can float your boat" - but with the conclusion that love'll find a way, which sounds like a victory to me. Especially love the gender-stereotype challenge in the chorus.

Tricky, "Bacative," "Council estate" (2008)



Stand by what I wrote last year: "the jaded voice of Rodigan blankly recalling a night of violence in the casino, the inaudible croak of Tricky choking and echoing into nothing, an untouchable girl’s voice chanting 'There’s no exit, I can’t stand still, keep on running'" + "an ecstatic portrayal of the vicious circle of life of a kid born into an estate". The rest of the album - not so sure. But these two are keepers.

Vashti Bunyan, Lookaftering (2005)



Instantly takes me back to the wyrdness of a rural childhood, circa 1987 - the knowing boy, losing himself in gardens where lime trees have fallen and tiles have slid from the roofs. Even the plucked nylon-string guitars recall a post-hippie primary school. A sublime British folk album, as good as any I can think of.

Vybz Kartel, "Sweet to the belly" (2003)



I read about Vybz Kartel / Adidja Palmer in a review; he has made one song which I enjoyed at the time and remain utterly seduced by; and I shall probably never hear anything by again. I'm glad dancehall exists of course, and reggaeton too, but they are genres which are destined to sink beneath the glut of other genres I'm slightly more interested in. But still, "Sweet to de belly" is pretty special. Palmer shares his shtick with R Kelly, so teeming with testesterone and bravado that it's very difficult to get offended by it (except when the egotism of sleeping with as many men's women as possible steps over into rampant homophobia, as I understand happens elsewhere). But it's the music that accompanies this comic bullshit that really grabs the attention: ambient, miasmic, sinewy like Aaliyah's "We need a resolution," with a formlessness that is only bent into any sort of structure by Palmer's forthright, perfectly timed delivery.

Warrior Queen + Heatwave, "Things change" (2008)



It's apt that this ended up on An England Story, Soul Jazz's round-up of how Jamaican people and styles have shaped British music, for this fantastically lively and clever track is nothing less than the 21st century resurrection of "Cockney Translation," a track which confirms that multiracialism is at heart of Britain's musical (not to mention lyrical) vitality. The piano riff which Warrior Queen (aka Wendy Culture - a relative of Smiley?) toasts over sounds made for this track, but in fact it has been expertly scalpeled from a prog-soul track, Courtial's "Losing You," lost from the 70s (and has that heavy synth riff at the end been pinched from 2 Unlimited?). Torn between the poverty of her old new and the struggle of her new home ("London no bed a' rose"), Warrior Queen tells a story which sounds as English as anything ever could.

Wiley, Treddin' on thin ice (2004)



The rest of the world became thoroughly and uncomfortably globalised in the Noughties - tabloids and politicians celebrated the debt-financed growth generated by the exploitation of cheap labour overseas, and slammed anybody who dared to move to the UK for a better life. But amidst this breaking down of borders, grime took the opposite path. Localised to the point of being postcode-based, its sounds and concerns reflected microcosms of life on a particular street or estate: a minigenre created in E3 would be at odds with another in E1. Wiley was the Don of the movement, creating "eskibeat" as a minimalist soundtrack to life in the abandoned East End. Although released a year after "Boy in da Corner," this contains all the elements that made grime (albeit intermittently) the scene of the decade, at least in London: the avant-gardely stark beats, the barely melodic shards and stabs of keyboards that made up grime's riff, the extreme pop nous ("Special Girl," liable to be overlooked among other, "realer" tracks, turns SWV's "That's what I need" into a thing of spectral clarity) and the philosophy of standing tall, refusing to be beaten down. As a lyricist and MC, Wiley is Dizzee's inferior, but musically he is the pioneer, and one of the most important artists of the Noughties.

The XX, The XX (2009)



Neither passive, aggressive nor passive-aggressive, this debut from colleagues of Hot Chip, Burial and Four Tet is the indie album of the decade because it disavows the overwrought conformism of that lumpen mass-movement. The last verse of "Crystallised," where Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim plead with each other in such subtly different voices that you fear the impasse in their relationship can never be broken, is a revelation. The bounce and click of "Islands" is near-perfect. Both shy and combative, their concerns with the dialectic of the interior and exterior, the mind and the body, are drenched in an amniotic sound of stop-start rhythm tracks and geometrically precise guitar equations which help their hesitant, claustrophobic stories to breathe.

Yo Majesty, "Club action" (2008)



Standard Christian-lesbian-Alanis-Morrisette-loving crunk fare - until about 1 minute in, that is, when the intermittent springy slapbass and cheap bouncy keyboards turn it into the lovechild of Liquid Liquid and ESG. People call it punk, but if so, it's punk like ATV - a flash in the pan, amateurish, apolitical, refusing to get with the programme. Their debut LP is flimsy, their live show in London this year a non-event. But watch the video for "Club action," and all is forgiven.

Zomby, Where were U in '92? (2008)



Zomby evokes rave by highlighting its signifiers (klaxons, hi-NRG diva vocals, samples of Cappella and Bizarre Inc), but this is no mere crash-course in a defunct genre. He approaches rave through the eyes of its offspring in the present, which shares much of the anonymised collectivity of the early 80s. The throbbing, insistent "Need ur lovin'" is texturally influenced by dubstep and two-step, and "Pillz" is a glitchy tribute to the Ying Yang Twins. But the highlight, where the past folds in on the present, is the album's closing track, where voices and effects from Super Street Fighter II Turbo are overlaid onto a sleepily-recalled sample of Baby D's "Let me be your fantasy" (itself a crucial turning point in the hardcore continuum, with the commercial imperative of massive, blissed out pianos and a hands-in-the-air chorus jar with an ultra-deep middle section). All that's missing is Zombie's true masterpiece, the Rustie remix of "Spliff Dub", which you can find on Youtube.