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Dada de Dada has eclectic musical and poetic interests and influences ranging across many genres including classical, contemporary, electronic, experimental, dub, and the ever-expanding hip hop. So from Bach to Philip Glass,John Cage, and Frank Zappa; Nitin Sawhney, Isao Tomita, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, and Hannah Peel to Benjamin Zephaniah, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kodak and Jay-Z. Posts to the site will, therefore, be as much about the crossing-boundaries work of others as any of the outputs of Dada de Dada itself.
As to the politics of Dada de Dada?
Dada de Dada aims to be an equal opportunities satirist. The only bias being against fundamentalist ideologues of whatever persuasion. For in the certainties, myths and stories they sell, they so often stoke the fires of discontent and disunity and focus a simplistic lens on ‘the other’, the non-believer, or non-member as the cause of all problems. There are always victims of such a mindset.
The world’s politics appears to be entering a period of turbulence and sometimes upheaval. That makes for a ready breeding ground for those who profer apparent certainties and a return to some nostalgic bygone golden age which is always sold as being predictable, simpler and better. Such a return is always via the agency of their radical and rapid solutions and, of course, their leadership. The normal checks and balances which slow or ameliorate potentially destructive policies by submitting them to inspection and debate are subverted or eliminated. As is the democratic process. The leadership cares (temporarily) only for the voter or media in as far as they are in *their* constituency of belief. Those outside of it are too readily declared to be ‘enemies of the state’ or ‘enemies of the people’ because they threaten their personal position. The really interesting questions here of course are why political systems keep generating such ‘snake-oil’ salesmen/women (usually men) and why, even in major democracies like the US and UK, a sizeable proportion of populations seem inclined to keep buying the snake-oil. We humans sometimes appear to be hard-wired for just the stories we want to hear. The internet and the multitude of social media channels now available makes it really easy to tune into just these stories we want to hear. Reinforcing, but never challenging, what we have come to believe. And that makes the ‘snake oil’ salesman’s job really easy. We can now invite them right into our homes.
Dada? The rhythmic sounds first produced by a child with so much to learn and, just possibly, so much to offer. Or Dada? The radical counter-cultural avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century that expressed itself via artefact, performance, sound and imagery to challenge and unsettle the status quo. Taking what a culture produced but reflecting it back in an altered/satirical state and in a variety of forms including collage, poetry or music. The Nazis were not fans of this ‘degenerate’ art and some European Dadaists lost their lives as a result. The original Dadaists were poking a stick into the many ant nests of conflicting ideological certainties and associated contrived mythologies/storylines that fed the turbulence of their time. There are certainly a lot of such ideological certainties and supporting contrived mythologies/storylines around today. So once again there is, perhaps, a need for a dada immunisation programme as a necessary antidote to the disease of absolute certainty, rigidity of thought and intolerance which tends to afflict us all as we head down into our chosen social, media and cultural bunkers. Our 21st century technologies and online platforms make possible many wonderful things, but have also proved to be infinite bunker machines; or is that rabbit hole machines? Bunkers where we only hear and see what we want to hear and see; and so we deliberately seek to limit our exposure to the different and the new.
Dada de Dada’s position on our increasingly digital world is based on the experience of many decades of championing and working with information technologies. It is also grounded, however, in a growing alarm about how the machines and systems which are meant to be making life easier and better for people are also progressively shaping human behaviour in less positive ways. So often it is the people who end up having to adapt to the processes the technologies will accept rather than the technologies serving the people, i.e. the staff, consumers, or the clients. The advent of AI into the public sphere is likely to make riding the dragon of digital progress even more of a scorching experience for some, and perhaps many.
