Rou Raynolds, lead vocalist, keyboard player and writer with the UK rock group Enter Shikari In conversation with WEAll’s Marina Gattás and Peter Doran, Queens University Belfast/WEAll Ireland) 

Our local music scene, when growing up, was incredibly broad and alive, and community driven. Music provided a wonderful space and it was the only thing that I really knew. The music scene was thriving and alluring. 

I grew up in St Albans in Hertfordshire where the Conservative council had a big mistrust of alternative music. They viewed the scene as a haven for drugs and violence when, in fact, the truth was the complete opposite. We put on shows, which was difficult because the council tried to stop us and shut us down in our one venue, our youth club. Our youth club was threatened with demolition by the landowner. Miraculously it is still there. 

There was immediate distrust of authority and frustration on my part. 

I could see what music does for young people-music is such a root to your identity and creating relationships with the broader community. Music can invite young people out of troublesome circles and into community-based safer circles. That was my first experience. 

I have studied musical history and was big into anthropology. Music has always been something that has brought human beings together. We have used music in ceremonies to bring people together around campfires...from time immemorial. Music festivals are the last bastion of that kind of unity, that kind of all-inclusive gathering. 

Music is open to everyone. In a strange sense it is wonderfully dictatorial and can make you feel something that reminds you of our shared vulnerability.

Over the decades the world has become more and more divisive. So music has taken on a deeper purpose around creating local communities, creating opportunities to address issues. These conversations are broader and deeper than usual.

Special role of music 

Music, comedy, art, literature and entertainment can introduce a topic that, perhaps, would normally make people quiver with annoyance or boredom. In our early days we’d be called a ‘political band’ and we hated the label. 

Music is so immediately emotional it can be a way to introduce subjects and ideas in a way that isn’t overly formal or difficult to access. It remains challenging and hard to do. It remains difficult to write music that is going to inspire a conversation or a reconsideration of something. Nevertheless, it is one of the best tools that we have. 

As a kid I would listen to Rage Against the Machine without necessarily picking up on the intricacies of their lyrics. I wouldn’t get the references to South American politics. I hadn’t a clue but there was an allure to their music that I was drawn to, that sensuous righteous indignation. There was clearly a passion behind their music, so it was immediate and intriguing. 

Even instrumental music can do this. It can make you think of something that blossoms into a new thought. 

The Recording Industry 

We have taken a decision to start our own record label. 

The music industry is extremely distorted by capitalism: the music we produce is treated less as an art form and more as a commodity, as are the musicians themselves. It’s a real mine- field. 

We were lucky to be influenced by hardcore punk. The New York scene in the late 1980s and 90s was an incredible influence. The fearlessness of those scenes showed that you can do these things yourself and you don’t need to sign your rights away and sign your songs away. 

A lot of bands and acts do the whole thing, they get hyped, hyped, hyped and then the media move on to the next hype and you get sort of dropped and forgotten, whereas we’ve really concentrated on the human connection aspect that has been the pivotal thing for us since day one. That’s really a kind of philosophical thing as well as about the music for me. 

Influences 

One of the first big influential moments for me was the Occupy Movement. If I took one thing from that, it was the worldwide acceptance of the idea that we live on a finite planet while our economic system ignores this simple observation. It blew my mind to consider that we 42 are born into this incredibly well established system, which is instilled in all of us. It’s not so much that we don’t question it, we don’t even think about it. The system of market-based economics is instilled in us like the air that we breathe, and we take this for granted. Many people are going back to Marx and to more ecologically focused writers. These issues have not been addressed and we have not progressed. We have regressed, with this neoliberal outlook which has now become so pervasive and taken over the whole world. 

The frustrating thing for me has been the complete lack of communication or conversation about these issues: we live on a finite planet, but our system demands infinite growth. 

We can’t keep going on with ‘Business as Usual’. 

In the last few years Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has been interesting because it’s a different perspective on everything. In a few generations time I don’t see our economic system looking anything like what it is today, given the damage it does to our psychology, ecology, and mental health.

 I have spent a long time thinking about these issues and once wrote a book, A Treatise On Possibility. 

The one thing we know about the universe is that it is in a constant state of flux. We have to resist rigidity. Refusing change is one sure fire way to die, looking at it from an evolutionary perspective. My overarching outlook on the world is that we need to embrace imagination. I think we need to look seriously at how things can be fundamentally changed. It’s my own view, from what I have experienced, that the system we have now is incredibly dangerous on almost all fronts. 

One book that was pivotal for my thinking was Richard Williamson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (2009). It’s brilliant in its treatment of the breadth of the damage that our current economic system does.

 I also remember watching people like Peter Joseph’s early documentaries and his speeches at the Zeitgeist Movement. 

Utopian fiction can also make you think in completely different ways about how the world could be, could operate and be organized in different ways. 

Meditation’s contribution to creativity and attention 

We have noticed with the YouTube charts, after one minute, the graph tracking people who’ve watched a video starts to fall off. After five minutes it’s off the cliff, and there’s about one percent of people who are still with you. 

When you look at the online platforms that are enjoying success at the moment, it’s Tik Tok, Snapchat, even Instagram. These are all based on the idea that, basically, a video should not be more than 20 or 30 seconds long maximum. 

There’s some great content out there at those durations but, when you want to address something that takes any degree of thought or explanation its utterly impossible. 

That worries me greatly because young people who are growing up with all these pressures to join such platforms – and pressures to make their own content, to have a sense of purpose or sense of validation that comes from internet content – it can all be so damaging to mental health. 

Our attention spans are just becoming more and more limited as we’re bludgeoned with short, sharp hits of dopamine. 

Meditation teaching 

During the first year of the pandemic, I did a lot of livestreamed meditation sessions. We’d just talk about my experiences and try and give people an introduction to meditation. We’d do small sessions online and it seemed to go down well. 

I ended up doing a short podcast where it’s basically just ten episodes, offering an introduction to meditation. I think, for a lot of people, it actually helped so I ended up doing a podcast with ten episodes. Meditation has become a must-have tool in one’s toolbox if one wants to stay sane in this society. We are so saturated with noise and intensity. Today, science has taken meditation and shaken away the excess religious trappings that we don’t particularly need. For me yoga and meditation are, well, just a way of life. 

Music and Meditation 

I aim to make music somewhere in the middle, soothing, to provide a breathing space. Listeners can escape their fears and stresses while, at the same time, I avoid putting their minds to sleep. I want to enliven minds rather than completely soothe an audience into a kind of slumber. 

Some of our audience have gone on a journey with our music and are more open than others to social commentary. Communicating big ideas. There’s a bit of a trend today. 

There’s a space for all kinds of music. With my peers, there are people who’ve gone on a bit of a journey, who have really opened up in their music and become more open to social commentary. That’s quite amazing for us now that there are other bands into our kind of scene. 44 Of course we have always had father figures like Billy Bragg and the Sex Pistols who beat a trail. Our peers include the metalcore band, Architects. Taylor Swift’s lyrical journey has also been super interesting; she is clearly on a new trajectory. 

[Reynolds cited a favorite example of a song that deals explicitly with his social commentary on the dominant economic system, Gandhi Mate, Gandhi.] 

The rhythms of GDP and beyond… 

I think the ‘p’ [politics] word and the ‘e’ [economics] word are a turn off in lyrics. You have to present these ideas imaginatively. In ‘Gandhi Mate’, Gandhi, I start the song with a rant, almost mimicking online bloggers raving at a webcam. In that song I introduced a critique of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and got away with it because of the song’s flamboyance and bombasity. I deal with everything from the military-industrial complex to hydrocarbons and printing money. 

Gandhi Mate, Gandhi – Lyrics 

Singer One: Now, I don’t know about you, 

But I don’t think the primary purpose of your life, 

Of my life and the entirety of the human race is just to blindly consume to support a failing economy and a faulty system. 

Forever and ever until we run out of every resource and have to resort to blowing each other up to ensure our own survival. 

I don’t think we’re supposed to sit by idly, whilst we continue to use a long-outdated system, that produces war, poverty, collusion, ruins our environment and threatens every aspect of our health, and does nothing but divide and segregate us. 

I don’t think how much military equipment we are selling to other countries, how many hydro- carbons we’re burning, how much money is being printed and exchanged, is a good meas- ure of how healthy our society is. 

But I do think I can speak for everyone when I say: 

We’re sick of this shit! 

Time to mobilize. 

Time to open eyes. 

We are not a quiet pocket of resistance. 

This is real and we cannot afford to fail. 

Act with, act with persistence. 

This is real and we cannot afford to fail. 

[Singer Two: I am the established order. Respect me and fear me.] 

Singer One: F..k you! We hold no respect. And when tomorrow comes we’re gonna step on your head! Pig! 

Band: Calm down, Calm down, mate. Gandhi mate, remember Gandhi….. 

This was the first time we put forward an economics issue and it was a success in terms of economic messaging. Some people do get it and they are in the choir, while others – of course – just want the music. 

[Shikari’s 2020 album, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, was issued with an ac- companying book, to critical acclaim. The album is peppered with tracks that celebrate possi- bility: ‘Crossing the Rubicon’, ‘The Dreamer’s Hotel’, ‘Modern Living…’, ‘Apocaholics Anonymous’, ‘TINA’, and ‘Elegy for Extinction’, and ‘Waltzing Off the Face of the Earth’]