EQUATE Meets Michael O'Neill
"[The idea that] only academics can comment on cultural life, that only journalists can write, for me that's completely ludicrous."
“Your cultural capital / dwarfs mine like a giant. / You’re a freelance artist / who’s still trust fund reliant,”
Declared the voice from my speakers; I smiled.
“You collect rare vinyl / and read philosophical books. / Your wardrobe’s worth thousands / to compliment your looks,”
I stifle a laugh, as the words seek out something close to the bone.
“You say what’s expected / in every single situation. / You’re dishonest but you’re perfect / for successful integration.”
(extracts from Cultural Capital, The Binary Order, Michael O’Neill, 2019)
Words & Interview by Joseph Francis
Fuck. “collect vinyl”, “freelance”, “cultural capital”, “you say what’s expected”. Could this be me? I can’t remember the last time a song grabbed my attention like that, making me laugh and blush.
Michael O’Neill is from Manchester and works for the National Health Service in a Mental Health Department. With music, he tells me that, since the age of about 14, he has always been a song-writer. In addition to his songwriting, he writes articles and publishes them on his Tumblr page. Both his music and his blog are often centred around themes of the abuse of power and the social, cultural and political impacts that it has on our lives.
About half of O’Neill’s song-writing is made up of social commentaries whilst the other half consists of stories about people he has either met or heard about. Judging by some of his lyrics, he doesn’t have much time for music journalism or any facet of music remotely linked to press and marketing, so I assumed that I’d have to work hard to get anything out of him. Thankfully, O’Neill was as forthright as his music, and we both enjoyed the opportunity to talk openly about the music industry, writing and (not) fitting into society.
“95% of culture is just shit as far as I’m concerned. It’s just nonsense,” he says, “People just want to have some cultural capital and will listen to something if that hangs well off them in relation to social experience […] it’s far too premeditated.”
‘Cultural Capital’, part of his album ‘The Binary Order’ released on Bristol label FuckPunk, denounces the sort of people that caused O’Neill to feel alienated from music, something that had been a passion growing up.
“Chin stroking, watching somebody piss on a fucking drum machine and calling it art and then saying, those forty thousand people standing in a field singing along to an Oasis song must somehow be idiots for liking it. What? Isn’t it all subjective? But music has been objectified to the fucking last and niched out and atomised to the point where social change can never really be produced by music anymore. I mean I like some experimental music, but the idea that there is nothing in anything else and you should sort of bypass your expression of experience in a more palatable way just to appear intellectually viable by a peer group — there’s a lot of that that goes on and it pisses me off.”
“Music as a career choice / supported by a trust fund. / It’s fine-tuned banality. / The liberty of the privileged. So now we live in reruns, / where PR teams make magic, / based on market research, / like a science so very tragic.”
(extract from Orchestrated Entertainment, The Binary Order, Michael O’Neill, 2019)
In music journalism, I have felt a similar scepticism as O’Neill: can I be subjective? Options of albums to review are handed out by a magazine and I take my pick. When I eventually send back my words, despite being presented to me under the guise of a review, if it sounds slightly negative, I would be asked to reword it — “Make it an extension of the Press Release, please,” often seemed to be the message.
“We succumb to the audience effects. We’re very aware of the collective gaze and we succumb to it either by self-policing or by allowing that gaze to police us directly and it’s the same when you’re creating, which is where you’ve got to say, You know what? Fuck this collective gaze. I’m not going to let that organise my principles. Self-sovereignty is really something we should embrace and cerebral hygiene. Not allowing all of the shit of a 24/7 digitised culture flowing into your brain. You should be very selective about what you hear but also be open to hearing new things. If you just succumb, if your principles are always organised by the collective, you’re forever going to be in a prison on a social level.”
The collective — our friends, colleagues and the strangers we pass in public. We all make up part of the collective but how we each behave within it can have a positive effect on those around us. O’Neill stresses the importance of integrity and freedom of speech, especially within art.
“If you haven’t got something to communicate, why would you choose art as an expression, or music as an expression? If it’s merely to satisfy a career in mind or embracing narcissistic aspects of yourself then…you can smell a rat from a mile away! Authenticity is key; it’s king. I mean, surely, when you see something or hear something, you want to believe that the person believes in it? You can feel that; you can hear it. You know that it’s meant and it’s sincere and it’s authentic. That’s the thing that I like about music or any kind of art, it exists because it has to exist, not because someone has told them to do it, or it seemed like a nice career path or you were inspired by your heroes.”
There is a sense that the upper echelons of the music industry have become dominated by those who, thanks to circumstance, have the luxury to decide what career path they want to follow (ie. the middle classes). At first, this is what drove O’Neill away from making music but now it drives him to challenge it in his songs.
Previously, I had assumed that the unabashed delivery of his lyrics was a result of him being well-read. He reassured me that, although he does follow independent news and debate, the opposite should be the case: lived experiences, more often than not, triumph over theory and research.
“[The idea that] only academics can comment on cultural life, that only journalists can write, for me that’s completely ludicrous. Lived experience and the expression of that lived experience may well refute the intellectual position massively. You have to look at early Hip-Hop in the US and say well, if it wasn’t for the expression of a disenfranchised Black community, would we really ever have known about the conditions (socially, politically, culturally) that that group of people experienced? What’s the alternative? The white middle class get to speak that narrative? Surely it should come from the people who have experienced those conditions. […] I like when a working-class voice shows its face and tells of a position that is often airbrushed out of the narrative.”
“Jane talks to herself / when there’s no one else around, / long term day release, / both her kids are in care. / A victim of economics, / she fell pregnant in her teens / before her violent former boyfriend / tried to burn the house down.”
(extracts from Modern Industry, The Binary Order, Michael O’Neill, 2019)
“Smoking weed at nine years old / and selling it by the time he was twelve. / He ran with a gang called the ‘NHC’, / every single member a badman wannabe.
(extracts from Brighter Britain Today, self-titled, Michael O’Neill, 2013)
The other half of O’Neill’s songwriting is made up of ethnofictions, as he describes them: stories based on the lives of people from the neighbourhood he grew up in — Crumpsall, Cheetham Hill. Although he tells me that the area has been notorious for street gangs, most notably the Noonan crime family and the NHC, it is also an incredibly diverse part of town, where you can meet people from all walks of life.
Recent initiatives, found in the workplace and on TV, have been put in place to combat prejudice and champion diversity, but O’Neill is quick to scoff at the thought of large corporations or the state trying to deliver any such thing.
“If you want to experience diversity, go out and experience diversity! It’s there! What barriers [are there], other than the ones you’re putting up in front of yourself? Do you need the state to mediate your interactions with other people? […] The state is not your friend and the quicker people get that into their head the better we will be as a society.”
Back in the 70s, 80s and maybe even 90s, the independent music scene used to be a melting pot for diverse groups of people. However, we both found that nowadays sport is where we have had the most success interacting with people from different backgrounds to our own. As a child, he played for the Manchester City academy team. Today, he plays basketball near to where he lives, “With young Black and Asian kids half my age, [and] no one gives a fuck, we’re just playing basketball and having a bit of banter.”
“This whole idea that you should work at getting rid of privilege and the idea that you could do it through diversity teaching and things like that is fucking ludicrous […] It’s the content of somebody’s character that will tell you who they are not what they’ve got on their body, not the colour of their skin, not how much access to wealth they’ve got. It’s fucking irrelevant. It’s very relevant to power because it’s used to divide us […] It’s Red team or Blue team.”
Bringing us to The Binary Order — binary relating to anything that has a choice of two things. With his album title, O’Neill is suggesting that, despite our complex lives deserving more than this limited amount of choice, our individual positions in society are nearly always defined by one of two options.
“We’re led to believe that they’re the problem; it’s always the opposite group. No! No!” he stresses, “Individuals are individuals; you can’t lump them into some socially constructed group […] Politics is a prime example of this […] You’re asked to conform to one of the two positions. If you [think] that somehow the world is more complex than the binary order, you’ll probably be [called] a conspiracy theorist or some sort of selfish fucker. It’s not good: it organises human principles far too much so that we’re always being forced to choose a binary position. Are nationals the problem or are immigrants the problem? Are you on the left or are you on the right? Are you pro-vaccine or are you anti-vaccine? But wait a minute, there’s a whole other debate to be had in between all of these positions, which, ultimately, serve to keep things the way they are. I mean, if you conform to either of those positions, things will continue to get progressively worse because we’ve been conforming to one of those two positions for a very long time.”
YouTube/Michael O’Niell
Autonomy is the way to combat the binary order and to free ourselves from the formulaic options we are routinely presented with. Not caving under the pressure of the collective, but instead going out and experiencing as much as possible on our own in order to shape our own beliefs and subsequently feel assured in them because they have not been spoon fed to us.
“We are so affected by what is expected of us: the norms within society, the norms within culture and the norms within art. Everyone organises their principles around those things instead of throwing that rule book out and going on intuition and being experience-led beings and, if that contradicts with the collective, so be it. […] Rugged individualism doesn’t mean selfishness. In fact, it means the opposite. It’s: by example, encourage everyone to throw away the shackles of their socially constructed identities. Throw them away because they’re only weights to you; they only produce mental anguish.”
It sounds daunting and tiring. If we’re given the options of either hiding behind a screen — reading and watching — fooling ourselves that we’re engaging with culture but never stepping outside of our comfort zone or (the alternative) going out and meeting new people from backgrounds at odds with our own, who may or may not like what we say or do, we’re nearly always going to choose the former. The latter sounds like an unnecessary risk.
“You know, can you exist in another sphere outside of the one you ultimately feel comfortable in? I think you feel more nourished. If you take that step out of your comfort zone and do those things, you must feel nourished. [When] you engage with people from other backgrounds, that’s got to feel good it just has to feel good.”
With the pandemic, there have been various restrictions on who we can see, only encouraging people to retreat to their social bubbles and not leave their comfort zones. Few positives have come from this seclusion so far, but the opportunity to reflect has certainly been one of them. It’s individuals that make the backbone of our society, so when social life opens up again, let’s not remain in our bubbles but instead look for opportunities to engage with a wide variety of people.
As our two hour call came to a close, I kept awkwardly trying to suggest that O’Neill be more proactive at sharing his writing and music, because his words and delivery could encourage social change. Like a visit to the doctor, they have unearthed some unflattering truths, but it’s what I needed to hear.
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Stream Michael O’Niell’s previous tracks HERE
“The Nonsense” by Michael O’Neill will be out in Spring 2021
Follow Michael O’Niell on socials
Tumblr: @michaeloneillwords-music
