Dr. Michael Friedman’s interview at Psychology Today with Pauline Black, lead singer for The Selecter, and Steve Shafer’s recent review of The Selecter’s new record, Subculture, are vivid reminders of the social issues highlighted by Ms. Black, The Selecter, and the 2-Tone movement overall. In the interview Ms. Black describes growing up in the 1950’s as a biracial child adopted by white parents and the racism and sexism she encountered coming of age in 1970s England. During a period of racial strife and economic dislocation in England, The Selecter, a multiracial band, fronted by a woman, playing a politically conscious mix of ska, reggae and punk and producing top 40 hits, was an important counter narrative to the National Front.
Subculture finds The Selecter still energized to comment on social, economic and political issues. At the end of the haunting track, “Breakdown”, co-vocalist Gaps Hendrickson calls out a stunningly long list of black youth, women, and men killed by police in the UK and USA. In his review Shafer writes “Inspired by appalling incidents in both the UK and the US, “Breakdown,” the most politically potent song on the album, posits that the relatively frequent unjustified police killings of mostly unarmed (and sometimes handcuffed) black boys, men, and women are a horrific symptom of entrenched racism, societal dysfunction, and purposeful neglect.” The track “Hit the Ground Running” is about workers locked into “zero-hour contracts” – employees are expected to be on-call at all hours but are given, at the employer’s discretion, anywhere from zero to 40 hours of work per week and are only paid for the hours worked. |
The Mix:
Follow us on Spotify: |
Follow Us On:
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Search the site:
-
Recent Posts
- Social support and intimate partner violence in rural Pakistan: a longitudinal investigation of the bi-directional relationship
- Overflowing Disparities: Examining the Availability of Litter Bins in New York City
- In New York City, pandemic policing reproduced familiar patterns of racial disparities
- The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Threat Multiplier for Childhood Health Disparities: Evidence from St. Louis, MO
- Lessons Learned From Dear Pandemic, a Social Media–Based Science Communication Project Targeting the COVID-19 Infodemic
Faculty Publications on:
PubMed Feed
- Mediation of the Effect of Incarceration on Selling Sex Among Black Sexual Minority Men and Black Transgender Women in the HPTN 061 Study
- Structural racism and homophobia evaluated through social media sentiment combined with activity spaces and associations with mental health among young sexual minority men
- Casino accessibility and suicide: A county-level study of 50 US states, 2000 to 2016
- Why and How Epidemiologists Should Use Mixed Methods
- Response
- Within-individual variability in cognitive performance in schizophrenia: A narrative review of the key literature and proposed research agenda
- Unintended reductions in assaults near sobriety checkpoints: A longitudinal spatial analysis
- County-level estimates of suicide mortality in the USA: a modelling study
- Author Correction: The evolutionary history of 2,658 cancers
- Neighborhood Built Environments and Sleep Health: A Longitudinal Study in Low-Income and Predominantly African-American Neighborhoods