The second episode of the Ruling Passions Project’s podcast is now live on the podcast page, and also on spotify and apple.
In this episode I talk to Jason Arday (he/him) about his love of music and how it has helped him understand the world. Jason was diagnosed autistic at 3 years old. He has recently been appointed professor of the sociology of education at the university of Glasgow. In our discussion we touch on a range of topics including race, autistic masking, vulnerability, intrinsic / extrinsic motivation, expectations of academia and the importance of music.
Additional mulitmedia links and transcript available below…
Additional links for this episode are here: https://shu.padlet.org/dscb18/9vuzwdgrah4npk4r
Episode 2 Transcript
INTRODUCTION Welcome to the Ruling Passions Podcast. This podcast forms part of a research project with the same name which seeks to explore autistic adults’ passionate interests from a socio-cultural perspective. I’m Chris Bailey, an autistic senior lecturer and researcher from Sheffield Hallam University and across a series of episodes I’ll be reflecting on aspects of autistic lived experience in relation to what are often called autistic ‘special interests’. I’ll be talking to other autistic people about their own interests, in order to illuminate the complexity and diversity of autistic culture. You can find more about the project itself by going to the website at www.rulingpassions.wordpress.com
CB: [01:06] Okay, So I am really excited to welcome today’s guest, who has managed to take some time out of their busy schedule to join us. So I will let them introduce themselves.
JA: [01:13] Hi Chris, thank you so much for having me in, it’s an absolute honour. My name is Jason, Jason Arday. I (try to be!) a Professor of the sociology of education at the University of Glasgow and I feel very fortunate to be on this podcast and I’m just really looking forward to talking about things outside of, in some context, work. I mean the stuff that I’m known for doing is I guess stuff around race and racism and stuff but I think that there is a lot of context.
[01:44] What is always interesting about race researchers is that they are always confined to just that one thing, and it would be good to talk about other things, because racism isn’t my hobby. There are other things that I find a lot more interesting than kind of challenging racism all the time. That’s not to trivialise it, it’s just to say that we all have identities and things that compromise those identities and I think that it’s always important to explore that in its fullest capacity with the opportunities provide themselves, and very often people who do a lot of race work are not really given those opportunities, if that makes sense.
CB: [02:19] Yes, and I think talking about things that go beyond our academic work and lived experiences I think can tell us quite a lot about people really. So I asked you to take part in this having recently seen that you’ve talked a couple of times about being autistic? As far as I’m aware that is only something that you’ve very recently started to talk about. Is that correct?
JA: [02:41] Yes, yeah, it is recent and I never spoke about it because I didn’t want to be judged about it. It’s weird how one conceptualises the thing, you don’t want people to think that you’re making excuses and stuff, and also I just knew that there was a lot of things, if I said it, I felt it worked to my disadvantage. So I kind of waited for an opportunity, which you don’t know by the way, when you’re making those kinds of choices, but I thought if I get established or do well, which as narcissistic as we all can be, particularly academics, but you don’t ever think that you’re going to do well in this. Or at least I didn’t. I just thought I was going to work as hard as possible and you arrive at the situation and then you kind of start thinking-
[03:26] I mean, look, to be quite honest with you Chris, what ends up happening is people start asking you a lot of questions, so I hate socials, I am quote elusive, quite hard to get hold of, and we work in a sector where self-promotion is a thing and a lot of people spend a lot of time self-promoting what they do and each to their own, but it’s not something I ever really did.
[03:53] Part of that creates a mystique, in other words, without glorifying it in any way where people don’t know a lot about you, so they want to know stuff about you, and so people become more intrigued. They want to know more about how you got to where you got to, because not everything is out there and I don’t put all my papers and stuff- I don’t do any of that stuff. So like people kind of hear ‘Jason does this kind of stuff, I hear he’s okay’ and stuff like that and you get asked more and more questions and so inevitably there comes a point where people are able to – they try and put two and two together for certain things and so the perception is that I probably, my trajectory to this point, I’ve done it in a very short amount of time, but then part of disrupting what the narrative might be around that is kind of trying to set people straight, because I think that historically when people kind of achieve professorship really, really young or they become senior very young, there is this idea that they’ve kind of climbed the career ladder in a very specific way and they’ve had a lot of advantage and privilege and if I had had that I would be the first to have said it. But I haven’t, and so part of that is that you are then sort of cornered into a situation where you have to explain to people actually I was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3. I learned to speak when I was 11 and I learned to read and write when I was 18 and then in 12 years I’ve got a PhD and so you’re forced to have to explain it to people because in the end, in some ways, they make these kinds of judgements about how you got to where you got to and then when they kind of hear they’re like ‘I had no idea’.
[05:30] You don’t do it for people to kind of eulogise how well you’ve done, but it’s important to give people an accurate kind of story and so part of it is serendipity that it happened at this time, you know, in the last two years or so where people started finding out about the autism thing, but it was hard enough being black, so I wasn’t going to kind of throw in autism to the mix as well.
[05:58] And like I said, if you don’t put yourself out there and people just kind of hear about this kind of mythical character, they do want to find out he doesn’t do any of these things, why is he like this, how did he get to- And bit by bit, you tell people bits and bobs with the biggest thing being I’m autistic and have been, at least as long as I’ve known since I was 3. So 33 years of my life. I’m 36 but I guess I’ve known since I was 3.
[06:32] So that is a very different existence, and obviously navigating, I have always said that navigating racism is difficult but for me, being autistic, if you can believe it, is probably a thousand times harder because of how I understand things or the difficulty that I have in understanding things. I always say to people ‘Imagine being in a situation where 90% of the time you don’t understand what’s going on’, and so in many respects you’re faking it until you make it. You don’t understand what’s going on but imagine saying to a line manager or saying to someone ‘I don’t get it’ and they explain it to you again and you are forced into submission.
[07:10] It’s hard enough being black, but if you turn around and say you don’t understand something people will just think that you’re not competent. So the judgement they make on academics of colour, globally speaking, but let’s just talk about British context, is that they’re not as competent and that is situated in racism, right? Now you add the autism bit to it as well and, do you know what I mean, it’s even worse. So a lot of the time, someone says something to me or I’m chairing something or doing something and it’s like ‘Do you understand?’, yeah, but it’s the biggest lie of told in my entire life.
[07:43] When I teacher said to me at school ‘Do you understand what’s going on?’ as a general rule of thumb very rarely do I understand. The only time I do understand things, funnily enough, is when it’s special interests.
CB: [07:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JA: [07:56] I have a perfectly clear understanding of that. But I guess in the real world that knowledge about those things is absolutely redundant and useless in relation – in terms of how other people may perceive it, in terms of what I actually do in my day job.
[08:10] So a lot of it is learning algorithms and patterns and that is where the autism thing becomes massively advantageous, because algorithms and patterns is something that works hugely well to my advantage. So once I’ve got the algorithm and the pattern of something then I can replicate it effectively well, but in that initial middle stage I don’t have a clue what that is because my brain hasn’t computed what the algorithm of the pattern is yet, you know?
CB: [08:36] Yes, that is very familiar to me, what you’re saying is very familiar. The sense of not understanding what’s going on but not being able to communicate that because what you’ve talked about there, like talking about being autistic, it kind of leaves you vulnerable, I guess. Doesn’t it. Because you are admitting certain things to people especially if you’ve not admitted those earlier in your life or your career or whatever, so having now gone through that process of telling people, how has that worked out for you? How do you feel about that?
JA: [09:12] Yeah, it’s not any kind of massive sense of relief. I mean all it’s done is kind of probably put in to focus the magnitude of the achievement, and not necessarily for myself but for other people who may have thought that – you know, I probably went to a Russell Group, you know, got a studentship, went on to a PhD and you know, went post-doc, seamlessly went through. Because generally speaking, if you become a professor at 35, 36 that is what would have happened. The quickest amount of time you can do it, unless you’re a child prodigy is probably 34, 35, 36. So I’m 36 and that is a presumption that people make, but then there’s no, 7.5 years ago I had a night job at Sainsbury’s to make ends meet. I had a cleaning job in the city, in London.
[10:07] I didn’t have that, and I began as a PE teacher and the journey that I’ve had has been uniquely different. The only thing that, like I said, worked to my advantage is the ability to gain the pattern, and the algorithm, and then to obsess over it, so once I learnt how to write papers and apply for research grants and all the things you need to do to be an academic, you align that with being very obsessive and being able to function on an hour’s sleep for like ten years and this is the result. But then the end product is that actually, like a sense of jubilation you may think that one may feel at doing something like that you don’t, because what you do feel is exhausted and you feel this sense of numbness that it is very hard to explain. It’s hard to explain because the interest comes from learning the pattern and the algorithm as an autistic person and you get to the point where you master it and you lose interest.
[11:08] Which sounds like a weird thing to say to people at this stage of maybe my career but it’s been harder now since I got, you know, being absolutely candid, it’s been harder to motivate myself now since I got the professorship. It’s been a lot hard to motivate myself now because in some ways the fun part is learning the algorithm and the code and once you learn that, the buzz in some ways kind of goes. I’m not a sociologist by training but I trained myself, yeah, so I have always been obsessed. Like one of my main things as a kid, when I was 14, I wanted to dress like Paul Weller, and Oswald Boateng, and basically from that age I’ve been obsessed with tailoring, and the reason why I’m using this as an example is that is something that I never lost any interest in it.
[11:53] I don’t have any vices, but it’s the thing that I know like the back of my hand, and I love more than anything. Even more than like football or sport or whatever. And you don’t lose interest in something like that, and I guess what I’m trying to discern now in my autistic brain is that intrinsic love for something like that is very different to the extrinsic love for doing stuff around race. And it is extrinsic, because you don’t wake up when you’re a kid and say right, I want to be a leading researcher on race when I’m older. I don’t think that any kid has that ambition. I think that you have that ambition, I had that ambition in my early 20s, but it’s different now and that has come from an intrinsic place. I suppose when you’re there it’s very different and also people look to you in a very different way. Because a lot of people don’t always know the autistic thing. They look to you as someone who has all the answers to everything but like a lot of my answers are situated in my autistic brain and how I make sense of things. Even the music stuff. All of my papers are named after song titles. Surely because there is a link between music and how I make sense of my autism.
[13:03] But that is something that people don’t know. But I guess now things start to become clearer to people once you start unpacking and they start learning these things. Like right, so this is why he talks like this/this is why he has these kinds of things. So like repetition for me is like a big thing.
[13:18] Another thing that kind of coincided with getting the professorship last summer, I mean I don’t know how it is for you Chris, but like as I’ve got older I am finding it harder and harder to understand my autism and my autistic brain. There are certain things in my autistic brain, like there are certain things in my head that are becoming more fixed. I feel like when I was younger, and I know that people say that this happens as people get older, but like there are certain things. I don’t know if it’s a stereotype of not or a description but they talk about autistic people having sometimes a rigidity of thought. Now I don’t think that’s exclusive to autistic people but I do think that is a common facet of autistic thinking. It’s weird as how I’ve got older, it’s like I’m fighting against myself more to sit within that rigidity.
[14:03] I’m becoming more fixed in my ideas and when I was younger, I don’t know why but it was maybe because of some of the behavioural training I had for 25 years or whatever it was to not think like that, and maybe I’m getting in to a phase in my life where I don’t have that training as much anymore, so my natural autistic behaviours are probably coming out even more but you only have the privilege of experiencing that in private right, because when you’re in public you mask.
CB: [14:26] Absolutely.
JA: [14:29] So you mask a lot of these behaviours and that for me as a process is becoming more difficult and it’s becoming more exhausting. So where I’ve done it my whole life, it’s very different to code switching in relation to race or class. This is very different. This is very different. Some of my natural behaviours that I might want to display as an autistic person, I’ve strangulated it. The only time I can actually really behave like that in all honesty is not even in front of my kids of my partner. It’s actually when I’m purely on my own, you know.
CB: [15:00] Yes so what you’re talking about there is that masking, isn’t it. that kind of being, well, the idea of being yourself in front of people and even knowing what yourself is, because you’ve either, through self-censorship or self-control, because you know you shouldn’t be a particular way, or whether it’s because society has told you that, it’s really hard to adjust that isn’t it, and be someone who you know really you’ve spent your whole life being told that you shouldn’t be.
JA: [15:33] Yes, and it’s a difficult thing because, you know, for me you learn that. You learn that, and what you learn to do is you learn to be able to perform I guess not through my own design, but I think that autistic people, particularly in the Academy, you learn to perform to a very high level. It’s a performance. And you do it to a very, very high level and it’s very different to even doing it from the context of race or gender. It’s very different. The Jason that’s at work is very different to the Jason that’s at home. I know that sounds like an obvious thing to say for people but it’s different in that level of concentration I have to apply to everything that I do. That in itself is actually quite unnatural, you know, it is unnatural because I don’t concentrate that hard when I’m doing anything else. Like for me at work, the one thing I am always obsessed with is accuracy. I know that if I am not accurate in what I do it could be consequential in terms of how people perceived me. And I’m not talking from a race lens. I’m just talking from an autistic point of view. If I added race to it then it would be even worse, but just from an autistic point of view it’s very difficult. Even something like an email is painstaking and it can take me sometimes 5 hours, to send what essentially is a 200-word email.
[16:50] But in my mind, because it’s not perfect and not accurate, you know, and if you’ve got 30 emails to reply to in a day then that is hugely problematic, you know. And I guess people get this sense of frustration as well, because they’re kind of like ‘I needed to hear from him today and he’s given this to me 30 hours later’.
CB: [17:12] And that is the expectation of the modern workplace, isn’t it. We have these tools that connect us but people expect those responses immediately, because it’s possible to give a response, because the technology makes it possible to give a response. We’re expected to comply with that and be as instant as the technology but our brains aren’t made that way, to be able to enable us to do it all the time.
JA: [17:37] They’re not and listen, it’s not exclusive to neurodivergent people either. that is composite of everybody, but I just think that neurodiverse people experience that in a very unique way. You know, sometimes it’s like this crescendo in my head and I can’t explain it but I always say it’s like – you know when you’ve got a really dodgy car and you put the key in, [car start up noises] it’s like eventually [engine noises] and it starts. That is kind of what it’s like and a lot of times, when you – for me, when I have that delay and the brain is working very, very slowly it’s very frustrating. If people get frustrated with me they won’t get more frustrated with me than I will be with myself when my brain can’t do something very simple as to send a 200-word email in 5-10 minutes. It’s really frustrating, but I guess what people don’t understand is that when my brain is doing that, which is actually quite often. I can’t make it do any quicker than that. I can’t make it do better than what it’s doing but imagine trying to explain that to a line manager or – you know, academic is pretty apathetic, it doesn’t really care about stuff like that. So imagine trying to explain that to someone. Even a student. These are things that, because of how societies and how higher education is, these are not things that we account for. So you learn to mask it. You learn to find ways, in some respects of faking it. Finding ways to get through it. finding a pattern of language to get you through, which kind of-
CB: [19:17] That formula?
JA: [19:18] Yeah, authenticity, you know, it strangulates the ability for people to be vulnerable because you learn the pattern, and that’s what I mean. When you learn the pattern I think what you compromise is the authenticity and that is something that I don’t think that people always think about when they’re not taking into consideration how people may engage with certain things. I think that it is just deemed straight way as being incompetent or not being organised or not being diligent or proactive. Not all is all it seems and I think that sometimes we would all do well to remember that.
CB: [19:53] Yeah.
JA: [19:54] But because we don’t talk to one another and we have this ridiculous standard that we want each other to attain to, sometimes we don’t realise. I don’t think that people would ever realise how difficult I find academia. I find it incredibly difficult but I think the perception is that because I’ve done what I’ve done, that I find it easy. Yes, believe me, it’s very difficult. Particularly because of the way that I process and understand things, for it to work it means me basically working 20 hours a day and now that is something I wouldn’t advise anyone to do. And that’s because I might be told something at 9 o’clock which makes perfect sense to everybody, but by 2am in the morning my brain has only just worked out what it is, or maybe the next day. You know, and that’s a difference of 20 hours when someone may want something done within the next 3 or 4.
CB: [20:47] And that sort of workload is incredibly hard to sustain in terms of health and family life and yeah, your own wellbeing, isn’t it. So the challenges of academia, and working life generally, not compatible with autistic thinking. I guess it’s really hard to know what to do about that, isn’t it, when you’re in it. For me, part of it has just been having those conversations like this I guess, and talking about it.
[21:16] I got to a point where I was like I just need to say I am autistic and this is hard, and there came a point where I just couldn’t carry on doing things as I had before.
JA: [21:27] Chris when you did it, how did you feel?
CB: [21:32] Oh well, for me my story is a bit different to yours because I wasn’t diagnosed until I was older. I wasn’t diagnosed as a kid and I kind of worked on the presumption that I was autistic for several years. Then essentially I had a bit of a breakdown and that led me to seek a diagnosis. Seeking the diagnosis and getting the diagnosis felt really powerful for me because it confirmed why I was struggling with some of the things you just talked about. It also felt like a bit of a turning point in that I’m not going to carry on doing things as I’ve done them before, because I can’t, because it makes me unwell.
[22:16] So for me it’s been a very positive thing, because it’s helped me make changes. For me it’s been very positive, but it is a very different trajectory to yours because you were diagnosed so much younger, so you’ve lived with that knowledge through your life, but you’ve also lived with other people knowing that and therefore that is going to have impacted on how they expected you to be, not to mention the intersections of race and all the other differences that you’ve experienced in your life compared to me, but specifically talking about the autism diagnosis and talking about it has been very positive for me really.
JA: [22:52] That’s brilliant. That is so great to hear because I guess the thing about being diagnosed as a kid, which in my case will have been ’89, no, ’88, because I was born in ’85, is that when you’re a kid, you become defined by that. So it’s like you’re the autistic kid, because you end up going to- I went to the special school and you spend pretty much all of your time outside of the classroom and you’re othered in a very different way, as in everyone knows that you’re autistic and you know you’re autistic. Do you know what I mean? There is no getting away from it.
[23:37] So in some respects, your adolescent and formative experience is interesting because obviously everyone wants to try and be cool with me but I guess I didn’t have that opportunity but what it did lend itself to is that I spent a lot of time on my own as a child because I was always in isolatory environments in terms of learning spaces, and I spent a lot of time with adults and what it did do is it prepared me very well for being an adult in terms of how to speak to adults, how to be around adults, and it allowed me to become very comfortable being in my own company and become comfortable with myself.
[24:13] So at that age where people want to fit in and where it’s a period of discovery and all those kinds of things, and for a lot of people part of that period of discovery is conforming, because I spent so much time on my own I didn’t have anything to particularly conform to. So I became very comfortable with myself and it meant that the things I was into were the things I was in to, and I very much followed the beat of my own drum in that regard and when I say I didn’t try and fit in it wasn’t like an act of rebellion. There was nothing to fit in to because I had spent so much time on my own.
[24:44] In terms of school, where that becomes a social space for people to find those synergies and fit in, it proved massively advantageous because I didn’t ever really care too much what other people thought and I had a particular way of doing things which I was always like as long as I’m true to myself, and that’s great, and I think that the way that I’ve gone about my academic career is probably very different to other people because I guess, like I said, the biggest currency in academia is self-promotion and I think that a lot of people, for good reason, and I get it, they seek a lot of validation from what other people say about their work or what they say about them as an academic and I get it. I understand why that is the case because academia is all about that but actually it’s not something I’ve ever – there are mechanisms you would put in place to gain that validation and one of them being self-promotion and I’ve not done that. I don’t put my work out for people to see. Because I’ve always been comfortable in knowing that if people are supposed to stumble upon it they will.
CB: [25:49] And people find it. People definitely find your work. And I’ve found your work, particularly the Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain, the book. I loved reading that and I’m guessing part of the topic of that would be something being music and your experience of growing up during the cool Britannia period and liking certain music. I’m guessing that music might be something you would associate as what we might call special interest or focused interest or whatever. Am I right?
JA: [26:21] It was huge, so like for me, I really wish I was an adult during that period. They say it was like the last great decade. So the sixties was like a great decade in Britain because of the Swinging Sixties and the last great decade was the nineties and I’ve spoken to a lot of people when I wrote that book and I’ve done quite a few documentaries on this and I’m doing one for the BBC at the moment on this particular subject, Cool Britannia, and I think that it was the last great decade, you know, as Noel Gallagher says, the great and good all resided in that decade.
[26:50] And the reason why I say that is because there are a lot of issues associated with that, but if we just focus on the music, just specifically the music, not the other political context. You’ve got these five, white, working-class Mancunians, and they basically decide, they are kind of the children of like Joy Division, Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, Happy Mondays. We’re going to take on the world and we’re going to win. You know, it’s one thing to be the biggest, as Stone Roses ambition was to be the biggest band in the city, right, and they became one of the biggest bands in Britain and then there is one thing to be like ‘Right, we don’t want to be the biggest band in the city, or in Britain, we want to be the biggest band in the world’ and for two years Oasis were the biggest band in then world. Do you know what I mean?
[27:36] And when you’re a council estate kid, and you take race out of this, which is the one time I will actually do that, and you just look at five working-class kids from a council estate who take on then world and win, as a 13, 14-year-old that is a big thing. When you’re in this concrete jungle and you’re thinking how do I get out of this, they did it and you kind of think ‘Well I can do that’, and the first time I heard the opening chord to Cigarettes and Alcohol it was like this crescendo coming through my TV at home. And we had cable, and there was this music channel called The Box, music television you control, that’s what they used to call it, and I remember the first time I heard it, I don’t know what it was, like whether it was the stolen chords from T-Rex or whether was just like- So Get It On, the T-Rex song Get It On, that’s where they stole it from, so it’s that opening bit where it’s like [sings intro] and obviously Noel Gallagher stole loads of like kind of chords and riffs. Morning Glory, for example, he stole that from REM, (This One Goes Out) To The One I Love. [sings intro].
CB: [28:44] I don’t think that I’ve recognised that before but yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JA: [28:46] I guess that’s where the special interests come from because you listen. Because I love music so much, so you kind of see where they kind of borrowed from, and even Don’t Look Back in Anger, that is stolen from Imagine, from John Lennon. So I guess when I heard all of that it just did something in my mind and then you kind of have like Paul Weller who is like, at this point he’s in the doldrums with the years after Style Council and then comes back with kind of like a self-titled album, the Stanley Road album and he has kind of got a song like Changingman, which is completely biographical, and for me, like school doesn’t make sense to me, people don’t necessarily make sense to me, all these educational behavioural psychologists don’t make sense to me but when I hear songs like that everything becomes crystal clear. I know what I want to be, and I know what I am. And it’s the only time I have some- You know, people can talk to me and I don’t have no sense of what they’re saying, but I hear those songs and I hear lyrics like ‘You can wait for a lifetime to spend your days in the sunshine’, or, you know, ‘but when it goes on top you’ve got to make it happen’, and the only thing I hear is ‘got to make it happen’. and those things make more sense to me than a human being saying to me ‘Jason, you need to knuckle down in school’ and it’s like well, I can’t, but you’re right. … knuckle down in school, you know.
CB: [30:04] And the way that you’re talking about it, you know it’s the sound of it, it’s the kind of social and cultural meaning of it because you’re talking about Oasis and who they were, but you’re talking about the sound of those chords, and you’re also talking about the lyrics, and those kinds of things coming together and making sense.
JA: [30:26] Yeah, I don’t know. For me it’s like sometimes you have this dull fuse in your brain, that there’s a light there but it’s a dull light, a flickering light, and then sometimes you just get this kind of firework explosion where everything becomes so crystal clear.
[30:43] I’m not promoting drugs on this but like a lot of psychedelia, particularly in the 60s, when they talk about taking LSD and things like that, they often talk about these portals in their mind that opened in terms of colours and I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. I’ve never done any of them, but I have always been interested in psychedelia and why those artists at that time were so creative. A lot of the reading and paraphernalia and the obsessions I’ve had with that, the other stuff that always comes out is this idea of kind of these kinds of chemicals opening portals in their minds and it can be through recreational drug use or through sounds and stuff like that. For me it’s very much sounds. It’s sounds. The things that I hear. And for me, when I first heard Oasis, it was like – particularly that Definitely Maybe album, it was like a chord going off in my brain.
[31:36] And, by the way, it still is. I have listened to that album probably once a day for probably 20 years straight, if not longer. So – because it all still makes perfect sense. People have things that centre them, yoga, spiritual retreats, a glass, half a bottle of wine. For me, listening to that album gives me a sense of where it all started and where I’m going. And look, Liam, and Noel, politically speaking there are a lot of things that they say and have done that do not align with the kind of society that we want to live in, but if anyone looked at any musician through that particular lens, I’m not sure how we would listen to.
[32:20] So, for example, the most sampled person in history is James Brown, but James Brown, if you put James Brown in today’s society, James Brown as no place in today’s society because he physically and violently abused a lot of the partners he was with.
CB: [32:37] Yeah, yeah.
JA: [32:39] Now we could turn around and say you should cancel James Brown, which arguably you should, but the truth is that he’s still the most sampled artist in history, so with these things sometimes can you separate the artist from the music? I think in extreme cases you should always do that, but I think that like Morrissey, the argument with Morrissey. Morrissey has some interesting views that I for one do not share.
CB: [33:06] The same.
JA: [33:08] But when I hear This Charming Man, do I think that is one of the best musical arrangements ever? You know, is there a person who doesn’t know that opening tenet. Everybody knows it when they hear that jangly riff by Johnny Marr. So these kinds of things sometimes, you’re in this kind of strange dichotomy where it’s like my politics do not align with that individual, but then you go back to that 14-year-old and you think what was it that drew me to those people? It wasn’t necessarily their political affiliations, it was this idea that they had and the fact that the lived it, they became it.
CB: [33:44] You’ve talked a bit about Definitely Maybe and it being a really important album to you. Do you think that it’s possible that a new band or another band could bring out an album now at this point in your life that would feel this important, or is this about when you heard it? Is there something about Definitely Maybe and the time in which you heard it that makes it so important to you?
JA: [34:05] I think it’s about the time I heard it, you know. there are other albums that have had the same impact. Tracy Chapman’s self-titled album in 1989, which I probably came across before Definitely Maybe, had a similar impact. I mean my favourite genre of music is rock’n’roll, so that is why I probably lent more towards that anyway. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is one that had a huge, huge impact on me. A huge impact.
[34:35] And the last kind of album that I was really, really moved by, I mean I like a lot of N.E.R.D stuff but that’s because I love Pharrell and I just think that he’s an amazing composer of music, but the last album I was really moved by, in terms of similar to Definitely Maybe was probably Silent Alarm by Bloc Party.
CB: [34:53] Yeah, absolutely.
JA: [34:56] And like for me, when I was 16 I went to this bar, or pub I guess in Deptford. At the time it had about five people in it and this band were playing on the Friday night and you could see the roadies setting up and kind of the studio hand and then the bank came out, and you have this kind of quite handsome back man that comes out who appears to be the frontman, and you’re kind of thinking okay, well this is interesting, because they were positioned as a rock act is going to come in and play this Friday and literally he just started playing this kind of crazy punk riff, you know, which turns out to be Helicopter. Subsequently two years later the whole world finds out who Bloc Party is and Silent Alarm is released and it’s insane. I think that was the last album I was properly like ‘Wow, this is massive’, because it won’t be lost on anyone that the only person that kind of comes to mind in a British context who was the lead singer of an alternative rock band, because we don’t talk about this particular person a lot, but I talk about in the book, you know, Skunk Anansie, AKA Deborah Ann Dyer-
CB: [36:03] Yeah, Skin, yeah, yeah.
JA: [36:06] She, you know, I remember seeing her at Brixton Academy and like for me that was another lifechanging moment. Seeing this, as I kind of described in the book, this beautiful, androgenous, Black, queer woman, in that space. And in what was a sea of kind of white, egotistical white mean at the time. And kind of seeing this black, gay, man, who completely embodies a different type of masculinity, that for me was like huge.
[36:49] I guess as a heterosexual black man it also challenges some of the dynamics you have in your mind of particular groups of people which, by the way, I don’t think I needed particularly challenging at that point in time because I think that I had a very good understanding of intersectionality even at that age, because of the mother I had, who was influential on that, but it was huge and that was the last kind of album I was moved by.
[37:14] but there are some great kind of albums that have come out since then, but I think that how music is produced is different anyway, so like very often now you release hits, you don’t release albums and, by the way, if you do release albums and everyone gravitates towards the two or three hits that came out in the charts, so the days of listening to an album from like 1-12, those days don’t really exist anymore. So people don’t enjoy albums in the same way. I know vinyl has made a comeback, so I think that people are being encouraged to do that, but even like-
CB: [37:46] Yeah, you can probably see my record play and my records just behind me there.
JA: [37:49] But this is it, and I think it’s important. I will tell you an album I’ve been moved by now, right now, and it’s a new album, Tears for Fears new album, The Tipping Point.
CB: [37:59] Oh okay, yeah, yeah.
JA: [38:02] Tears for Fears have been around for a long time but they don’t actually have like a massive back catalogue of work but when they do produce work it’s unbelievable, right? And The Tipping Point I think is a really, really good album. I think that it’s a really good album. So in terms of an album that I’m moved by now, I would probably say that, at the moment.
CB: [38:22] I’ve spoken to, and not just on the podcast, but as part of this project I’ve spoken to lots of autistic people and one of the main interests that comes up is music. It seems to be a theme running through many autistic people’s lives, that intensity of interest in music, that kind of repetitive nature of listening to the same thing over and over again, but also what you’ve talked about, that way of understanding the world through music. And it’s something that I feel very strongly myself. Music has always been my thing and I have always gravitated to particular lyrics and what I love about your work about the Cool Britannia book is the way in which you’re so direct about the way in which you’re understanding of things to do with music. You even put a playlist for the book, don’t you.
JA: [39:09] Yeah, yeah.
CB: [39:12] Which I really love that idea. And, to a very small extent, in some of my work I’ve included quotes from kind of popular culture, from Joy Division and stuff, because they are my starting point for making sense of things. So yeah, it is really interesting to hear you talk about that from your personal perspective.
JA: [39:28] I was going to say, Chris, you know you said Joy Division is your starting point and Oasis is my starting point, but Joy Division is yours. How did you come for that to be? Because I guess Joy Division became New Order, right?
CB: [39:41] Yeah, so Joy Division, see I’ve got a Joy Division tattoo, Joy Division, because I’m old, and we didn’t have the internet when I was young, my first experience of Joy Division was through ordering a tape of theirs through the library, so I ordered a cassette of the album Closer, and I just remember the day I got it and I was blown away by just the sound of it, the sound of it and the words. It was the sound of it, so yeah Joy Division.
[40:13] I was also, and still am a big fan of The Manic Street Preachers and their work is just so dense lyrically.
JA: [40:20] James Dean, honestly, he is unbelievable. It’s funny you say that, I was talking to someone about The Manic Street Preachers the other day and we were going through our top five and I said to them, like I said to them Design for Life is a big one.
CB: [40:33] Yeah.
JA: [40:34] And I said to them, If you Tolerate This, I think that came out in 98, around 1997, and it also became the melodramatic backdrop to David Beckham’s fall from grace in ’98, in the ’98 world cup! So when they were kind of doing the rise and fall of David Beckham, that kick out at Simeone, then they kind of had Manic Street Preachers, that particular song playing in the background, but I don’t know, I think Manic Street Preachers are brilliant.
CB: [41:03] There is also the album, Second Toughest in the Infants by Underworld is just like, like you’ve said about Definitely Maybe, that is the album that for me, for some reason, it’s that one that I don’t have it on every day but I will listen to it when I want to kind of – yeah, when I want things to make sense.
JA: [41:26] You’re so right about that making sense. I just thought that there is only one album that maybe I will listen to more than Definitely Maybe, or there is two actually, there is Paul Simon’s Graceland, which is actually my favourite album, and there is Ten by Pearl Jam.
CB: [41:43] Oh yeah, okay.
JA: [41:45] And for me, Eddie Vedder has just got the best voice. Ever. The only person who has got a better voice than Eddie Vedder, sadly who is not with us anymore is Chris Cornell from Soundgarden, and listening to that, I just think again the thing with these people is they are great storytellers and for whatever reason, how they tell stories to me makes a lot of sense, and even in my childhood, you know, my biggest, or one of my biggest memories as a kid was my mum reading to me a lot and then playing Enya afterwards, so I listened to Enya like – I listened to Enya a ridiculous amount because my mum is also obsessed with kind of Celtic and Greek mythology, which is why I’m called Jason!
[42:30] Yeah, so that becomes a big thing, and it’s just so interesting hearing albums that you engage with and it would be good to hear what other albums kind of stick out for you.
CB: [42:43] Well, now, because I asked you that question like is it just stuff from when you were younger and for me it is a lot like, the Underworld – I think it was around 94, that Underworld album came out in 94, how old would I have been? I was born in 78, so 16 or something. Maths isn’t my strong point.
JA: [43:03] Ah you’re still young, you’re still young.
CB: [43:03] Yeah, yeah, I’m young. So there was the Underworld album and actually before the Manics got famous there was The Holy Bible, which was their really dense and quite depressing album, but just – I clung on to that. But I find that music becomes important during intense periods of my life when stuff has happened that has kind of made life challenging. And so sometimes it’s like more recent music, like – so, the pandemic was a thing, as we all lived through the pandemic, so I kind of gravitated towards certain music. So there is a bank called Have a Nice Life, but a couple of their albums have really stuck with me over the last couple of years, so for me there is all the music from when I was younger, and a lot of that kind of really resonates with me still, but it’s also, yeah, when I’m going through something in life. Whether that’s when we’ve had our kids, because I’ve got two as I think you’ve got two kids as well.
JA: [44:04] Yeah, two kids, yeah.
CB: [44:05] So that being a thing, and that being a particularly emotional thing, so there is albums that were out around those times that kind of resonate. One by a band called Chromatics.
JA: [44:15] Yeah, I’ve heard of them.
CB: [44:18] Really good. and I really like stuff by Burial. So for me it’s like electronic music as well as kind of indie and rock and stuff. But yeah, Silent Alarm is a brilliant album as well. If that was released now I think people would just download Helicopter and Banquet and that would probably be done with that.
JA: [44:34] Yeah, literally, and they would be. And it’s a shame because like I mean look, by the way, when Silent Alarm came out, I think that those were the songs that were played the most, because apart from anything else they were used a lot as fills in adverts.
CB: [44:51] Yes, they were, commercials, yeah.
JA: [44:54] And TV kind of dramas and stuff, so they probably did really well out of that, but I mean the albums that you’re talking about, it’s just brilliant. I think finding albums is for me a big part of the work I want to do kind of going forward is really around the impact of music and kind of cultural and autistic experiences, because I think that it’s an integral thing, you know, and I guess it’s something that only a couple of people, or a lot of people started cottoning on to now, but like someone emailed me a few months ago like ‘Jason, can I ask you a question? All your papers, I think they’re song titles, is that correct?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, you’ve only just figured it out?’, so even like – they’re not song titles for song titles sake, they actually do fit.
CB: [45:41] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JA: So the paper ‘No one can See Me Cry’, the mental health paper, that came about because there was a person I was interviewing at the time who said Jason, I know you really like REM, and I was like yeah, I do. They were explaining to me about how they navigate racism every day and they were like I always say I have to apply my make-up twice, and I was like ‘What do you mean?’ and they were like it’s so painful the racism I navigate at work that I go into the toilet, pretty much the same time every day, sit in the cubicle, cry, then reapply my make-up. But it’s that whole thing of I just don’t want anyone to see me cry, so it was like no one can see me cry. Like you know that’s the lyric in Imitation of Life, like ‘Come on, come on’, and I was like, – you know, what was really interesting is that the person who was experiencing that, you know, they took the time to explain. I mean I got it, right, but they knew how much I loved music and they took time to explain it to me in a way that actually made sense and it ended up becoming the quote for the paper, you know, or not the quote, but the lyric. And it’s like, I don’t know, the papers – we dream the same- So it was around racism and how we all collectively need to be responsible for that, but it’s like we dream the same dream, and if we want racism to end we all need to ‘dream the same dream and want the same thing’. and someone was like ‘I swear that’s a song’, and I was like yeah, yeah, by Belinda Carlisle.
[46:58] These things are always- It’s deliberate because the idea is to give people a small sense of how I make sense of things through an autistic lens, and that lens very much is around music. I can bring just about anything back to music. You know, sport and music are probably my favourite things on this planet but for me, I could probably live without sport, and I’m saying just I couldn’t live without music. I couldn’t live without music.
CB: [47:30] Same, yeah, same.
JA: [47:32] It just helps me make sense of everything around me. The other day I was listening to David Gray on Virgin Radio and you forget how brilliant that guy is. You really forget how brilliant that guy is and that song, a lot of those songs that he same in the late-mid 90s, they all still have the same relevance now. Like Babylon, like describing a Friday night out and being high on that type of adrenalin, it still makes sense now.
[48:06] I kind of thing of when I’m doing work, the biggest thing that I think about is will it make sense in like 5-10 years’ time? So you try and think about it, not that I’m a songwriter, but you try and think about it like music. I can listen to The Jam and I can listen to Paul Weller talking about Eton Rifles and understand that he’s talking about white working-class culture. I can make sense of that. I can listen to Going Underground and understand that he’s talking about unions and the impact of that and I can make that link and I always hope that everything I write, like the Cool Britannia stuff, in 10 years’ time, if someone doesn’t have a clue about the 90s it will make sense to people in a really legible way that is kind of infused with kind of – you know, I always say you want to try and write like, in terms of outside of academia, you want to try and write things like a documentary almost.
CB: [49:05] Yeah, yeah.
JA: [49:05] And I always think that if that book could be made into a documentary, which fortunately for me it will be, like you want to be able to tell that story through that lens. And I think as academics there is not a lot of currency attributed to that, not through any academic’s fault but because of the currency we deal in but I think that it’s beginning to move in a different direction now. Mechanisms like this, how people express their ideas and what they’re doing now, people are beginning to engage in these things in a different way and there will come a time in the future where academic papers will serve– I think they serve one purpose now, you know, I think people are gravitating towards mediums like this where they can fully express themselves because let’s face it, when we produce an academic paper, in the end what you’re expressing is the views of the reviewers. You write something, they tell you that they don’t like it. If you want it to be published you reshape it and you do what they want you to do. That isn’t freedom of thought when I think of freedom of thought and when I think of music and how musicians express that it’s freedom of thought. What we’re beginning to see is a writing that is actually moving away from that rigid bind in academia.
[50:14] I think that people are beginning to be more free in their thinking so you’re going to see people writing in a more melodic accessible way that still speaks of traditions of academia but it’s going to be different in the years to come and I think that is a consequence of how we actually digest and understand music. I think music is responsible for that.
CB: [50:36] I love that idea of melodic writing. I’ve lost track of time but I’m going to say let’s draw a close there. I could talk about music with you all day but I’ve already taken up enough of your time.
JA: [50:46] No, not at all.
CB: [50:47] And I really appreciate the time you’ve spent talking to me. Thank you so much, Jason Arday, for talking to me today.
JA: [50:56] Oh Chris, it’s been an absolute honour, thank you so much.
(end)
Ruling Passions 