The opening track of Parquet Courts’ latest album is the best opening track of any album this year and probably sweeps the floor with last year too. The album’s called Wide Awake! The song is called Total Football.

Over the course of four minutes and a few seconds, Total Football lays down some serious political ideology while drawing parallels with the Dutch football strategy from the 70s (football as in soccer, not the American variety, although that gets a twist or two later on) all on top of some absolute instrumental churners. Parquet Courts have always had a way with a good punk chant-along but this might be their best yet. A fiery, determined, explosive, inspiring, contagious, catchy belter of a song.

That’s what gets you first, the cathartic power of the track. And then you dig a little deeper and realise what the band is trying to say…

We are conductors of sound, heat and energy

And I bet that you thought you had us figured out from the start

We are conduits of clear electricity

Now you’re back on the pitch to take the apparatus apart

A history lesson before we begin. Total Football was the tactical theory pioneered by Johan Cruyff’s Netherlands national team that made (and lost) consecutive World Cup finals in 1974 and 1978. There are heaps of predecessors (not the least of which being the European Cup winning Ajax team of that decade) that helped lead to totaalvoetbal, history never happens in a vacuum, but it was the Netherlands team in the 1970s that really revolutionised things.

The main idea is that traditional positions are interchangeable. Every player needs well-rounded skills and an open mind. Fluid positions allow a playmaker like Cruyff to drift around the field to get himself involved, knowing that somebody else would slip into his centre-forward area to take advantage of any defenders dragged away from their post (Ajax and Netherlands employed a 4-3-3 formation – although with one centre-back who’d often step into midfield to begin attacks).

This made them ruthless to defend against but it also ran the risk of leaving them exposed without the ball, which is why the manipulation of space becomes so crucial. Stretch the field when you’ve got the ball, shrink it when you don’t. This in turn led to some furious pressing tactics where the opponent with the ball would be swamped as soon as it reached his feet. They played a high defensive line to enable it all and depended on some insane levels of fitness and energy. Revolutionary in its day and influential even in the current era, where Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, for example, have very clearly built upon its foundational tenets.

Rebels, teachers

Strikers, sweepers

Better protected

Whenever collected

However Total Football only worked when every individual worked together in service of the team. A single weak link and it all falls apart, one dude fails to press the man in possession and there’s an easy pass out of danger, leaving three defenders out of position and allowing the other team to surge forward in attack. There has to be unity and cohesion and trust. That’s the only way it happens. But get those things rolling and you’ve got a collective that exceeds the sum of its parts.

And that’s pretty much what Parquet Courts are getting at. We live in some troubling times if you let it all get to you. Children are being ripped away from their parents and locked in literal cages as we speak while the President responsible for this atrocity simultaneously withdraws from the UN Human Rights Council because of perceived inaction over nations with questionable human rights records despite, even disregarding the American government’s own hypocrisy there, that same President having joyful meetings with North Korea’s leader and calling for Russia to be reinstated in the G7… and this is all in the last week.

That particular administration is an obvious example of the abuse of power by those who hold it but obviously it spreads so much deeper than that. We live in a pivotal time when it comes to our environment – you know that planet which we share and that sustains us? – yet corporate greed continually beats down personal responsibility. Same goes for global poverty because if the 2000 or so billionaires on this planet wanted to then they could end it with the click of a finger. The rich are getting richer and they’re doing so by exploiting everyone else. Oxfam estimated in January that the growth in wealth of the world’s existing billionaires through 2017 alone could end world poverty seven times over.

Workers, authors

Poets, stoppers

Power resembled

If we are assembled

This is an idea that the band keeps punching at in Wide Awake!, raging against the inactions of the powerful in a song like Before The Water Gets Too High (“or is it someone else’s job until the rich are refugees?”). Similarly the song Normalization questions exactly how much of this “bullshit” one is willing to take. And Violence is a dig at just how endemic aggression and pain remain in modern society. Even the title track itself is a funky-as-hell jam about wokeness.

This is call to arms stuff. Yet mixed in between are gorgeous tracks like Mardi Gras Beads, Freebird II and Tenderness which bring us back to loving humanity. The revolutionary tunes are one thing but many a social movement has been defined by its lack of empathy towards its opposition. Battlelines are drawn where it becomes us versus them, which is basically how The Orange Man got elected in the first place. His campaign tapped into a vocal portion of that country who felt angry, oppressed and undermined. He offered them a voice and an outlet. It’s only natural that they would fall slumbering into the trap.

Only through those who stay awake can an institution be dismantled

It is dishonest, nay, a sin to stand for any anthem that attempts to drown out the roar of oppression

Eric Hoffer wrote a book about this in 1951 called The True Believer which is stunningly applicable even today. He argued that when people begin to perceive a loss of control in their life, no longer feel any potential for self-advancement, that’s when they seek to subsume themselves as individuals within a greater group. Misfits and the “new poor” (as in people who have experienced comfort but no longer have it) are particularly vulnerable. These mass movements act quickly to draw the boundaries of their identity not so much by defining themselves as by defining their enemies. They prioritise the group over the individual. They demand self-sacrifice. They demand such a buy-in that fanatics are blinded and inured to the damage that they’re doing to others.

This is what’s happening right now. This is what Parquet Courts are rallying against. Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest fits in nicely with the sporting comparisons, a man who politely knelt for the anthem during NFL games and swiftly had his very reasonable method of social protest hijacked into a debate about patriotism and respect, which it was never ever about. As Malcolm Jenkins later said: You aren’t listening.

Hesse Total Football

Twombly Total Football

Tzara Total Football

Mina Total Football

That’s the NFL, though. That most American of sports. The one where you have specific timeouts designed to slip extra advertisements into, where the efforts of the many are overshadowed by the singular leader, the masculine ideal, the individual brand, the quarterback. The charismatic man who defines the team, same as the charismatic man who defines the mass movement – because there’s always a powerful, paternal leader at the head of a mass movement. That’s American Football. That’s not Total Football.

The saddest part is that the fanatics are so obviously being manipulated but you can only see that from a safe distance. They’re not enemies, they’re temporarily lost souls (mass movements always die out for the same reasons that they rise, they’re not built to last – Hoffer explains this with the point that mass movements are meant to offer a brighter future. As soon as they start offering victories in the present they lose their impetus).

Which is where the difficulty lies. We’ve identified a problem. We’re activated and ready to do something about it. Sweet as. But how do we avoid becoming the very enemy we’re trying to overcome?

Panthers Total Football

KoBrA Total Football

Dada Total Football

Beatles Total Football

This is where our society is at, stuck between progress and stability. Change is always uncomfortable but there’s a tendency to be dismissive of those who stand in the way of progress rather than being accommodating and instructive. All conflict is an opportunity for learning, but open-minded discourse isn’t something that comes easy to people these days. Gotta always keep the humanity. Always need that fix of a little tenderness, to quote a song.

Throw it back to Total Football then. No leaders, no positions. All working selflessly for the benefit of the team. It’s a collective but it’s not oppressive. All chipping in wherever we’re needed rather than sticking to our job and our job alone. You remove personal responsibility for yourself and replace it with personal responsibility for others. Empathy, mate. That’s the magic formula.

Swapping parts and roles is not acting but rather emancipation from expectation

Total Football is a dedication to a philosophy, after all. Total Football is what happens when everything is happening in rhythm for a united cause.

Collectivism and autonomy are not mutually exclusive

Total Football is not about subsuming the individual but rather simply not prioritising it above others. You can still be Total Football without compromising your self. Johan Cruyff is one of the greatest players of all time.

Those who find discomfort in your goals of liberation will be issued no apology

Total Football is also a bloody kick-arse of a song that kicks-off the best album yet from the best rock and roll band in the business these days.

And fuck Tom Brady!

 

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