Name Ben Watson | Role Music writer | |
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Books Frank Zappa: The Negative, Cider - Hard and Sweet, Derek Bailey and the Story, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Frank Zappa: The Complete | ||
Ben Watson (born 1956) is a British writer on music and culture of Marxist views, known especially for his writings on Frank Zappa.
Watson is well known as a regular contributor to The Wire, as well as the author of numerous books, often entailing studies of popular culture from the perspective of Marxist aesthetics. Watson was a member of the British Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party; his writing combines this background together with influences from Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, the Situationists and wider cultural interests including the writings of James Joyce and J.H. Prynne. His first full-length book, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play argued that Zappa's work was part of the protest against capitalist society. Watson calls his own field of study in this area Zappology. He is also an experimental poet and novelist; his first novel Shit-Kicks and Dough-Balls was published in 2003.
Watson's partner is the Marxist philosopher (and scholar of Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs) Esther Leslie with whom he has collaborated on various works.
Since 2003 Watson has broadcast a weekly radio show (2pm Wednesdays) on Resonance 104.4FM (www.resonancefm.com) called Late Lunch With Out To Lunch.
In 2010, he and Andy Wilson founded the Association of Musical Marxists; together with Keith Fisher the AMM started up the Unkant imprint.