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IN THE BEGINNING there was an Empire that had the dark heart ripped right out of it.
And into the Void came a sexier, funkier, more humane side to the national character, a side that that had always been struggling to make itself heard but had never quite, until now, been able to do so.
As it grew, the sound became thinner, paler, older, losing much of its kaleidoscopic lustre, so that it became necessary, in the perpetual, irrepressible search for revolution and newness, to state what it was all about all over again. Which it did, with a wonderful primordial yelp.
Very soon the weary, lethal ghost of the Empire returned dressed as a hateful woman, and the sound was forced underground, or hurled kicking and screaming to the margins, where it sang about opposition and loneliness with such eloquent energy that it seemed to have found a new, beautiful form for an old, beautiful truth.
But as the Empire itself adapted to the new way of things by morphing into insidious new shapes, the sound became confused, disparate, lost sight of what it was battling against, and began to lazily repeat itself with an odd mixture of flippancy and earnest inanity, exchanging pure self-expression for pure self-worship, which was exactly what the new order prized above all.
The vociferous cry of the Outsider became the vaguely indifferent shrug of the Poseur-rebel gazing uxoriously at the past, rebelling only against the notion that it might be necessary to stand squarely behind an ideal of what the future could be.
And the Void beckoned once more, unless something come again to fire new light into the darkness.
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