Of course all the usual disclaimers apply (they're bland but they need to be stated): any death is an unspeakable tragedy; this must be a living nightmare for her family; it's shocking that this could happen to someone so young. For myself it feels like this is the first person of my generation to die in an end-of-the-line kind of way; other people of exactly my age have died in accidents, but this was more than an accident, the endpoint of her "natural" trajectory, an accelerated aging process, a wasting away, and as such not really different in essence from the one we're all going to have to face eventually. This was the first "mature death" of a contemporary I've experienced, and it's very sad.
Outside of this human context though, this is another one of those "how did this madness ever take hold?" moments to set beside the reaction to the Murdoch defrocking. Amid all the ill-judged appraisals from online hacks desperately scratching around for something positive to say about the actual music, there's a sense of collective embarrassment that we ever allowed what was essentially a pop-cabaret one-hit-wonder to become an international superstar and sometime figurehead for an entire culture.
Amy Winehouse released one good single in 2006, a song whose extreme formal conservatism was redeemed by a campy yet catchy and ingenious lyrical conceit. This is, quite literally, all she ever did of any worth, as far as I can make out.
The rest of what happened was essentially a meta-narrative that perfectly encapsulates the cultural nadir that was the mid-to-late noughties: consumer hedonism, etiolated post-feminism, unapologetic retrophilia of a scarcely believable magnitude, celebrity culture, an alternately tragic/fairytale myth of individualism, vast shallowness on an epic scale. It's some source of comfort to me that these things don't seem quite as hegemonic now as they did back then. Wait a minute, did someone say "Adele"?
“… and then the tears brast out of his eyen …”, Malory, La Morte D’Arthur
“Amazing. Amazing. Really great stuff lads. But I’m not sure I quite understand the verse”.
The rehearsal is going terribly. The new tune we’re working on – our prospective next single – started life as a brilliant computer demo, but it’s now been reworked and mangled beyond all recognition, cramped with far too many indulgent ideas. Warring factions in the band tugged the tune in conflicting directions before we’d even got a performable version up and running (Me: “It sounds like a Michael Jackson pastiche for an American Apparel marketing campaign”; bassist Geoffrey: “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”). After several tinnitus-inducing days of practice, we managed to jam something moderately fluid and cohesive into shape. But now the major label A&R who’s funding the single and the producer who is lined up to oversee the sessions have arrived to tell us what they think.
“Don’t get me wrong. I think I know what you mean in the verse. I’m just not sure other people will”, says Producer.
“What do you mean you don’t know what we mean? And which other people anyway?”
“Look,” pipes up our Manager, also in attendance. “We want something that’s going to create a real impact. The Zane Lowe people said the last single was ‘too frenetic’. They didn’t get it. So right now we really need something big-sounding. Something punchy. The chorus in this tune is fucking great, the best thing you’ve ever done. But perhaps the verse is a bit high-pitched and … wayward, if that’s the word?”
It’s supposed to be wayward, I think to myself. That’s where we come from: beside the way.
“Exactly,” says A&R guy, who is very young and frankly a bit slow and dim-witted. Someone told us that in the industry he’s known as Quietly Confident Joe, but to be honest, I think the industry has mistaken naivety and cluelessness for quiet confidence in this case. “It’s too wayward,” says Joe, dimly. “The chorus is great, but can you rewrite the verse?”
Lead-singer Danny looks crestfallen. For all that I think he’s brought this sort of thing on himself by tirelessly chasing after the music biz seal of approval from day one, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s being pulled so many different ways, with the result that there’s increasingly very little of him left. Because the whole venture has always been predicated on getting signed and pleasing the industry Big Other, he’s steadily lost his means of self-identification, and at the same time, most of his self-esteem.
“You can rewrite the verse, can’t you Danny?”
“Yeah okay. I’ll see what I can do over the next couple of days.”
***
In the summer that follows everything accelerates to the point that some sort of implosion becomes inevitable. The Zane Lowe people belatedly “get it”, and Zane himself begins to ladle on us the sort of manic, superbowl-announcer hype that is his stock in trade. From this point on a major deal is basically a formality. Even in a period of downturn for the industry, if you’re a half-interesting British band and you have a manager with a track record and the backing of the nation’s foremost radio DJ, sooner or later one of the big guns is going to have a punt. And when this happens, because A&Rs are precisely as lazy and sheep-like as the schoolbooks say, it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for the bids to come in. Once someone gets it – it seems – so does everybody else, with miraculous simultaneity.
So, as Manager keeps reminding us, after breaking through to radio and MTV2 territory, we hold all the cards. All we have to do is play the game wisely, put our feet right through festival season and we’ll have finally made it to “base camp” (OED: Base Camp, colloq. mus. ind. b/s, the record deal; the light at the end of the tunnel; a pot of gold used to lure gullible young musicians; the point at which all artistic and ethical compromises made in the run up to being signed magically vanish and a band is allowed to do what it wants with impunity).
But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that this is not a game I have any interest in playing. For a long time I tried to justify being a part of what was obviously a thoroughly moribund indie scene by regarding it all as a sort of heroic challenge. We could, I thought, with a minimum of effort, be the most daring, articulate, politically engaged, vociferous band of the last 20 years, and subvert the whole rotten musical landscape at the same time as we won people’s hearts with our white-hot bravery, modernistic flair, and dizzyingly eclectic pop skills. This might sound like blind idealism, but my feeling was that not only would this have been the right thing to do, it would also have been successful. People are crying out for something radical and uncompromising. All we had to do, I thought, was have the courage to resist certain temptations, resist going down the obvious mainstream paths, try to create a way of existing outside a music industry that seemed like it was in its death throes anyway. We could have been the first band of a brave new epoch instead of the last one of an era of gentrified Glastonburys and wearisome corporate awards ceremonies, a band that survived in the long-term on the margins instead of in the short-term at the centre of an elite middle-class leisure industry. Perhaps inevitably, over time I’ve realised that no one else really feels this way. To put it baldly: Danny, the lead singer, in the grand tradition of lead singers across the ages, sees the band as his big chance to put his ego into the stratosphere; Geoffrey, the bassist, wants to be an indie pop star; and Jimmy, the drummer, just wants a steady, respectable job.
Faced with this disconnect with the other band members, for a while I took refuge in a sort of romantic formalism. I posted an article on our myspace blog called “Why We Write Pop Songs”, in which I tried to pretend that the music was all that mattered, man, and that the outside world couldn’t harm us so long as we focused on the magic of sound alone:
When you strip away from pop music all the politics, the celebrity, the money, and the hyperbole, you are left with a series of magical moments of pure form, moments that ultimately resist analysis, and that have the potential to completely transform your life and make you feel like the world has been created all over again when you hear them.
…
Pop music is not about fashion, or commercial compromise, the egotism of individuals or the surface world of urbane media types – it is about trying to salvage tiny transcendent spaces of beauty and meaning in a world that tries with all its might to impose upon us the fallacy that life is just so much shallow, meaningless, pleasure-seeking selfishness. We write pop songs because we think that creating those life-transforming musical moments when the sun appears to shine in the bedroom is the most hopeful and radical thing a human being can do.
For all the truth in this, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut out the peripheral stuff: the money and the hyperbole, the cultural context, the “surface world of urbane media types”. Of course I went into the whole adventure knowing that compromises along the way were inevitable, that not everyone is as left-wing or idealistic as I am, that being professional and pragmatic has its own kind of nobility, that funny little plans never work quite right. I knew the music scene in the UK was in the middle of some sort of epochal nadir and that we would face an uphill struggle trying to do something worthwhile, that saying no to the yeasayers wasn’t going to be easy. I knew alternative music wasn’t quite what it was when we first came to know it as teenagers, when there was still something faintly meaningful in the notion of a counterculture, when John Peel was still alive, and hip-hop and dance music thrived in underground national networks, and the NME was still worth reading in parts.
I knew things had become pretty bad. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer extremity of the situation. Gradually a vast, tragic realisation has dawned, and it has hit me like a death. Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to see that the remains of the counterculture – “indie music” in this case – now stand in complete antithesis to any original countercultural ethos. Not only that, but the simulacrum that now passes for alternative music is actually obviating the possibility of any new aberrant or oppositional culture developing. In short, being in a guitar band in the early-twenty-first century, I am not just a hamstrung part of the solution. I am, unequivocally, an integral part of the problem. I can see the way things are going. We’re becoming just another mildly prog-ish guitar band sustained by media hype and PR bullshit, the kind of Serious Artistic Proposition that gratifies the music industy’s vanity and enables it to pretend that something new is happening, while the really new development, the real democratic upsurge, is left to fall by the wayside. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted.
And yet even having finally reached this conclusion, despite all this I think I could still carry on battling if it was part of a team that at least vaguely agreed in the necessity of some sort of fight. I’ve known Danny and Jimmy since we were kids in the same remote part of Northumberland. We’ve shaped each other’s lives: shared musical tastes, first-time drugs experiences, got beaten up at school because of having long hair. My parents died when I was in my early twenties, and Danny and Jimmy were at both funerals. Surely that’s got to count for something? Surely some kind of family-feeling, some kind of unshakeable loyalty and fellowship can be the common purpose that binds us together, even if we have slightly different views about some things? Wouldn’t a sense of shared history and separateness be enough to see us through?
It would’ve been enough for me, but in the end the forces of self-interest and the machinations of capitalist realism manage to take even this away from us. Toward the end of the summer, we’re playing one of my tunes in rehearsal when drummer Jimmy, who rarely offers his opinion on anything, says that he doesn’t think it’s worth bothering with the tune.
“It’s not that I don’t think it’s good. It’s great. I just don’t think it fits into the set.”
“What ‘set’? We decide the set. And anyway, our gigs are absurdly eclectic as it is. What the hell is all this for if we’re not able to do what we like?”
“We can’t really do what we like though, can we?” chips in bassist Geoffrey. “We should be doing whatever is expected of us.”
“Are you joking? What the fuck? What who expects of us?”
“I just don’t think we can take any risks with the set bearing in mind that we’re not signed yet”, says Jimmy, and I can feel tears welling in my eyes. People talk about negative solidarity, but this is something else, the worst single moment of my life so far, outside of people dying. How has our whole identity, our grounding in friendship, our shared past come to count for so little against impressing some imaginary industry figure? How has one of my best friends, someone from the same part of the country, the same school, the same lonely fucking village as me, come to put short-term professional gain before loyalty and a basic belief in ourselves as a unit? How have they managed this?
***
We always should have been a Newcastle band, so it’s appropriate that it should all end there. The morning after a surprisingly good gig at the Ouseburn, with lots of our friends from the north-east in attendance, the three of us – Danny, Jimmy, me – are sitting in the Centurion Bar at Newcastle Central Station. Geoffrey isn’t here because I didn’t invite him. He was never really a part of the band I started and named with my best friends in the tragic time of my life.
The three of us sit and sip on cokes underneath the vaulted Victorian ceiling, a grand multi-coloured mosaic that reflects in winks and glimmers the rays of late-morning light coming in from the vast open station.
“So why did you invite us here Al?”
I start to read out loud from a single piece of A4 paper. I didn’t think I could do this without some kind of script, idiot that I am. You’re my friends, and I love you, but I can’t carry on with things as they are. I’d like to leave the band, and I’d like you to respect this as my absolute and final decision …
When I’m finished reading there’s really not much more to say. Jimmy pats me on the leg and says something feeble that makes me think how aloof and perfunctory he’s become about everything over the last few months. Danny isn’t saying anything. I need to catch my train back down to Oxford and my girlfriend, so I say my final goodbyes and head out to the platform.
Before I’ve gotten too far Danny comes running after me. He’s weeping and he buries his head in my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry Al”.
“It’s okay. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about”.
“I love you”.
“I love you too”.
I shouldn’t have been so forgiving. Actually, there's a world of things for him to be sorry about. But then it’s probably right that, as the whole thing concludes in any meaningful sense, there should be one last, belated statement of loyalty, a residue of the original dream of ennobling everything, everything that was destroying us, something to hold onto in the months and years to come.
“… and then the tears brast out of his eyen …”, Malory, La Morte D’Arthur, Book XX.
“Amazing. Amazing. Really great stuff lads. But I’m not sure I quite understand the verse”.
The rehearsal is going terribly. The new tune we’re working on – our prospective next single – started life as a brilliant computer demo, but it’s now been reworked and mangled beyond all recognition, cramped with far too many indulgent ideas. Warring factions in the band tugged the tune in conflicting directions before we’d even got a performable version up and running (Me: “It sounds like a Michael Jackson pastiche for an American Apparel marketing campaign”; bassist Geoffrey: “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”). After several tinnitus-inducing days of practice, we manage to jam something moderately fluid and cohesive into shape. But now the major label A&R who’s funding the single and the producer who's lined up to oversee the sessions have arrived to tell us what they think.
“Don’t get me wrong. I think I know what you mean in the verse. I’m just not sure other people will”, says Producer.
“What do you mean you don’t know what we mean? And which other people anyway?”
“Look,” pipes up our Manager, also in attendance. “We want something that’s going to create a real impact. The Zane Lowe people said the last single was ‘too frenetic’. They didn’t get it. So right now we really need something big-sounding. Something punchy. The chorus in this tune is fucking great, the best thing you’ve ever done. But perhaps the verse is a bit high-pitched and … wayward, if that’s the word?”
It’s supposed to be wayward, I think to myself. That’s where we come from: beside the way.
“Hmm,” says A&R guy, who is very young and frankly a bit slow and dim-witted. Someone told us that in the industry he’s known as Quietly Confident Joe, but to be honest, I think the industry has mistaken naivety and cluelessness for quiet confidence in this case. “It is a bit wayward,” says Joe, dimly. “The chorus is great, but can you rewrite the verse?”
Lead-singer Danny looks crestfallen. For all that I think he’s brought this on himself by tirelessly chasing after the music biz seal of approval from day one, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s being pulled so many different ways, with the result that there’s increasingly very little of him left. Because the whole venture has always been predicated on getting signed and pleasing the industry Big Other, he’s steadily lost his means of self-identification, and at the same time, most of his self-esteem.
“You can rewrite the verse, can’t you Danny?”
“Yeah okay. I’ll see what I can do over the next couple of days.”
***
In the summer that follows everything accelerates to the point that some sort of implosion becomes inevitable. The Zane Lowe people belatedly “get it”, and Zane himself begins to ladle on us the sort of manic, superbowl-announcer hype that is his stock in trade. From this point on a major deal is basically a formality. Even in a period of downturn for the industry, if you’re a half-interesting British band and you have a manager with a track record and the backing of the nation’s foremost radio DJ, sooner or later one of the big guns is going to have a punt. And when this happens, because A&Rs are precisely as lazy and sheep-like as the schoolbooks say, it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for the bids to come in. Once someone gets it – it seems – so does everybody else, with miraculous simultaneity.
So, as Manager keeps reminding us, after breaking through to radio and MTV2 territory, we hold all the cards. All we have to do is play the game wisely, put our feet right through festival season and we’ll have finally made it to “base camp” (OED: Base Camp, colloq. mus. ind. b/s, the record deal; the light at the end of the tunnel; a pot of gold used to lure gullible young musicians; the point at which all artistic and ethical compromises made in the run up to being signed magically vanish and a band is allowed to do what it wants with impunity).
But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that this is not a game I have any interest in playing. For a long time I tried to justify being a part of what was obviously a thoroughly moribund indie scene by regarding it all as a sort of heroic challenge. We could, I thought, with a minimum of effort, be the most daring, articulate, politically engaged, vociferous band of the last 20 years, and upend the whole rotten musical landscape at the same time as we won people’s hearts with subversion, modernistic flair and dizzyingly eclectic pop skills. This might sound like blind idealism, but my theory was that not only would this have been the right thing to do, it would also have been successful. People are crying out for something radical and uncompromising. All we had to do, I thought, was have the courage to resist certain temptations, resist going down the obvious mainstream paths, try to create a way of existing outside a doomed music industry that seemed like it was in its death throes. We could have been the first band of a brave new epoch instead of the last one of an era of gentrified Glastonburys and wearisome corporate awards ceremonies, a band that survived in the long-term on the margins instead of in the short-term at the centre of an ephemeral middle-class leisure industry. But over time I’ve realised that no one else really feels this way. To put it baldly: Danny, the lead singer, in the grand tradition of lead singers across the ages, sees the band as his big chance to put his ego into the stratosphere; Geoffrey, the bassist, wants to be an indie pop star; and Jimmy, the drummer, just wants a steady, respectable job.
Faced with this disconnect with the other band members, for a while I took refuge in a sort of romantic formalism. I posted an article on our myspace blog called “Why We Write Pop Songs”, in which I tried to pretend that the music was all that mattered, man, and that the outside world couldn’t harm us so long as we focused on the magic of sound alone:
When you strip away from pop music all the politics, the celebrity, the money, and the hyperbole, you are left with a series of magical moments of pure form, moments that ultimately resist analysis, and that have the potential to completely transform your life and make you feel like the world has been created all over again when you hear them.
…
Pop music is not about fashion, or commercial compromise, the egotism of individuals or the surface world of urbane media types – it is about trying to salvage tiny transcendent spaces of beauty and meaning in a world that tries with all its might to impose upon us the fallacy that life is just so much shallow, meaningless, pleasure-seeking selfishness. We write pop songs because we think that creating those life-transforming musical moments when the sun appears to shine in the bedroom is one of the most hopeful, radical things a human being can do.
For all the truth in this, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut out the peripheral stuff: the money and the hyperbole, the cultural context, the “surface world of urbane media types”. Of course I went into the whole adventure knowing that compromises along the way were inevitable, that not everyone is as left-wing or idealistic as I am, that being professional and pragmatic has its own kind of nobility, that funny little plans never work quite right. I knew the music scene in the UK was in the middle of some sort of epochal nadir and that we would face an uphill struggle trying to do something worthwhile. I knew alternative music wasn’t quite what it was when we first came to know it as teenagers, when there was still something faintly meaningful in the notion of a counter culture, when John Peel was still alive, and hip-hop and dance music thrived in underground national networks, and the NME was still worth reading in parts.
I knew things had become pretty bad. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer extremity of the situation. Gradually a vast, tragic realisation has dawned, and it has hit me like a death. Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to see that the remains of the counter culture – “indie music” in this case – now stand in complete antithesis to any original counter-cultural ethos. Not only that, but the simulacrum that now passes for alternative music is actually obviating the possibility of any new aberrant or oppositional culture developing. In short, being in a guitar band in the early-twenty-first century, I am not just a hamstrung, compromised part of the solution: I'm an integral part of the problem. I can see the way things are going. We’re becoming just another mildly prog-ish guitar band sustained by media hype and PR bullshit, the kind of Serious Artistic Proposition that gratifies the music industy’s vanity and enables it to pretend that something new is happening, while the really new development, the real democratic upsurge, is left to fall by the wayside. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted.
And yet even having finally reached this conclusion, despite all this I think I could still carry on battling if it was part of a team that at least vaguely agreed in the necessity of some sort of fight. I’ve known Danny and Jimmy since we were kids in the same remote part of Northumberland. We’ve shaped each other’s lives: shared musical tastes, first-time drugs experiences, got beaten up at school because of having long hair. My parents died when I was in my early twenties, and Danny and Jimmy were at both funerals. Surely that’s got to count for something? Surely some kind of family-feeling, some unshakeable spirit of fellowship can be the common purpose that binds us together, even if we have slightly different views about some things? Wouldn’t a sense of shared history and separateness be enough to see us through?
It would’ve been enough for me, but in the end the forces of self-interest and the machinations of capitalist realism manage to take even this away from us. Toward the end of the summer, we’re playing one of my tunes in rehearsal when drummer Jimmy, who rarely offers his opinion on anything, says that he doesn’t think it’s worth bothering with the tune.
“It’s not that I don’t think it’s good. It’s great. I just don’t think it fits into the set.”
“What ‘set’?" I say. "We decide the set. And anyway, our gigs are absurdly eclectic as it is. What the hell is all this for if we’re not able to do what we like?”
“We can’t really do what we like though, can we?” chips in bassist Geoffrey. “We should be doing whatever is expected of us.”
“Are you joking? What the fuck? What who expects of us?”
“I just don’t think we can take any risks with the set bearing in mind that we’re not signed yet”, says Jimmy, and I can feel tears welling in my eyes. People talk about negative solidarity, but this is something else: outside of people dying, the worst single moment of my life. How has our whole identity, our grounding in friendship, our shared past come to count for so little against impressing some imaginary industry figure? How has one of my best friends, someone from the same part of the country, the same school, the same lonely fucking village as me, come to put short-term professional gain before loyalty and a basic belief in ourselves as a unit? How have they managed this?
***
We always should have been a Newcastle band, so it’s appropriate that it should all end there. The morning after a surprisingly good gig at the Ouseburn, with lots of our friends from the north-east in attendance, the three of us – Danny, Jimmy, me – are sitting in the Centurion Bar at Newcastle Central Station. Geoffrey isn’t here because I didn’t invite him. He was from a different world, never really a part of the band I started and named with my best friends in the worst period of my life.
It's the first day of September. The three of us are sitting sipping on cokes underneath the vaulted Victorian ceiling, a grand multi-coloured mosaic that reflects in winks and glimmers the rays of late-morning light coming in from the vast open station.
“So why did you invite us here Al?”
I start to read out loud from a single piece of A4 paper. I didn’t think I could do this without some kind of script, idiot that I am. I’d like to leave the band, and I’d like you to respect this as my absolute and final decision …
When I’m finished reading there’s really not much more to say. Jimmy pats me on the leg and says something feeble that makes me think how perfunctory and business-like he’s become about everything over the last few months. Danny isn’t saying anything. I need to catch my train back down to Oxford and my girlfriend, so I say my final goodbyes and head out to the platform.
Before I’ve gotten too far Danny comes running after me. He’s weeping and he buries his head in my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry Al”.
“It’s okay. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about”.
“I love you”.
“I love you too”.
I shouldn’t have been so forgiving. Actually, there's a world of things for him to be sorry about. But then it’s probably right that, as the whole thing concludes in any meaningful sense, there should be one last, inviolate statement of loyalty, something of the original dream to hang on to in the months and years to come.
As an addendum of sorts to the above post and comments, here's the first NME I ever bought (actually my dad bought it for me - he was a reader back in the '60s/'70s, which I guess is a revealing context in itself):
Telling eh? This is from summer 1996 and you can see that there's an epochal tug of war going on here: "Noel on the new Oasis album" and "Lager! Lager! Lager!" vs. Public Enemy, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Radiohead, the actual leftfield music of Underworld etc (though what Simply Red is doing there is anyone's guess).
The contrast with the 2009 cover speaks for itself, but around that time I actually counted the number of words and it was literally half the amount of a mid-nineties edition.
Have finally got around to reading Owen's Pulp book and he highlights another interesting stage in this narrative:
... in the early 2000s, the NME made a swerve into coverage of electronic music, R&B and hip-hop, but covers for Aphex Twin, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Destiny's Child and Missy Elliott did not go down well with readers; as is well known, the NME's circulation has always plummeted when a black artist is on the cover.
Wayne, I can remember we were talking about this "turn-of-the-century moment" a while back weren't we? I really need to get back to writing for the decade blogs innit so maybe this would be a good place to start ...
All ye supporters of fan ownership (which should be everyone) should check it out.
Monday, 11 July 2011
I’m sitting in Bryant Park, which is both the best and the worst of New York. And what do I, a young man, think of the world today? Light sits in pearls on the trees and the green has grown lushly since the spring when I was last here, and there is a fountain and I decide that everything is well or adequate, as in I don’t feel that I am inadequate, and I think that really loving the world is so rare isn’t it, so many reasons not to, but I do now, I know it in a warm rush. English office girls eat yoghurt and falafel salad out of tupperware boxes because America and England are the same place now really. “It's great this heat you feel like you’ve had a much harder workout.” And what sort of caste are they, is it Ancient Rome or yes more like nineteenth century Britain like Henry James or an Impressionist painting full of ladies in white and beautiful shapes elegant long legs so much power and control. That’s what I’ve thought about this year, about power and how simple it is really, you grow up and you learn to hate power and if you’re good you learn how to say this in the right way. It’s like Basil said to Tom: “do not let it embitter you”. But these girls, oh calls for sympathy from on high, they are okay really and one is going home to see her boyfriend, “3 out of 5 days with his family”, and I know that can be tough. What do they do every day? I suppose if they’re happy I should be too because if there’s one thing I do it’s try hard even if not in that sort of way. And really I don’t know how all of this America can carry on it feels ready to burst and you look in people’s eyes and it’s like they know it, everyone knows they’ve gone way beyond and gotten way more than they ever should or else it’s one of those broken faces so sad, if it takes my whole life I want to see fire back in those faces, I know it will happen one day. On that note all these buildings look ready to topple, they’re sort of proud but self-mocking, they know they’re temporary not like a cathedral or Le Corbusier's UN building which I love and which sits apart in gleaming turquoise majesty on the edge of Manhattan now the scaffolding has come down, and this has taught me about the European side to my soul which was one reason for coming out here in the first place, this sense of contrast. So lucky to be able to come here, but it’s such a weird one isn’t it, I’m outside the normal run of career etc this is something I’ve tried to do in a productive way, and I'm here with my girlfriend who is a scientist doing worthwhile research with state funding I think, though I suppose I am guilty regardless. Guilt is good it makes you try to be kind, if everyone was a little guiltier we wouldn’t be in such a mess. But then I’m eating a falafel and salad in pitta for lunch and I worry that feeling happier puts you back into a cycle of condoning all the pernicious stuff, like when you say fuck it and buy an expensive shirt and feel really good about it, it has a magic which is the glisten of power ultimately, to come back to that point, you accept the force of this power and it lifts you momentarily into the clouds. This is at the route of it all isn’t it, this religious joy in things and money and self and like DFW says this is one very good reason for actual religion, and I don’t know where I’m at on that count. I went to a Catholic church a few weeks ago and loved the singing and the fact that it was in Latin but then the sermon was boring and of course there’s the question of authority, which I’m not opposed to per se, but this was the wrong kind of authority, like in the film of The Da Vinci Code which I checked out because Zizek liked it and agreed with him that it was good, though maybe this was down to feebleness of mind just accepting his judgement. No, I’m not like that. It is the Sacred Feminine principle I think however, because I found myself saying the Hail Mary one night before I went to sleep and it felt right somehow, the feeling of God as a mother, which is how I felt about the Duomo in Florence because medieval cathedrals and maybe all cathedrals for that matter are supposed to be Mary the mother, and I felt this very powerfully, that it, the Duomo, was looking after me somehow in that very specific time of need. So I think religion has to come back into the equation in some form or we’re all buggered, I don’t understand the atheists they’re like adolescents who haven’t gone beyond the buzz of taking the piss out of holy cows or their teachers or whatever. Lots of people use “paternalism” like it’s assumed everyone knows it’s a dirty word, but to me because I don’t have any parents any more it speaks of nurturing and warmth, so I think paternalism is part of it too though of course not in a conservative or fascistic way. The family could be a model for a better society instead of an alternative to it, which both I suppose a certain kind of Communist and Margaret Thatcher would agree on, but I think it would be the wrong kind of Communism or Socialism that ignored this. And oh God it does feel like all the madness of that women might finally be departing after thirty years, like the death of the White Witch in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, because if there’s one thing this Murdoch scandal shows it’s that things do change and Empires crumble and it's like I’ve always thought, except for in my darkest moments, that you have to at least hope things can change for the better to even really be a proper person. And as I somehow sit in this beautiful park in New York this in the end is what I think about the world as a young man, that all those terrible powerful people might just if we can believe it fall into the dust, that we might finally be able to say their names out loud and absorb justice and the possibility of change into our bloodstream, even if fucking utopia or call it what you will can of course never quite arrive, and then we can pass this blood on to our children who aren’t even born yet, and we can survive for longer and in greater numbers, and dream richer, more hope-skeined dreams.
After the Miliband Loop, here's some more scarcely believable media surrealism.
The "Association of Independent Music" announces a "new" alternative awards ceremony: the AIM Independents Day.
The event, held in Soho, central London, will include awards ranging from international achievement of the year to best difficult second album and the Golden Welly for the best independent festival.
This is not a leg-pull, I assure you ...
With Adele, on independent label XL dominating the charts and airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic, dance label Ministry of Sound having a run of success with singles such as Example's Changed The Way You Kiss, which beat Coldplay to No 1 last month, and Arctic Monkeys' fourth album, Suck It And See, on Domino making it to No 1, champions of the sector are heralding 2011 as "the year of the indie".
All hail the return of counter-cultural subversion!
"Independent music-makers have been overshadowed in the last 10 years by the relentless X-Factor phenomenon and vast marketing campaigns," said Wenham ["CEO" of the events]. "The independent sector, by contrast, has never regulated its genres and creates a real mix driven solely by a passion for music."
Other awards categories include:
Independent entrepreneur of the year
For someone approaching the market in a smart and forward-thinking way
Innovative marketing campaign of the year
Recognising the year's best independent marketing campaign
Independent breakthrough of the year
For the artist who created serious waves in 2011
Indie champion award
For an individual who demonstrates unwavering support for the independent community and voted for by Aim members
Lest you think that the Guardian article announcing this is just another puff piece written by a lobotomised hack in thrall to music industry PR, bear in mind that there is actually some real news here:
Ben Watt, founder of small dance label Buzzin' Fly and half of Everything but the Girl, said the release of Tracey Thorn's latest album, Love and Its Opposite, on the label's sister imprint Strange Feeling, was a textbook example of what could now be achieved by an indie in the new world. "Tracey reached her fans easily and directly with cheap nimble marketing that maximised social networking, and we made decent money for her and for the label," he said.
Yes, that's front page Guardian website news, disinterested reportage of a worthwhile cultural initiative that puts the focus back on "passion" and away from "sales". This is a really new, really comment-worthy development.
Even though the severely self-interested, money-oriented AIM Independents Day has been taking place since 2009.
The most depressing thing about this is that it was so unnecessary. He could easily have come out cautiously in favour of the strike, and suffered only mild flak from the right-wing press. He could have prepared the ground for a gradual reconstruction of pragmatic Labour populism. Not only would this have been the right thing to do, it would also have been successful.
Sometime soon, somebody will have the guts to do this. But, in a quick flash of cowardice and sheer mundane stupidity, Ed is finished.
I say this with absolutely no relish, though with some hope that his successor will learn from the monumental lack of character, principle, and imagination displayed here.
