BLEAK HOUSE

Been reading a spot of Dickens this month (along with the entire rest of the country/world) and it kinda shows stylistically in these two short posts: satire and sentiment.

By the way is anyone else irritated by the supreme lack of focus on Dickens as radical critic in all this birthday fuss? Seems symptomatic of the rather counter-revolutionary start to 2012.

AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT IN COLLABORATIVE RAGE

In which Tom and Dave rail intelligently against the dystopian Saints and Scroungers.

DAFT AS A BRUSH

I finally got round to reviewing that book about Gazza by Ian Hamilton.

While we're on the subject, here's a sonnet I wrote about the great man a while back.

WAY TO GO

The imminent death of the guitar now being something of a meme, check out the salient (and hilarious) bit around 40secs into the 2nd part of the Pitchfork Flaming Lips docu.

THE POP BAND AS A SMALL FAMILY BUSINESS

Simon Reynolds makes an interesting point about the non-existence of a generation gap in contemporary culture.

... the only actual generational rebellion is to have zero interest in music, or minimal investment in music (opting not to see it as anything more than background enhancement to other activities, a tool for socialisation/decor for life, certainly not any kind of grand project or zone for identity formation / emancipation ...

My guess is that many young people actually learn this view of music as "decor for life" from aging, economically comfortable elder family members who have long since exchanged an "investment in music" for an investment in a 4-bedroom pile in Surrey.

In a substantially privatised culture, the ability to act independently in one's youth via a collective social apparatus is no longer possible, and the economy becomes anchored by the principle of inheritance. Hence the nu-folkers, an emphasis on tradition, record collection rock, etc. Pop music becomes a sort of bourgeois heirloom. It's not that the children of the baby boomers (and their successors) are rebelling against their parents' ethos of music-as-emancipation; rather, the view that has become institutionalised by the affluent, no-longer-radical members of this older generation is that music is just another means of capital accumulation. And it's the sons and daughters of this demographic that are breaking through to success and visibility because they're merely continuing the family business, as it were.

Hence the terrifying aptness of Mumford and Sons. (And obviously there's all the other bete-noires: FATM, Lily Allen, Laura Marling, all children of wealthy and influential parents, often counter-culture apostates. It's all in the book so sorry if I'm repeating mesel').

Depressingly (here's me thinking the faux-folkers had run out of gas) the 2012 installment arrived in yesterday's Guardian in the form of the Staveley-Taylors:

Note the first exchange in the interview: family and the home is now the starting point of musical meaning.

So what would the real modernist rebellion look like? As with a lot of these things, it's not a case of an enterprising individual somehow breaking out of this context to come up with something new: innovation will only take hold on a sizable scale when the whole culture is reorganised along fairer lines.

Also, I reckon those parents who did genuinely stick to a counter-culture philosophy and didn't sell-out are passing on a more meaningful "legacy" to their kids. It's just that these people tend not to be wealthy enough to be able to give their offspring the sort of leg-up that is necessary to make it in the music industry these days.