TEN REASONS TO BE UNCHEERFUL

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ONE: John Peel and Tony Wilson are dead.

TWO: Jo Whiley and Mark Ronson are flourishing.

THREE: British independent music is inches away from being buried completely under a hail of derivativeness, elitism, fashion, and unscrupulous corporatism.

FOUR: What was formerly, meaningfully independent has been reduced to a casual, two-syllable advertising slogan. Indie now has (in Britain at any rate) exactly the same cache in the world of marketing as Ferrari or Luckies might have had in previous years, and is used indiscriminately to sell all manner of products - clothes, mobile phones, hair products, computer games, cars, models, lifestyles.

FIVE: This is, unequivocally, a terrible state of affairs.

SIX: In the past, a lot of pious shit was talked about ‘selling-out’; today it is a scarcely tenable concept.

SEVEN: Musical purism has gotten out of control. Contra Noel Gallagher, ‘it’ (whatever it is) is not just rock’n’roll. Popular music can be simple, primitive, dance-like and spontaneous. But it can also be every bit as sophisticated, intelligent, ideological and pretentious (in the most positive sense of the word) as any other art form. British popular music in particular has, historically at least, often epitomised the very best kind of hybrid amalgamation of spontaneity and intellectualism, body and head, instinct and ideas, simplicity and depth. Moreover, this ‘both-and’ tendency has perhaps gone further than any other cultural movement in our history towards challenging the rigid hierarchies of British social life, consistently undermining class-like separations of high and low, presenting a forward-looking, often radical, always exuberant tradition that left its doors open to all-comers (unlike, say, much classical music, opera, fine art, etc).

EIGHT: The NME has abdicated its position as arbiter of the musical underground, becoming instead an epitome of the new tendency towards childishness, music-as-fashion, uncritical PR-style enthusiasm and musical conservatism. Where once it was a vital subversive bulwark, the NME is now in the vanguard of all that is reactionary in British culture life: a beau ideal of consumer capitalism.

NINE: This makes me want to cry.

TEN: As does Kate Nash, in a very different way.

AN APOLOGY

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As the member of a guitar band I would just like to offer my sincere apologies for the inordinate predominance of guitars in contemporary music.

This prompted by a recollection of the listening habits of myself and friends, aged 16, circa Xmas 2000.

Favourites were:

Dr Dre - 2001
Destinys Child - Writing's on the Wall
Steve Reich - New York Counterpoint
Doves - Lost Souls
Super Furry Animals - Guerilla
Beastie Boys - Anthology
The Beatles - White Album
Aphex Twin - The Richard D. James Album
Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP
A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory
The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin.

What happened to this catholic openness?

ONCE AND FOR ALL ...

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PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT

PRINCE HARRY IS NOT A HERO; HE'S A CUNT


&c, &c

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

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Capturing the zeitgeist with frightening accuracy, the theme of last night's Brit Awards appeared to be 'Money/Death', as if someone behind the scenes had gotten completely the wrong end of the stick about Damien Hirst's 'Diamond Skull'.

Like a cross between Beverly Hills circa 1982 and an Edgar Allan Poe short story, the stage featured a gargantuan memento mori disguised as a cartoon of co-host Ozzy Osbourne, a fixture which rhymed neatly with the gurning, synthetic hideousness of his wife's actual face.

Appropriately, those cultural altruists at MasterCard provided, in Kelly Osbourne's eloquent phrase, 'association for' the night, in what, if I'm being generous, may have been a knowing wink at the unabashed corporatism of the whole thing, but was probably nothing of the sort, the digitised red-gold hues of their logo after all providing an apt symbolic lynchpin for the pervasive sense of orgiastic decadence.

Props to the Arctic Monkeys though for arriving like a band of irreverently iconoclastic (and pretty pissed) spectres at the feast, sending-up the quasi-aristocratic nature of the event by dressing as country gents (though you can bet the British fashion press will overlook the irony here), taking gloriously-slurred pot-shots at the omnipresent BRIT School alumni, and generally exhibiting the kind of behaviour you might expect from sane, talented people amidst the absurd, gem-encrusted panorama of vanity.

They might have a bit of a way to go before the music is on a par with the maturity of the lyrics, but their hearts are clearly in the right place, and they stood out like heroic subversives last night.

JUST WASN'T MEANT TO BE

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'It's like

the first time

I told her

I liked her arse

she said:

"really?!

but I poo

out of it!"

and I thought:

Jesus Christ,

where

do I go

from here?'

A MARGINALLY LONGER POEM

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SNOW ON THE WINTER PALACE

I remember the hospital as a boarded-up Hermitage in winter
Set for our decorously private tragedy -
The wiping-out of a family

When you died the snow drifted wordlessly around
Its quiet lyricism recalling Russia
And a longstanding literary tradition

I loved snow
And as a facetious adolescent would place it
In a never-complete list of ‘Top Ten Things in the World’:

Music, girls, drugs, books, Eastenders - and snow
Trying to convey wittily
A democratic eclecticism

Now I can’t think of it
But a glacial nothingness
Shatters the nerves on the back of my neck

THIS ROUGH MAGIC I HERE ABJURE

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I love serene relinquishings of power in song lyrics.

Examples include:

Teenage Fanclub - 'I Don't Want Control of You'
Ian Brown - 'Keep What Ya Got (By Giving it All Away)'
Ivor Cutler - 'Women of the World' ('Women of the world take over / Cos if you don't the world will come to an end / And it won't take long')

Like Shakespeare's late plays.

FRIDAY NIGHT ROUND OUR HOUSE

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ME: Why don't we go to Chorlton?
PAUL: Ah no man ... I just dunno if I can be arsed getting beaten up and then getting fucking ... bohemianized by the fucking ... diverse cultures.

SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS FROM ONE OF HUMAN HISTORY'S VERY WORST FILMS

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"My name is Matt Buckner. Last spring, I got kicked out of Harvard two months shy of my diploma, but what I was about to learn, no lvy League school in the world could teach me. "

"Was that a terrorist attack?What happened here?"
"Welcome to match-day madness. Tottenham was in town last night."
"Are you a soccer fan now?"
"Don't let them hear you say soccer."
"Who's 'them'?"
"The British Empire."

"I'll tell you what I'll do, all right? I'll give you a hundred ... if you take Matt here to the match."
(Heavy South-African accent) "Fuck off, you're having a bubble."

"I'm not being funny, but the last thing I want to do is to take you to the match.
So here's how it works. Give me half the money. I'll go to football. You can see where Churchill took a tom, or whatever you Yanks do in Jolly Old."

"Ruby Murray means curry. We call it cockney rhyming slang."

"So, basically, firms are gangs."
"Kind of. But we're a far cry from all that Bloods and Crips bullshit. Shooting a machine-gun out of a moving car at an eight-year-old girl, that's just cowardly."

WISE WORDS FROM A CHINESE FRIEND

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Time goes so fast, and I think what it leaves us is far more than what we can memorize-joy, sorrow, gathering and leaving, perhaps what we got out of that is maturity and strength, and thus we are approaching to know what life is.

I can't decide whether this is Hallmark-style mawkishness or Zen-like poetry, but I think I'll go with the latter.