"Babies follows a simple 'Teen Angst' story-song. The song's protagonist, a teenage boy, spends platonic afternoons in a female friend's room listening to her older sister and the boys she takes to her room and, presumably, has sex with but this isn't enough for him and he hides in the elder sister's wardrobe and watches her with David, who works in a local garage. Unable to tell the younger sister, who appears to be the real object of his affections, for fear she will tell her mother the song's narrator listens outside as she proposes sex to a boy named Neve (The song's chorus is a proposal of sex 'I wanna take you home, I wanna give you children...'). Finally he comes 'home' to the disappointment that the elder sister has moved out, presumably in an act of nostalgia he re-enters the wardrobe but falls asleep and is found by the elder sister and the two have sex only to be caught by the younger sister, culminating in the boy making the pathetic, but seemingly genuine, excuse "I only went with her cos she looks like you". Wikipedia, "Babies" (song).

THE LATEST RADIO DEPT ALBUM IS SUPERB, ESPECIALLY "HEAVEN'S ON FIRE"

"Subiza" (copyright Delorean 2010) is a timely portmanteau word. It offers a useful means of collecting together a variety of quasi-Balearic excursions from the past few years: from direct pastiche (Mountain of One); to looser approximations of late-eighties neo-psychedelic euphoria (jj, Beach House, Delorean); to historicist revivals within dance music itself (of which, regrettably, I don't have any examples to hand, though I feel sure they exist). On top of this, it seems like all my friends are heading to Ibiza this year, as if the noughties never happened (a nice thought, this. Just stop and think about it for a second).

Anyway, in "Heaven's On Fire", Radio Dept have written the Subizan anthem par excellence. Vocals dripping with understated, ambrosial cool, immaculate housey keyboard riffs, and a sample about destroying "the bogus capitalist process that destroys youth culture", which should sound naive and embarrassing, but is actually just poignantly, simply true. This is an absolutely phenomenal bit of songwriting.

Moreover, it underlines an aspect of "classic" or "high" indie that seems to have become pretty rare over the past decade. I'm thinking about a basic sense of ateleological hopelessness/hopefulness, the kind you get with a tune like New Order's "Ceremony". Like "Ceremony", "Heaven's on Fire" is an indie record in the purest, definitive sense. There is an anti-utilitarian, edge-of-the-world feeling about it, the feeling that everyone knows someone is about to die and there’s nothing to do but, well, lament. A feeling of imminent burial transfigured by blind optimism.

I don't mean to get too Gothic, and to be slightly more concrete, this is clearly a question of context and milieu. Radio Dept seem to embody the old-skool indie notion of the well-kept secret: a group of friends together since high school, releasing an album every few years, not bothered (even obviously nonplussed) about the big time. Strip away all the fashion, hype and nonsense; the provision of this sort of environment, the valorization of this sort of ideal, was indie music’s great gift to the world. Like the hippy-dippy anti-capitalist sample at the start of "Heaven's On Fire", this might sound naively obvious, but it's a truth that bears endless repetition. 

link to Oxford Left Review, Issue 2, featuring a version of my piece on the future of the music industry.

LABOUR LEADERSHIP HUSTINGS (OXFORD TOWN HALL): AD HOC NOTES

Generally, it's a little bit disillusioning. With the possible exception of Diane Abbott, all of the candidates seem pretty thoroughly New Labour, still caught in a very cautious "musn't alienate middle England too much" mindset. For example, Abbott was the only one to say she would take steps to get rid of Trident; the other four were very technocratically "realistic" on this issue, saying that they were committed to multilateral disarmament, and that unilateral disarmament wasn't practicable. I could see what they were saying, but surely a party with any kind of left-wing ethos - and with 5 guaranteed years of opposition ahead of it - can afford to offer a bold statement on an issue like this. This is a relatively minor issue (you would hope), but it's symbolic of a wider malaise: lingering Blairite/Brownite establishment pragmatism, combined with an inability to offer galvanizing left ideology for the traditional Labour grass roots.

To run down the candidates as individuals:

David Miliband. Must be avoided at all costs. Very intelligent and articulate. By far the most polished and confident of the five. Said some appealing stuff, but I don't think he believed a word of what he was saying. He is a robot, and his policy statements and past record speaks for itself. Pro-business, supports extension of private sector, "excellence" in schools, etc etc.

Ed Miliband. Very slightly more left-wing than his brother, but from the same stable, and similarly "establishment". He's just not that confident and can seem a bit ridiculous in his delivery. Classroom geek. Both Milibands are much too "head" over "heart", and they won't win back any disenfranchised working class voters. They just don't get it. Two shiny new Nick Cleggs in the making.

Ed Balls. Wasn't actually too bad. Seemed quite reasonable on some points. Quite obviously deputy leader or home secretary material though, in my eyes. And just so New Labour and right-wing.

Diane Abbott. By far the most attractive on the face of things. Palpably the most genuine by about a mile. Funny. Opposes tuition fees, Iraq, etc. Big stain in that she sent her kids to the £10,000-per-year City of London School. You have to be mature about things like this, but it seems bizarre that all the other - much more right-wing - candidates sent their kids to state schools. How can she speak authoritatively for Welfare State against elitism, private sector etc? On paper though, Abbott is definitely the closest thing to what the Labour Party needs, ie. someone to re-synthesise the middle-class intellectual/social liberal and the working class populist/communitarian strands of the traditional base. A great communicator though not overly sharp on finer details. But quite "London" - how will she go down in Welsh, Scottish and Northern English heartlands?

Andy Burnham. I was quite impressed, but my enthusiasm dissipated somewhat when I read up on him. His record is very Blairite and he stands squarely behind Iraq, private sector involvement in state sector etc. And yet ... He's young (40), and you feel that he might be able to grow into opposition in a way that the others cannot because of association with Blair/Brown and government (though Ed Miliband could also do this). And there is something of Jon Cruddas about him (why oh why didn't he stand?!). He's a Manc Catholic, and big on the idea of the family in a humane-communitarian way that I think is quite promising (like Cruddas, and US Democrats eg. Clinton, Obama). He'll do very well in the North (and probably Wales and Scotland too). Hit the nail on the head when he said in his peroration, "I think people are sick of politicians who sound like they're reading their speeches from a pager". Used to be part of the Football Taskforce - has backed football co-operatives and reopening the Hillsborough enquiry. This is exactly the sort of grass roots cultural territory that the Labour party should look to. Also encouragingly against London-centric elitism. Will run his campaign from Manchester and has interesting suggestions about equality of opportunity, most notably, forcing employers to advertise work experience placements as a check on nepotism. These are canny, innovative ideas, and if he can shake off his New Labour past he might just be able to pull it off. Needs to gain in confidence but has plenty of time.

NOT EXACTLY SURPRISING, BUT FUNNY ALL THE SAME

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record company unpeople on The Kooks

News of an alliance between the more hopeful elements of post-Blair/Brown Labour, and a grassroots, anti-robber-baron football supporters organisation (NUST) is extremely encouraging.

Lots of potential in this.

KE$HA AND THE RISE OF THE "EVIL STRIPPER" PERSONA IN POP

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This trend has been burgeoning for some time, beginning with the Pussycat Dolls, Fergie and other friends of humanity in the mid-late noughties.

It reaches an apotheosis though in the figure of Ke$ha. A sample lyric from her recent single "Blah Blah Blah" shows a combination of sexual libertarianism and ennui-bordering-on-total-hopelessness for which there can be few precedents in the history of western art:

Boy come on get your rocks off
Come put a little love in my glove box
I wanna dance with no pants on
Meet me in the back with the jack and the jukebox
So cut to the chase kid
'Cause I know you don't care what my middle name is
I wanna be naked
But you're wasted.

I would like to reiterate that what I find objectionable about this is, not the absence of morality and/or humaneness in the depiction of human sexuality, but the total lack of purpose therein. Contrast this with, say, "Sympathy for the Devil".  

These lyrics express a dystopia that is now very real.

See also below article on 3OH!3 + Katy Perry.

"the elevation of the freed subject always has as its shadow the debasement of the subject to a thing of the marketplace, to that which only exists for others - to the personality of which we ask, Well now, just what are you?" - Adorno

"A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE CHILD-CULT"

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"I suppose that there is no one who has not noticed, passim and without attentiveness, perhaps, in a hundred different forms, the prevalence of what now amounts to a cult of childhood, and of the Child. This irresponsible, Peterpannish psychology is the key to the Utopia of the "revolutionary" Rich; the people, namely, who have taken over, have degraded, and are enjoying the fruits of revolutionary scientific innovation - far from its creative ardours, cynically scornful of its idealisms, but creating out of its ferments, which they have pillaged, a breathless Millenium.

This subject has been so thoroughly analysed by me elswhere that I do not propose to go into it again here. All that is necessary to say is that it is essential, if you wish to understand at all a great deal of contemporary art and thought, even the developments of positive science, not only to gather up all the dispersed manifestations of this strange fashion, but - having done so - to trace this impulse to its source in the terrible and generally hideous disturbances that have broken the back of our will in the Western countries, and have already forced us into the greatest catastrophes. Whether, these great disturbances are for the ultimate good of mankind or not, no one can claim that they are pleasant, or that they do not paralyse and weaken the system they attack. Many complaints break out in consequence in the midst of our thinking; and the instinctive recoil of the stricken system makes it assume strange shapes.

What you have to ask yourself is why, exactly, a grown person should wish to be a child? - for to use the forms of infantile or immature life, to make an art of its technical imperfections, and to exploit its natural ignorance, is, in some sense, to wish to be a child.

That, to start with, it is connected with the cult of the primitive and the savage is obvious. The same impulse that takes the romantic painter, Gauguin, to the South Sea paradise, takes a similarly romantic person of today to the Utopia of childhood, in the sense indicated above. Only the latter has the Heaven of Childhood inside himself (it is time-paradise); whereas Gauguin had to go a long way to reach Samoa. That is the advantage that time-travel has over space-travel.

That was really Proust's Utopia, too. And the great appeal of that author is partly because he shows a method for capturing and retaining that spirit - the recherche du temps perdu - and partly because he so feverishly expresses the will to that particular dream. As we read him, the 'I' of his books is that small, naïf, Charlie Chaplin-like, luxuriously-indulged, sharp-witted, passionately snobbish, figure, a model for many variations bred thickly everywhere. But that is not the whole story; and rather than give an imperfect notion of what a little investigation will reveal, I will having started the inquiry, leave it at this point, or refer the reader to that part of my recent book dealing with this subject [The Art of Being Ruled].

How the demented also joins hands with the child, and the tricks, often very amusing, of the asylum patient, are exploited at the same time as the happy inaccuracies of the infant; how contemporary inverted-sex fashions are affiliated to the Child-cult; and in fact all the different factors in this intricate sensibility, being evolved notably by such writers as Miss Stein, will be found there. Not to seize the secret of these liaisons is totally to misunderstand the nature of what is occurring around you today."

- Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927)