Severn Gurls

I thought, given that Katy Perry is signalling the death of postwar western civilisation through her evil song _California Gurls_, that I would try to persuade myself and anyone who wishes to read that life goes on. Building, making things, creating families goes on. Even after Katy Perry and her festival of zero.

Well, to be honest, it's not easy.

Because sun-kissed skin so hot it'll melt your popsicle, even though or perhaps even because it's so self-contradictory, so utterly meaningless given its stated objective, its clear innuendo-meaning - because that is so shit, language seems to have been finally shat out after a 50 year curry and 50 years of crap, factory made lager; because, ultimately, even pop music has conflicted itself in its own greatest exponents, and they, as they speak, have called for erectile dysfunction in the midst of "undeniable" hot sex teenage girls -

because of all that, meaning has now finally been flushed down the karzee.



Meaning has finally, thankfully, been disowned. We no longer need a word or a phrase to correspond to an idea.

Think about it, you twats, think about it: a pop song asks to you want to fuck teenage girls. Then it tells you they're so hot your popsicle will *melt*. You will just go soft, just sort of being there.

I really don't think that it means you will come in your pants.

Really. I don't.

It means the literal opposite of what it intends to mean.

Language is dead. Words have no purpose.



Katy Perry killed language.

Dante is too dead to save it; Chaucer too ironic; Shakspear too involved in non-existent persons;Pope too into the sounds of words; Austen in ghastly inter-human relations;Dickens in the...the...play of words, pictures and sentences. After Dickens everyone is toying with their own history. Plath is killed doing it, Hughes after having sex with words; Larkin hates words too much; Roth just has too many of them. Orwell thinks words mean something, for fuck's sake; Hardy thinks they are about how there is no God (probably) and Amis (jun) veers from the play of words to the play of his memories.


Shit.


Language was killed by Katy Perry. She sliced it open with an auto-tune.

Open and its guts spilled into the air, to be eaten by the Eagles and vultures and Beatles and flies and Airplanes and to be left alone, token gut by chitterling, to fly away.



Fly away.

California Gurls(Daisy Dukes, Bikinis On Top)

Hi.

Yes, life is sweet and dandy, &c, &c.

But I've just downloaded, not entirely by accident, a piece of silence. You see, I thought I heard a clever, postmodern (tsk) satire on sexual politics this afternoon. I was driving up towards the Air Balloon, on my way back to the Cotswolds from the netherlands of South Glos, so I was kind of trying to drive at 80mph between a caravan and a lorry hurtling downhill. I had this idea that "Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top" was some kind of dazzling wordplay, some new style of subversion based on crap early 80s children's TV.

Accordingly, I downloaded the track.

But really, it isn't - not at all. It is 3.56 of utter, utter silence. Sure, there are ritual incantations about sun, palm trees, jeeps, sex on the beach (aha! ambiguity) and a bit by Snoop Dogg. But apart from that, it says absolutely nothing in 3.56. Not a damn thing. There isn't even any real music, just the "savage, barking rhythm" of the Two Minutes Hate.

Can you imagine how O'Brien would have reacted seeing Katy Perry on his massive telescreen?

Regardless of that, the fact is that the modern type chart music can sometimes conceal serious intent beneath the froth of a Belgian beer - namely, Bulletproof by the girl whose mum was out of The Bill and also Calvin Harris' I'm Not Alone. To name but two. They sort of take the vocabulary of drugsex music (hey, neat) and manage to coil a meaning around it - sometimes, like Bulletproof, a non-verbal meaning.

But this - this is shite.

I say that, but my guts actually produce more substance than this track does.

Luckily, I've also downloaded Jump by Van Halen.

Bullshit Proof

Here's what I will never be trapped by again:

1) The "soulmate" crap. That's about control, guilt and the pretence of tender-heartedness. If someone says it to you, ignore it. Falling for it is irredeemably beta.

2) The relationship shit-tests like "were you looking at her?" to which all possible answers are wrong. The best thing to do is to respond in kind, ie: "Well, of course: she's as hot as fuck".

3) The absence of communication. If she doesn't text you, that's her fucking problem. *Never* get trapped into sending loads of texts to a silent woman. She will loathe you for your spinelessness.

4) Sexual intimacy. There ain't no such thing. You are just number n. So, to some extent is she. We don't communicate souls in sex, however much hand-wringing Christian clergyman think we do. We just fuck like animals. At last we're learning how to do it properly. Remember that kissing is absolutely nothing at all.

5) Rows are good. If she gets cross with you, get cross back. Never, ever appease a woman's anger. Women hate craven, cringing men.

6) Never believe what a woman says about the type of man she finds sexy. All that stuff about kindness, intelligence, etc is all crap. Women are as sexually predictable as we are, and we find big tits and slim hips sexy, and they find big, dominating men sexy. Believe me, your reading of Heidegger will be utterly irrelevant to whether she likes your cock, and she will, whatever she says, not be turned on by your claim to be a poet.


Well, that's it. As you can guess, some of this is inspired by reading less savoury stuff about "game", but my experiences over the last two years (of steadily being battered into the ground like the beta I am) suggest that there is a lot of truth in it.

Women are not hard-wired to be caring, or loving, or care-givers or whatever. They, like men, are animals, and their desires and preferences are far more animalistic than we often think.


The title of this post is inspired by the extremely cool track Bulletproof by La Roux, which is 80s synth pop for 2009, with a video whose visual imagery is what many 80s groups would have made, had the technology allowed it. It shows that this kind of music really does have meaning: archetypal grid patterns, geometric solids, splintered images, too much lighting, asexual or androgynous characters (she's a mixture of Toyah, Hazel O Connor and Flock of Seagulls). I wonder if the grid patterns, reminiscent of laboratories and prisons, are trying to say something in particular...

And not a single whoremark arse tattoo in sight. No lingering cunt-shot either.


Even crap 80s synth pop had more to say about real life and real personalities than Lily Allen, whose failure to reach an orgasm is not really inspiring me. Nor am I rendered speechless by Black Eyed Peas' prediction of a great night's clubbing and sex. I'm also unprepossessed by Lady Gaga's somewhat tired attempt at edginess. Equally, Evacuating the Dance Floor could have had intriguing cold-war psychological subtones - but it doesn't. It's just shit.

Yeah, ok. I'm spending 2 hours a day in the gym right now. So I know my music. Thanks to TMF.

Scrape Away

Oh, you need to get away


Oh, you need a change of pace.....



c Paul Weller, 1980

See You, for CBI

CBI doubts my thinking over the similarity between Depeche Mode's "See You" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

Well then he is wrong, despite his encyclopaedic knowledge of music.

for the synth refrain in "See You" goes: dum, de-dum DumDum, dum de-dum DumDum

(is the best way I can put it - you hear it about three times during the track)


and the close of Love Will Tear Us Apart (ok, not the middle, or beginning, admittedly) goes: er...ok well it isn't the same but goddammit it is very similar indeed; I am surprised anyone who knows the two tracks can't place the similarity.

Yes alright, egg on musical face...

A Point re: 80s Pop

Depeche Mode's "See You" borrows the central riff from Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

Twice.

That's all.

I See Only The Basic Materials I May Use

I love borrowing post titles from top 80s tracks*; I get to mould my whinging and moaning around someone else's intelligent thoughts.

So here I am, posting as Jim Callaghan, it seems a bit weird to then launch into full rant mode; so I won't. The toad work is once again rearing its ugly head (end of half term) and this particular toad is extremely ugly, especially in the way it disposes of rival toads. In fact toads are like that. Metaphorical toads I mean, Philip Larkin type toads. Toads don't tend to brook rivals, or challenges. Toads don't appreciate being left alone: they demand attention. Indeed you might argue that the whole concept of work, far from being a way we define ourselves (Gang of Four this time), is a way we have of defixating our egos. Let me explain. You start off with self-obsessional late capitalist man (I'm assuming it's late capitalism, it's beginning to seem like it anyway). He likes the mirror and reads the Guardian with the prim seriousness of the man who knows all opposing worldviews to be not merely incorrect, but also evil. Or he reads the Mail with the insouciance of someone for whom the major story of the day is Christiano Ronaldo's impending move to Real Madrid/new contract at Man Utd. It doesn't matter. The mirror in the bathroom does matter however. So does glass generally. He moves onto blame-everyone-else therapy when he doesn't turn out to be JFK or Einstein: he blames his parents, or the colour of the sky, whatever. The key thing is his victimhood. Then everything he thinks about is in some way internal; himself, sex, his favourite football team, genetic engineering.

What better way could there be to salve this poor man's conscience and bring him out of his morass of self-indulgence than work? OMG - looking outward and putting other people first! Maybe. Responsibility, at any rate. Work forces him into a state of mind where in fact he does not matter at all.

So his life becomes one of those ghastly trick of the mind pictures where he constantly has to switch focus because he simply does not know which is real: the self-absorption, or the responsibility.

The answer of course is that neither of them is real. One is an illusion, and the other a series of pathetic power games which exist, in the main, not to put food on the plate, but to give expression to someone else's self-absorption; because all work comes down in then end to this person. However, our poor confused late-capitalist still needs to put food on his table and so he goes along with it, joins in with it, eventually becomes that person for whom this supposedly outward activity is really just another way of biting the head off the toad.

Work is the devil in the flesh, but not the iron in the soul; more like the iron in the flesh as well.



* Well duh. I've finished with Change and I'm onto Red Guitar now.

Not Playing One's Red Guitar (Redux), Or Why Do I Fail Just When I'm Needed?

What a top track this is (tsk, Red Guitar by David Sylvian).

I love the flow and inconsistency of mood, and the tacit acknowledgement of being a failure, because one is more bothered about other stuff (ie red guitars). The inability to focus, to be determined, to give, frankly, a flying fuck about things everyone else loves. Even, the recognition of emotion and love but the simultaneous distancing from it.


If you ask me, I may tell you: it's been this way for years.

Love in a Void

Love in, love in, love in a void, a void in love....

Sometimes you just have to accept that you need to shut up, sit down, and let the people who can actually write crystallize the sensations you so desperately want to articulate.

In the above case, Siousxie and the Banshees. Again.

Coool.

Hey, not only am I a part time member of the real world, and a substitute on the bench of technology, I also have an Ipod. How cool is this.

I have synched (how 80s is this word) all my tracks. Guess what I'm listening to?

Here's a clue. The track begins with "C" and ends with "hange."


Fucking magic.

I Don't Want To Stay Here On My Own

It might be nice sometimes, but other times it is dark, cold and there is noone to love; it bleeds concern and sucks adoration through a straw. This time is an illusion which entices you into living; at other times you know, for certain, that life means nothing but a progress towards soil, even a race. You know that your greatest end is as part of a beautiful tree, even though you know that this is environmentally unfriendly. But if you let yourself stay, and rot, you will be such a tiny part of so many lovely plants: your brain might even be part of the trunk of a giant oak, surveying the degredation year by year. How magnificent - for one's body and self to become part of a more permanent England than even New Labour had in mind when they set about fucking it up as the home of racists and fuckwits, the worst of all places - where they came from.

I like the idea that I'll become a leaf and that I'll blow underneath a car, the car of a twat teenager spouting all the fuckwittery of his own day, as I always wished I could do of mine but never believed any of it. How we claim the satisfaction of desire as the end of ethics, how we sweep, always sweep, we love to sweep.

What an awful instrument, the brush. It simply hides, in the soft summer breezes, in the winter we hide from, in the end of days. When we end, when the clouds rise up on all sides from the tumult on the horizon, and the heat, and the oak leaves dissipate into nowhere, then we will love winter and all its hatreds, until we feel it stronger than before, and darker, darker.

Our best and brightest are the most determined that we hide in the blazes of desire and strength. That we destroy what we think is weak. It has to go.

Fever breathe your love on me.

I am happy to be a tenth rate mind, at least I think there might have been something to live for apart from strength and sexuality. I can accept being an idiot if it means thinking there might have at one time been more to life than I can see now.

Tenth rate music and tenth rate alcohol will do for my inspirations. And this is why I carry on. For the best is the most brutal and I really, really do not want to know.

In Loving Memory of a Name

...forgotten, not lost....


How lovely. Colin Moulding always had a better touch for _real_ life than Andy Partridge.

Where Does The End Of Me Become The Start Of You?

Somewhere at the end of my sentence, is the answer. Then, you take what I've said and you mulch it through your prejudices, be they right or left, then you add your assumptions of what I am and you conclude the brief encounter with an idea of what you think I have said, and worse, what you think I think. All of this is rather nastily mashed in social mores and the end result is that you almost certainly think that I'm a cunt. I don't mind that, per se, it is probably true, I just "feel" that it's a touch unfair. And some people's feelings count for a good deal more than many others, so depending on your ethnic or sexual characteristics, this could well be enough to earn me a "cunt" certificate from the government itself. For example, if you scream and shout and say "cunt" but you happen to be a leftist, then you're not so bad, you were just provoked; if I do it, then I am full of rage and anger and I need therapy or a prison sentence, or worse. Or I'm defending my privileges, despite owning nothing at all, or whatever, but by looking at the colour of my skin you nonetheless know what I've been through or not, so you are qualified to comment by the presence of the Guardian under your flabby arm. And if I complain then I am yet another privileged white fucker against equality, or whatever justification for discrimination you've come up with this week after too long spent in the saloon bar of one of London's rather more fashionable establishments. And the comment threads at Harry's Place will go on and on about how easy I've had it and how I've never sat on an Equality Committee in my life, and how, after all, "cunt" is fair enough comment on me.

Where you begin is where my voice ends, and where I begin is where I turn what you say into whatever I want it to be: where I see memories of myself when you speak, and where I think of what you've made me think of myself when you've spoken of your life, even though it's taken me months to make you open up such that I now know something, a very small something, of the real you, and I've immediately reinterpreted it in the light of my bizarre assumptions about life and ethics.


Where you begin is where I've thought for a long time my words end, in gentle and soft landings somewhere in your outer consciousness; that's where I think I end but whether you see me there or not, is, frankly, up to you - and I guess that the answer is that I am a shell on the seashore, glinting in the occasional sunlight, but for the most part occluded by polluted waters or industrial skies.

And it all comes back to the end of the sentence: the suggestion of irony, the lifting lilt, the downbeat self-mockery, the absence of an actual full stop. I suggest by my insecurity that you might like to know more about me, and that I would like to know more about you: but you have other things to do, and your phone is ringing in your pocket, and the tea will be getting cold in an hour or so, so I am faded to black, which is where I should be.

The end of the sentence is no more interesting than the beginning, or the endless dullness of the middle with all its subordinate clauses and hesitations. The end of the sentence goes nowhere and says nothing.

You Hear Laughter Cracking Through the Walls

Spellbound by Siouxsie and the Banshees(look it up on YouTube) is one of those genuinely unsettling songs, a piece of art that makes me shiver, only very slightly, but enough to prmopt me to think of the recesses of the imagination. I also think it captures neatly an imaginative or rhetorical violence in music that had been going for some years but which had lacked a register to become anything more than loud and aggressive. Here, the implied violence is given the cloaking of Grimm's Fairy Tales or of a hundred traditional stories about fairy circles and spirits. Its negative spirituality and bursting irrationality is invasive and caught me when I first heard it as a somewhat isolated teenager in 1989 (I still have my tape recording of it made off the tv from the BBC programme "Boxpops" which used to do tracks and news from previous years on a any given subject). I don't know whether you can read it as Freudian or not, I guess you probably could. I read it as a cultural symbol: out of the depths of recession and near-economic despair, of real street violence and alienation, comes this primal elaboration of fear and uncontrol. It's a metaphor, in word, rhythm and structure: this song is reaching into human experience for a very specific cultural problem.

But anything which goes in that direction can have unexpected and haunting effects. Even this vocabulary makes my point harder to communicate: "haunting", "primal", "fear" - you could add "ghostly" and "piercing" to that list. What it's all saying is that humanity fears determinism as contradicting its most basic day-to-day assumptions; and that it fears annihilation, being made unphysical or unplaced. You could make this mean death only, or you could, a la Paul Tillich and existentialism, say that it means any radical form of challenging (of the kind that was certainly underway in 1981) which dislocates and threatens to undermine you.

Whether we exist in any meaningful sense or not, we have fears of the shadowy and the ungrasped or ungraspable: I think it's straightforward to see that it all refers to the fear of otherness, which, by its very definition, means we will not be as we are. That is hard to imagine, and it means we, as we are, will be negated. We always strive against negation, create order and physicality, but we know we are going to be negated and that in steps along the way things will happen to negate what we are and what we understand on many occasions. Those things might produce something better and finer, more worthwhile, but the process is terrifying. Hence we write songs that try to show something of the nothingness that surrounds us and we shiver for a bit, or it won't leave our heads for a while: we watch horror films and are unsettled: we tell ghost stories and are thoughtful: we emphasise our bodiedness by fucking everything in sight and inventing ethics to justify our desperation.

The Famous Mr Major Tom

This is a *genuine* Alan Freeman line, circa September 1990. I still have it on tape: the magnificent "30 Years of Number Ones" radio 1 programme that lifted me out of the desert of early 90s pop-shit and in one hour gave me The Jam, David Bowie and the Police and told me that 3 minute tracks could be amazing. Fuck me I was never the same again. Thank fuck.

*and it goes like this, very hauntingly* is how the great man introduced "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police. Amen, brother, amen to that.

The line quoted in the title of this post refers, of course, to AshestoAshes,and is how Freeman concluded his airing of the song on that show. The tv show of the same name I have _not_ seen, out of aesthetic purity; nonetheless: the tin drummer's personality is expressed perfectly by the synth wailings from 3:04 to 3:34 of that track. In case you were interested.

It's Always The Same/ It's Just A Shame That's All

Can't remember who did this - Genesis probably, in fact I think it was them.

I drew a picture of it for my dad, so much did I like it in 1982 or 1983 or whenever.

He was, like, not getting out of bed until 12.15 for Grandstand and I was like watching Saturday Superstore or something and listening to this somehow, somewhere, and so I drew this cartoon strip with me listening to this track and trying to get him up or whatever. Don't really recall. Don't suppose it matters. Long time ago. Now I'm a long way grown up and it clearly has no relevance to my life....


Still. It's got a point, though, hasn't it?

That Book By Nabokov

I knew that would get your attention.

Yes, alright, TD is not dead. What happened was this: after reading yet another Guradian editorial about how all is well in our glorious isle, and how being appalled at murder is moral panic and hence a bad thing; and one in the North London Daily Mail* about how climate change will take our children from their playgrounds, the tin drummer fell as dead, on the ground: he was then buried but was not in fact dead. Owing to a clause in his will stating that an emergency button had to be put into his coffin he was rescued after only 30 days of eating wood and maggots. And breathing...well, we'll leave that for now.

However.

His health is poor, so he advises his readers not to expect too much (ie regular, well written, knowledgeable posts).

For now I will say only this.

The TOTP2 retrospective on The Police this week was fucking brilliant. As were they. The pop group I mean. I know the real police also need a retrospective, but we're not going to see that any time soon. I mourn, as does everyone else, the death of Tony Wilson (pbuh) but I disagree with him about The Police. They did not piggyback New Wave: they were clever, stylish, intelligent and cool.

And they referenced Nabokov.

Evidence of dumbing down can be seen by the fact that the 1980 original release had the above quoted line; whereas the 1986 re-recording said: "that famous book by Nabokov" as if it needed some explanation.

Anyhoo. I love music with hinterland; and the lyrics of The Police have hinterland. As the retrospective showed, Sting's solo stuff verges too much into the lick-my-own-ass territory: I wonder if Stewart Copeland brought him down to earth occasionally.

Hey ho. Look, I'm working near as dammit full time now so don't expect anything good. This country is, though, more of a shit hole than it was when I "died", complete with even more arrogant lefties telling us that everything is fine and that to believe that murder cannot be tolerated in a civilised society is "right wing". Hooray. Some of my best friends are right wingers. Andrei Kanchelskis for one.** [rest of paragraph edited to remove drivel]

anyway. Some of you might be under the impression that I outed myself as "[edited and obscured on legal advice]". Au contraire. He was my ghost, and himself died unexpectedly after a lethal cocktail of The Daily Mail, eight pints of Stella, four packets of plain crisps, and the sight of a local youth spitting into the street. Tragic, really.

*The Independent. In case you didn't know.

**I'm guessing at this. I liked him anyway.

Update:It seems the break has not stopped my rubbish writing! Never mind. It's too late to do anything about that anyway. Still, it's not an inevitable condition for everyone. If you don't want rubbish writing, consider an online degree in English composition. Also, ditch the Stellas. They do for your writing what they do for your driving.

No Instruments Required

The greatest, most iconic piece of electronic music since 1945, which needs a radical re-appraisal by music critics: I don't know why it isn't routinely recognised as the pioneering work of genius that is surely is.

Alas I've only been able to find an extract of it online. Or rather, only the opening sequence.

Tin Drum

James has asked me to explain the moniker. I have already done so, in the dim and distant past, but it's worth repeating. I love the Japan album "Tin Drum" but that is not how I chose the title, indeed I struggle to see the connection between the album and my inspiration. My inspiration comes from the Gunter Grass novel "The Tin Drum" in which a boy stops growing at the age of 3 and spends the rest of his life -among other fairly ghastly things- banging a tin drum at all and sundry. My idea was that I would compare myself to a poisonous Danzig dwarf in the 1920s, spewing out shit and filth; or rather, I know that is how I was often seen in the real world, so it was an ideal handle for the blogosphere. I *also* know that the tin drummer is seen as a metaphor for Hitler, and I am - sigh - *not* a Nazi; just that I liked the idea of seeing myself as a little scrote banging a drum to the annoyance of everyone else.

By comparison, Japan's album is lightweight, though it is very good indeed. It is really about isolation and travel, in a far more sensitive way, than either my blog or the novel.

Just in case Tim Ireland (shudder) is reading, yes I do, generally, keep this handle for all comments and posts.

Japan

Regular readers will know that I did not choose my moniker because of Japan,'s 1982 album Tin Drum, but I love it nonetheless, and Ian has challenged me to write a post about them because he hasn't heard of them.

Alright. Japan are basically New Romantics but they are not twats. They take, from 1979's Quiet Life album onwards, the meme of the old-but-young man which has always been a Romantic idea going back to Thomas Chatterton but which also surfaced in that chaotic period of the dying consensus between 1976-79. I've always found that fascinating, as a 20 year old who felt 70 ten years ago and who found, in the lyrics of David Sylvian a similar soul. Sylvian may have been self obsessed but I don't think any of Japan's lyrics are personal. He creates narrators and voices in his songs, which are inspired by films, novels and experience: these voices dance, walk and locate emotions in various places in order better to explain what he, Sylvian, thought about the process of living and growing up in a world divided by ideology and hidebound by the worst kind of history anyone could ever imagine. Japan embraced the New Romantic style in order to give a non-stereotyped but bending idea of gender, and synths to give a broken up, digital version of rhythm which went way beyond disco into something that tried to resurrect a fragmented music of dancing and love. There is no way I could imagine dancing to any of, say Gentlemen Take Polaroids or Tin Drum - it attempts to replace movable rhythm with something you think you should move to, but can't. It's too on/off. Too hyphenated. Too unreal. In that, I think, Japan, in a far more convinced way than other New Romantics, and with all due respect to their influences such as Roxy Music, were trying to show that we were moving from an industrial world in which you were a small moving cog in a permanently shifting machine, into a digital world in which you were either on or you were off. I tend to think that their cover of Smokey Robinson's "Ain't That Peculiar" demonstrates this perfectly. You expect to move; you want to move; you stand still in the reciprocating silences and fake sounds.

All of this comes to a head in Tin Drum, and David Sylvian launches off into a number of post-Japan ideas as he outgrows the format (actually I don't think he does; I think there was plenty of mileage in this extremely talented band, but that's the impression I get from the album): in the final song, "Cantonese Boy" you have the whole set of ideas: political ideology; movement; travel; growing up; destiny - in one 3-odd minute song with an extraordinary Mick Karn bassline and the apotheosis of Japan's wholly serious take on synth pop. In 2007, as we know, we're so clever and muscially intelligent that tracks based entirely on synth within an old style pop song are rubbish - they're limited and sound dated. I can't help thinking the Japan period represents David Sylvian telling anyone who will listen that he doesn't give a toss about that; indeed, that having his music crystallised in a very locateable time and in a marble-solid style means something after all, whatever people in 2007 think about it.

They might not be rated; the style may be abhorred; but I stick to my view that their music was brilliantly original and trying to make a set of serious points.

Now you can take the piss out of me.