Every morning I wake up on
The new Girls Aloud single is fucking awesome. So is PopJustice’s description of it. Also, MP3 blogs are very cool (please download the song mentioned in that link, it sounds a bit like a cross between Marilyn Manson and Busted).
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I was annoying an Irish Catholic communist friend of mine the other day by insisting that she had a Protestant work ethic (she insisted on paying for her own drinks, you see). After objecting that she didn’t have a work ethic, she then said, “And don’t call me a Protestant; how would you like it if someone called you a Protestant?� A telling point, and it took me a while to come up with a response. Eventually, it occoured to me that there are some Protestants I wouldn’t mind at all being called, of whom I mentioned Milton and Winstanley. And a fairly significant argument was avoided in choosing those Civil War heroes…
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And in an embarrasingly obvious way, too. More later.
My dislike of Bruce Springsteen was based on what I took to be a mismatch between his intentions and the resources he had available to him (or allowed himself to use), that is, stadium rock. For all his, I didn’t doubt, earnestness, his music (or what I’d heard of it) always seemed to me to be inescapably false. No matter how much you may believe in them, it’s in the nature of clichés to be false, so you can’t tell the truth if all you have to use are clichés; you can’t make genuinely sincere music if you sound like Bryan Adams.
So, last night I was in the Live and Let Live, listening to an improptu set by Diamond Dave. Sometime during his cover of ‘I believe in a thing called love’, it occoured to me that rock (and, by extension, Springsteen) has a whole other tradition to draw on, which I’d entirely ignored. Maybe Springsteen has actually been talking the language of folk music, and I’ve not been listening. This would, or could, give him an idiom in which the things I thought he wanted to say would actually be sayable.
So, I spent this morning downloading Springsteen tracks, and it turns out this is right, at least sometimes. ‘Backstreets’ (despite sounding like Meatloaf) and, especially, ‘I’m On Fire’ just are folk songs, albeit with 80’s rock production.
Of course, Alistair has already said all this in his Correct Opinion on the subject. However, I missed his point originally, possibly because when Alistair wrote that Springsteen “comes from the American populist tradition of Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie,� I assumed he must be talking about content, rather than form. I couldn’t see any formal similarity between Whitman or Steinbeck and Springsteen, and so ignored any formal similarity with Guthrie; you see, the last word I’d use to describe either of the two writers is ‘sincere’. They’re concerned with truth in general of course, but not with individual truths. However, if Springsteen is really a folk musician, then he won’t be sincere either. Folk music is almost paradigmatically insincere, as it’s often rather twee identification with ‘troubadours’ and ‘bards’ makes clear. It’s lyric poetry, the construction of a fake experience in order to universalize and communicate the real experience. And in that context, Springsteen’s clichés are anything but. It was while this train of thought hit me half way through ‘Rosalita’ that I realised I do like Bruce Springsteen, after all.
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More evidence of the influence of Hegel on fragile minds: the other day at work I was writing a specification for a database (I have such an exciting job, you can just tell). I reread a paragraph and noticed that I’d included a long digression about how the Concept of the Data had made its structure manifest in the information we had collected. Admittedly, without the cod-Hegelian capitals, but it was impressively content-free and incomprehensible; of course, I left it in.
Meanwhile, I was reading a position paper (even more exciting, see) in which the author praised a proposal as “immanently sensible�. I should go along to the meeting and object that immediate sense-experience is self-contradictory, and needs to be sublimated into the dialectic of self-consciousness.
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I wanted to be a vet but because I don’t like blood and hate seeing animals in pain, I thought I would take the easy path and go into politics.
Regrettably, Nick Griffin’s daughter seems unaware that her father thinks politics is a matter of “well-directed boots and fists.� Unless, I suppose, her concern for animals doesn’t extend to Blacks, Asians, Roma, Jews, socialists or anyone else who would be or has been on the receiving end of this kind of ‘politics’.
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When I first heard the UK’s number one, ‘Fuck it’ by Eamon, I was shocked and appalled. Mostly by how bad a song it is, but also by the spectre of violence towards women that seems to lurk just below the surface of the song. However, the Guardian suggests that it’s so bad it’s good, and I’m beginning to think they have a point. Eamonn’s impotent outrage, combined with his tale of being cuckolded and his silly whiney voice, completely emasculate him. He’s bitching about this woman because she fucked someone else and he can’t do anything about it. That’s really funny (in a laughing at, not laughing with, sort of a way). Best of all, of course, is the radio edit, where even the verbal echoes of his potency are systematically and mechanically erased. Ha ha.
On a related note, my copy of Kanye West’s The College Dropout (which is generally great; I may have more to say about it later) has some, but not all or even most, of the swearing blanked out. It doesn’t seem to be based on content: ‘nigga’ and ‘motherfucker’ are allowed most of the time, which you’ld imagine pretty much any actual censorship would remove. It’s rather puzzling.
A detailed dissection of the Eamon song makes me think I may have spoken too soon. In particular, the idea that “it sounds like a parody of a slow jam that nevertheless works as a slow jam,� suggests that it’s rather more self-aware than I had originally thought. I also like the description of Eamon’s genre as “ho wop�.
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Some links. First, James’s assesment of Anne Clwyd, which I’m not sure I agree with, but it does roll off the tongue rather nicely. Also, check out his comprehensive Eurovision coverage. Second, an occassional update from the always excellent Lapsed Modernist, full of phrases that roll off the tongue. “A bible-thumping variation on the Eros/Thanatos liebestod,� “MUTATED VIRUS destroys mankind,� “ontogenesis notwithstanding, the potential threat must be exported onto the other side of the binary before it can fuck shit up,� “wolves (!) in the New York Public Library?� “a crucial part of American narratives is depicting the enemy as mindlessly collectivist and locust-like,� all leading up to the killer conlcusion: “Hopefully the message the audience will take with them will be that Bush wants to destroy New York. And, you know, no matter how unlogically one arrives at that conclusion, the conclusion itself is still accurate.�
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Great band name? Anyway, I like that the Illuminati are apparently well organised enough to have a ‘Secret Societies Group’ (after all, it must be a bugger keeping track of them all), and that someone has finally revealed the dastardly intentions of the Ba’hai.
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Following on from Bush’s turn to Baudrillard, Rumsfeld seems to have been studying Nietzsche. Not for Rumsfeld the attempt to “separate the lightning from its flash.� No, when he says that he takes responsibility for the torture in Iraq, he is well aware that this does not mean that there is any ‘he’ who is in any way ‘responsible’ and should, for example, resign; “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, working, becoming.� I’m not sure of the quality of his Nietzsche scholarship, though; this seems like the old-fashioned Straussian nihilist Nietzsche, rather than the Derridean or Deleuzian ‘dancing star’.
Actually, this seems to be a favourite strategy of our moral leaders. Accuse Bush or Blair of complicity in some evil, and they will no longer attempt to deny or justify their involvement; instead they’ll agree with you that the evil is indeed evil, attempt to outdo you in denouncing it, and then, conscience assuaged, carry on as before. Perhaps this isn’t so much Nietzschean as Humean, a millitant refusal to countenance the mysticism of cause and effect. The constant conjunction of Blair and evil turns out to be a sign of the tough choices he is prepared to make and so, actually, a sign of his great moral strength. Evil + evil = good.
Incidentally, the title of this post comes from the Cambridge Evening News. It’s actually a grimly sordid story, but the headline made me laugh out loud, disturbing the guy behind the counter in our local Mace.
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So you can imagine how pleased I was to find this file while testing my new MIDI driver setup, which also opened my eyes to this collection of amateur MIDI transcriptions, both hilarious and heroic. The best thing about them, though, is the effect translation to the General MIDI instruments has on the tracks. ‘All the Things She Said’ turns into Dubstar’s ‘Stars’, ‘Dirrty’ sounds like the theme tune to some 80s action film, and most impressively, the new-romantic heart of ‘Toxic’ is exposed (of course, I’m not the first to mention this). It’s like a kind of accidental bootlegging.
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