On a possibly happier note, there’s this:
Some other SoundCloud “albums” passed unreported here, but this one entertains me for some reason and is the first in ages to make it to BandCamp — rest assured as always that no-one is expected to buy the fucking thing, BC just represents a different grouping mechanism.
And yes, this is my third post in three days. Some kind of inertial shift? No promises whatsoever.
I happened to be reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest in June, which seemed grimly apt. A common pattern in several of his novels — though perhaps less in Children of Earth and Sky, as it turns out — is of events accumulating into a huge societal transformation, whose enormity is not apparent until afterwards. Errors of judgement, missed opportunities, subtly shifting political alliances and conflicts of interest conspire to bring about the end of a golden age, destroy a fragile civilisation, harden and coarsen and entrench attitudes in a wearied population. Life goes on — what else should it do? — just a bit less well. Only in retrospect do we perceive the knife edge on which it was so finely balanced.
These are fictions, of course, heightened and romanticised, and who knows how well they capture anything of the real historical moments on which Kay draws — the fall of the Tang and Northern Song, Byzantium and al-Andalus. An appeal to a Golden Age is always dangerous. Nostalgia corrupts; just look around us now.
Still, it certainly feels like one of those moments. A collective surrender to the imp of the perverse; a yearning for things to be made worse. And it’s not over yet, of course.
I’ve intermittently felt the urge to write about it, but it’s been difficult to summon much enthusiasm for blogging amidst the ruins, the trembling ground, the overwhelming sense of unmooring. A part of my identity is leaching away.
In the poisoned discourse of 2016, we are told that it is arrogant and elitist and anti-democratic to complain about the abrogation of a whole population’s rights at the whim of a narrow majority of actively-deceived voters, to rail against the generational betrayal of the young by delusional elderly racists, or to point out that contradictory goals do not suddenly become reconcilable just because an uneasy coalition of people with opposing aims all declared a desire for their own particular fantasy of not the status quo.
We voted for magic. Now bring me my unicorn!
Well, fuck that shit. Fuck the vanity of uninformed opinion, the false equivalence of visceral prejudice with expertise, the active disdain for reality. Fuck the shameless lies and pandering of nauseating hucksters like Gove and Johnson, peddling random policy baubles and then backing away with an insouciant shrug. Fuck the sociopathic (and ongoing) rabble-rousing of haterags like the Express and Mail and the cowed pseudo-balance of the BBC. Fuck the insistence of the ignorant that their vapid views be listened to and taken seriously.
That seething mass of mutually-incompatible twattery who make up the 52% are wrong and their misexpression of misdesire deserves no fucking respect at all. Literally every single reason for voting Leave boils down to one or both of evil and stupid.
I am prepared to accept that most of those people are not evil.
“[…] People do seem to get addicted to their resentments. It must be like an endorphin, or a brain action in a temporal region, near the religious and epileptic nodes. I read a paper saying as much.”
“Fine for you, but let’s stick to the problem at hand. People feeling resentment are not going to give up on it when they are told they are drug addicts enjoying a religious seizure.”
Lay me place and bake me pie
I’m starving for me gravy
Leave my shoes and door unlocked
I might just slip away, eh?
I shouldn’t have been awake and in front of the TV at that time on Monday morning. In the past my being so would have implied some kind of disgraceful and debauched behaviour, but nowadays the reasons are sadder, more prosaic, more difficult.
I shouldn’t have been, but there I was, in the teeth of some other crisis, with the BBC news as a flickering backdrop, just intrusive enough.
As the story broke, the presenters seemed as bewildered as we were. A few archive clips were reeled out, lurching in and out as some poor sap behind the scenes tried frantically to figure out what aspect ratio they should be. Platitudes were mouthed. Gradually the editorial line began to crystallise, the narrative neaten to hagiography.
It’s not like we didn’t know the story already.
I’ve been trying to think, since then, of anyone else who comes close in terms of significance, culturally, personally. There are — have always been, will always be — plenty of casualties. No shortage of sorrowful obits, memorial tributes, parades of hits. Just this afternoon we learn about Alan Rickman; who knows who else may have gone by nightfall? But can any of them compete with Bowie? Will any of them be as… foundational?
Musicians, artists, writers, performers. There are plenty I’ll miss, some very much indeed; I could trot out the usual suspects, but what’s the use? We’ll be ticking them off soon enough. We’ll dig out the old albums and argue over their relative merits as if in a maudlin, pointless Top Trumps game. Some joyless heretics will inevitably pipe up to dismiss them as less important than great leaders, politicians, clerics, industrialists and what have you; and, seriously, fuck those guys. But perhaps the Stranglers were — are becoming — right after all.
It’s a personal thing, of course. There are poor benighted souls out there with no clue who David Bowie was. Others who inexplicably fail to rate him. The environment is different now, his impact less evident; but by the same token, it seems to me, everyone else is diminished even more. That heroic space, now vacated, may just have ceased to exist. Perhaps the facile headlines describing Bowie as “legendary” were right: a figure from a bygone age, already shading into myth. We won’t see his like again.
Science and technology will continue to change the world; so will terror and catastrophe. But music and art? How can they, now that they are only content?