Friday, August 01, 2003
Trace a political kiss from your lover’s lips…
Did I ever tell you that Jaws is my favourite film?
Is Marcello looking to wind-up The Church of Me? Recent posts have erred more and more towards the explicit in terms of revealing the function of the blog (less The Church of Me than The Church of… well, those of us who read it know who, Marcello, and I’m almost crying as I’m writing this and I don’t even know you so fuck knows how you must feel every day); the possibility of a book is mentioned more and more often (it must happen, mustn’t it?). Your “history-book-thing”. I hope it’s helped. I hope it will continue to do so. Purely for selfish reasons, you understand?
I have no idea who Jim DeRogatis is and I’ve never read Lester Bangs but thank you, Sam. One thing though; Reynolds has been around for a fair while…
A bad stomach through Wednesday night as a result of a dodgy kebab (when will I stop filling my body with shit?) and all I could do at 4am was listen to The Colour Of Spring on headphones. My trail through the hinterland of 80s pop music continues apace with Tears For Fears; this week I went out and bought their first three albums after one too many encounters with “Mad World” for comfort over the last few months. How much have I enjoyed Songs From The Big Chair? A lot. I’m enjoying it now- “Shout” is a great tune. How much braver is this than, say, a legion of so-called alternative bands operating these days? Organs, synths, sax, guitar, lyrics about something (how old do I sound? < / fogey >). The new SFA is a nice enough pop album but there’s an intensity about this that Phantom Power is missing to its detriment. Maybe it’s an 80s thing, Depeche Mode, U2, earnestness, white flags, primal scream therapy… Didn’t Mansun want to sound like Tears For Fears? A shame they were such complete fools.
Sitting at the train station, Thursday lunchtime, and the child next to me, maybe 6 or 7, stank of chips and TCP. Further down the platform two sisters, at a guess 18 and 15/16, stood together, cut from the same clay, neither stunning but the younger one that touch more alive, a shade slimmer, more confident, a touch luckier with the family genes than her older sister… How must that feel for the elder sibling? Soul destroying? Does she even notice?
For the first time in a long time (as long as I can remember) I have fingernails. I’m not sure how this came about. What do I do with them? Quick, hurry, someone get a splinter so I can tweeze it out with my digital cartilage (is that what it is?- isn’t it the stuff your hair’s made of?). I so want to pick them to feel the satisfaction of pulling them from their roots, it’s so much better than slowly tearing off a scab…
Interesting article in G2 today about the Fight Club-like phenomenon of New York’s “inexplicable mobs”. I, of course, being 24, male, mildly media-savvy and open to suggestion, want to start one of these in Shaldon or Cockwood or Pinhoe.
Overseen magazine article headline; My cheap Spanish boobjob disfigured me for life…
Word doesn’t like ‘boobjob’ but it suggests ‘blowjob’ quite willingly as an alternative- does this say something about Bill Gates?
A scribble in my notebook (Moleskine, naturally) reads “think about going jumping…” As this is undated I must trust memory, never wise for me, and if memory serves it’s a reference to sitting on the breakwater that juts from Boatcove into the approximation of a bay that is Dawlish seafront, listening to the walkman (Manitoba or Bark Psychosis, I imagine- is it ever anything else these days?- I must make some more minidiscs) whilst some teenagers next to me (I was there first) debated whether or not to go jumping from the end of the breakwater. “Is it safe? It’s a long way down. Is it cold?” Do it, it’s ace, imagine that feeling between jumping and immersion, imagine that blood rush as you hit the water, the adrenaline… They jumped, but only after I’d made my way to the middle of the cliff, where I watched them like the voyeur I am. I haven’t jumped off the breakwater in years.
Don’t go in the sea off Teignmouth. Work is underway to repair a broken sewage pipe. 2003 and we’re still pumping shit into the sea off our beaches. When the wind blows off the sea in winter, when the waves get chopped up and whipped across the seawall and beneath the viaduct, that orange foam which floats across the crazy-golf and discolours your alloy wheels, that’s not natural.
Don’t go in the sea off the North Devon coast either; a fifteen-year-old Marine Biology student has spotted a Great White Shark. No doubt in Tring an eight-year-old flutist has seen Elvis… No, that’s cynical. Experts say that from her detailed description of the fish’s movements and size it could well be a Great White. It makes my laughing dismissal of the River Lizard which I tell Emma haunts the Exe seem a little foolish. Meanwhile more people decide to search for the Loch Ness Monster. Makes the carp in the ponds at the university seem slightly sinister.
Get poisoned in the sea off the south coast of Devon. Get eaten in the sea off the north. As I keep telling myself; when you live in Dawlish everyday is a holiday. I’ve never been on ‘holiday’. As a child we couldn’t afford it and by the time I could have earned enough money to take myself away on holiday my modes of escapism had become long established. At various stages since I was, what?- four?- these have swung from my imaginary friend Robin to drawing to reading to playing football to taking drugs to getting drunk, all the while (all the while?- bit strong… from time to time) music there as the valve behind the valves? Escaping too, not from.
Paul Morley in The Guardian Review (mental note from my good side; be careful Nick, you have no idea who the fuck this guy is but he’s probably quite important – mental note from my bad side; fuck it) bemoaning (is he though?- really?) the death of the single. The single is the 7”. The single is not multi-format. Though Morley himself admits that he helped introduce multi-formatting when he worked as Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s promotional director, his attitude towards this act of murdering something he loves seeming to be oh well, it’s dying anyway, and isn’t it fun seeing the shiny new things we can kill it with? There’s magic in those black wax dinner plates and their little grooves, magic in being able to see the stylus move inexorably to the middle of the record and it’s never-ending groove; getting lost in that groove and then being snapped out when it’s time to turn it over / put a new one on. Keeps the concentration up. Do CDs encourage us to make music an addition to our lives because we can just press ‘repeat’ and keep the spinning and spitting out music for ever? So we can do something else other than listen? So the 80s killed the 7” and with it the singles chart and TOTP; what else are they going to be blamed for? I was born in 1979, so you can shut up right now.
The first single Morley bought was T Rex. At a guess he still has it somewhere, and even if the original has long been lost or broken or worn out, I imagine he’ll have found a replacement. He talks of being ‘defined’ by singles, by 7”s, by individual songs. Maybe each new 45 helped him grow as a person. Being ‘defined’. The first 7” I bought was “Bad” by Michael Jackson. After a week I used it as a frisbee because I was bored of it. It broke. Ch-ch-changes… The constant struggle for me has been to avoid definition, to keep myself out of those boxes. Maybe because the boxes I wanted access to were denied me, so therefore no boxes are good enough. Maybe because deep down I always suspected that there wasn’t anything to define. The idea that a record (or a succession of records) could define me, however much I love it (yes you, Spirit of Eden; yes you, The Stone Roses; yes you, Orbital ‘Brown’; yes you Paul’s Boutique [notice how I pick albums rather than singles?- rockist through and through!]). I’m Nick Southall and that’s as much as you’re getting.
Googling one’s own name; the triumph of postmodernism?- the triumph of the drive to self-celebrity?- a desperate clutch at binary, abstracted snatches of fame in order to bolster an insecure mind? I also work for Nickelodeon, for a political organisation in Woolongong, South Africa, as a professional footballer, and, most weirdly, for Exeter City Council (not a relative!). But mostly, according to Google I am me. Which is reassuring.
Morley’s praise of singles may be a devoutly poppist gesture (the Pope condemns dirty gays, says they shall not be allowed to marry, says it is against the “natural moral order”- oh come on John) but his tangible glee at the arrival of the iPod and the endless lists of untouchable, ether-dwelling songs, downloaded and paid for individually (if at all!- punk fucking rock!) reveals him as a definite rockist*. Why? Lists. Lists. Lists. Definition, permanency, codification, clarity, order, rules, balance, truth. Oh Paul. Didn’t you realise? His new book is about a journey (presumably metaphysical/fictional [“I don’t write fiction- I invent fact”]) with Kylie Minogue (she’s not hip anymore, Paul- “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” passed when The Flaming Lips covered it live, we all love “I Luv U” now, didn’t you know?) through history from “the pre-modern through the modern into the postmodern and beyond”. The truth is revealed in one sentence, with almost pornographic explicitness; “There will be no objects to hold or fetishise, people will simply collect lists.” There may be no “compulsive alphabetising”, but you can bet there’ll be even more compulsive pseudo-meritocratic ranking and rating. True chaos is anathema to pop music, and the rockist (and the poppist) cannot deal with it, so they list (verb; to list, lister, listing, listed).. People won’t even need to listen to songs anymore, they can just look at the lists. All is well.
Oh, I mean it’s a really interesting article and everything, much better than Petridis’ awful Kraftwerk piece last week, but all this bemoaning the transmutation of the single from culturally resonant gem into marketing man’s commercial tool is negated by those four words that start the penultimate paragraph; “In my new book…” And to then go on and praise lists as well…
I still can’t bring myself to massacre Tom Cox after his awful thing in The Sunday Times last weekend. “In my new book…”
Playlist during the writing of this post; Tears For Fears, Wire, Tricky.
*Not, of course, that the terms ‘rockist’ and ‘poppist’ mean fucking anything. Just so you know.
8/01/2003 11:45:00 pm
|
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home