Post punk/musos/NLP
John Rose was messaging to ask how the baby was settling in and to say he’d retracted his comment about Puddle of Mudd being the worst cover ever, citing correctly their right to “murder any song they want”. It doesn’t matter anyway. He also invited me to choose a post punk track for his excellent IP radio show Flam and Flange. I’ve been contemplating it, and options include How I wrote Elastic Man by The Fall for it’s portrait of life in disarray (I’m resigned to bed. I’ve got bottles and comics stuffed by it’s head) and also the cheeky irreverence of suggesting said song containing the pejorative “I’m a potential DJ”, or Lowdown by Wire because of the equally dreary “another cigarette, another day, from A to B…” oh to go from A to B! I’m consigned to A. Still in lockdown stasis. Nothing but time and nowhere to go. May as well write another article. Oh or maybe anything by Joy Division, but I don’t know what. Joe and I used to have a joke about musos:
A What’s your favourite Joy Division song?
B I dunno… Ceremo…
A WRONG! It’s shadowplay!
I’m on a couple of music forums but I can’t get involved. It seems a bit of a pissing contest, paradoxically stretched between obscure consensus answers and contrarianism. It’s not as bad as when I was on the music forums on that gamer app Discord, that was dreadful.
Listening to transmission now — one of my favourite Joy Division songs. But you don’t have to like it. I won’t think any more or less than you either way.
I guess it comes from a need to bond over shared preferences, which naturally includes excluding others. It’s a kind of sifting. In NLP they say every action has a positive intention, even if just for the person doing it. These people are trying to reinforce their identity and reach out to a favoured minority in a way not dissimilar to me writing these words about it.
At school, listening to alternative music kind of cemented me in my clan of four or five people with a few peripheral sympathisers. It also served to alienate me from others. “Is that even music?” someone said, walking into my 6th form study. Like the army cadet at camp when fed up of waking up to Pete’s Pulp Fiction gunshots I put some minimalist ambience on to wake us up and he said “I thought I was still dreaming”. He’d clearly never heard anything like it, which at the time, made me feel good a bit. But then I was 17. Maybe the people in the facebook group are younger… it’s quite likely thinking about it.
I just like the music I like because I like it. That sounds like a redundancy, a truism. But it isn’t. A lot of our tastes are cultural signifiers, for people to see what kind of people we are. That’s natural enough and I’m not claiming to be above it, but I’m trying to enjoy a variety of things without projecting snobbery and superiority, because really what does it matter what kind of noises you like putting in your ears. I admit that’s downplaying the entire history of youth cultures, centered around psychedelia, punk, post-punk, and everything since. I wonder if there will ever be another musical movement of significance, briefly autonomous from commodification and capitalist exploitation. A pure expression of dissent, or rapture, or identity, or whatever. I know this much, I won’t be able to be anything but a spectator.
