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Stevenage, oh town of cycle tracks and my birth. Zooming through the underpasses swerving past scared early morning shoppers on the way to work at the Lister Hospital. Walking the flying bridge from the railway station through the Leisure Centre to the

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but how can Pop music be about longevity when all of this won't be around in 40 years anyways. It's the moments that count. I am remembering a 14 year old girl buying If You're Feeling Sinister from a gorgeous record store boy, and her not knowing anything about

SYNGE AND YEATS ARE ON HIS SIDE I see in queue, I mean, Q, on a station platform (terminus, concourse, booksellers, or what you will. It's like the 1840s happened) that MORRISSEY is revenant, yes, 'returning', with a long-player, as yet unrecorded, called IRISH BLOOD, ENGLISH HEART. This will excite those academics and Jon Savage fans (they exist, I think) who have long called on "M" to acknowledge his gaylicity. I haven't done that, but it will excite me, too, if it ever appears. But it does raise (not beg) a question: what ever happened to the Los Angeles LP of whose existence Michael Bracewell was the first to inform us? INDEPENDENT READER? I? I have still yet, yet, still, to see any further discussion on this list of the album THE NEGATIVES, by the singer once known as 'The Singer With Soul Band The Commotions'. So far, all told, I have only heard the following, non-sinister comments - possibly accurate, possibly not; you be the judge, jury, and indeed executioner - on this LP: 1) It's called THE PARANOIDS 2) 'You' can 'download' it 3) It seems to be all about Los Angeles. I'm afraid that this has not satisfied me. Why is no-one talking about 'Man On The Verge', the song of 2000? Or 'Past Imperfect', the other song of 2000? Or 'That Boy', the third song of 2000? Goddamit, this *is* the LLOYD COLE MAILING LIST, isn't it?, run by and for LLOYD COLE FANS!!? Think about it. HEARTBREAKER, by PAT BENATAR Someone just mentioned Dave Eggers. Last night I read Ian Sansom's review of his famed book, which naturally I've not read (I don't read books). On the basis of what Sansom (I.) quoted, I felt that his critical faculties had taken a walk down a long pier. The tone seemed waff and less intelligent, not only than it doubtless thought it was, but than the estimable Sansom (I.) thought it was. I think that only Welthorpe (E.) can help me on this one. I WAS BY THE WIRE FENCE, AND DODGING FLYING BRIDGES Obliquely she reminds me: the other day I saw that Mooro pitched in with a rare flight of provincial romanticism - pedestrian only shopping precinct with futuristic clock tower, cars flying underneath like some torrent in the St Gothard pass.... [etc] - that really cannot be allowed to go uncommended. It was one of the best things I'd ever seen from Mooro. I think he should write a 'concept album' or something. TIME'S TIDE WILL MOTHER YOU Genevieve W wrote something that I thought was pretty sound: the band she was about to hear. I remember her secretly listening to Tigermilk on headphones in boring classes... As I hope shortly to say, I think Pop music can be about longevity, shortlevity, and lots of other things. But I think Ms W is on to something here. Why (for instance) demand that B&S go on churning stuff out, if they're not up to it (I have no idea, of course, whether they are or not), when they have already given us things to value and live by? We need (I find myself formulating a provisional 'rule') to be able to *value the finite*: for most is finite. And I also happen to agree with Ms W that nostalgia - next-door neighbour to love - can be a great thing in the context of pop. Or of anything. When Ms W gets older, she may sadly find that she finds it difficult even to be nostalgic as she used to be. That is a bona fide loss. CRITICISM AND ICONOGRAPHY It is time for stormy weather. It's time to broach once again this silly chestnut of the MFs vs B&S question, as raised in the article to which the geezer Miller, then Honey, pointed us all. I was going to fall silent on this, but enough others have taken it up that it seems to be worth having one last swing at it. A meta-comment first, on the geezer Pennington's comment:

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This sort of thing infuriates me to no end. Critics. People who seem to think that they are illuminating us about our own opinions.

Is Mr P saying that 'critics' are a bad thing? I think he's wrong. 'Criticism', which has of course been historically defined any number of ways, does all kinds of different things: but one thing that (for instance) it can do is to make us see an artefact differently: to see it more clearly, perhaps; to see it in a relation to other things that we hadn't thought of; to get a bit more out of it. Saying that 'critics' are bad because you don't like some 'criticism' is like saying that pop music is bad because you don't like some pop records.

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Most people realize there cannot be objective standards for music.

Or, I take it, for any other kind of aesthetic judgement? You may well be right: though even about this I do not feel sure. However, it is, I think, a good pragmatic presupposition, which makes it less likely that you'll cause needless offence.

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But the bare fact is that no one is capable of writing 69 quality songs in that short a span of time.

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It's all very interesting as a concept but

What span of time? If I'm not mistaken (but I could easily be mistaken), 'Papa Was A Rodeo' was written around the time of The Charm of The Highway Strip. In any case, your case is not proven, and not easily proveable. piss-poor as an album if you ask me. I think you are quite, quite wrong: but you have already pointed out that this is all subjective stuff, so fair enough. STRANGE RELIGIOUS TRACTS Anyway, on to the geezer Fitchett (AF) himself. I don't really know the geezer; he may be a splendid soul, generous, funny, intelligent, erudite and all the rest of it. I expect he won't mind - I daresay he won't care at all - if I find fault with his work. I don't care for the style of the thing: I find sentences like 'Or maybe I am. I have no idea.' annoyingly slack. This, too: 'it's useful to draw parallels because� because� because. Because.' But I don't want to get bogged down in that marsh, Rodney. What about the substance (2001)? - PEOPLE DON'T LISTEN TO FYHCYWLAP ALL THE WAY THROUGH I find this a perverse line of argumentation indeed. If AF doesn't like the LP, fine: but he must know that thousands of people have listened to it all the way through hundreds of times. I don't like it all equally (who does? who does with any LP?), but I do find most of it (I suppose there could be exceptions: 'The Chalet Lines'?) rather *easy* to listen to. This is not a criticism: I find Lloyd Cole terribly easy to listen to. And the question which surely arises is: how often does anyone listen to 69 Love Songs all the way through? However much you admire it, you'd have to set aside three hours of listening time. It's not that the album doesn't deserve our attention, but that our time for doing such things doesn't readily come in three-hour blocks. Anyway, I find the whole 'all the way through' idea somewhat spurious, for I think there's a case for *not* listening to things all the way through. Listening to, say, The Queen Is Dead all the way through - let alone a Smiths 45s compilation - you get acclimatized to it, get used to it: its strange wonders have, perhaps, that bit less effect. Isn't there a case for listening to songs you really love *one at a time*, with intervals, not all in a row? - MURDOCH SHOULD WRITE EVERYTHING IN B&S Some agree, some disagree - but this is a very old chestnut. I think a fresher question might be: what is the current state of Murdoch's own creative powers? Imagine that the next B&S LP has 12 songs, 9 by Murdoch, 3 by 3 other people. If you really don't like those other songwriters, you can skip them - but the crucial question for you will be, has Murdoch delivered the goods on *his own* songs? That's what will matter most, if said LP ever turns up. - MAGNETIC FIELDS ARE BETTER THAN BELLE & SEBASTIAN As it happens, I agree - but are such polarizations, hierarchies and stand-offs that useful? I also think that the Beatles were better than the WHO and the Smiths better than the HOUSE OF LOVE, but I wouldn't want to be without those 'lesser' outfits. Part of the fascination of culture is all that proliferation of variety, of voices which can't help but be different from one another. And I would never have heard of the MFs without B&S, anyway. - STEPHIN MERRITT IS GOD Believe it or not, I have as high an estimate of Merritt's songwriting as AF does. But I don't think that this 'god' stuff is that useful. For one thing, as another listee has pointed out to me, it has a very dodgy Rock History (Hendrix, Clapton, etc); but more generally, it's just so vague, so reach-me-down, as to be uninformative. Saying that someone's 'god' is a poor substitute for detailed description and analysis. Does AF give us those things too? Maybe. - CLAUDIA GONSON COULDA BEEN A STAND-UP COMEDIENNE If I'm not mistaken, CG is energetic, garrulous and very talented. That is not the same as having the qualities (whatever they may be) required for stand-up. - TO HEAR 'ACOUSTIC GUITAR' IS TO HEAR JULIE LONDON This is a *bit* intriguing, but I'm not quite sure that I understand it. - BEGHTOL, KLUTE AND SIMMS SING LIKE ANGELS I find this a peculiarly unhelpful claim. For one thing, there is, I think, a vague convention in pop thinking that 'singing like an angel' means something like: ethereal; high; dreamy. Examples presumably include Fraser, Wheeler, Berenyi/Anderson, etc etc. Now, I admit that this is a limited-looking use for the term, a mere convention, and perhaps AF is trying to break out of it, turn the idea of 'singing like an angel' into something else. But is that worth doing? I think not, because - like 'god' - it has been so used and overused that it no longer seems to tell us much. There are so many *detailed* things that could be said about the unusual voices of Beghtol and Klute (I think that AF does quite well on Simms - whose performance blew me away, and about the spelling of whose name I am never entirely sure): the 'angel' thing is a clich� that, once again, substitutes for those details rather than summarizing them. - THE NATURE OF POP IS... The nature of Pop is, according to AF, lots of things, which may or may not cohere. He frequently gives us another of Pop's defining characteristics, another reason why something is untrue to Pop - of which the most contentious example round here was 'Pop is Not Democratic', so B&S are bad. Miller says that that's wrong, because Pop *is* democratic. I think they're both wrong, because they're both right. It seems to me very likely that pop music can be, perhaps even should be, 'democratic' (ie: with creative input from lots of people) in some cases, 'undemocratic' (ie: dictated by a single talent) in others. This 'Nature of Pop' stuff always seems to narrow the field of pop in unnecessary, indeed illegitimate ways. If I'm not mistaken, there was a lot of talk about this stuff a while back - on sinister in the early days (I wasn't around), on other websites perhaps, at pub tables where Tim Hopkins had just got a round in, etc. Beyond the geezer AF, I'm not entirely sure who has spent a lot of time issuing definitions of The Nature Of Pop, or whether anybody still does it - though come to think of it, I seem to have heard Welthorpe do it occasionally. But despite having no clear target to aim at, and at the risk of shooting a dead horse, I submit that 'Nature of Pop' talk can be a mixed blessing. - On the one hand, it seems to have released, or stimulated, a lot of valuable energies: to have got people thinking seriously about pop music and why and how they love it; which I cannot think a bad thing. If the forging of exclusive definitions and rules is what it takes to get that to happen, so be it. - But on the other hand, talk of The Nature of Pop usually seems to amount to saying 'I like this... and it's Pop', and 'I don't like that... it's not really Pop'. In a word, it is, of course, an *evaluative* discourse: but it wears the garb of a merely *descriptive* one. It seems to me that there's an unnecessary confusion of language games here. Furthermore, reading AF's meditations on Pop made me imagine coming across a website full of people earnestly debating whether, ooh, Tony Harrison, Dave Eggers, Samuel Beckett, John Keats, Laurence Sterne and John Buchan were !LiTeRaTuRe! or not, formulating rules for the literary which amounted to jealous defences of certain authors that they loved, etc. I am afraid that I would find such a discussion somewhat absurd, because it would appear that it was wasting time on these matters of definition, boundaries, exclusions, etc, rather than simply describing the pleasurable, treasurable particularities of any number of instances of the vast and unwieldy field that is pragmatically called the literary. Those who have come this far may be glad to hear that that is, at last, all I have to say; as well as being roughly, as Raymond Williams used to tell committee chairmen, what I came to say. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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