Sinister: SImon Reynolds and B&S

[the duke of harringay]

tim said that reynolds said:

>  what music needed was a load of
> noise that superceded the song (he wouldf
> justify such babble by going
> on about 'jouissance' and 'the demolition of
> self' and suchlike which is
> all very well until you realise he's doing it
> because, basically, he
> likes the Young Gods).

young gods.  not good.  not good at all...

>         No doubt he'd hate Belle and Sebastian
> for the reason that they
> are the best songwriters operating in the whole
> of pop music today.

yeah, he has/had a problem with
singer/songwriters, didn't he?

> he'd slip into the easy stereotype of calling
> them twee and childlike
> and then bung that stuff about how the whole
> enterprise is the pop music
> version of anorexia, which I always thought was
> a duff argument (to
> broadly  summarise, he said that anorexia was
> all about refusing one's
> status as an adult and the consequent pressures
> and responsibilities of
> the world; he then identified Talulah Gosh as
> doing the same thing).

interesting, because what i wrote to myself just
last night, whilst thinking about the manner of my
own Pop Obsession in general and my personal
interest in Belle & Sebastian in particular was as
follows.

chin up kids.

the duke.

what i wrote:

In a pub once Tim suggested that all Great Pop is
written from the perspective of being 16.  Not
that all Great Pop was ABOUT being 16, but rather
that it encompassed a certain sense of excitement
and tremulous anticipation that the IDEA of being
16 conjures in us.  I find this argument
seductive, just as I find seductive the idea that
the moment to which we return and find each time
slightly altered by the passing of our elliptical
routes before we then embark on another of those
roads to (inevitably) nowhere, is also rooted
deeply in adolescence.

Richard Hell once suggested that adolescence was
the most important part of your life, and that the
extent to which you stay true to the ideals you
develop at that time is the extent to which you
stay Alive.   And I think this hits on the point I
feel I currently find myself believing in more and
more.

Perhaps this is the eternal curse and saving grace
of the Pop Generation, or at least the Pop
obsessives; that the refusal to accept the
responsibility of adulthood and the fact that we
find Pop altering our perceptions of importance
results in an ongoing obsession with a return to
adolescence.  That the true revolutionary spirit
of Pop is not to overthrow governments and systems
of media oppression through direct action, but by
collusion, by exisiting in a peter pan like bubble
of myopia.  Perhaps, like the Mods’
pharmaceutically induced disinterest in sex, the
Pop generation will grow to refuse the concept of
family, will deny the importance of familial
responsibility in favour of the endless song, the
endless rave, the endless summer of love.

One can but hope.

--
Tangents On-Line
http://www.virtual-pc.com/tangent/
Tangents On-Paper: PO Box 102, Exeter, EX2 4YL, UK

tangent at mail.zynet.co.uk




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