Sinister: SImon Reynolds and B&S

[Keith Watson]

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.

[Keith Watson]
Indeed this is a fantastic argument, responsibilities of adulthood are only 
there if you wish to take them - of course there are a few things there, 
paying bills and stuff but mainly I still feel like I'm 16 any, in fact I 
feel like I'm 9, I don't feel like I've ever felt any different, people 
constantly bombard you with the idea that you're going to grow out of stuff 
like this, all your life (incidentally, this is kind of what I take 
"everybody's trying to make us a century of fakers" to mean - or at least, 
this is how I like to take it). People force themselves to forget about the 
things they once enjoyed indeed loved, just since they feel like it doesn't 
fit in with the way they're expected to behave. I'm never going to grow up, 
I can't see it, I've been told all my life I will and I haven't yet and 
long may it continue. It's like the difference between feeling alive and 
dead.


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.


[Keith Watson]
Indeed I don't believe it'll ever overthrow the government, but it can do 
much much more - changing people's attitudes to things is one thing - to 
take a trivial example... Look at the telly and see how often people swear, 
all the time now, and then think of the uproar with the Sexpistols on the 
Bill Grundy show 21 years ago. The affect that these people have is far too 
subtle to be able to explain definitively but it's definitely there.

Cheers,
	Keith.


ps: I kind of liked Blissed Out, I think he writes well about the stuff he 
likes, it's more just his views on the stuff he doesn't like that are 
strange, well, you can't expect everyone to like everything. Having said 
that "The Sex Revolts" which is another Simon Reynolds book is not quite as 
interesting.

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