Sinister: love before hate, age before beauty, swine before pearls

[Hopkins T]

Lots of threads all making the same sort of sense to me...mind if I try to
weave them together just a little?

When I was sixteen, I was totally in love with pop and pop possibilities. At
that time of my l found myself able to invent and reinvent myself as an
individual, to build myself as an adult (OK, I may have failed...) and was
thrillled by the possibilities.

For those possibilities to mean anything, it is/was absolutely necessary to
draw lines about what's wrong and right, or I'd never have worked out why it
was important to take a stand against what's wrong and what's ugly in the
world.

The world is a fucked up place and pop music, which in itself is a little
backwater of capital, is never going to change that. But when I was sixteen,
pop music helped me understand that, while beauty will not make the pot
boil, the urge to express yourself, to aim towards some sort of radical
beauty, is a positive one. That view continues to inform what I do and how I
look at the world.

And the economics of pop at the time: struggling to get 1000 copies of a 7"
single out, labels necessarily acting as little capitalists, stays with me
as a great example of how it is impossible to escape from capital in this
society, but capital can be turned against itself, its structures can be
used to communicate, to make people feel and think and sometimes believe. 

I certainly didn't need to be told that the bands I was listening to (and
the Jasmine Minks are a great example) were special, because I knew they
were. Frankly, I'd probably have been a bit put off if some old groaner like
the 28 year-old me had come and started to try to impress upon me how lucky
I was. I only loved a small number of pop groups, but for a short time it
seemed they could do anything, go anywhere...such a sense of possibility.

And it's that sense of possibility which Belle and Sebasian inspire in me.
Me and the duke sometimes talk of how all true pop music pertains in some
way to the state of being sixteen, to the (often painful) excited confusion
of not really knowing what's coming around the corner, and loving it.

Don't know if I've succeeded in being relevant to anything, or whether list
veterans will have groaned and gone to sleep yet.  And don't much care.

For anyone still awake, try singing 'I could be Dreaming' along with '(My
Baby Does) Good Sculptures' by the Rezillos. Extraordinary.

timh
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.             Listen, this is pish, I think I'll leave
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