When Sirens Sing Unfamiliar Songs
The end of the week… there is plenty of good electricity in my head this morning. My job is practically over and I have many thoughts to address. The new flat is arranged and already barking for financial attention, but this is something about which I can relax for a short time; now I can go to ground whilst the deposit cheques and forms bounce around the postal system. Right now I am more occupied with tomorrow's gig, which promises to provide an evening of blissful, musical fireworks in the head. The name A Silver Mt. Zion means nothing to most people, but to those of us who have bought the albums and paid for tickets, this is set to be a rare and special moment in time.
Really, I have not bought enough music this year. This is a strange thought to behold, but I have not been lacking in music, with John Peel three nights a week and Radio 3's Mixing It on Friday nights providing me with a constant source of new stuff. Actually, I was one of the few people who liked everything that Peel played…nothing was too weird for me and in the end I believe I was alone in wishing he would play less white indie guitar. Nevertheless, these music shows, no matter how great, are more of an aperetif…the main course lies in the full albums I have not been buying.
Curiously, despite loving so much of the music Peel played, I never bought a huge amount of CDs based on the bands he championed. Perhaps the tracks that stood out the most for me are the ones that were too hard to track down. Too obscure, too vinyl or not on any album…the amount of superb floor-shaking drum'n'bass classics I missed out on through an intense fear of 12 inch records turns me cold. But whatever the reason, in my life I have bought more music through reading magazines. Before closing down at the start of the year, Jockey Slut was a useful musical source, as was Uncut before it became a bloated, middle-aged and pot bellied disappointment of a magazine that ditched any trappings of supporting inventive music and decided to wallow full time in tired nostalgia.
Hmm. Where is this going? What was I leading up to? One of these days I will get round to a comprehensive study of online music, particularly the radio stations. I believe these can be an essential part of my listening life, once I have suitable access to it. I once spent a day at work trawling the digital seas for anything worthwhile...a radio station I can tune in at any time of the day and enjoy is my own personal holy grail. (1250 results) What I found was Eastern European country music, Japanese ambient synth pop and foul talk radio. Utterly bug-eyed perhaps, but always surprising… and a damn good thing too. I have never been one of those watery-eyed whores who buy a CD single and then listen to them over and over again until the laser pops a sprocket. To hell with that, and to hell with pop music in general.
Ah, but that is another debate and I am tired of its insidious tentacles. Even broadsheet newspapers are writing self-satisfied articles in praise of pop music as if this is somehow proving some frightfully important point about music and snobbery, when all it really does is throw dust into the faces of weary straw men.
We are bombarded with these irrelevant and disingenous arguments at all times these days and some of them bother us more than others. Many people like throwing arguments at situations that don’t exist, thus creating the situation in the first place, and I believe that too many people are being defined by how much they argue. It makes reading the news a stomach-churning activity. Then again, we always knew that the news is Bad For You, and now we have proof (see this article). Besides, there is too much bad blood in our daily politics for us not to be splattered with at least some of it.
For the worst of this bad blood we turn to Northern Ireland. The playground self-aggrandising of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley continues and is deep into a blame-fuelled malaise that could take weeks to address. The respective leaders of Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists have been playing bollock conkers for so long now that they exist in a sensory-depriving fog of pride and belief in some crazy historical context that will favour them and them alone. They are unaware that the rest of the world is slapping their heads in disbelief with each statement and retaliation. They can hear the sound of clapping from the gallery…this appears to them to be some kind of partisan statement of encouragement but is, in reality, a slow hand clap that is saying "get off the goddamn stage". The light is bright at the end of the tunnel, but the bastards just won't walk those last few yards.
"The latest IRA statement of self-justification only serves to convince the decent people of Northern Ireland of the fact that the IRA had never any intention of decommissioning." -- Ian Paisley
"Decent people?" Ye gods. So on the flip side there must be a lot of obviously indecent people who oppose his argument…all desperate for death and chaos and madness, right?
But he went off the deep end long ago and the bubbles in his blood are growing bigger by the day. He is managing to make Gerry Adams look reasonable now; demanding that the IRA film the decommissioning of its weaponry is a futile statement based not upon what "decent people" give a damn about, but is part of this fog of pride that stops him engaging with anything but his own political ego. With the IRA willing to decommission, Paisley is playing a weird game, and in a strange way brings to mind a scene from The Man With Two Brains, where Steve Martin is stopped by the police in Austria and forced to perform increasingly elaborate drunk tests.
Paisley: Get out of the car. Start decommissioning your weapons!
Adams: Very well. It is done.
Paisley: Now do a rollover, turnover and flip-flop whilst taking a photograph of yourself decommissioning your weapons!
Adams: We do this under protest but it is done…
Paisley: Now juggle these, do a tap dance and sing the Catalina Magdalena Luptenschteiner Volunbeiner song!
Adams: God DAMN your disarmament tests are hard!
But to hell with this squabbling…history will play itself out and both sides will be portrayed for all time as proud but ineffectual fools, and it will be a lesson in how atavistic chest-beating leads to nothing but misery for everyone in the blast radius.
Okay…this appears to have terminally drifted away from music and has already gone on far too long. But the Christmas season is upon us and starting from tomorrow I will be as far away from the suffocating office environment as possible for at least three weeks. These weary bulletins I have been writing for a while now are likely to be more sporadic in that time, and I make no apology for this. Things are changing in my life and they demand my attention. But I will always need to write, and so this insane jabbering will need to continue. What the hell, eh?
Really, I have not bought enough music this year. This is a strange thought to behold, but I have not been lacking in music, with John Peel three nights a week and Radio 3's Mixing It on Friday nights providing me with a constant source of new stuff. Actually, I was one of the few people who liked everything that Peel played…nothing was too weird for me and in the end I believe I was alone in wishing he would play less white indie guitar. Nevertheless, these music shows, no matter how great, are more of an aperetif…the main course lies in the full albums I have not been buying.
Curiously, despite loving so much of the music Peel played, I never bought a huge amount of CDs based on the bands he championed. Perhaps the tracks that stood out the most for me are the ones that were too hard to track down. Too obscure, too vinyl or not on any album…the amount of superb floor-shaking drum'n'bass classics I missed out on through an intense fear of 12 inch records turns me cold. But whatever the reason, in my life I have bought more music through reading magazines. Before closing down at the start of the year, Jockey Slut was a useful musical source, as was Uncut before it became a bloated, middle-aged and pot bellied disappointment of a magazine that ditched any trappings of supporting inventive music and decided to wallow full time in tired nostalgia.
Hmm. Where is this going? What was I leading up to? One of these days I will get round to a comprehensive study of online music, particularly the radio stations. I believe these can be an essential part of my listening life, once I have suitable access to it. I once spent a day at work trawling the digital seas for anything worthwhile...a radio station I can tune in at any time of the day and enjoy is my own personal holy grail. (1250 results) What I found was Eastern European country music, Japanese ambient synth pop and foul talk radio. Utterly bug-eyed perhaps, but always surprising… and a damn good thing too. I have never been one of those watery-eyed whores who buy a CD single and then listen to them over and over again until the laser pops a sprocket. To hell with that, and to hell with pop music in general.
Ah, but that is another debate and I am tired of its insidious tentacles. Even broadsheet newspapers are writing self-satisfied articles in praise of pop music as if this is somehow proving some frightfully important point about music and snobbery, when all it really does is throw dust into the faces of weary straw men.
We are bombarded with these irrelevant and disingenous arguments at all times these days and some of them bother us more than others. Many people like throwing arguments at situations that don’t exist, thus creating the situation in the first place, and I believe that too many people are being defined by how much they argue. It makes reading the news a stomach-churning activity. Then again, we always knew that the news is Bad For You, and now we have proof (see this article). Besides, there is too much bad blood in our daily politics for us not to be splattered with at least some of it.
For the worst of this bad blood we turn to Northern Ireland. The playground self-aggrandising of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley continues and is deep into a blame-fuelled malaise that could take weeks to address. The respective leaders of Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists have been playing bollock conkers for so long now that they exist in a sensory-depriving fog of pride and belief in some crazy historical context that will favour them and them alone. They are unaware that the rest of the world is slapping their heads in disbelief with each statement and retaliation. They can hear the sound of clapping from the gallery…this appears to them to be some kind of partisan statement of encouragement but is, in reality, a slow hand clap that is saying "get off the goddamn stage". The light is bright at the end of the tunnel, but the bastards just won't walk those last few yards.
"The latest IRA statement of self-justification only serves to convince the decent people of Northern Ireland of the fact that the IRA had never any intention of decommissioning." -- Ian Paisley
"Decent people?" Ye gods. So on the flip side there must be a lot of obviously indecent people who oppose his argument…all desperate for death and chaos and madness, right?
But he went off the deep end long ago and the bubbles in his blood are growing bigger by the day. He is managing to make Gerry Adams look reasonable now; demanding that the IRA film the decommissioning of its weaponry is a futile statement based not upon what "decent people" give a damn about, but is part of this fog of pride that stops him engaging with anything but his own political ego. With the IRA willing to decommission, Paisley is playing a weird game, and in a strange way brings to mind a scene from The Man With Two Brains, where Steve Martin is stopped by the police in Austria and forced to perform increasingly elaborate drunk tests.
Paisley: Get out of the car. Start decommissioning your weapons!
Adams: Very well. It is done.
Paisley: Now do a rollover, turnover and flip-flop whilst taking a photograph of yourself decommissioning your weapons!
Adams: We do this under protest but it is done…
Paisley: Now juggle these, do a tap dance and sing the Catalina Magdalena Luptenschteiner Volunbeiner song!
Adams: God DAMN your disarmament tests are hard!
But to hell with this squabbling…history will play itself out and both sides will be portrayed for all time as proud but ineffectual fools, and it will be a lesson in how atavistic chest-beating leads to nothing but misery for everyone in the blast radius.
Okay…this appears to have terminally drifted away from music and has already gone on far too long. But the Christmas season is upon us and starting from tomorrow I will be as far away from the suffocating office environment as possible for at least three weeks. These weary bulletins I have been writing for a while now are likely to be more sporadic in that time, and I make no apology for this. Things are changing in my life and they demand my attention. But I will always need to write, and so this insane jabbering will need to continue. What the hell, eh?
posted by Jamie at 10:55 AM
2 Comments:
An excellent post.
I caught part of a phone-in from Radio Ulster (re-broadcast on Radio 4). The final caller said something along the lines of:
"When peace finally comes to Northern Ireland, these boys (Paisley & Adams) will be out of a job"
Too true.
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