Good afternoon campers! If you are “freshly” back from T in the Park then I hope you enjoyed yourself. We
DJ’d at T in the Park in 2009 and I was hoping we would be invited back again this year, but nothing materialised. I had weekend tickets – partly with the aim of making sure I could get a decent number of pals in if we were DJing (above and beyond any guestlist) – so I ended up punting them and headed instead to Birmingham for a good friend’s 30th birthday barbeque. ( I know Geoff Ellis occasionally reads and replies to
“open letters” from bloggers so no doubt he will be providing me with a personal explanation as to why poor old Pin Ups didn’t get the nod.)
While I wait for Geoff’s response, I might as well get on with my post! The Birmingham BBQ/party was exceedingly good fun, and following various adventures with “e-coli burgers”, and Singstar, a rowdy dining room/living room disco emerged and ran from 2am until pesky neighbours intervened at 4.30am-ish. The tunes for the impromptu dancefloor came from my souped-up IPod Nano. I bought the IPod mainly for use at Pin Ups and it’s rammed with loads of party tunes spanning the decades. (If I were a boy-racer it would be a Ford Capri with some illegal fuel injection “under the hood”.) This makes for faintly irritating listening if you are, say, on the train to work at 8am, but for a party it’s dynamite! Marvin Gaye, The Cure, Kate Bush, Jay-Z, boom boom boom!
I suppose the contents of the IPod represent the fact that I’ve been obsessed with music for the best part of 20 years. I have come to wonder over the last while if I’m a bit of a dying breed. I don’t think I am, but en route to Birmingham I read Gordon Legge’s
'The Shoe', brought to my attention by
Alistair Braidwood at “Dear Scotland” (warning – there are spoliers!), and it was quite thought-provoking.
The Shoe is a terrific book, set in the mid-80s (1986?) in an unspecified town somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh (Falkirk perhaps?), and concerning a group of young men in their early 20s who are crazy about music. The characters discuss their favourite artists and songs with wonderful intensity, breadth of knowledge and - best of all - conviction in their personal judgement (back in the 80s there was no hedging your bets until the Pitchfork review came online). In the 1986 setting the dialogue rings true. I am not sure, however, if the dialogue would seem as believable if the book were to be set in the present day.
I don’t think people are quite so earnest about music anymore, but that could be due to a whole lot of factors than just a lack of enthusiasm or feeling. In the present day we have irony, "postmodernism", and a lot of things are “liked” with a knowing wink. Furthermore, the way that music is obtained and discussed has changed so much since 1986 that it’s arguably impossible to make a fair comparison.
Personally I don’t buy anything like as many physical records (CDs, vinyl etc) as I used to. Nowadays I tend to trawl blogs (my personal favourites are
listed here), read reviews, and download a selection of recommended tracks once I’ve had a good listen to them on Spotify. Tellingly, I have realised while writing this blog that I have never downloaded from ITunes an album in its’ entirety – I always “cherry pick”. I expect this is a pretty common approach. The obvious result of what I would term “online cherry picking” is the closure of record shops. Virgin (on Union Street), Echo and John Smith’s (both on Byres Road), and the huge Missing (on Wellington Street) are all places in Glasgow which took up far too much of my time in the late 90s/early noughties, but are now closed. (If these names ring a bell, on Optimo’s message board there is
an enjoyable thread about the unfortunate demise of 23rd Precinct, and other Glasgow record shops of days gone by.)
Besides record shop closures, I’d argue that a more subtle result of “online cherry picking” is that the listener can be left with a snapshot of an artist’s career (shorn of chronology), and unless a deliberate effort is made to investigate further, then the experience can be a bit unsatisfying and similar to just listening to loads of Greatest Hits EP’s (if such a thing existed). I could write further about “the death of the album”, digital theft, and so on, but these things have been written about by better writers many times already.
As for discussing music - although I might indulge in the odd bit of internet bickering about an act or a song, these spats are carried out with somebody who might well be living in another continent, and are ultimately pale imitations of the epic U2 v REM/New Order v Smiths/Blur v Oasis (or Suede) muso-geddons that I’d have with my friends 10 years ago. Unfortunately a lot of my friends are too busy nowadays with Terrifying Real Life to waste an afternoon debating whether
“Lemon” is a comedy song or the greatest tune that Talking Heads never wrote.
Nevertheless, I’d like to think there are still teenagers or young twentysomethings out there today knocking (metaphorical) spots off each other about present big issues.
Here’s a nice new one to get you going. “We knew all along that MIA was
‘a pretentious, truffle fries-eating phony spouting radical politics at odds with her extremely comfortable lifestyle’, but the tunes are usually good, so you can shove your damning
review up your ass, Pitchfork.” Agree or disagree??
John D.x