Vinyl Diary, part 4: New Wave

In 1993, the rock press started to talk about something called ‘Britpop’. I had no idea what it meant, other than that someone had invented yet another music genre. The phenomenon went on to carry some cultural weight, although perhaps not always for the reasons celebrated by some commentators. Depending on your point of view, Noel Gallagher hanging around Downing Street with Tony Blair was either the zenith of ‘Cool Britannia’ or the precise moment at which rock music relinquished its risible claim to be the standard bearer for anything resembling a counter-cultural movement. Here’s a clue: If you’re sipping tea with the Prime Minister, you may still fancy yourself as a rebel, but you are most definitely inside the tent, pissing out. 

It is generally accepted that the first two Britpop albums were by Suede and The Auteurs. Suede had some good songs, but the production on their album was awful, spoiled by an excess of washy reverb and the vocals being too far back in the mix. The singer, Brett Anderson, wrote lyrics coyly alluding to vague homosexual encounters and once claimed in an interview that he was "a bisexual man who never had a homosexual experience". It seemed a bit lame, but at least he looked like a bona fide pop star.

By contrast, Luke Haines of The Auteurs, with his foppish hair and junk shop clothes, looked more like your well-read sixth-form mate who would sit at the back of the class making snide remarks. He sang like someone who had only previously performed in his bedroom, with the vocals all double or even treble-tracked; his weedy voice and cynical tone conveyed the impression of someone who was, perhaps, out to take some revenge upon the world. For all of the vocal limitations, his songs certainly had a bit of devilment and wit about them. When I heard ‘Showgirl’ on the radio for the first time, I was struck by the boldness of the opening few bars. The sudden drop after the line “I took a showgirl for my bride” sounded brave, assertive, brimming with confidence; it compelled me to shut up and listen. The songs on ‘New Wave’ appeared to explore a bohemian demi-monde of actors, musicians and dancing girls, stuck permanently between jobs and waiting for their big showbiz break. In ‘Valet Parking’, Haines sang “I’m sick of parking cars” and you got the feeling that he meant it. 

His lyrics could be acerbic, but were sometimes mysterious and allusive. On the splendidly cryptic ‘Idiot Brother’, he directed the following line at surely the only person in the world who would understand what it was about:

"And what about our fat friend
With the golden ear?"

I had no idea what was going on, but it was fun trying to guess.

'American Guitars’ was interpreted by some as a Britpop statement of intent, something along the lines of: ‘we’ve had enough of these bloody yanks influencing our pop kids’. But the lyric is clearly celebratory, with Haines -for once- expressing genuine admiration about something, perhaps in recognition of an authenticity that he felt his own work might have lacked:

 

"Some people are born to write, some people are born to dance
Thought I knew my place in the world, thought I knew my art.
Glad to be there, see them begin.
It was easy to see them, they were the best band to be in … American Guitars"

I really liked the sound of the group. The uncomplicated guitar and minimalistic piano always served the interests of the songs, while James Banbury’s cello added a certain je ne sais quoi to the proceedings. On ‘Bailed Out’ –which, in the wrong hands, might easily have turned out to be a bit of a plodder- Banbury’s deft lyricism lifted the track into another dimension.

Despite making a distinctive contribution to the sound, Banbury was viewed as a mercenary by the group leader. In the first volume of his memoirs (‘Bad Vibes – Britpop and my part in its downfall’ published in 2009), Haines, throughout the text, refers to him merely as ‘the cellist’. The book is bitter, bitchy and misanthropic, but there is also humour in the mix, with the author being honest about what a twat he could be at times.

‘Bad Vibes’ paints an illuminating picture of the thin line between failure and success, but it is even better on the thinner line between ‘modest’ and ‘massive’ success. The Auteurs famously lost out on the Mercury Music Prize by one vote to Suede; I don’t know if that made any difference to their respective trajectories, but Suede went on to be huge and The Auteurs didn’t. Haines eventually got over the disappointment and, henceforth, only felt sick about the injustice of it all once every couple of minutes.

One of the reasons I think I liked ‘New Wave’ so much was the fact that I was -at the time- in a band which, to my ears at least, ploughed a similar furrow to The Auteurs. “If this is Britpop”, I thought, “bring it on”. My hope was that my own band might get a record deal on the back of some timely zeitgeist-surfing. We also hired, at considerable expense, a cellist to play on some of our recordings and the results convinced me that we were in transition from being half-decent (we were quite a solid unit) into something quite interesting. But finding a good cellist who would do the stuff that the rest of us were willing to do (paying for rehearsals, gigging in grotty pubs, paying for van hire etc.) was about as difficult as finding a unicorn that could cook; all the good ones wanted MU rates just to get out of bed.   

My band never managed to secure that elusive record deal. But I eventually got over the disappointment and nowadays only feel sick about the injustice of it all once every couple of minutes.

Let's play ... Quidditch?

When I was out for a walk the other day, I spotted a sign (pictured left) in the middle of Kelvingrove Park, where the University of Glasgow’s ‘Quidditch Club’ was holding an open session. The sight of the cavorting students made me stop and think. I wasn’t sure what to make of it; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Upon returning home, I told my 19-year old son about the Quidditch Club. He drew a look of disdain and uttered four words, the first two of which were “that is”, the fourth of which was “tragic”. 

I think I understand why he responded like that. The idea of people investing time and energy in a game that was made up by an author, a game made for flying wizards on broomsticks, does seem quite silly. Those students were only pretending to play a pretend game because they are not wizards, they don’t have broomsticks and they can’t fly. It’s obviously not a ‘real’ game, so they must be a bunch of losers. Well … perhaps not. According to my internet machine, there is a governing body (founded in 2010) called the International Quidditch Association. The version being played by those students is sometimes described as ‘Muggle Quidditch’, because it accepts that the participants aren’t wizards, don’t have actual broomsticks and can’t fly.  

After making that discovery, I reviewed my impulse to pass judgement. What is the difference, after all, between running around with a stick between your legs and, say, pretending –as I sometimes do- that a tricky putt on the 18^th green is actually for the US Masters?

Lots of young folk prefer to get their kicks sitting in front of a computer, so we should applaud the fact that the Quidditch Club members were out there having fun, taking part in an activity which involved physical exercise and social intercourse. There are worse things those students could have done with their time. They might have joined some ‘triggered-by-inappropriate-words-in-literature’ group and, instead of 'Quidditching' in the park, been out demonstrating their belief in equity and diversity by burning books or pulling down statues.

This made me think a bit more about the extent to which fantasy should be a legitimate part of an adult life. Is playing a game invented by an author a less authentic fantasy than some others we could name? Are students running around with broomsticks any more tragic than those who escape into works of fiction or those who follow football teams around the country or those who pretend that their tricky putt on the 18^th hole might win them a major golf championship? (Don’t answer that last bit, because you’ll just hurt my feelings).

Some would argue that there are plenty of problems in the world for us to solve and that frivolous pastimes just distract us from the serious business of improving the lot of the poor, the disadvantaged and the oppressed. But people who can only talk about serious stuff are, generally speaking, the sort of people that you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with. 

The game of Quidditch is nonsense on stilts (or at least nonsense on a pretend broomstick), but a life lived without fantasy, fun and frivolity would, I think, be far less rich than one concentrated on purely utilitarian concerns.  

This topic is probably worth exploring in some depth, but I’ll leave it for the moment. I need to get back to practising my golf swing, because the US Masters is only a few weeks away. 

The view from the hole

Further to last week’s post, I have been involved in several interesting discussions with various folk over the merits and demerits of Doctor Peterson’s work. A lot of the criticism being circulated online claims that his views are somehow ‘dodgy’, but the critics don’t often get around to a full examination of those views, preferring instead to focus on how dreadful his audience is. 

The more interesting topic, I think, is to ask why Peterson’s message is resonating with so many young people. His recent speaking engagements in London (booked before the transmission of that Channel 4 interview) sold out in minutes. A few weeks ago, an American college campus invited him to speak at their 400-seat theatre. He was ‘no-platformed’ by the usual zealots, so the organisers of the event decided to book the only available local alternative, a 1,500-seat concert hall. It sold out.

Much of the criticism characterises this audience as ‘alt-right angry white males’ (although mostly male, Peterson’s audience is clearly mixed); that level of analysis -and it is an act of generosity to describe it thus- will get us nowhere. 

The Independent published an article about the Channel 4 interview under this headline:  

'When white men feel they are losing power, any level of nastiness is possible.'

That wasn’t just intellectually feeble; it was utterly reprehensible. This kind of thing actually reinforces one of Peterson’s key messages: namely, that identity politics is a dead-end street and -at the end of that street- lies a whole heap of trouble. When I was growing up, to have assumed (and judged) someone’s views from their ethnicity, age or gender would have been considered discriminatory, vulgar and racist; now it has become the norm.  

We are in a deep hole with this stuff, yet some folk want to keep on digging. I’d suggest that one of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is that many people have decided that they don’t like the view from that hole.  

Take the Red Pill

If there is anyone out there who still hasn’t watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with the Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson, I would strongly recommend that you check out what was a wonderfully illuminating piece of television. I found it riveting, but I’m not sure if that was in spite of -or because of- the interviewer’s insistence on trying to put words into her interviewee’s mouth at almost every turn. If you try counting the number of times she says “so what you’re saying is …” before inserting a ridiculously skewed interpretation of what he has actually said, you will need all of your fingers and some of your toes. It is evident that ‘listening’ and ‘responding to what the other person has actually said’ were not part of Ms Newman’s game plan.   

Some have argued that it was her job to challenge Peterson and not to just nod in agreement with whatever he was saying. This is a fair point and, if Channel 4 News applied that principle across the board, it would certainly present itself as a more balanced source of information. Peterson may not be right about everything, but even when he's wrong, he has reached his position because he has at least considered the available evidence. But, in an age in which feelings appear to trump reason, he is regularly libelled as a neo-Nazi, slave-trading, baby-eating agent of the patriarchy, or something.

Ms Newman’s lazy assumption was that her guest was an ‘alt-right' misogynist provocateur. Her researchers (I’m assuming she will have had some help) must be pretty dim if they thought that some back-of-a-fag-packet observations on this man’s significant academic oeuvre would cause him to recant his views. Mainstream news outlets regularly claim moral superiority over so-called 'fake news' sources, so examples of this kind of shoddy practice deserve to be highlighted and ridiculed.

There is a sense in which the exchange also illustrated what can happen to polite discourse once certain difficult topics are declared ‘off-limits’. Perfectly reasonable people who might, under normal circumstances, be prepared to discuss those difficult topics, start to retreat from debate. Once you’ve witnessed some poor sod raise his head above the parapet only to be monstered as a misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe (they’re all the same thing), it makes sense to keep your opinions to yourself. But people who shout those magic ‘shut-down’ words to dismiss their opponents eventually lose the ability to argue. And, when they come up against someone who won’t shut up and won’t back down, someone prepared to use logic and reason to make their points, the shouters have nowhere else to go. They don’t have the tools to argue because they’ve never had to do it; once their magic words lose potency, shouters are stuck in a very deep hole.   

I have been following Jordan Peterson’s work since his experiences at Toronto University dragged him into what -for shorthand purposes- I'll call the 'cultural debate'. During that time, he has conducted himself with dignity and intelligence. He has had exactly this kind of discussion many, many times and is way too smart to be intimidated by folk who, rather than listen, choose to project their own ‘evil Nazi’ fantasies onto him simply because he doesn’t share their worldview.
His critics, generally speaking, don't want (or are not equipped) to refute his arguments. Their standard approach is:

1) Try the magic words, like misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe.

When that doesn’t work,
2) Adopt the 'straw man' approach (like Cathy Newman) by deliberately misinterpreting his arguments ("so ... you're saying that all women are stupid?").

When these tactics fail (and they always do), resort to:
3) Playing the 'victim' card.

On youtube, the average Channel 4 News interview gets a few thousand hits. On big stories, the numbers might head somewhere north of 100,000. The Newman-Peterson interview, at the time of writing, has had more than six million views. Once it went viral, Channel 4 announced that it had consulted ‘security experts’ (but curiously, not the police) because of ‘vile misogynist abuse’ received by their presenter. With the help of their ideological allies in the press, they attempted to switch the narrative from ‘hectoring presenter embarrasses herself with civilised professor’ to ‘female presenter bullied and exposed to vile misogynist abuse’ from Peterson’s so-called ‘army of trolls’. Make of that what you will. As a fan of his work, I’d be more inclined to thank Ms Newman for handing him such an epic victory.

However one chooses to interpret the interview, it feels like something significant may be happening.
It’s not unusual for the younger generation to rebel against what is on offer from the world created by their parents and, when I listen to the kind of conversations that are going on, when I check out some of the podcasts, I get the sense that a cultural shift may be taking place. Jordan Peterson appears to have connected with a young audience in search of authentic meaning, an audience that suspects it could get a better deal than the one they’ve been told is the only one on the table. We assume that young people need their information delivered in bite-sized chunks, yet many of them clearly have the appetite to absorb long and deep discussions about complicated political and philosophical ideas.        
(To take one example, Joe Rogan’s podcast with Petersen and Professor Brett Weinstein lasts for 2 hours 45 minutes and has been watched by 3 million people).

Some young people seem to have worked out that television and newspapers aren’t going to help them. Why trust a tired medium in which demonstrably partial people have set themselves up as the entitled gatekeepers of information?
They seem to have worked out that, by and large, teachers and college professors aren’t going to help them. Why trust a profession in which the intellectual gene pool is so dismally shallow? Lots of young people understand that when someone is in favour of every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity, that person is more of an indoctrinator than an educator.   

When critics point out that Peterson’s message is not exactly 'new', they overlook an obvious point: To many young folk, what he’s saying seems new because, generally speaking, they will have been taught by people who adhere to the dead-end ideas of post-modern cultural relativism. And the people who taught those people will, generally speaking, have been taught by people who also adhered to those ideas. And the people who taught those people … you get my drift.

In the science fiction film ‘The Matrix’, the rebel leader Morpheus offers the main character Neo a choice between two pills: red or blue.

"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

The hero must choose between the convenient falsehoods maintained by the blue pill and the inconvenient truths revealed by the red.

Having been trained to react to cultural relativism’s trigger words, drilled to respond to the poisonous diktats of identity politics, young people are now being 'red-pilled' by Jordan Peterson. If we are to avoid hurtling towards a nightmare post-dialogue age wherein 'right' and 'left' are literally unable to communicate with each other, I can't think of a more important job or, indeed, a better man to do it.

If you haven't watched it, here's the interview.