music - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

I went back to rockville

Between me thinking about writing something about what home and belonging means and actually starting to do it, it’s become a far more topical subject than I expected, which seems to be how these things go these days.

The initial impulse to write it came from several unconnected things; some photos I took in Iceland over a decade ago; the lyrics to the R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville;” a beautifully evocative description of a rundown railway station in a dusty, remote part of Austria-Hungary in the 1900s. That description felt especially poignant because Austria-Hungary is a country (and the Habsburg Empire an Empire) that no longer exists, but which must have felt permanent in its day and which people in the 1900s felt just as patriotic and loyal towards or as ambivalent about as people now do towards the constituent parts of the United Kingdom or/and the UK itself. But all of that has retreated into the distance a little because as I write this, up and down the country – even in this little corner of rural Scotland – people are engaged in a protest of sorts. Unusually for a protest, it takes the form of doing something which has always been entirely acceptable to do and which no one has ever tried to discourage the protesters from doing; hanging up flags.

The seal matrix of Bishop William de Lamberton from the 1290s, the oldest extant physical use of the Saltire in Scotland

The flags that have made it onto the news – especially from the recent, ironically-named “Unite the Kingdom” right-wing rally in London, are mostly St George’s cross, interspersed with Union flags, but in this village the flag fliers tend, naturally to display the Saltire (St Andrew’s cross, reputedly the oldest national flag in Europe – which if its semi-mythical origins are correct actually predates the Kingdom of Scotland itself by a couple of centuries) and the Union flag. But although flags are simple and very easy to identify in a design sense, they are also kind of a blunt instrument when it comes to signalling. Other people in this area have been displaying the Saltire and the medieval Scottish flag (the Royal Banner; a rampant red lion on a yellow ground) with no Union flag. I presume this is some kind of counter-protest but I may be wrong; to be sure I’d have to ask the flag fliers, and who wants to do that? Whatever else they are, National flags tend not to be especially inviting, particularly when displayed in their country of origin. Nearby I’ve also seen – in a more obvious counter-protest – people displaying Palestinian and Pride flags.

carved wooden ceiling boss of a unicorn carrying the Saltire from Linlithgow Palace, c.1617

It’s a regularly remarked-on (and ultimately meaningless) irony that the historical St George was a Turkish man of Palestinian descent, but less remarked on (though similarly meaningless in this context) that St Andrew, who the saltire represents, was born in what is modern day (Israel-occupied) Syria. Lions (though not red ones) are native to sub-Saharan Africa and India. And yet, for the people waving, wearing, hanging, painting or generally displaying the flags, these symbols of Syrian and Turkish-Palestinian saints and these African/Indian mammals (1 for Scotland, 3 for England, though confusingly the English ones were historically referred to as leopards, which scans less well for a football song lyric) are symbols, I presume, of home. And therefore the people displaying them for patriotic, political or intimidating purposes mostly don’t care what their origins are, which is fair enough. It’s my home too, but although I have no special feelings about the flags of Scotland or the UK, seeing them all over the place, rather than just on official buildings or big hotels is oddly alienating, just like seeing the stars and stripes on every other street on a trip to the USA was.

The flags of your nation, displayed in that nation, tell you two things; firstly, where you are – which you already know – and secondly, that somebody wants you to be very aware of where you are, which you still already know. Theoretically, people are displaying them for themselves and not for anybody else, but a flag by its nature is a signal and for most of the time, the person who flies it outside their home or paints it on the street or on some historical landmark, or puts a sticker on a bus shelter can’t see it, but anyone passing by can.

Because so many of the people involved in the current protests are xenophobic (not really derogatory; many of these people are explicitly saying they are protesting against “migrants”. “I belong here,” is not a protest; and anyway nobody is disputing it. “You don’t belong here” is mostly what the protest is about) there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of symbols our flags are and what, beside dead saints, they represent. Obviously, flags themselves aren’t racist, or at least are only as racist as the people displaying them. There are possibly a few exceptions; most obviously, I feel like any Jewish or Romany person has the right to feel victimised if someone is displaying a black swastika in white circle on red ground; I wouldn’t think it was outlandishly sensitive if an African-American person felt offended by someone waving a Confederate flag at them. Still, it’s strange the extent to which seeing the flag of your country everywhere makes that country feel like a different place from the one you grew up in. But home is a strange thing anyway and ‘feeling at home’ in the comfortable sense of being where you are supposed to be, in the place that it feels natural to be, isn’t universal; clearly the protesters don’t feel it or they wouldn’t be protesting.

Philip Larkin in 1943 by Bruce Montgomery, looking like he should be on a Smiths album cover

The poet Philip Larkin – often seen as a definitively (I refuse to use the word ‘quintessentially’) English figure and sometimes derided as a ‘Little Englander,’ made some interesting observations about home that demonstrate how one-dimensional that (not unfair) assessment of him is. In The Importance of Elsewhere (1955), he argues (well, it’s a poem, not an argument; anyway, he says) that feeling lonely and out of place is a normal, appropriate and even a comforting response to being in alien surroundings (specifically Belfast) – “Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,/Insisting so on difference, made me welcome.” The strangeness of the place itself “went/ To prove me separate, not unworkable.” On the other hand, feeling lonely and out of place in the place you come from and where you theoretically do belong does the opposite; and it possibly says unpleasant things about the place itself, too.

Larkin was right; for himself at least and therefore it’s not surprising to find that a slightly earlier poem (Places, Loved Ones, 1954) begins “No, I have never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground / Here I shall stay…..” A few years later, he obliquely questioned whether the idea of home is even desirable at all, since ‘belonging’ to anything can only ever be transitory – “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go” (Home is so Sad, 1958). Eventually and unexpectedly, he did find that place where he could say this is, etc, etc – which turned out to be Hull. He celebrated the city in a 1961 poem called Here – the title surely a self-referential one, looking back to that fourth line of Places, Loved Ones. Here is one of Larkin’s very few poems of belonging, but inevitably he celebrates the town for what would normally be considered its negative traits; inaccessibility, neglect and, if not actual unfriendliness, then at least a distant kind of reserve; “Here is unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” He really was the Morrissey of 20th century English poetry.

Coventry was where Larkin came from, but though he wrote about it several times, it was never in the sense of feeling at home there. But if “feeling at home” means some kind of existential peace and contentment, there’s no real reason why that you should have any particular connection with where you’re originally from, unless you happened to have an idyllic childhood. Equally, there’s no special reason why where you currently live should be where you feel at home, unless you are contented there like, presumably, the angry people with their flags and paint. But if they really love their country they certainly hide it well, not just because of their anger, but also how they treat the place and the mess they leave behind; they really do protest too much.

Morrissey with the American singer Phranc in 1992 by the great Kevin Cummins. Moz really is an unlikely right-winger

I’m loath to mention Morrissey again but a short side note seems relevant. Even though for all his apparently xenophobic Englishness, he doesn’t (in common with many xenophobic, wealthy ‘patriots’) love England enough to actually live there. Actually he rarely claims to love it at all; Morrissey is far more Larkin than Farage. The question of his (unusually complex but now undeniable) right-leaning politics goes back a long way, but when in 1992 he released the album Your Arsenal and alarm bells rang in the NME offices at the title of the song “The National Front Disco“, those NME scribes did him a disservice. He’s not foolish or racist enough to write a song glorifying the NF, though the song is definitely and maybe deliberately an uncomfortable one. In the lyrics he puts his finger (sympathetically or otherwise; it’s impossible to say) on the mentality of the kind of people currently waving placards telling foreigners to get out of “are country” (wish I was making that up). “There’s a country, you don’t live there / But one day you would like to / And if you show them what you’re made of / Then you might do.” That is really the essence of the march that happened last week in London and the smaller versions of it across the UK, including, dismayingly, one in Falkirk (one likes to think Scotland is above that kind of thing but realistically nowhere is, people being what they are).

‘Home’ is only on the most mundane level the place where you live, and the less mundane ideas of home are far more mysterious and often very personal. Without wishing to delve much into etymology, ‘home’ is a concept which even in its basic form as a noun (The place where a person or animal dwells, as the OED slightly creepily puts it) includes meanings that I don’t think I was aware of; “figurative. With reference to the grave or one’s state after death. Frequently with preceding adjective; ‘long home‘.” Apparently ‘long home’ was a common usage in Old English – and if you don’t belong in your grave then where do you belong? The long home is where the heart is; which makes me think of the last line of Wuthering Heights – surely one of the most beautiful endings to any deeply unpleasant novel:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847

And then there’s home as in ‘too close to home,’ ‘coming home to roost,’ the Home Office, a point being ‘driven home,’ ‘home truths,’ ‘Home Rule,’ ‘make yourself at home’ (I have vague memories of a comedian or comedy character introducing their act by saying something like ‘Make yourself at home. Unless you’re in a hotel in which case make yourself in a hotel.‘ Vic Reeves? Alan Partridge? No idea).

Relatedly, belonging is a strange, unpredictable and entirely personal sensation. Larkin seems not to have felt he belonged anywhere until he found somewhere suitably impersonal and forbidding. Morrissey seems to thrive as an eternal outsider in Los Angeles, though it’s hard to think of anyone who seems more like an embodiment of Manchester. Belonging (I don’t say this self-pityingly, I’m comfortable with it) isn’t a feeling I’ve felt especially often and when I have it’s been at random times and sometimes in unexpected and unlikely places. Just recently, out walking in the area where I live and mostly grew up, I had one aspect of it; the exact kind of weather I obscurely feel most at home in; mild, grey, windless, with a low, quilted-looking heavy sky that didn’t quite threaten rain and let no ray of sunshine through. I like muggy weather and have never yet met anyone else who does. It’s kind of the other side of Larkin’s The Importance of Elsewhere – if not feeling at home ‘at home’ makes you unworkable (as he puts it), maybe the conditions that you feel the most at home in equally say something, possibly something unflattering, about you? Enjoying blue skies and sunshine (which I do too, although less) just seems more positive somehow.

Baudelaire looking effortlessly cool & French in 1862 by Félix Nadar

Clearly for the protesters, belonging is as much about people – a homogenous group of people – as it is about place. That’s the opposite of the vague kind of belonging that I sometimes identify with, the kind of thing expressed (very romantically) by Charles Baudelaire when he writes about ‘the flâneur’ in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). “To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world […] The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito. … The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electrical energy. One might compare him, also, to a mirror, immense as that crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life, and the grace in motion of every element of that life.” Well, I rarely feel as enthusiastic as that, and I generally don’t like being in a crowd with a specific purpose, even a benign one like the audience at a concert. But on the other hand, though I rarely feel at home anywhere, I never feel like my home has been stolen or invaded, and I don’t feel threatened because I see or hear people who are different from me. So that’s nice.

Xenophobia is kind of stranger than misanthropy, which is at least understandable, because people can be destructive and unpleasant like no other species. But although humanity has apparently infinite variety on the personal level, that variety, though it seems to terrify some people, is on every other level, extremely limited. However many names we choose to give this geographical (rather than political) area; the British Isles, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Northern Europe – the population is, -whichever newcomers may arrive, and wherever they arrive from – pretty homogenous, because the human race is pretty homogenous. I was interested to hear my vague gut feeling given scientific validity by the archaeologist Dr Helen Geake (on the Time Team podcast of 9th September this year.) In response to a question about the diversity of the population of Anglo-Saxon England (following the discovery of a skeleton with African ancestry in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery) she said, “I’m not wanting to say ethnically diverse, partly because […] there’s so little genetic variability between humans that I don’t think we have anything like ethnicities or races or whatever. I just don’t think that makes any sense when you look at the science. I think it’s more of a diversity of appearance and origin.” When you consider the inter-species variation between, say a lion (since I mentioned them before) and a housecat, or a chihuahua and a Saint Bernard, it’s clear that the gradations between human beings are far more subtle. And when it comes to people you feel an affinity with, you’re as likely to feel at home (that expression seems stranger the more you consider it) with someone you met by chance recently (or even met virtually online), as with someone you’ve known since you were a child. Interestingly (there’s a euphemism!) I read just this morning that a “Race Science Institute – ie debunked Nazi bullshit – funded by one of the world’s richest men is currently trying to be influential in UK politics.

mouldy football pitch by the fjord, Neskaupstaður, eastern Iceland, around 4.30 am

Randomly – although it’s the thing that made me think about writing all this in the first place – I don’t think I’ve ever had that ‘at home’ feeling more strongly than I did when walking in the outskirts of a small town in Iceland at 4.30 am one July, during a night where the ‘midnight sun’ felt more like perpetual dusk. Why should that be? I have no idea. The conditions were right I suppose – not unlike the flat grey day mentioned earlier. Iceland is very beautiful but although this stretch of road ran alongside a fjord at some points, it mostly wasn’t something picturesque that you’d put on a postcard. It featured details as apparently uninspiring (but weirdly loveable to me) as a mouldering football pitch, a school or some kind of municipal building. At one point there was a boat on a platform, which did give more of that sense of ‘elsewhere’. What did ‘at home’ feel like? You know it when you feel it I suppose a kind of contentment that may partly have come from having had a few drinks plus 24 hours or so without sleep; but although comfortable it didn’t feel like exhaustion.

that mildewed football pitch in more detail

If I tried to express that feeling to some of the protesters, quite possibly they’d say something like “If you like it so much why don’t you go and live there” (British people have a long history of telling people if they don’t like the country they can just leave, and yet they rarely feel like they themselves should leave if they don’t like the country). It occurs to me now that when racists, xenophobes or (popular current euphemism) “concerned citizens” scream at people to go back where they came from, when they wrap themselves in the flags of their own country and wield their identity at people, what they are doing may partly be asserting how they feel about their home, but what they really want is for everyone they oppose to not feel at home. And when, at the best of times, ‘feeling at home’ is a fleeting and precarious emotion, that’s kind of a shitty thing to do.

confessions of a godless heathen

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819, by Amelia Curran

Ignore the senstionalist headline; there are no confessions here, and I’m not a heathen, I’m an atheist. When I was a teenage atheist, one of my main issues with the idea of god had been neatly summed up well over a century earlier by Shelley in The Necessity of Atheism (1811):

If God wishes to be known, cherished, thanked, why does he not show himself under his favourable features to all these intelligent beings by whom he wishes to be loved and adored? Why not manifest himself to the whole earth in an unequivocal manner, much more capable of convincing us than these private revelations which seem to accuse the Divinity of an annoying partiality for some of his creatures? The all−powerful, should he not heave more convincing means by which to show man than these ridiculous metamorphoses, these pretended incarnations, which are attested by writers so little in agreement among themselves?

As an adult atheist I still think that, but I think a lot of other things too. I should possibly point out here that though I don’t believe in any deities, the god I primarily didn’t and don’t believe in was the Christian one, simply because that’s the one who most prominently didn’t and doesn’t exist in my own personal experience. My lack of any kind of religious belief is something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years and mentioned many times in passing on this website. I’ve never written specifically about it, but several things I’ve recently come across made me want to. One is the slightly dubious, clickbaity claim that (as one headline put it) “God is back” and that Gen Z (or some such amorphous group) is embracing the Catholic church. I’m sure that to some extent that’s true, as the Catholic church is just as evident as always, the choosing of a new Pope is TV news etc, but it’s also true that there have been other, substantially similar news stories about Gen Z embracing astrology and conspiracy theories and feminism and anti-feminism and fretting about world war three. None of those things are mutually exclusive of course (most of them should be; maybe feminism & anti-feminism actually are), and what it seems to add up to is that kind of end-times malaise normally associated with the end of a century or millennium.

I feel like it’s necessary to take those kinds of stories with a pinch of salt though, simply because over the years I’ve read all kinds of similar stories about Gen X which occasionally apply to me and often don’t, but in either case I’ve never been asked my opinion in order to gauge it and neither I presume have most people. And since every generation seems to spawn its own Nazis, centrists, communists and anti-fascists and everything in between, its philanthropists, misanthropes and bystanders, its religious zealots, libertines and atheists (etc, etc, ad nauseam), it seems fair to assume that any theory about a generation, just like any theory about a gender, race or sexuality is going to involve the kinds of generalisations which, once really examined, make the whole theory redundant. Presumably, church attendances are on the rise, but does that mean that belief is on the rise, or just that the desire for belief – quite a different thing – is? Or both? Who knows.

Alongside that, not coincidentally, more and more (inevitably right wing) politicians have been yammering on at first in the USA and now here, about “Judeo-Christian” values. It seems that this is mostly because they don’t like foreigners and Islam and are immune to irony. Because in insisting on the values of two ancient foreign religions from what we now in the West call the Middle East and denying the very similar values of another, very similar (though not quite as ancient) religion also from what we now call the Middle East does seem ironic, especially when one is tying it in with one’s national identity. There’s been a growing rhetoric (again, on the right) that suggests that Christians are becoming an oppressed minority in the UK, which is both tiresome and laughable but nicely (and again not coincidentally) complements the growth of a men’s rights movement that claims feminism (which, like atheism has arguably only recently began to have a fairly minor influence if any on the power structures underlying British society) has ‘gone too far’ and all that fun stuff.

Although my attitude has changed over the years, I don’t think my views really have. I genuinely think that it’s terrible and damaging that all over the world people are punished or ostracised or oppressed or killed or made to feel bad about themselves for offending arbitrary rules established in the name of imaginary beings. And in a way worse, the idea that there are omniscient, omnipotent beings who would be offended by actions which they must have foreseen at the moment of creation but decided to allow anyway, in order to punish them.

That kind of thing seems to be the basis of a lot of atheist polemic. Sometimes I find it entertaining and (depending on the writer) interesting, but, even while still believing every word of it, and feeling that it’s worth insisting on if asked about my views, as a middle aged atheist I wonder about the usefulness of saying it polemically at all. Because – for me at least – the opposite of religious faith isn’t science and logic (though I do believe in those), it’s simply non-faith. And I’m not sure there’s much to learn from that.

It’s not an argument that strengthens any cause, let alone mine, but I have come to think that lack of belief in a god or gods is just as instinctive, reflexive and fundamental as faith in them is. My mother was a Christian in her youth (in an atheist household, oddly for the 1950s) to the point where she considered becoming a nun. During her life, she wavered from various kinds of Christianity, to Taoism and Buddhism and a kind of vague paganism, but – and I think this is the most important point – although she lost her faith in many belief systems over the years, she never lost her essential faith in some kind of benevolent god or spirit at the heart of creation. For me it’s almost the opposite.

I have always been very interested in religions from Animism to Zoroastrianism in the exact same way that I’ve always been interested in mythology (I don’t really distinguish between the two) and I find pretty much all religions to some degree fascinating. I love churches and places of worship, I love the atmosphere of ‘holy’ places (even pre-historic places we now assume were once sacred) and I love the imagery and paraphernalia of religions, in the exact same way I love art and history. But it’s good that I’ve never wanted to belong to a faith or to become involved with those mythologies, because I can’t remember a time when I ever believed in even the possibility that a deity of any kind was an actual, real thing. Santa Claus either for that matter, although presumably at some pre-remembered point I did believe in him (Him?)

I have no idea where my lack of faith came from but I can pinpoint when I first became aware of it. I went to three ordinary Scottish primary schools, which in the 1980s meant reciting the Lord’s Prayer every morning before the class started. Not surprisingly, I still remember most of it, though mysteriously I can’t work out which bit I thought in my childhood mentioned snot; I was quite deaf then, but I definitely remember a snot reference, which always seemed odd. In my memory that daily recital was just part of a greater daily ritual which also involved (in the early years) chanting the alphabet and (through all of Primary school) greeting the teacher in monotone unison (The phonetic version of Mrs expresses it more accurately) “GOOD MOR-NING ‘MI-SIZ WAT-SON” or whoever the teacher happened to be – seemingly there were no male Primary School teachers in my day.

I have surprisingly sharp memories of looking round the class during the morning prayer to see who else didn’t have their eyes closed – there were usually a few of us, and sometimes we would try to make each other laugh – but a key part of that memory for me is the sureness of the feeling that I wasn’t talking to anybody. The praying itself wasn’t something I questioned or minded – if anything I quite liked it. It didn’t feel at all ‘bad’ or rebellious not to believe, it just never occurred to me at any point that god was real and might be listening, any more than I remember feeling that the notes put up the chimney to Santa would be read by an old man with a red suit and white beard, or that the carrot for Rudolph would be eaten by an actual reindeer.

At school we went to church (I think) three times a year – at Christmas, Easter and (an anomaly) Harvest Festival – and so folk horror-ish paraphenalia like corn dollies are always associated with church in my mind. The sermons were boring, as were some of the hymns, although others, the ones where the kids invariably sang the wrong lyrics, were fun – but I liked (and like) churches. I liked the musty, chilly smell and the wooden pews and the acoustics and the stained glass windows and especially the holiday feeling of being at school but not at school. And, though they only came into school life at these times of year I liked the Bible stories too. It seems funny now, but until well into adulthood the image that the word ‘Palestine’ summoned in my mind was an illustration of Jesus wandering around in pink and turquoise robes; I presume it’s from some forgotten book of Bible stories. But to me, stories – sometimes good ones (in the case of the early days of Moses and the last days of Jesus, very good ones), sometimes boring ones, are all that they were.
But where does lack of belief come from? The same place, presumably as belief.

In Word on a Wing (1976), one of my favourite David Bowie songs – also I think one of his most deeply felt and certainly one of his most open and revealing songs – Bowie, then in LA and in the middle of a drug-fuelled existential crisis but soon to withdraw to Berlin to live a relatively austere and private life, sings:
Just because I believe
Don′t mean I don′t think as well
Don’t have to question everything in heaven or hell

For me, that sums up (non-blind) faith perfectly. Essentially, it’s what Keats (those romantics again!) summarised as ‘negative capability’ (“Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” – from an 1817 letter to his brothers) but applied to one of the most fundamental human impulses. I completely respect it and see what both Keats and Bowie mean by it, but it’s completely alien to me. Well, not completely: I don’t need to know how a jet engine works to travel by plane, I do indeed have ‘faith’ in it, but what the (nowadays many) commentators who characterise scientific belief as a kind of religious faith seem to overlook is that I don’t believe it because a scientist says it’s true, but because I can actually travel on a jet plane, and even before I did travel on a jet plane I could see that other people travelled on jet planes, that planes really do fly and engines really do work. Which seems like the build up to some kind of New Atheism gotcha of the ‘if God is real why doesn’t he just prove it’ type popular in the 2000s (essentially a more sneery version of the Shelley quote). but that’s not really me either. Although I am definitely an actual ‘speculative atheist’ and I suppose even an ‘atheist fundamentalist’ and though I genuinely do believe that the world and humanity would be better off without religion, I’m just not sure how much better off it would be.

It’s not that the New Atheists were wrong (or even new, thinking again of Shelley). Most of the arguments that were raised against them are easily picked apart. The idea that there is no morality without religion is so obviously wrong that it seems pointless even to argue against it. The same basics of morality (murder and stealing and cheating and lying are bad, treat people as you wish to be treated etc) are and have been all but universal, though not without different nuances, throughout history and throughout world cultures.
But the problem with lack of faith as certainty (and for myself I really am certain about it) is that its arguments, though more logical – at least up to a point, as we shall see – have precisely as much effect on the certainty of faith as the arguments of faith have on the certainty of non-faith. Logic is no help here.

From my point of view, in the certain absence of a god or gods, religion is purely human and therefore many of the (in themselves solid) arguments against it are kind of a cop-out. It’s not unreasonable to find it laughable that a supreme supernatural being should care what food you eat on which days, or what you wear or how you like to have your hair. It seems bizarre that an almighty creator who could presumably do whatever it liked, would take the time to tell humans which crops they prefer to have planted where or that male masturbation is bad rather than simply preventing the possibility of rule-breaking ‘at source’. But the omnipresent invisible elephant in the room is that whether or not a god really felt or feels strongly about these things, whether or not a god had them written down in words, they really were written down in words, by human beings, some of whom definitely did want these rules to exist and to be enforced. And it’s human beings that still enforce them. Also, it’s just as true that primarily secular or entirely secular societies also have rules and customs regarding things like clothing, food, hairstyles and even names, although they rarely come with threats of severe retribution and never with the threat of ongoing retribution after death. And yes, many of these customs – like the acceptable length of women’s skirts in western society – ultimately derive from religious directives, but any authoritarian society, not only theocracies or weird, nominally religious ones like Nazi Germany, but even states where religion is completely anathema like Stalinist Russia, Communist East Germany or the North Korea under its current regime are hardly relaxed about the individual’s freedom of expression.

Religious wars and religious persecution are bad, not because they are religious per se, but because wars and persecution are bad. Wars and persecution may often be provoked by religion, but surely if like me you don’t believe in god, then blaming that non-existent creature for religious wars is just euphemistic buck-passing bullshit? The Crusades were horrific, bloody and unjustifiable, but to blame “Christianity” for them, rather than Christians, that is, actual European human beings, is like blaming, or giving credit to, Tengri for Genghis Khan’s conquest of vast tracts of Asia, or suggesting that Jupiter, Neptune and co enabled the Romans to found their empire. “Catholicism” didn’t create the Spanish Inquisition any more than the concept of Nazism created the Holocaust or Islam as a belief system resulted in 9/11 or the Taliban. Left to themselves, religions, ideologies and philosophies don’t do anything; they just sit there. And they all have one common denominator, and it’s not a deity.

This morning, I saw that the Pope had made a statement that some policy or other of the current US administration is “un-Christian and un-American.” Well. I am glad to see anyone with any kind of authority challenging inhumane, intolerant and fascistic regimes. But those actions are only un-Christian insofar as Christ himself wouldn’t like them, according to the Bible. But Christ was one single man-god who acted a certain way and said certain things. All manner of atrocities are entirely in keeping with the actions of two millennia of Christians. As for un-American, again, the acts the Pope condemns are not compatible with the statements made by the founding fathers of the Unites States of America; but they are probably no worse than the actions carried out by those same founding fathers in their lives or many of the successive governments of the USA. Or indeed many, many other governments in the world. And, to be all New Atheism about it, when it comes to the welfare of children for instance, it’s not like the Catholic church itself has an impressive record. Does that mean the Pope shouldn’t condemn things or that American people shouldn’t try to hold their government to account using the egalitarian rules set down when the country was founded? Of course not; but invoking some kind of imaginary, ideal standard of behaviour really shouldn’t be necessary to do so. There’s human decency after all

Another (non-conclusive, because none of them are) argument for the human, rather than divine nature of religion is that the religions that have survived the longest and strongest in the modern world are those which are most compatible with it. The paternalistic, to varying degrees misogynistic Abrahamic religions all defer their ultimate spiritual rewards (but more on the non-ultimate ones later) until after death. They have no in-built expectation of much material happiness or contentment on this plane of existence and to varying extents they actually value hardship, while prioritising men within the earthly realm. Well, the paths that led us to 21st century culture, especially imperialism and capitalism, are fine with all that. Work and strive now, happiness comes later, unless you are one of the privileged few. Communism in theory isn’t fine with that, but naturally, having been formulated during the Industrial Revolution, when the vast mass of people were already oppressed by a tiny ruling class (itself a mirror image of the earlier rule of Church & monarchical elite vs peasant majority), it is defined by its opposition to capitalism. Early Communism therefore took hardship as a given (there is no proletariat without it) and, in lieu of heaven, deferred the payoff of universal prosperity and equality to some future time when the world revolution has been achieved and all opposition to itself removed. It’s a cliché to say that communism is itself a kind of religion, but the parallels are unignorably consistent; trust the leaders, put up with the shit now, eventually if we’re true to our cause it’ll all work out, if those heretics don’t spoil it.

On the other hand, various older kinds of religions, animism and ‘earth mother’ paganism and so on, value (quite logically) the need to look after the world we live in. It’s not that the religions of the book explicitly say not to, but they aren’t primarily concerned with this world – and imperialism and capitalism and even communism, which have other uses for the material world than care and stewardship, have historically all been fine with that. It’s somehow not very surprising that the aspects of non-Christian religions that became most taboo during the age of imperialism, and therefore attributed to “savage” or primitive cultures – human sacrifice, cannibalism, idol worship and so on – should be parts of Christianity itself. Without human sacrifice, even if it’s only the sacrifice of one special token human, there is no Christianity. The divinity of Christ kind of goes without saying – that’s what makes it a religion. But his humanity is what makes him more than just the old Testament god. And insisting on his humanity inevitably made the eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood controversial. But seriously, whether someone believes they are literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of an actual human being or only symbolically doing so, it’s a cannibalistic ritual just as atavistic and visceral as any of the imagined horrors that the Christians of the crusading period or the Europeans who spread their faith across the world believed they had encountered. It doesn’t seem too fanciful to say that what really horrified those Christians was the discovery that things they saw as fundamental to their own civilisation might be just as fundamental to civilisations that they had to believe were inherently inferior in order to destroy them.

Monkey (1979) Buddhism & Taoism that was fun for kids

The fact that there are analogous stories to those in the Bible throughout history and world cultures (death, rebirth, sacrifice, enlightenment) suggests that whether or not one has any faith in these stories, they aren’t ‘just’ stories. In fact, a lesson that stayed with me (because it suits my personality I suppose) from the 70s TV show Monkey, based on Wu Cheng’en’s 16th century novel, Journey to the West – something like “winners make losers, therefore remove yourself from competitions” purports to be from a Taoist religious text. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge (I like to think a banana) and paying the unexpected price for it is, even as a mythological story, one that has real life analogies all through human history. I remember as a child when plastic coca cola bottles began to replace glass ones. It seemed futuristic and in a weird way utopian – lightweight like a can but resealable, far less risk to your drink if you dropped it than a glass bottle; less broken glass in the streets and parks. Whether or not scientists were already concerned with the problem of plastic’s lifespan or the sheer accumulation of it I don’t know, but kids weren’t, for a few years at least. Which has nothing to do with religion – but the attempt to do good turning out not only to be bad, but to be something that has to be dealt with and paid for down the generations is hardly an alien one. And in this case it was made worse not by religion, but by the inability or unwillingness of people under capitalism (myself included) to distinguish between convenience in the sense of people not having to waste half of their lives in drudgery and convenience in the sense of not having to get up to change TV channels. There’s probably a parable in there somewhere.

A favourite anti-atheist argument is the ‘intelligent design’/watchmaker one. It’s clearly an empty argument, but my counter arguments would only be convincing to an atheist – and not even to all atheists. The argument, put simplistically, that because a watch, or a computer, or anything human-made and complex didn’t just evolve on its own, but had to be consciously invented, therefore means that life, earth and everything else must have been consciously invented too requires an obvious leap of logic. The universe is not a machine, life is not the same as battery life.

The most complex things in our world seem to be human beings, and human beings also produce other human beings, often with no conscious thought and rarely with any kind of design at all. People are accidentally invented all the time. The idea that creation is accidental or ‘just happens’ is hardly a difficult one to grasp. The people that people produce are every bit as complex as their parents and grandparents, but only occasionally, and in the most superficial way, are they designed. Worse than that, logically, we know how humans are created, but even so it’s hardly unusual for them to be produced even when the people doing it very much desire not to do so. To look at the way that the most complex creations on earth are usually made and to label it “intelligent design” would be a strange thing to do, since it doesn’t necessarily include much intelligence or any actual design. Of course that doesn’t prove that things weren’t originally designed, but the gulf between organic living things and intelligently designed things as we experience them, even at the beginning of the AI age, is so fundamentally different that you might as well argue that a cat must have designed clouds because you once saw a cloud that was cat-shaped.

As mentioned in passing before, it’s popular among a certain kind of (usually, but not exclusively right-wing, American) Christian to compare ‘faith’ in science to faith in god, which is a false equivalence, for the jet plane kind of reasons mentioned above – but although I do believe science to be superior in every way to religion – because it learns from experience, for one thing – I do sometimes wonder whether it suffers from being (this sounds very different from how I mean it) homocentric (is ‘anthropocentric’ better? It sounds worse) in a similar kind of way. I remember learning (in a very basic way) about the big bang at school and asking the teacher, not unreasonably I think, *what* was supposed to have exploded and where that came from and being told “that isn’t a scientifically interesting question.” Well, quite possibly all the teacher meant is that at the current time any answer to that question must be pure speculation of a non-mathematical kind, but teen-me felt that it was basically “science works in mysterious ways” and he/I didn’t like that.

Somewhere in this article I had been going to say that Shakespeare was was as right as anybody when he wrote “Nothing will come from nothing” but now that I’ve reached this point I wonder whether being creatures that are born, who come from somewhere, who live for a while, who are subject to time and then who die and stop existing (or go somewhere else) shapes our understanding of everything. I do believe in the big bang because the evidence around us confirms its likelihood. The universe started, it expanded and at some point it will end. The idea of something that just is, forever, or that exists outside of time, whatever that would mean, seems as incomprehensible as non-existence does. That things, including human beings do stop existing is in one way obvious – but things breaking down, decomposing, changing from one form to another and (romantically) melding with the universe or (prosaically) enriching the soil or whatever is a process that is understandable. The personality and individual human consciousness switching off and simply not existing is the hard part to take in. As far as we can tell this isn’t a change in energy type, the electrical impulses that are us don’t seem go anywhere or do anything. But maybe that whole frame of reference; beginning, middle, end isn’t everything, it’s just the limits of human understanding. Which doesn’t, to me, imply the existence of any kind of creator or supreme being, just that there’s scope there for whatever you care to imagine but which you can never truly know. Keats would be fine with that.

Similarly, to apply logic to the existence of god will always be self-defeating, because logic is (as far as we know) a specifically human way of explaining the universe to its/our own satisfaction. The laws of physics and nature and mathematics do seem to work according to logic, which is very helpful for teaching and learning and science, but human beings themselves routinely defy logic in both profound and trivial ways. Many of the things that humans value most highly are completely resistant to logic, like art and god and love and money. Even something as humble as sports; one human being being able to run faster than another or play a game better than another is only dubiously something to celebrate, and if it is, then logically one might expect people to support only the best teams and athletes. If, alternatively it’s to do with identification with and loyalty to one’s own area, then fans might only be expected to support teams or athletes from the same geographical location as yourself, which is occasionally how it works, but just as often isn’t. There’s nothing especially logical about the enjoyment of a race or a game in which you aren’t involved for its own sake. Does that mean that logic is a faulty way of understanding the universe? I don’t know; but it is a faulty way of understanding human beings. The idea that god’s existence is a logical reality in a 2 x 2 = 4 way makes about as much sense as the position of the planets at the time of your birth dictating your future.

As Bowie implied, faith needn’t – and in many cases I’m sure doesn’t – preclude seriously considering the implications of one’s belief. But sometimes it does. I’ve never wanted to believe (I don’t really get why anyone would, if they don’t; which is my deficiency), but as an adult I have always wanted to understand people who do. And in general, I find it frustrating to try to do so, as two different but very similar anecdotes about my encounters with people of faith illustrate. I am aware though that these may say more about me than they do about the believers.

In my professional capacity I was once interviewing a prominent American black metal musician whose latest album went on about blasphemy a lot. Given that black metal encompasses everything from orthodox satanists to heathens and pagans and occultists and chaos magicians and nihilists, I asked what I thought was a reasonable question; what meaning does blasphemy have unless one believes in god? Doesn’t the concept of blasphemy essentially reinforce the religion it attacks by affording it some kind of legitimacy?* The musician’s response was the black metal version of these go up to eleven. I think what he actually said was “Everyone knows what blasphemy is.” And he was right I suppose, but he was also characterising his band as purveyors of simple shock and outrage to the very few people who are still shocked and outraged by blasphemy. Ho hum.*

The archetypal image of black metal, Nattefrost of Carpathian Forest, photo by Peter Beste

*this made me think of an occasion in high school where I muttered “of for god’s sake” or something like that and my maths teacher said “don’t blaspheme, William!” and I replied “it would only be blasphemy if god existed” and was given a punishment (lines). It was only years later than realised I deserved the punishment, not because of god, but because I was being a smart arse to a teacher – at the time I just felt righteously angry about the lines.

Likewise, a visit from some very pleasant Jehovah’s Witnesses left me with unexpected admiration for them, but also some frustration; they also left prematurely, which my younger self would have regarded as a victory. The respect was for their answer to the kind of question that seems like a typical smart-arse one, but I was genuinely curious. If there are only 144, 000 places in heaven in your religion (I had only recently learned that strange fact) and those are all spoken for already, why are you knocking on people’s doors trying to spread the word about your faith? I hadn’t expected their response, which was something like “Oh, we don’t expect to see heaven. Heaven is for god and the saints and angels, Earth is the paradise that god made for humans, it just needs to be fixed.” A version of Christianity that withholds the promise of paradise even after death was weird to me, but also impressive. Having a faith where you never expect to attain the best bit seems coolly ascetic, but also kind of servile, which it literally is. The fact that servility seems distasteful to me is I suppose my weakness not theirs.

I was less impressed with the response to what I felt and still feel is a serious question and not just a cynical gotcha; If god is all you say it is, all powerful, blah blah, then why create evil? There was a stock answer ready, which was to do with free will and choice, but even though there are holes to be picked in that too (the ‘free will’ of transgressors has nothing to do with the free will of their victims, what about their will?) – that wasn’t what I meant. What I was asking is, If you can do whatever you like, can see everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen, if you are capable, presumably, of endless satisfaction and happiness, why create ‘bad’ – or, more personally perhaps, why create even the concept of ‘things you don’t like’ at all? To that question, I got the Jehovah’s Witness version of “these go up to eleven” and a quick goodbye. But I genuinely wasn’t trying to catch them out, I really wanted to know what they thought about it, but apparently they didn’t think anything. Having said that, I can see now that I write about it, that interrogating your belief system for the benefit of a stranger who obviously isn’t going to be persuaded to join you is probably not all that attractive. Still, I didn’t knock on their door.

Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) – something to aspire to?

So much of religion seems to me to be saying that that, whatever the wonders and horrors and joys and pains of life, it’s not enough and they want more. But again, that’s not exclusive to religious people. I recently saw an unsettling but also unintentionally funny video in which the PA of a shadowy, influential and incredibly wealthy figure was talking about transhumanism and his master’s ultimate Roy Batty/Weyland-from-Prometheus plan not to die at all. Which feels very sci-fi, but also very late Roman Empire. At the same time, my generation grew up with the rumour that Walt Disney’s head is in a refrigerator, awaiting medical science until he can be resurrected when the technology catches up enough. Rebirth and resurrection; there really is nothing new in human history.

detail of the crucifixion from the Isenheim altarpiece (1512 – 6) by Matthias Grünewald

All a bit bleak, maybe; but if religion only offered oppression, judgement, condemnation and war then far fewer people would devote their lives to it. And if the negative aspects of religion all exist independently of religion, then so do the positive aspects, and without the same arbitrary punishment/reward structure underlying it.

Religion offers comfort to people in distress, it offers a sense of community and belonging, it offers contact to people who feel isolated. It offers various kinds of love. I can’t think of many artworks more moving than Matthias Grünewald’s crucifixion from the Isenheim altarpiece (1512-6), painted to comfort people who were suffering from skin diseases, by showing them the scourged Christ’s suffering, which mirrored their own. But just as the Quran didn’t issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Bible didn’t take babies from unmarried mothers and kill them and bury them in the grounds of institutions, neither do those books feed the poor, embrace the lonely, paint pictures or create a sense of community. Human beings do those things, and they do them regardless of religion. They do it in societies where religious beliefs aren’t based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and they do it in societies where religious beliefs are actively frowned on. After the dissolution of the USSR, few people were nostalgic about the food queues or the secret police, but many were nostalgic about the sense of community that came from masses of people being in the same situation together. And now that capitalism which, unlikely though it seems, is not always so far removed from Soviet communism, has created its own underclass and hierarchical power structure and pogroms and whatnot, people have also created their own communities, support groups, charities and friendships.

The one positive thing that faith offers that non-faith of my kind doesn’t, is a personal relationship with god – and that’s where we came in; you either believe or you don’t. I can completely understand that having a direct line to someone who knows you and understands you better than you know yourself, who accepts and forgives you could be nice and comforting. Maybe in pre-Christian or non-monotheistic societies that voice was the voice of the ancestors or the spirits of the trees and rivers. I can see how that would be nice too, but for myself I can’t imagine having such a thing or longing for it or even wanting it. For me, you either disbelieve or you don’t.

And maybe that’s really the strongest argument, not against faith, which there is no argument against, but against religions as institutions, as rules and directives of the kind that people are so keen to re-establish. Because if there’s one thing you can see, looking not just at the diversity of religions but at the diversity of beliefs within them, at the different ways that people relate to and communicate with their gods, it’s that god is just as personal and individual as any of its believers and disbelievers and so making an orthodoxy of it can only ever harm more people than it helps.

the end of all songs

A question occurred to me while watching a documentary about Joy Division ; is there any better ending to a song than Ian Curtis bellowing FEELING FEELING FEELING FEELING FEELING FEELING FEEEEEELING! as the music clatters to a halt at the end of “Disorder”? Lyrically, despite its explosiveness, it isn’t cathartic, but in a musical way it is – for the listener at least – because until that point, the tempo has been too fast and the lyrics too complex for Curtis’s voice to do whatever the deep, melancholy equivalent of ‘taking flight’ is. There’s an underappreciated art to ending songs and it’s not something that even great bands do infallibly or that all great songs feature. Not all songs need to end with a crescendo or flourish, and very few songs benefit from just grinding to a halt or being cut off mid-flow, but the sense of completeness when a song (especially a relatively short song) ends perfectly is one of the things that makes you want to hear it again.

“Decades,” the final song on Closer, the final Joy Division album, is one of relatively few songs (given their vast number) where fading out at the end doesn’t seem like a cop out. There’s nothing wrong with fading out a song, but often it just feels like an easy option taken in order to dodge the question of how to end a song properly. Which is fine, except in live performances, where it’s difficult to satisfactorily replicate a fade-out. Partly that’s because of the practicality of it – does the band all try to play more quietly? Do they just get the sound person to turn down the volume, which works, unless you’re close to the stage, which, in that situation is sub-optimal, since hearing the unamplified sounds from the stage (drums clattering, guitars plinking etc) is kind of a mood-killer? And if so, when do they all stop? There’s also the awkwardness of the audience reaction; the crowd might start cheering/jeering before the song is actually finished, or they might not start until someone in the band indicates that that the song is definitely over, which is also not ideal. Basically, it feels artificial – but obviously it has the appeal of being simple – haven’t thought of a proper ending for you song? Just keep playing and fade it out afterwards. But Closer needed to fade into silence and it does.

Another musical ending this week – a seriously clunky segue this but bear with me – was the death of Ozzy Osbourne, a week after what was explicitly intended to be his final performance, a different kind of ending and a very unusual one in the music world where ‘farewell’ tours can become an annual occurrence and no split is too acrimonious to be healed by the prospect of bigger and bigger sums of money.

On paper, any kinship between Ozzy and Joy Division seems unlikely to say the least, but the ears say otherwise. Regardless of the punk roots of Joy Division, the only real precursor to a song like “New Dawn Fades” from their 1979 debut album Unknown Pleasures is Black Sabbath. And it’s not only the oppressively doomladen atmosphere, though that’s important; Bernard Sumner’s opening guitar melody is remarkably like Tony Iommi’s melodic solo from “War Pigs” – a classic song, incidentally, which has one of the worst endings of any great song ever written. Presumably, Black Sabbath had no idea how to end it and so did something worse than a fade out; speeding it up until it ends with a comical squeak. Oh well. But anyway, there are many moments, especially on Unknown Pleasures, where Joy Division sound like a cross between Black Sabbath and the Doors, although I’m sure neither of those things were in the minds of Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis, any more than they were in the consciousness of the music journalists who lauded the band in ’79, who mostly tended to see punk as year zero, the new beginning from which the influence of anything pretentious or overblown had been erased.

That basic idea was one I also accepted without much thought as a teenage indie fan in the early 90s when Joy Division – by then defunct for a decade – became one of my favourite bands. With the honourable, weekly music paper-approved exception of the Velvet Underground, I was dubious about anything old or anything that I considered overtly commercial. Without giving it much thought I just assumed that mentality came from my reading of Melody Maker and the NME. I had definitely accepted their pre-Britpop genealogy of cool rock music that essentially began with the Velvet Underground and then continued via punk and post-punk into 80s indie guitar music, most of which existed firmly outside of the mainstream of the UK top 40. But reflecting on Ozzy on the news of his death, it seems my snobbery has older roots.

I don’t remember when I first heard Ozzy Osbourne’s name, but I do remember when I first heard his music. It was 1988 and I was about a year away from growing out of metal, but still immersed in it for the time being. Within metal itself I had fairly wide taste and my favourite bands included many of the biggest metal bands of the era; Iron Maiden, Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Helloween, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, Queensrÿche, Slayer, Anthrax, plus many more. At that point I mostly discovered music via magazines (especially Metal Forces) and my friends. In addition to my modest collection of records and tapes I had many more cassettes that had been made for me by friends and I spent a good bit of my spare time making tapes for them; it was fun. And so; Ozzy. A friend had taped a couple of albums for me on a C90 cassette (the odd pairing, it seems now, of Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls Girls and Slayer’s Reign in Blood) and filled up the rest of the tape with random metal songs, among them “Foaming at the Mouth” by Rigor Mortis, “The Brave” by Metal Church, “Screamin’ in the Night” by Krokus and Ozzy’s latest single, “Miracle Man”. I pretty much hated it. I thought Ozzy’s voice was unbearably nasal and awful and the production really harsh and tinny (that was probably just the tape though).

Teenage metal fans were obliged to like Elvira in 1989

By then, I knew who Ozzy was, and was aware of his bat-biting notoriety, though that definitely seemed to be a bigger deal in the USA than it was in the UK (or at least in my corner of rural Scotland). At some point just a little later, Cassandra Peterson, or more accurately Elvira, Mistress of the Dark presented a short series of metal-related shows for the BBC. One episode included Penelope Spheeris’ fantastic documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, which includes one of my favourite Ozzy interviews, but also concert footage of Ozzy during his ‘mad housewife’ era when his image seemed to be based on Jackie Collins’s style at the time. I love that era of Ozzy now, but at the time I thought it was laughably awful. It must have been around that time that I also became aware of Ozzy’s history with Black Sabbath, who I only knew in their then-current incarnation with Tony Martin, which again I now love but at the time thought irremediably middle aged and boring. The fact that Ozzy’s Black Sabbath was from the 70s meant that I pretty much dismissed them without needing to hear them. When Elvira showed a classic early Led Zeppelin concert in black and white I also found that tiresomely old and dull, especially in comparison with the Napalm Death concert she presented. It’s hard to relate to now, but in the 80s, for me – and I think for most people I knew of my age – the 70s was cheesy, embarrassing and possibly funny, but with no redeeming features. Actually, that’s how the 80s were for a good part of the 90s too; changed days.

Again, like most of the metal fans I knew, I loved metal, but I mostly didn’t like rock. Metal meant precision, virtuosity, heaviness and speed. Rock (to this kind of metal fan) was simplistic, old-fashioned and (worse) commercial. Oddly, I never thought to include the very glam-oriented hair metal bands I liked in the rock camp; which I can now see is where they really belonged. I loved bands like Poison, Faster Pussycat and Pretty Boy Floyd, despite the fact that their very obvious ambition was to be famous and that they wrote schmaltzy ballads. I made the same exception, mysteriously, for Guns ‘n’ Roses, who I loved. But I thought of them as metal, not rock.

Cliff Burton rocking like it’s 1974 (c.1986)

It was a distinction that my parents’ generation seemed simply not to understand. To them and their friends if you liked Metallica wasn’t that basically the same as liking Meat Loaf? But I was of the generation for whom, from the earliest days of primary school, the idea of being seen in flared trousers was the stuff of nightmares. That horror of the era we were born in was hard to let go of., which is no doubt partly why the legacy of punk was easy to embrace later. In 1988, when I first heard them, Metallica instantly became one of my favourite bands and …And Justice For All one of my favourite albums. A crucial part of that was that the band, as I first knew them, looked cool to me. When, probably later that year, I first heard Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets I loved those too, but the sight of the great Cliff Burton (RIP) in his denim bellbottoms with his middle-parted hair and little moustache, looking like he should have been in Status Quo circa 1974 was extremely cringe-inducing; that was not cool. Not in Scotland in 1988 anyway.

It took a while for that attitude to change. One of the gateway albums that led young teen me away from heavy metal and towards the indie/alternative world was Faith No More’s The Real Thing, which included a cover of “War Pigs.” And at that time the song still felt old fashioned and less good than the rest of the album to me. It was only after a few years of hardcore indie snobbery that my attitude really changed. As my adolescence got to the more painfully introspective stage I stopped listening to metal, having been introduced to things like the Pixies and Ride and simultaneously discovering slightly older music like The Smiths, The Cure, Joy Division and the Jesus & Mary Chain. The part of me that still liked loud and heavy guitars didn’t care so much about precision anymore and so alongside the typical UK indie stuff, I also liked grunge for a while, mainly Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana, but especially grunge-adjacent weirdness like the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth. That would seem to provide an obvious bridge to the hard rock of the 70s, since virtually all grunge-oriented bands referenced Sabbath and Kiss, but no.

In fact, what happened was that in the Britpop era, I loved 70s-influenced bands like Pulp and Suede (I was never a fan of Blur or Oasis) and as Britpop became dull I started to get into the older music that Britpop referenced. At first it was mostly Bowie and Lou Reed, but after reading Shots From the Hip (referenced a million times on this website) by Charles Shaar Murray, I broadened my horizons to include 70s glam in general (Roxy Music, Eno, Jobriath, Raw Power-era Stooges, but also the bubblegum stuff) and other things that Murray mentioned, whether positively or disparagingly. The latter seems odd but I’ve discovered lots of things I like that way. And suddenly, Ozzy was inescapable (though less so than he is this week).

I bought the Charles Shaar Murray book because Bowie was featured heavily in it; but he also wrote about Black Sabbath. I bought a book by the great photographer Mick Rock, because he had photographed Bowie and Lou Reed and Iggy and John Cale; but who should be in there but Ozzy, looking uncharacteristically thoughtful. I bought old 70s music annuals from glam and tail end of glam era; Fab 208 maybe – because they had Bowie and Mott the Hoople and Pilot and whatnot in them, but inside there was also mention of Black Sabbat. I remember a paragraph about their then-forthcoming compilation We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n’ Roll being especially intriguing.

Birmingham in the 1970s by Peter Trulock

Anyway, one thing led to another and I spent a large chunk of the late 90s and early 2000s immersing myself in the music of the 1970s. At first it was primarily glam, but then all kinds of rock, pop, soul, funk etc. At some point it started including bands that I’d long been aware of and never liked; like Led Zeppelin, Kiss – and Black Sabbath. The first Black Sabbath album I owned was Sabotage, bought for 50 pence in a charity shop. The texture of the sleeve was, interestingly, the same texture as my LP of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, but the imagery was a little less classy, thanks to Bill Ward’s checked underpants being visible through his red tights; oh well. Ozzy sounded pretty much as I remembered from “Miracle Man,” but primed by Charles Shaar Murray’s description of Ozzy [caterwauling] about something or other in a locked basement and with a more sympathetic production and – crucially – the far more bare and elemental sound of Black Sabbath, so unappealing just a few years earlier, he sounded right. And then, when I heard the earliest Black Sabbath albums, Black Sabbath and Paranoid, both from 1970, one of the things they reminded me of, most unexpectedly, was Joy Division.

Black Sabbath in 1970 by Keef, Joy Division in 1979 by Anton Corbijn

Yes, the whole aura is different, Sabbath were surly and aggressive where Joy Division were solemn and withdrawn, but there’s something about the simplicity of the sound. Geezer and Hooky’s basses took up as much space as Tony and Bernard’s guitars. Bill Ward, like Stephen Morris, was a drummer who brought a strong dance/funk element into the band’s rock music without any sense of incongruity. Ozzy and Ian Curtis are worlds apart as vocalists, but both have a despairing intensity that makes them stand out, even within their respective genres. Both bands were from the grim, grey, hopeless industrial 1970s north of England, but whereas Joy Division were definitively a product of Manchester, with all the gritty coolness that conferred upon them, Sabbath were solidly of Birmingham, with all of the perceived oafishness and lack of credibility that entailed in the music press at least. Both singers were self-destructive too, but the same year that Ian Curtis tragically ended his life, Ozzy was reflecting on his self-destructive behaviour in “Suicide Solution”* and starting his life anew, launching a solo career which, against all expectations, made him an even bigger star and ultimately the icon who is being mourned today, far more widely than I’m sure he would ever have imagined. It was a good ending.

*Ozzy was always a far more thoughtful lyricist than he’s given credit for; I can’t think of any other artist from the aggressively cocky 80s hair metal scene who would have written the glumly confessional anthem “Secret Loser” from Ozzy’s 1986 album The Ultimate Sin

Hulme, Manchester in the 1970s, by David Chadwick

Because I’m a nerd, and not just a music nerd, writing this piece made me think of Michael Moorcock’s elegiac sci-fi/fantasy novel novel, The End of All Songs, published in 1976, the year that Ian Curtis, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner met at a Sex Pistols concert in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, the year that Black Sabbath released their seventh album, Technical Ecstasy, generally agreed to be the one where the cracks started to show in the Ozzy-led lineup but one of my favourites. Moorcock took the title of his novel from a poem by the Victorian writer Ernest Dowson, which feels appropriate to end with, since fading out is kind of a hassle, text-wise.

With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the drop’d curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.
Ernest Dowson, Dregs (1899)

gratuitous text and bloody violence – the commercialisation of 80s horror

This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre

The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags and twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.

*you could say the 50s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour

As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos, they had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and, to young teenagers at least, they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.

the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update

The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. Tasteful is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, but combined it with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.

70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s

But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the current ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age. The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like the star actors of the day, but where Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated thing, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.

The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition

The extent to which the star authors, rather than the books themselves, were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives. James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of classy as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.

New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album

Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times etc – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the titles of the books took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.

Stephen King’s Greatest Hits

Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed; all of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach; after wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontznd Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.

80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)

Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s. Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in court in cases of trademark infringement; not that said moron would have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel – but they would know they weren’t reading Stephen King.

the other Stephen of 80s horror

In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical mid-80s horror stodge but graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own. Clive Barker’s books looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors. From then until the end of the horror boom his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.

Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author

From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. That sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable. In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain and nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.

Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)

Play For Today: long overdue catch-up, spring 2025

Kind of shocked to discover that I haven’t done any of my once-regular Play for Today roundups since 2019! Last time around, rather than doing a proper playlist, I just mentioned some interesting things that had come my way (that I didn’t review for any magazines or websites), so I’ll do that again, possibly interspersed with things I’ve been playing a lot (in fact not; maybe later). These are all from the past few months and I haven’t necessarily given them the time they deserve, but I think they’re all worth a listen…

NECHOCHWEN – spelewithiipi (Nordvis Produktion)

I loved Nechochwen’s Heart of Akamon and was quite shocked to find it’s now a decade old. They’ve released good music since then, notably a split album with Panopticon, but spelewithiipi (catchy name!) really reminded me of just how much I loved Heart of Akamon. For those who haven’t come across them, Nechochwen are an acoustic dark folk band (sometimes including metal elements, I kind of prefer when they don’t but it’s all good) that explores (as they put it) ‘the indigenous roots and history of the Upper Ohio River Valley.’ Their music is autumnal and haunting, and I love the imagery too. spelewithiipi is a beautiful album, and it’ll sound even better later in the year.

<a href="https://nechochwen-nordvis.bandcamp.com/album/spelewithiipi">spelewithiipi by Nechochwen</a>

GHOST WORLD – Armadillo Café (Svart Records)

Ghost World have made some of my favourite albums; I was immediately smitten with their 2017 debut album, which was my album of the year that year and at first the 2018 follow-up, Spin was disappointing to me, but ultimately went on to be one of my all-time (so far) favourite albums, so there’s some kind of lesson there. Anyway, Armadillo Café is an odd, whimsical but lovely concept album that so far is taking longer for me to absorb, but it’s full of good tunes and I’m confident that I’ll end up loving it without even noticing again.

<a href="https://ghost-world.bandcamp.com/album/armadillo-caf">Armadillo Café by Ghost World</a>

VERSATILE – Les litanies du vide (Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions)

Hmm. I gave this a go because, despite the fact that industrial metal is one of my least favourite genres of music in the world, Swiss black metal has a special place in my heart and LADLO is a very dependable label. And..? Well, not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s good, there’s a nice chaotic, noisy atmosphere and it reminded me at times of Abigor (who I do like) and Blacklodge (who I occasionally like). The atmospheres and the choral bits are really cool and the noisy stuff with sirens etc is impressively alarming, though not nice if you have a headache.

<a href="https://ladlo.bandcamp.com/album/les-litanies-du-vide">Les Litanies du Vide by Versatile</a>

Kati Rán – LYS (10 Year Anniversary) (Svart Records)

More ‘dark folk’ (“Nordic/Pagan” this time, though Kati herself is Dutch I think) – LYS is an album that I very much enjoyed when it came out and then pretty much forgot about, so it’s nice to hear it again and find that it really is lovely. She’s an amazing multi-instrumentalist and even though I have no idea if the music would sound at all familiar to the Nordic peoples of centuries ago, I feel like it evokes those ancient times and cultures perfectly for a modern audience (i.e. me). The follow-up, ‘SÁLA’ came out last year and I still didn’t get around to hearing it, but now that I’ve had this reminder I will

BOOTSY COLLINS – Album of the Year #1 Funkateer (Bootzilla/Roc Nation)

I reviewed this for Spectrum Culture so won’t say much about it here, but in these tense and miserable times, Bootsy’s indefatigable enthusiasm and uplifting silliness are more welcome than ever. Plus it’s just a really good album. The man’s a genius.

a short essay about killing

the poster for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988)

I don’t believe in the death penalty. In this, I’m in the majority, globally. I’m not sure when exactly I became against it; until at least the age of 12 I was pretty much a proto-fascist with an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ sense of justice, as boys tended to be in those days and for all I know still are. But I know that by the time I saw Krzysztof Kieslowski’s brilliantly grim A Short Film About Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) when I was 16 or so I was already anti-death penalty and have remained so ever since.

My reasons are, typically, kind of pedantic. There are many obvious arguments against it; there’s the ‘what if you accidentally kill the wrong person’ argument and that’s a pretty strong one – it has happened and does happen and is irreversible. There’s the fact that the death penalty seems to have a negligible effect on the crime rate. In fact, countries with the death penalty on the whole seem to have more rather than less murders (not that there’s necessarily a link between those two things). Even from the coldest and most reptilian, utilitarian point of view of getting rid of the problem of prison overcrowding, any possible benefit is negated by the fact that in most countries with the death penalty, prisoners spend years on death row being fed and housed, rather than being quickly and efficiently ‘processed.’ There’s also the Gandalfian(!) argument from The Lord of the Rings; “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” This wasn’t just a handy deus ex machina because Tolkien needed Gollum to survive in order to destroy the ring. It was that, but Tolkien was also a devout and serious Christian and that was his moral outlook. Thank the gods that unlike his friend CS Lewis, he deliberately left religion out of his books though! In the Biblical commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill, the Christian/Jewish god doesn’t list any exceptions or mitigating circumstances – in that one instance. Of course elsewhere in the Bible there are many circumstances where humans killing humans is considered appropriate and even righteous – the ultimate irony being that Jesus, kind of like an anti-Gollum, has to suffer death through violence to achieve his purpose. Religion is odd; but I’m not a Christian or Jew.

All of those points are relevant, but for me personally, it’s far simpler than that; if you can be legally killed, that means that in the eyes of the state there’s essentially nothing wrong with killing people. I think there is, and I don’t think that it should just be a matter of having the right paperwork. In essence, to kill a murderer is not telling them ‘what you did is wrong‘ so much as ‘you did it wrong‘ which I don’t think is a minor difference. And on top of that, there’s the whole question of who you are handing this responsibility of life and death to. I have a lot of respect for some lawyers, attorneys, judges, police officers etc, but there are others that I wouldn’t trust with my lunch, let alone my (or anyone else’s) life. States have a character, and often it is institutionally biased regarding race, class, gender and sexuality. Giving that kind of power within that kind of framework seems likely to make far more problems than it solves. But even in non-death-penalty countries like the UK we routinely give people the legal right to take other people’s lives, all they have to do is join the armed forces.

British volunteers in the International Brigade, 1937

I’m no more consistent than anyone else and my attitudes have their exceptions and contradictions. I (predictably) don’t philosophically differentiate between the military and mercenaries, because what ‘serving your country’ means in practical terms is carrying out whatever the policy of your government is that week, with no certainty that it won’t be contradicted by a new policy (or a new government) the next week and if enemies suddenly turn out to be allies or vice versa, the dead remain dead. That said – here’s the contradiction – I’m not a pacifist absolutist either, and I think, or like to think that if an invading army arrived in my country I’d take arms against it. These things are particular though; everyone likes to think they’d fight for a good cause, but the Spanish Civil War stands out for the number of anti-fascist fighters from all over the world who took up arms in defence of Spain. But that happened partly because so many people were ready to – and wanted to fight. Many of those – George Orwell is a prominent and typical example – belonged to the generation who had been just too young to fight in World War One and whose feelings about war – including a considerable amount of survivor’s guilt – had been shaped by it. And the fascist attack on the Spanish republic gave them a clear-cut situation to intervene in, in a way that the more political rise of fascism in Italy and Germany didn’t.

But anyway, the death penalty. People of course do terrible things, but although lots of them are significantly more horrific than a lethal injection or the electric chair, the end result is the same. Being – odd, brief segue but bear with me, it’s relevant – a fan of black metal music, the subject of death and murder is one you come across in a different way from just being, say, a fan of horror movies. Because the poser-ish ‘darkness’ of black metal spills over (though less than it used to) into ‘real life,’ almost as if the kind of art you make bears some relation to the kind of person you are. I won’t go into the tedious-but-fascinating Lords of Chaos stuff about Mayhem & Burzum or Absurd because it’s not quite relevant here, but the story of Smutak (Pavel Selyun) who ran Morak Production record label in Belarus is.

In 2012 Selyun discovered that his wife, the artist and singer Frozendark (Victoria Selyunova) was having an affair with the artist, zine editor and musician Kronum (Alexey Vladimirovich Utokva). Sticking with the psuedonyms seems appropriate, so anyway; Smutak murdered both Frozendark and Kronum, dismembered them and was apprehended on the Subway three days later with Kronum’s head (or skull; same difference I suppose – some accounts say he boiled the head – I don’t need to know) in a bag. After his arrest, he was imprisoned in Minsk and after a confession gained under torture and the failure of various appeals he was executed two years later, by being shot in the back of the head. A horrible postscript that demonstrates how the death penalty punishes the innocent as well as the guilty; after the execution the authorities failed to hand over Smutak’s body to his mother or tell her where he’s buried, the case was handed to the UN Court of Human Rights.

Not many people (and certainly not me) would say that Selyun didn’t ‘deserve’ his treatment. But still. He possibly tortured and definitely killed people and then was tortured and killed. There is a kind of balance there, but it’s one in which the act of torturing and killing itself is made neutral. Whoever tortured and killed Smutak doesn’t need any kind of defence because they did it in the name of the law, but the idea that torturing and killing is morally neutral because you don’t have any emotional investment in the act is an odd one. Smutak had nothing to gain from his actions other than some kind of horrible satisfaction. The person or people who did the same to him got paid for it. Which is morally, what? Better? He reportedly felt the same kind of fear as his victims; well good, I guess, but that did nothing to benefit the victims. It may have pleased the victims’ relatives but I wouldn’t want to examine that kind of pleasure too closely.

The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.

But more to the point; why does the killer (assuming their motives are the ones that are being extrapolated from the crime) care anyway? If actually shooting someone dead in the street is okay, then surely being indirectly responsible for the misery and possible deaths of others is barely even a misdemeanour. It amounts to the kind of Travis Bickle movie logic I’m sure I’ve sneered about elsewhere; complaining about the decay of social values and then committing murder is not reducing the sum total of social decay, it’s adding to it. A society where evil CEOs are shot dead in the street is a society where human beings are shot dead in the streets and that becoming acceptable is not likely to be the pathway to a more just, equal or happy society.

Michael Haneke’s disturbing Benny’s Video (1992)

What the death penalty does do, and probably a key part of why it’s still used in some countries, is offer a punishment that seems (in the case of murder at least) to fit the crime. Interestingly, public executions – which counterintuitively seem to have no better track record as a deterrent than any other kind – are now vanishingly rare. Part of that is no doubt to do with public disgust and part with institutional secrecy and shame, but I imagine that part of it is also the fear that the public would enjoy it too much. I’m not sure if I would think that if it wasn’t for the spate of Islamic State beheadings that were so widely watched on the internet back in the early 2010s (was it?) I watched one, like most people seem to have, and still wish I hadn’t; but you can’t un-ring a bell. That was at the back of my mind when I wrote about saints and martyrdom for this site and I can bring images of it to mind horribly easily. But even before that it shouldn’t have surprised me – like many other teenage horror movie fans in the pre-internet era I watched exploitation videos like Face of Death that featured executions, accidents etc, and in doing so realised that I was a horror fan and not whatever fans of that are. I should have learned my lesson there, but it’s undeniable that these things have a murky kind of fascination; since then, thanks to one of my favourite writers, Georges Bataille, I’ve ended up reading about Lingchi (‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’) and looking at the chilling and depressing photos of it, been appalled by postcards of lynchings, seen revolting photographs of soldiers’ desecrated bodies and murder victims… I haven’t gotten used to those images and I hope I never will. Teenage me would no doubt sneer at that because he thought that things that are ‘dark’ are cool, but that seems like a laughable and childish attitude to me now, so I can take his sneering. I seem to be edging towards the point that Michael Haneke is making in Funny Games (1997), which I find a bit tiresome and preachy (even more so the remake), but I’m not. I disagree with the premise of that film because I do think there’s a difference between fictional horror and real horror, and that enjoying one isn’t the same as enjoying the other. I think his 1992 film Benny’s Video makes a similar but much more subtle and complex point far better.

Imprisonment (whatever your views on the justice system) is a pretty unsatisfactory solution for most crimes, but it’s difficult to think of a better one which doesn’t essentially exonerate the kind of behaviour we want to characterise as abnormal or criminal. Stealing from a thief is obviously ‘justice’ in the eye-for-an-eye sense, but as a punishment it’s laughable. Raping a rapist would be grotesque and double the number of rapists in the room every time it happened. But even so, it’s never going to be comfortable that the tax payer is contributing to the relative comfort of someone like (I’ll only mention dead ones, this isn’t a complaint about the legal system being soft on psychopaths) Fred West. A solution l think I might suggest is one which I’m very dubious about myself from lots of different humanitarian, psychological and philosophical points of view; why not offer (and that word alone would make people angry) ‘monsters’ – the kind of killers in a category of their own, who admit to horrendous acts of murder and torture and whose guilt is not in doubt – those who will never be allowed freedom – the choice of a lethal injection rather than life imprisonment? That’s a horrible thing to contemplate, but then so is paying for the meals and upkeep of someone like Ian Brady, especially when he essentially had the last laugh, exercising his little bit of power over the families of his victims and having his self-aggrandising bullshit book The Gates of Janus published.

Anyway, that last part was kind of icky and uncomfortable, but so it should be – the whole subject is. So for what it’s worth, those are my thoughts on the death penalty. Time for a shower; until next time, don’t murder anyone please.

henrik palm and the releases of the year 2024 (with typically lengthy disclaimer!)

Way back in April this year Henrik Palm released an album called Nerd Icon (via Svart Records). It’s very good – 80s-inflected melodic hard rock is as good a description as any, I guess, but it has a very individual personality and none of the pomposity or poser quality of that kind of music (no offence to actual 80s rock, which I love). In fact it’s one of my albums of the year (see short list below somewhere). But thinking about ‘albums of the year’ (yes, I probably whinge about this annually) especially in the context of Henrik Palm’s work makes me think of what a meaningless accolade it is. Not because there isn’t lots of good music produced every year, but just because people who love music don’t generally accumulate favourite albums in a real time, chronological way. The point of recorded music is that it has been recorded and can be therefore enjoyed outside of the time and place that it was made.

To labour the point, if music only moved forwards, with this year’s top 50 (or whatever) albums superseding last year’s and so on, ‘classic albums’ wouldn’t exist and once-obscure artists would remain obscure and people like Nick Drake (obvious example I know) would be only loved by the shockingly tiny handful of living people who bought his work at the time. But even before the internet that wasn’t the case and it still isn’t, so end of year lists end up being as peculiar a time capsule as the top 40 from years ago is. Yes, they are ranked by quality rather than popularity, but as looking back at these things demonstrates, they are no more reliable for that.

Not an album of this year, but an unexpected favourite

But the reason Henrik Palm illustrates this point for me is that in 2020 he released Poverty Metal, I heard it at the time and quite liked it but I don’t think I wrote about it anywhere, though it got a surprised mention in 2022 – and to my continued surprise I still play it fairly often. It’s an album as unassuming and quirky (I mean that is the right word but bleh) as its title – melodic, sometimes kind of 70s-ish, sometimes not, rarely very metal, often quite delicate and always thoughtful. It’s peculiar, but part of what makes it peculiar is how conventional it is – but at the same time, how unusual it is by the standards of those conventions. I guess it has become one of my favourite albums, which I don’t think anything on my actual 2020 ‘albums of the year’ lists did. And after the dust has settled on 2024, it may be that if any album from this year enters my personal pantheon, it could be one that hasn’t really registered with me yet or that I haven’t even heard.

Now that I’ve undermined it in advance, here’s my ‘albums of the year’ feature.

My favourite albums of this year are two which I (obviously) think are great, but for varying reasons I don’t know if they will stick around my personal playlist like Poverty Metal has – but they may.

The first is In Concert by Diamanda Galás (Intravenal Sound Operations). Live albums are interesting in that many people (including myself) can be slightly dismissive of them (“_____ has a new album coming out! Oh, it’s just a live album“), a strange reaction, because if you’re lucky enough to see your favourite artists live you never think “oh, it was just a live performance.” In the context of home listening, none of the ephemeral magic of a live show – the stuff that’s really about you – is present, but theoretically the most important part is. In comparison with Galás’ recent, brilliantly gruelling work (Broken Gargoyles was my album of the year in 2022) the album is simple, or at least unadorned; just her extraordinary voice and uniquely expressive piano. But that’s quite a ‘just’ – and she plays a set of songs that are urgent, deeply moving, haunting, wise, shockingly relevant and occasionally wickedly funny. What more do you want? It’s about as far removed from a stadium band delivering polished versions of their greatest hits as you can get and though it would no doubt be a fantastic souvenir and reminder if you were lucky enough to see the performance, it’s entirely transporting just as a record. Will it join the Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Litanies of Satan, The Sporting Life and Broken Gargoyles as one of my favourite Diamanda Galás albums? Who knows? Some of her work takes time to really get to know in a way that In Concert doesn’t, and I feel like I’m still ‘working on’ (not the right phrase) some of her older work – what that means for this album I don’t know, but I do know that nothing this year has cut deeper.

Joint album of the year – The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World

My second album of the year is Songs of a Lost World by The Cure (Fiction), which I reviewed here, which is just as visceral for me, but for completely different reasons. It is, as an amazing amount of people seem to agree, a superb album, moving and memorable and all of that; but I have been a fan of The Cure since I was seventeen and there hasn’t been any point where I stopped listening to them completely. That doesn’t necessarily mean I was predisposed to like it – their last couple of records didn’t do much for me, though they have their moments – but it is relevant to my personal response to it. Even though by any objective methods of analysis (there aren’t any) Songs of a Lost World is probably as good as anything the band has done, will it join Seventeen Seconds, Disintegration, Japanese Whispers and Pornography as one of my all-time favourite Cure albums? Or even Faith, The Top, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the Head on the Door and Boys Don’t Cry as my second-tier, almost-favourite Cure albums? Only time will tell, but in that time I will no longer be the me that was most receptive to their music and the band will have to compete with far more music (old, new, whatever) than they ever did when I obsessively listened to them. Then I had no way of getting their work except by buying it or making tapes from friends who owned it. I definitely think I love music just as much as I ever did, but I don’t obsessively listen to anything the way I did in my teens and early 20s. The older Cure records, even the ones I liked relatively less, like Wish and Kiss Me… are imprinted on my brain in a way that just doesn’t get a chance to happen now. But in a way I feel like Songs of a Lost World addresses and encapsulates all of those feelings, which is one of the reasons it’s so good.

Not sure if it’s coincidental or significant that both of my favourite albums of the year are by artists I’ve been listening to for decades, but it’s interesting either way. So anyway, a wee list of honourable mentions and we’re done with this for another year

Henrik Palm – Nerd Icon (Svart Records) – sort of 80s-ish, sort of metal-ish, 100% individual

Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Feeding Tube) – I loved Not So Deep as a Well ten years ago (mentioned in passing here) and love this even more

Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight) – wrote about it here – for me it doesn’t top my favourite Das Seelenbrechen, but it’s as good as any of his others

One of my top 3 or 4 albums of all time, John Cale’s Paris 1919 was reissued this year, his latest POPtical Illusion was good too

Mick Harvey – Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute) – lovely autumnal album by ex-Bad Seed and musical genius, more here

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Wild God (PIAS recordings) – for me a good rather than amazing Nick Cave album, but he’s better than most people so still easily made the list, though I’m not sure I like it more than his old colleague’s work

Aara – Eiger (Debemur Morti Productions) – Superior Swiss black metal, conceptual without being pompous and full of great tunes and atmosphere

Claire Rousay – Sentiment (Thrill Jockey) – bracingly sparse and desolate but lovely too

Alcest – Chants de L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast) – seems so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but this was (I thought) the best Alcest album for years, beautiful, wistful and generally lovely. I talked to Neige about it at the time, I should post that interview here at some point!

Onwards!

most things don’t exist

eh, Mel Gibson: but he played a good Hamlet (dir Franco Zeffirelli, 1990)

With apologies to Marcel Proust – but not very vehement apologies, because it’s true – the taste of honey on toast is as powerfully evocative and intensely transporting to me as anything that I can think of. The lips and tongue that made that association happen don’t exist anymore and neither does the face, neither do the eyes, and neither does one of the two brains and/or hearts* that I suppose really made it happen (mine are still there, though). In 21st century Britain, it’s more likely than not that even her bones don’t exist anymore, which makes the traditional preoccupation with returning to dust feel apt and more immediate and (thankfully?) reduces the kind of corpse-fetishising morbidity that seems to have appealed so much to playgoers in the Elizabethan/Jacobean era.

Death & Youth (c.1480-90) by the unknown German artist known as The Master of the Housebook

Thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
When life and beauty naturally fill’d out
These ragged imperfections,
When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set
In those unsightly rings: then ’twas a face
So far beyond the artificial shine
Of any woman’s bought complexion
(The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606/7) by Thomas Middleton and/or Cyril Tourneur, Act one, Scene one)

*is the heart in the brain? In one sense obviously not, in another maybe, but the sensations associated with the heart seem often to happen somewhere around the stomach; or is that just me?

More to the point, “here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft“, etc. All of which is beautiful; but for better or worse, a pile of ash isn’t likely to engender the same kind of thoughts or words as Yorick’s – or anybody’s – skull. But anyway, the non-existence of a person – or, even more abstractly, the non-existence of skin that has touched your skin (though technically of course all of the skin involved in those kisses has long since disappeared into dust and been replaced anyway) is an absence that’s strange and dismal to think about. But then most things don’t exist.

Vanitas: Still Life with Skull (c.1671) by an unknown English painter

But honey does exist of course; and the association between human beings and sugary bee vomit goes back probably as long as human beings themselves. There are Mesolithic cave paintings, 8000 years old or more, made by people who don’t exist, depicting people who may never have existed except as drawings, or may have once existed but don’t anymore, plundering beehives for honey. Honey was used by the ancient Egyptians, who no longer exist, in some of their most solemn rites, it had sacred significance for the ancient Greeks, who no longer exist, it was used in medicine in India and China, which do exist now but technically didn’t then, by people who don’t, now. Mohammed recommended it for its healing properties; it’s a symbol of abundance in the Bible and it’s special enough to be kosher despite being the product of unclean insects. It’s one of the five elixirs of Hinduism, Buddha was brought honey by a monkey that no longer exists. The Vikings ate it and used it for medicine too. Honey was the basis of mead, the drink of the Celts who sometimes referred to the island of Britain as the Isle of Honey.

probably my favourite Jesus & Mary Chain song: Just Like Honey (1985)

And so on and on, into modern times. But also (those Elizabethan-Jacobeans again) “The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite.” (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c.1595) Act 2, scene 6) “Your comfortable words are like honey. They relish well in your mouth that’s whole; but in mine that’s wounded they go down as if the sting of the bee were in them.”(John Webster, The White Devil (1612), Act 3. Sc.ene 3). See also “honey trap”. “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”You catch more flies with honey.

But on the whole, the sweetness of honey is not and has never been sinister. A Taste of Honey, Tupelo Honey, “Wild Honey,” “Honey Pie”, “Just like Honey,” “Me in Honey,” “Put some sugar on it honey,” Pablo Honey, “Honey I Sure Miss You.” Honey to the B. “Honey” is one of the sweetest (yep) of endearments that people use with each other. Winnie-the-Pooh and Bamse covet it. Honey and toast tasted in a kiss at the age of 14 is, in the history of the world, a tiny and trivial thing, but it’s enough to resonate throughout a life, just as honey has resonated through the world’s human cultures. Honey’s Dead. But the mouth that tasted so sweetly of honey doesn’t exist anymore. Which is sad, because loss is sad. But how sad? Most things never exist and even most things that have existed don’t exist now, so maybe the fact that it has existed is enough.

“Most things don’t exist” seems patently untrue: for a thing to be ‘a thing’ it must have some kind of existence, surely? And yet, even leaving aside things and people that no longer exist, we are vastly outnumbered by the things that have never existed, from the profound to the trivial. Profound, well even avoiding offending people and their beliefs, probably few people would now say that Zeus and his extended family are really living in a real Olympus. Trivially, 70-plus years on from the great age of the automobile, flying cars as imagined by generations of children, as depicted in books and films, are still stubbornly absent from the skies above our roads. The idea of them exists, but even if – headache-inducing notion – it exists as a specific idea (“the idea of a flying car”), rather than just within the general realm of “ideas,” an idea is an idea, a thing perhaps but not the thing that it is about. Is a specific person’s memory of another person a particular thing because it relates to a particular person, or does it exist only under the larger and more various banner of “memories”? Either way, it’s immaterial, because even though the human imagination is a thing that definitely exists, the idea of a flying car is no more a flying car than Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a flying machine was a flying machine or that my memory of honey-and-toast kisses is a honey-and-toast kiss.

If you or I picture a human being with electric blue skin, we can imagine it and if we have the talent we can draw it, someone could depict it in a film, but it wouldn’t be the thing itself, because human beings with electric blue skin, like space dolphins, personal teleportation devices, seas of blood, winged horses, articulate sentient faeces and successful alchemical experiments, don’t exist. And depending on the range of your imagination (looking at that list mine seems a bit limited), you could think of infinite numbers of things that don’t exist. There are also, presumably, untold numbers of things that do exist but that we personally don’t know about or that we as a species don’t know about yet. But even if it was possible to make a complete list of all of the things in existence (or things in existence to date; new things are invented or develop or evolve all the time), it would always be possible to think of even more things that don’t exist, – simply, in the least imaginative way, by naming variations on, or parodies of everything that does exist. So supermassive black holes exist? Okay, but what about supertiny pink holes? What about supermedium beige holes? This June, a new snake (disappointingly named Ovophis jenkinsi) was discovered. But what about a version of Ovophis jenkinsi that sings in Spanish or has paper bones or smells like Madonna? They don’t exist.

Kind of a creepy segue if you think about it (so please don’t), but like those beautifully-shaped lips that tasted of honey, my mother no longer exists, except as a memory, or lots of different memories, belonging to lots of different people. Presumably she exists in lots of memories as lots of different people who happen to have the same name. But unlike supermedium beige holes, the non-existence of previously-existing things and people is complex, because of the different perspectives they are remembered from. But regardless, they are still fundamentally not things anymore. But even with the ever-growing, almost-infinite number of things, there are, demonstrably, more things that don’t exist. And, without wishing to be horribly negative or repeating things I’ve written before, one of the surprises with the death of a close relative was to find that death does exist. Well, obviously, everyone knows that – but not just as an ending or as the absence of life, as was always known, but as an active, grim-reaper-like force of its own. For me, the evidence for that – which I’m sure could be explained scientifically by a medical professional – is the cold that I mentioned in the previous article. Holding a hand that gets cold seems pretty normal; warmth ebbing away as life ebb away; that’s logical and natural. But this wasn’t the expected (to me) cooling down of a warm thing to room temperature, like the un-drunk cups of tea which day after day were brought and cooled down because the person they were brought for didn’t really want them anymore, just the idea of them. That cooling felt natural, as did the warming of the glass of water that sat un-drunk at the bedside because the person it was for could no longer hold or see it. That water had been cold but had warmed up to room temperature, but the cold in the hand wasn’t just a settling in line with ambient conditions. It was active cold; hands chilling and then radiating cold in quite an intense way, a coldness that dropped far below room temperature. I mentioned it to a doctor during a brief, unbelievably welcome break to get some air, and she said “Yes, she doesn’t have long left.” Within a few days I wished I’d asked for an explanation of where that cold was coming from; where is it generated? Which organ in the human body can generate cold so quickly and intensely? Does it do it in any other situations? And if not, why not? So, although death can seem abstract, in the same sense that ‘life’ seems abstract, being big and pervasive, death definitely exists. But as what? Don’t know; not a single entity, since it’s incipient in everyone, coded into our DNA: but that coding has nothing to do with getting hit by cars or drowning or being shot, does it? So, a big question mark to that. Keats would say not to question it, just to enjoy the mystery. Well alright then.

Klaus Nomi as “the Cold Genius” from his 1981 version of Purcell’s “The Cold Song”

But since most things *don’t* exist, but death definitely does exist, existence is, in universal terms, rare enough to be something like winning the lottery. But like winning the lottery, existence in itself is not any kind of guarantee of happiness or satisfaction or even honey-and-toast kisses; but it at least offers the possibility of those things, whereas non-existence doesn’t offer anything, not even peace, which has to be experienced to exist. We have all not existed before and we will all not exist again; but honey will still be here, for as long as bees are at least. I don’t know if that’s comforting or not. But if you’re reading this – and I’m definitely writing it – we do currently exist, so try enjoy your lottery win, innit.

Something silly about music next time I think.

Ancient Roman vanitas mosaic showing a skull and the wheel of fortune

nostalgia isn’t going to be what it was, or something like that

When I was a child there was music which was, whether you liked it or not, inescapable. I have never – and this is not a boast – deliberately or actively listened to a song by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Roxette, Take That, Bon Jovi, the Spice Girls… the list isn’t endless, but it is quite long. And yet I know some, or a lot, of songs by all of those artists. And those are just some of the household names. Likewise I have never deliberately listened to “A Horse With No Name” by America, “One Night in Bangkok” by Murray Head or “Would I Lie to You” by Charles & Eddie; and yet, there they are, readily accessible should I wish (I shouldn’t) to hum, whistle or sing them, or just have them play in my head, which I seemingly have little control over.

Black Lace: the unacceptable face(s) of 80s pop

And yet, since the dawn of the 21^st century, major stars come and go, like Justin Bieber, or just stay, like Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift, without ever really entering my consciousness or troubling my ears. I have consulted with samples of “the youth” to see if it’s just me, but no: like me, there are major stars that they have mental images of, but unless they have actively been fans, they couldn’t necessarily tell you the titles of any of their songs and have little to no idea of what they actually sound like. Logical, because they were no more interested in them than I was in Dire Straits or Black Lace; but alas, I know the hits of Dire Straits and Black Lace. And the idea of ‘the Top 40 singles chart’ really has little place in their idea of popular music. Again, ignorance is nothing to be proud of and I literally don’t know what I’m missing. At least my parents could dismiss Madonna or Boy George on the basis that they didn’t like their music. It’s an especially odd situation to find myself in as my main occupation is actually writing about music; but of course, nothing except my own attitude is stopping me from finding out about these artists.

The fact is that no musician is inescapable now. Music is everywhere, and far more accessibly so than it was in the 80s or 90s – and not just new music. If I want to hear Joy Division playing live when they were still called Warsaw or track down the records the Wu-Tang Clan sampled or hear the different version of the Smiths’ first album produced by Troy Tate, it takes as long about as long to find them as it does to type those words into your phone. Back then, if you had a Walkman you could play tapes, but you had to have the tape (or CD – I know CDs are having a minor renaissance, but is there any more misbegotten, less lamented creature than the CD Walkman?) Or you could – from the 1950s onwards – carry a radio with you and listen to whatever happened to be playing at the time. I imagine fewer people listen to the radio now than they did even 30 years ago, but paradoxically, though there are probably many more – and many more specialised – radio stations now than ever, their specialisation actually feeds the escapability of pop music. Because if I want to hear r’n’b or metal or rap or techno without hearing anything else, or to hear 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s pop without having to put up with their modern-day equivalents, then that’s what I and anyone else will do. I have never wanted to hear “Concrete and Clay” by Unit 4+2 or “Agadoo” or “Come On Eileen” or “Your Woman” by White Town or (god knows) “Crocodile Shoes” by Jimmy Nail; but there was a time when hearing things I wanted to hear but didn’t own, meant running the risk of being subjected to these, and many other unwanted songs. As I write these words, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, a song that until recently I didn’t know I knew is playing in my head.

And so, the music library in my head is bigger and more diverse than I ever intended it to be. In a situation where there were only three or four TV channels and a handful of popular radio stations, music was a kind of lingua franca for people, especially for young people. Watching Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening, or later The Word on Friday was so standard among my age group that you could assume that most people you knew had seen what you saw; that’s a powerful, not necessarily bonding experience, but a bond of sorts, that I don’t see an equivalent for now, simply because even if everyone you know watches Netflix, there’s no reason for them to have watched the same thing at the same time as you did. It’s not worse, in some ways it’s obviously better; but it is different. Of course, personal taste back then was still personal taste, and anything not in the mainstream was obscure in a way that no music, however weird or niche, is now obscure, but that was another identity-building thing, whether one liked it or not.

Growing up in a time when this isn’t the case and the only music kids are subjected to is the taste of their parents (admittedly, a minefield) or fragments of songs on TV ads, if they watch normal TV or on TikTok, if they happen to use Tiktok, is a vastly different thing. Taylor Swift is as inescapable a presence now, much as Madonna was in the 80s, but her music is almost entirely avoidable and it seems probable that few teenagers who are entirely uninterested in her now will find her hits popping unbidden into their heads in middle age. But conversely, the kids of today are more likely to come across “Owner of a Lonely Heart” on YouTube than I would have been to hear one of the big pop hits of 1943 in the 80s.

Far Dunaway as Bonnie Parker; a little bit 1930s, a lot 1960s

What this means for the future I don’t know; but surely its implications for pop-culture nostalgia – which has grown from its humble origins in the 60s to an all-encompassing industry, are huge. In the 60s, there was a brief fashion for all things 1920s and 30s which prefigures the waves of nostalgia that have happened ever since. But for a variety of reasons, some technical, some generational and some commercial, pop culture nostalgia is far more elaborate than ever before. We live in a time when constructs like “The 80s” and “The 90s” are well-defined, marketable eras that mean something to people who weren’t born then, in quite a different way from the 1960s version of the 1920s. Even back then, the entertainment industry could conjure bygone times with an easy shorthand; the 1960s version of the 1920s and 30s meant flappers and cloche hats and Prohibition and the Charleston and was evoked on records like The Beatles’ Honey Pie and seen onstage in The Boy Friend or in the cinema in Bonnie & Clyde. But the actual music of the 20s and 30s was mostly not relatable to youngsters in the way that the actual entertainment of the 80s and 90s still is. Even if a teenager in the 60s did want to watch actual silent movies or listen to actual 20s jazz or dance bands they would have to find some way of accessing them. In the pre-home video era that meant relying on silent movie revivals in cinemas, or finding old records and having the right equipment to play them on, since old music was then only slowly being reissued in modern formats. The modern teen who loves “the 80s” or “the 90s” is spoiled by comparison, not least because its major movie franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and Jurassic Park are still around and its major musical stars still tour or at least have videos and back catalogues that can be accessed online, often for free.

Supergrass in 1996: a little bit 60s, a lot 70s, entirely 90s

Fashion has always been cyclical, but this feels quite new (which doesn’t mean it is though). Currently, culture feels not like a wasteland but like Eliot’s actual Waste Land, a dissonant kind of poetic collage full of meaning and detritus and feeling and substance and ephemera but at first glance strangely shapeless. For example, in one of our current pop culture timestreams there seems to be a kind of 90s revival going on, with not only architects of Britpop like the Gallagher brothers and Blur still active, but even minor bands like Shed Seven not only touring the nostalgia circuit but actually getting in the charts. Britpop was notoriously derivative of the past, especially the 60s and 70s. And so, some teenagers and young adults (none of these things being as pervasive as they once were) are now growing up in a time when part of ‘the culture’ is a version of the culture of the 90s, which had reacted to the culture of the 80s by absorbing elements of the culture of the 60s and 70s. And while the artists of 20 or 30 years ago refuse to go away even modern artists from alternative rock to mainstream pop stars make music infused with the sound of 80s synths and 90s rock and so on and on. Nothing wrong with that of course, but what do you call post-post-modernism? And what will the 2020s revival look like when it rears its head in the 2050s, assuming there is a 2050s? Something half interesting, half familiar no doubt.

2024 – welcome to the/a future(s)

Another year – and the actual name of the year itself gets ever stranger and more unlikely and exotically futuristic, if you grew up in the era when the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was still set in the future. And here’s the annual attempt to get something onto this site at the beginning of the year – just made it in the first week this time – and hopefully, to post more often. The goal is a minimum of once a month but I think goals are better than resolutions so that’s as far as I will go.

2023 was the usual mixed bag of things; I didn’t see any of the big movies of the year yet. I have watched half of Saltburn, which so far makes me think of the early books of Martin Amis, especially Dead Babies (1975) and Success (1978) – partly because I read them again after he died last year. They are both still good/nasty/funny, especially Success, but whereas I find that having no likeable characters in a book is one thing, and doesn’t stop the book from being entertaining, watching unlikeable characters in a film is different – more like spending time with actual unlikeable people, perhaps because – especially in a film like Saltburn – you can only guess at their motivations and inner life. So, the second half of Saltburn remains unwatched – but I liked it enough that I will watch it.

Grayson Perry – The Walthamstow Tapestry (detail)

I didn’t see many exhibitions last year but am very glad that I caught Grayson Perry’s Smash Hits in Edinburgh. I didn’t really plan to see it as assumed in advance I wouldn’t like it, but in fact I loved it and ended up having a new respect for GP that only partly evaporates whenever I see him on TV.

I can’t be bothered going in depth about my favourite music of the year because the year is over and I’ve written about most it elsewhere. Old teenage favourites came back strongly: Kristin Hersh’s superb run of albums continued with Clear Pond Road. I hadn’t thought a lot about Slowdive in years but I really liked Everything is Alive and was very pleased to see them get the kind of acclaim that mostly eluded them when I was buying their first album a million years ago. Teenage Fanclub’s Nothing Lasts Forever and Drop Nineteens’ Hard Light were good too, and The Girl is Crying in her Latte by Sparks was probably my favourite of theirs outside of their early 70s classics. There were some excellent black metal (or black metal-related) albums too; much as I don’t like to think of Immortal without Abbath, Demonaz did himself proud with War Against All. Niklas Kvarforth returned to form with the brilliant Shining and Skálmöld’s Ýdalir is as good as anything they’ve recorded. In less guitar-oriented genres, I loved Kid Koala’s Creatures of the Late Afternoon and the latest Czarface record but my favourite album of the year if I had to choose one was the loveably lo-fi and enigmatic compilation Gespensterland.

I read lots of good books in 2023 – I started keeping a list but forgot about it at some point – but the two that stand out in my memory as my favourites are both non-fiction. Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art is completely engrossing and full of exciting ways of really looking at pictures. I wrote at length about Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia here. Kostyuchenko introduced me to a country that I only knew via history and stereotypes and her book is an exercise in what good journalism should be – informative, interesting, compassionate and readable. Both of these books cut across a wide range of subjects and examine unfamiliar things but also analyse the familiar from unfamiliar points of view; you should read them, if you haven’t already.

It’s no great surprise to me that my favourite books of the year would be – like much of my favourite art – by women. Though I think the individual voice is crucial in all of the arts, individuals don’t grow in a vacuum and because female (and, more widely, non-male) voices and viewpoints have always been overlooked, excluded, marginalised and/or patronised, women and those outside of the standard, traditional male authority figures more generally, tend to have more interesting and insightful perspectives than the ‘industry standard’ artist or commentator does. The first time that thought really struck me was when I was a student, reading about Berlin Dada and finding that Hannah Höch was obviously a much more interesting and articulate artist than (though I love his work too) her partner Raoul Hausmann, but that Hausmann had always occupied a position of authority and a reputation as an innovator, where she had little-to-none. And the more you look the more you see examples of the same thing. In fact, because women occupied – and in many ways still occupy – more culturally precarious positions than men, that position informs their work – thinking for example of artists like Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage or – a bigger name now – Frida Kahlo – giving it layers of meaning inaccessible to – because unexperienced by – their male peers.

The fact that women know more about themselves but also more about men than men do – because they have always had to – gives their work an emotional and intellectual charge often missing from those who belong comfortably within a tradition. This is a pretty well-worn idea – it’s why outsiders like Van Gogh or dropouts like Gauguin’s work speaks to us more clearly than the academic, tradition-bound art that they grew up with. Anybody on the margins, in whatever sense, of “mainstream society” has to have a working knowledge of that society, just to exist. Society has far less need to understand or even notice those people. – therefore their points of view are likely to not only be more individual, but more acute when it comes to observing the world in which they live. Class, race, gender; all of these things are always fascinatingly central to art and art history and the gradual recognition of that fact is making art history ever more exciting and vibrant. For now at least; we live in a time of conservative backlashes which attempt to restore order to those with a comfortable position within yesterday’s world – there will probably be an art historical backlash at some point, and the reputations of the mainstream stars of art in Van Gogh and Gauguin’s day, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau will find their reputations restored.

If that backlash comes, it will be from the academic equivalent of those figures who, in 2023 continued to dominate the cultural landscape. These are conservative (even if theoretically radical) people who pride themselves on their superior rational, unsentimental and “common sense” outlook, but whose views tend to have a surprising amount in common with some of the more wayward religious cults. Subscribing to shallowly Darwinist ideas, but only insofar as they reinforce one’s own prejudices and somehow never feeling the need to follow them to their logical conclusions is not new, but it’s very now. Underlying ideas like the ‘survival of the fittest’, which then leads to the more malevolent idea of discouraging the “weak” in society by abolishing any kind of social structure that might support them is classic conservatism in an almost 19th century way, but somehow it’s not surprising to see these views gaining traction in the discourse of the apparently futuristic world of technology. In more that one way, these kinds of traditionalist, rigidly binary political and social philosophies work exactly like religious cults, with their apparently arbitrary cut off points for when it was that progress peaked/halted and civilisation turned bad. That point varies; but to believe things were once good but are now bad must always be problematic, because when, by any objective standards, was everything good, or were even most things good? For a certain class of British politician that point seems to have been World War Two, which kind of requires one to ignore actual World War Two. But the whole of history is infected by this kind of thinking – hence strange, disingenuous debates about how bad/how normal Empite, colonialism or slavery were; incidentially, you don’t even need to read the words of abolitionists or slaves themselves (though both would be good to read) to gain a perspective of whether or not slavery was considered ‘normal’ or bad by the standards of the time. Just look at the lyrics to Britain’s most celebratory, triumphalist song of the 18th century, Rule Britannia. James Thomson didn’t write “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves; though there’s nothing inherently wrong with slavery.” They knew it was something shameful, something to be dreaded, even while celebrating it.

But anyways, the kind of avowedly forward-looking people we that are saddled with now, with their apparent concern for the future of the human species – especially the wellbeing of thus far non-existent future humans, as opposed to actual real living humans are, unlike the Amish, okay with progress, in the material sense of cars, computers, aircraft, spacecraft. But that only makes their core concern with traditional values and what is natural/unnatural even more nonsensical. If the defining thing about human beings is nature – men are like this, but not like that, women are like that, but not this; that nature dictates that compassion and medical science ate wasted on the weak and inferior, etc, then why draw the line at controlling gender and reproduction? Why get excited about the use of vaccines, or whether or not people “should” eat meat? If nature/”natural” really is the be all end all of human existence, why wear clothes, drive cars, cook food, use computers, build houses? At what point does nature dictate what we do or can or should do? Isn’t everything humans do inherently natural because we have the capacity to do it and actually do do it?

Again, despite the supposed rationalism that fuels the superiority complexes of so many powerful people in whatever sector, their bullshit traditional ideas are dictated against – and always have been – by the lived experience of almost everyone in the world. If ‘real men’ are strong, rational and above all heterosexual, how come most of us will have met, throughout our lives, emotional, irrational men who can’t cope with pressure, who aren’t in control of themselves or their environment? How come homosexuality has existed since the beginning of recorded time and does not go away no matter how traditional or repressive society becomes or how much generation after generation insists that it is unnatural? If ‘real women’ are weak, gentle, sentimental, maternal, submissive and above all heterosexual, how come (etc, etc, etc, etc) Because of decadent western society? Well Western society is partly founded on the ideas of Ancient Greece, which though pretty misogynistic, famously did not have quite the same views on sexuality. And how come these people equally exist in every other society too? Could it be that traditional ideas of ‘human nature’ have nothing to do with actual nature but have always existed in western patriarchal societies simply to reinforce the status quo in the interests of those at the top of the hierarchical tree? From monarchies to oligarchies to modern democracies and communist states – all of which have their own ruling class, even when it is explicitly labelled otherwise – it’s been in the interest of those in charge to prevent anything which fundamentally changes the way things work.

For similar reasons, people in western society (perhaps elsewhere; I am no expert) who live unremarkable and mediocre lives within essentially complacent, and often apolitical circles are increasingly drawn to right rather than left wing extremism to gain prominence and (importantly) material success. Extremist views across the spectrum are entertainingly “edgy” and titillating to people who like to be entertained by controversy and/or shocked by outrageous behaviour, but right-wing views are far more acceptable within the media – and therefore are far more lucrative and rewarding – because they don’t threaten the financial basis that underpins the media and political structure.

So in short – only joking, this will be a long sentence (deep breath). If comedian or podcaster A) gains millions of followers who are excited about disruptive ideas that undermine the state by questioning the validity of the (sigh) mainstream media, by interrogating ideas of media ownership and the accumulation of wealth and power and so on, that represents a genuine threat to Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere, Meta and Elon Musk in a way that comedian or podcaster B), gaining millions of followers who lean towards ideas that disrupt society by attacking progressive, egalitarian or (sigh) “woke” culture does not. Regardless of the actual or avowed political beliefs of these media magnates, is comedian/podcaster A or comedian/podcaster B going to be the one they champion in order to tap into the zeitgeist (which media magnates have to do to survive)?

BUT ANYWAY, it would be nice to think that these things would be less central or at least more ignorable in 2024. It would also be nice if people in power could not enable the worst elements in society (where the two things are separable). It would be more than nice if the governments of the world would listen to people and end the butchering of helpless civilians. It’s important to remember that it is in the interests of governments – even relatively benign ones – that people in general feel powerless. But we’re not. If making resolutions works for you then make them, if not then don’t, if you have goals then aim for those and you may achieve something even if not everything you want to achieve. But if something is unacceptable to you, don’t accept it. You may have money, power, time or you may have little more than your own body and/or your own mind, but those are 100% yours and the most important things of all. Happy New Year and good luck!