Victorianitas

Anyway, it's a neatly-written article with some great turns of phrase - "the modern frenzy of political cross-dressing," "the Bono school of messianic non-politics," and Paul Weller referring to Boris Johnson as "that div who's running for mayor" - although I wish John Harris hadn't swatted the Morrissey issue that soon. "When it comes to Cameron's supposedly beloved Smiths," he says, "younger readers might want to factor out Morrissey's recent strange views about immigration and his all-round post-Smiths embrace of a crabby kind of small-C conservatism, and think instead about the themes [...] that implicitly put the Smiths at 90 degrees to their time." And you think, well, all right, but we Younger Readers don't have an image of the Morrissey of twenty years ago shining bright enough to blot that out, do we?

Not that I disagree, entirely. It's easy enough to see why the Smiths deserved their reputation in the 80s. But it's a little trickier to work out why we're meant to keep on claiming a man as a hero of the left after he wrapped himself in a Union Jack onstage at Finsbury Park, used the word 'flooded' in reference to immigration, and claimed that England had been 'thrown away' as a result. And if you weren't there for the 80s - or if you were there, but you didn't get out of single digits until the end of the decade - it's difficult to appreciate just how he could have mattered enough to make whatever he says now irrelevant, let alone mattered enough to have legions of not-yet-disaffected-enough fans leaping to support him in the latest war with NME, shouting "Out of context!" and "He wouldn't have said that!" louder than the man himself. (I read the interview, and not only did he indeed say that, but the only conceivable context in which it would have been excusable is an unquoted interviewer saying "Morrissey, I will give you this biscuit in return for your best Enoch Powell impression." David Cameron can have him for all I care.)

But then, our heroes wouldn't be our heroes if we let them disappoint us. And they'd never make it onto that pedestal without a younger generation that Just Doesn't Get It, either. Those of us whose teenage years were measured out in apolitical Britpop might be immune from the soul-gnawing feeling of watching Morrissey degenerate into a talking version of the Daily Mail, but hey, at least they had him back when he was good enough to make whatever he said later into something they could 'factor out'. Who did we have, Oasis?

Still, I don't think David Cameron et al's claims to love the anti-Thatcher music of the 80s ('well, I just liked the tune!') have anything to do with forces so pure as nostalgic hero-worship, or indeed the kind of musical cluelessness that John Harris suggests (albeit in the tone of a confused shrug) in the Guardian piece. Just a wild stab in the dark here, but I suspect the Tories are claiming such things as part of a wider effort to grab the massive disaffected-former-idealist voting bloc. Still feel the odd twinge of loyalty to your younger self, even though your Clash LPs are gathering dust in the attic and the Telegraph seems to make so much sense these days? It's okay! David Cameron's just like you! And so's Morrissey, so don't feel guilty!

But anyway, the reason I'm writing about all this a month later is because of (the excellent) Johann Hari's interview with (the still un-jaded) Billy Bragg, who summed up the whole thing in the best way possible:

As an earnest man, Bragg has a twitching nose for phoniness. That morning, he appeared on Andrew Marr’s morning programme, and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne told him he loved his music. “Him and Cameron claim they loved the Jam and the Clash,” he says. “It’s all lies. I can spot a Tears For Fears fan a mile off. I bet they spent the eighties singing along to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’”

--
* - Speaking of which, is that true? I was sure it was someone else who sent their kids there and Shouldn't Have Done, but someone swore blind to me recently that it was Paul Weller. It wasn't, was it? Was it?

I only believe in an interventionist God when it comes to iTunes. Maybe the world won't rearrange itself for me, maybe all prayers will come down to Turgenev's summary "Great God, grant that two and two not make four," but the soundtrack to my life will be chosen with a divine sense of poetry. When I got an apologetic e-mail from a friend I'd fallen out with some years ago, iTunes's shuffle function played the Magnetic Fields' 'I Don't Believe You.' Reading posts on the Foucault blogwars of last year, iTunes played me Cher singing 'Oh, No, Not My Baby'. And walking down the corridor out of the building with my final, final, corrected and revised thesis in my arms, somewhat pissed off with my department and very disillusioned with academia, my iPod played the Ramones song 'Poison Heart' on full volume: "Well, I just wanna walk right out of this world..."

It's not the last time I left that building (hell, I have to be in on Friday to teach). But oh, how I wish it was. It was perfect.

[And on the subject of music, to she who knows who she is: a full mix CD of angry/sad/angrysad songs is available on request. I can also do a sideline in Mindlessly Chirpy Music, if that'd help. I have Aqua on here, and no shame at all.]

When my friend L was redecorating her spare room, a lengthy and tiring job that required large amounts of furniture-moving, spider-chasing and junk removal, she told me she wanted the whole thing to happen in a montage. Painting done a chunk at a time to the sound of some chirpy pop number, interspersed with shots of L and her boyfriend wiping sweat from their foreheads, sorting old shoes into pairs, polishing floors, laughingly flicking paint at each other - and the whole thing over and done by the final bars.

So I've decided: I'd like the next few months of my life (post-PhD, pre-finally getting a job please God please) to go by in a montage, too. This is not a particularly productive or interesting time, I'm fairly sure all the important stuff could be crammed into four minutes or so, and it'd be much less tedious and much more cheerful to watch in light-hearted, quirky montage form.

It'd have to start off with applying for jobs, of course (chin in hands, staring miserably at CV?). Coffee cups building up around the computer. Running for the bus in the rain, umbrella flipping inside-out in comical manner; scrabbling between sofa cushions for change; marking student work with my eyes closed; ringing the closing bells at the library (which could also connote 'Gradual Dissatisfaction With Minion Job and Minimal Pay', so there could be a few of these - first time, ringing bells after carefully reading time-list and checking watch against main clock; second time, ringing bells after glancing at watch and rolling eyes; third time, ringing bells without looking up from a book); flipping through depressing 'There have been no jobs matching your chosen search criteria' e-mails from jobs.ac.uk; dancing round the living room in pyjamas to the tune from Flashdance (I don't do this, but what the hell, it's a montage, I could); washing dishes; throwing away bank statements unread; turning sofa upside down and thumping it to see if it'll dislodge any more coins; staring glumly at the goldfish; typing madly away at an article, then deleting 17 out of the last 18 sentences; shaking head at CV in sad, resigned manner.

The tune should be the Fratellis' 'Whistle for the Choir', which gets the mood just right, and also fits really nicely for the job application process ('Is it out of line / if I was to be bold and say would you be mine? / Because I may be a beggar, and you may be the Queen / And though I may be on a downer, I'm still ready to dream...')

As before, plus:

'So Much Wine' (The Handsome Family) - I can't believe I forgot this one, as any song that begins 'I had nothing to say on Christmas day, when you threw all your clothes in the snow' deserves pride of place on anybody's Christmas album. It's got that Del Amitri-esque trick of balancing lyrics of relentless despair with a chirpy tune, too ('Listen to me, butterfly: there is only so much wine you can drink in one life, but it will never be enough to save you from the bottom of your glass'), which would surely fit somebody's Christmas, but I was just listening to it while reading a blog post on the MLA convention, which gave it a whole new twist. Good luck, brave souls.

'When The Water Gets Cold And Freezes On The Lake' (Herman Dune) - Herman Dune are a French band my brother's crazy about, but I could take them or leave them, this song excepted. Good breakup songs are difficult to pull off this simply ('I love the smell of your hair and the blue of your eyes / But you're far too complicated, and you tell a lot of lies'), and the return to a freezing lake as a point of resolution is something sharp. This should be the other bookend of a mix CD that begins with Joni Mitchell's 'River'.

'Christmas In Washington' (Steve Earle) - which has very little to do with Christmas or winter or anything related, really, but earns its way onto every such playlist simply by virtue of being really, really good.

'Through December' (Laura Viers) - Haunting, mournful, sounds like the concept of 'bleak' set to music, but it's gorgeous. (On a related note, I had this playing on repeat when I was marking my last batch of undergraduate essays.)

'Christmas In Nevada' (Willard Grant Conspiracy) - I can't, by any rhetorical charades, make the lyrics here look like anything festive, but I can say that it's so musically upbeat that by the time the singer hits 'I'll take my pay and buy a gun / Steal a car and hope it runs / Find a place to make my name', it's up there with 'God bless us, every one!'

'River' (Joni Mitchell)
'O Little Town of Bethlehem' (Jewel)
'O Come O Come Emmanuel (Sufjan Stevens)
'Sixteen Maybe Less' (Iron & Wine/Calexico)
'It Came Upon a Midnight Clear' (Sixpence None the Richer)
'7 O'Clock News/Silent Night' (Simon and Garfunkel)
'Carol of the Bells' (Vienna Boys' Choir)
'Merry Xmas Everyone' (Noel Gallagher)
'Mary's Boy Child' (Sissel Kyrkjebø)
'Let It Be' (Joan Baez)
'Hark! The Herald Angels Sing' (most of the Rat Pack, apparently)

Re: 'Let It Be' - no, no, I know it's not. But it's on there anyway, mostly because I love how forcefully she sings 'There will be no sorrow', as if it's an order.

[Part 1 of an occasional series.]

There's this movement you pick up when you spend too much time in cities. Duck your head - just a little - step sideways, turn your hands palms-in, and keep walking. "Would you like -" No. "Do you have time -" No. "Did you know -" No, and I don't want to, and please don't tell me, just let me get past you without acknowledging that you were ever there. It's not personal; it's just that I have somewhere to be, and I don't have time to stop and decide whether or not to care.

If the Weakerthans' 'Pamphleteer' was what it claims to be, a song about a lonely soul handing out pamphlets for a cause nobody's interested in and reflecting on a lost love while he does it, I'd like it less than I do now. It's sweet enough, and it's a clever conceit, weaving phrases of manifestos and protest songs into a hymn of unrequited love: 'Why do I still see you in every mirrored window, in all that I could never overcome?' When he trails off with 'I am your pamphleteer, I'm your pamphleteer,' you know it's not just the city he's singing to. Still... the power of those lines is lessened somewhat when they're is turned into a faux-profound backdrop for yet another "She's not interested in me - :(" song, surely? I'm not going to argue 'Pamphleteer' describes the history of socialism, or that it's making some grand, detached, post-post-modern comment about the material it's using, but then it's not a love song, either. More than anything, it's a song about that little sidestep dodge on a busy city street.

It would be difficult to argue that the Weakerthans are cheapening the history of left-wing protest, for a start. Lead singer John K. Samson, formerly of anarcho-punk band Propaghandi, co-founded the not-for-profit collective publishing company Arbeiter Ring; they've sung 'Solidarity Forever' on stage before, and while their own songs aren't as blatantly political as Propaghandi's, you can still feel it there. Winnipeg's Golden Boy statue becomes a 'Golden Business Boy' in 'One Great City!', crowing out his love for the town while his wrecking ball smashes it apart. (Of course, it's Winnipeg - all cities are Winnipeg in Weakerthans songs - but equally of course, it's every other city too. I heard them sing this live in England to a crowd that turned the refrain of 'I hate Winnipeg' into 'I hate Manchester', and it fit so well you couldn't even see the join.)

And if 'Pamphleteer' does shrink the political into the personal, it at least does so beautifully. You wonder how a figure eloquent enough to describe the 'rhetoric and treason of saying that I'll miss you', or present himself as a 'spectre haunting Albert Street', can be so helplessly, awkwardly silent in the face of whoever he's singing to. (I don't think any lines ever written sum up awkward as well as these ones do: 'How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you; how you don't know where you should look, so you look at my hands.') The grand, swooping chords don't clash with the quiet, half-abashed tune under the voice, but blend into it. When the fragments of protest songs and slogans turn up, there's no way to parse them neatly and keep them separate from the pamphleteer's own voice: 'Sing oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one like me remembering the way it could have been.' The lyrics in the liner put the line from 'Solidarity Forever' in quotation marks - 'Sing, "Oh, what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one" like me remembering...' - but that doesn't seem quite right, either. Really, what this needs is a quotation mark that fades out on a gradient. Weakerthans album liners never put line breaks in the lyrics; probably that's why.

It's the 'Solidarity Forever' line that makes it for me. This isn't a song about hopeless causes, or about one individual's romantic woes appropriating a history of political struggle. If it's unclear whether pouring out one's heart to someone who doesn't want it is a metaphor for pressing a heartfelt pamphlet to someone's chest and watching it flutter ungrasped to the ground, or vice versa, then maybe it's supposed to be. What matters is the absence of connection, the isolation, the weakness of being just one when 'just one' counts as nothing at all. If there's any kind of political principle underlying this, it's that nobody can feel like a whole person without someone else caring enough to champion whatever they care about. And that sounds like a fine one to me.