In the oak tree I hoped we’d feel like this forever / Forever, forever-ever, for-ever-ever … ?
The wheel keeps on turning. Time elapses. The world moves on. Things improve, stuff deteriorates. Change is the only constant, blah blah.
And yet …
It is the duty of us sentient adults to try and put a finger on exactly what sort of change has or is taking place. Things are lost and things are gained, but there has to be some sort of judgment or conclusion (however tentative), some sort of summary of where we are now, some record of what’s important, some suggestion about how to push things forward.
My conclusion is, very simply, that this decade we lost more than we gained. Some brilliant new music was produced. New possibilities were opened up. A new level of experiental variety was arrived at. Stars were born, and tyrants gotten rid of. But (and I say this with a fiercely idealistic sense that positive change can and will take place in the future) when all is said and done, this decade the negatives were just a bit too numerous.
You want specifics? Well, there’s the obvious stuff. 9/11. Afghanistan. Iraq. The neo-liberal political consensus. Blair. Bush. Brown. Cameron. The NUFC debacle. A culture of all-pervasive consumerist hedonism and shallowness. Ideology put on the back-burner. The death of both my parents, way way before their time. Widening inequality. Impenetrable individualism. League tables. Ambition. Careerism. Ketamine. People reading less. People thinking less. People caring less.
And when it comes to music there have been some pretty obvious lows. Read the rest of this entry »
FARMER OF THE YEAR. GLASTO DRUDGERY.
OMM managed to get its decade review out on the weekend with the usual album and singles of the decade lists, as well an article from Morley outlining the infantile nature of such exercises. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Instead it was an interview with one of the ‘people of the decade’, Michael Eavis. When asked a question about Jay-Z’s ‘controversial’ headline slot giving Glastonbury a shot in the arm (alright, it wasn’t a question, but a sports journalist-esque statement with “didn’t it?” added at the end, thus allowing the interviewee to realise all he is required to do is agree), he said this . . .
“Oh yeah, and the whole culture of Glastonbury had a facelift. And it was the year before Obama was elected in America. God, it was so nicely timed, that.”
First things first, and those comments on Obama strike me as more than a little unsettling. Is he name dropping Obama on the basis that both he and Jay-Z are African-Amercian and therefore automatically linked? Is he comparing the now established conservatism at Glastonbury to America’s own neo-con vein and inability to integrate following years of de facto and de jure segregation? Is he deluded to the point of thinking that Glastonbury is influential enough to impress ideas upon the American people? It’s nicely timed that an artist who is black and American headlined Glastonbury because a black American became President as well?
Read the rest of this entry »