Just one more in a long line
The thing about 21st Century communications – e.g. the modern internet and social media, plus probably loads of other things that my grandchildren aged 7 and 3 know about but which I don’t – is that nobody is quite sure who and what might be listening to or reading your outpourings. These days human beings (even us oldies) are obsessed with ‘being involved’.
[There was a story in the media earlier this week that the police are reporting a recent surge in sexting by 7 and 8 year olds. (Which sounds completely absurd, only that in this era of Trumpery and ‘anything goes’, maybe not). On this subject generally, I could only smile – and agree with the sentiment – when my cousin told me recently that his 83-year old aunt had confided in him that she quite liked the idea of doing ‘sexting’, the only thing stopping her so far being her lack of knowledge of technically how to do it and indeed what it was!].
These days, for example, you can record and post on the web a video of your dog looking sheepish amid a pile of rubbish and mayhem he’s wreaked within your home whilst you were out.
A fortnight later, and it has either disappeared into the ether forever … or else it has gone viral, you’ve had 12,000,000 hits on YouTube, advertisers are queuing up to offer you money, and credible offers are flooding in to publish a cookery book and host your own ‘live’ chat show on prime-time US television.
When it comes to the editorial principles of this august organ, I guess the idea that anybody beyond the age of fifty, or even those not yet there, might like to ‘put out there’ their perceptions of the modern world – as it were, as a form of “We post, therefore we exist” statement that sounds as it if should be parked in the file marked ‘Loonies’.
Especially when we don’t much care whether anyone bothers to read our burblings.
But maybe that’s not the point, is it?
Why should any rational being on Earth deliberately pump data signals out into the universe – and simultaneously search for evidence of others a million light years away doing the same back – other than for the sheer hell of it and maybe seek to make some sense of it all, whatever it is?
Which is also why I get to hold the post as music editor of the Rust. Like most consumers of music out there in La-La Land, the truth is that I belong to the school of thought neatly summed up as “I may perhaps have only a passing acquaintance with notions of quality, but I know what I like”.
Just like all the other journalists and pundits, I had to listen to a vast mountain of rubbish – and write a whole load of inconsequential nadder-nadder about it every week – just for the opportunity, once in a while, to come across the unexpected ‘oasis in a desert’ of an artiste or a work that was really special, just like any young princess has to kiss a lot of frogs to find her Prince Charming.
Where that leaves me in my seventh decade is in the metaphorical hospital ward designed for those cynics who have seen/heard it all before and don’t much like the prospect of the same coming round again, as it always does eventually.
Let me give an example that occurred to me within the past ten days.
For it was about that long ago that I first caught the rumblings of the music industry’s jungle drums about Pure Comedy, the shortly-to-be-released new album by the highly-regarded US musician/songwriter (36 years old next month) Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty.
These days most of my little dips into modern ‘relevant’ music consist of reading the monthly music magazines and visiting my favourite websites. These are where I pick up my understanding of what is happening and – via the reviews – receive pointers as to which new music might be worth listening to, if not purchasing.
I knew of Josh Tillman largely through his membership of a moderately-successful US band called the Fleet Foxes six or seven years ago. He was their drummer and wrote a few songs, though I’m proud to say – as with so many artistes since 1990 – that I have never heard a single note of Fleet Foxes music and would not care a jot if it became ever thus.
However, the previews – and then reviews as the launch date for Tillman’s [sorry Father John Misty’s] new album approached – were so uniformly positive that my antennae picked up and I took notice.
Here are some links to examples of what I mean:
Alex Petridis, writing in – THE GUARDIAN
Leonie Cooper, in the – NME
Will Hermes, in – ROLLING STONE
Andy Gill, in – THE INDEPENDENT
Tom Doyle, making it his album of the week in – MOJO
You might say that – bombarded by reviews such as these and indeed many more I then sought out as my radar ‘fixed’ on the product in question – I could be forgiven for metaphorically going down to the sea shore, disrobing into my ‘budgie-smuggler’ Speedos, taking a deep breath and diving into the waves.
That is exactly what I did. On Wednesday I visited the Amazon website and – for a total of about £16 (£9.99 for the CD, the rest for packing and postage) – I organised ‘next day’ delivery.
Yesterday the post arrived late morning and there was my little baby – my passport to a new, belated appreciation of what passes for quality ‘current music’ these days.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I found the time to relax and put the CD into my hi-fi system, turn up the volume and close my eyes, hoping for the best.
About a minute and a half into the second track I was getting out of my armchair to go to the hi-fi and switch it off. Fine and dandy, hard-worked over, well-produced it might have been, classy musician though Tillman (Father John Misty) may well be, but nothing about it was to my taste.
Second division-standard Elton John-lite is how I’d sum it up, folks – and I write that as someone who absolutely hates Elton John”s music. Not so much Pure Comedy, more Pure Purgatory.
[I note in passing that I’m not having a good run at the moment – that’s the third CD in a row over the past two years that I’ve bought entirely on the uniform positivity of its reviews and then consigned to the ‘Discard’ pile on the day it arrived. As I quipped to a visitor yesterday: “That’s the great thing about the price of CDs being as low as £9.99 these days – when they disappoint it doesn’t feel quite such a waste on money when you throw them straight in the bin! …”].
