Part of the fun of th'interveb is the ability to share... Here is an image BANG! No you don't have to queue up to the Guggenheim, or wait for the salon to host its grand exhibition; here it is BANG! Here's a bit of music I think you'd like, no there's no need to call around to my house and watch me pull out my vinyl LP's ...BANG! whatcha think? Good eh? Here's their influences BANG! Hear the similarities? It was used in this scene for that film BANG! Rick Astley did a cover of it...BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG!
Okay the last bit was me shooting Rick Astley repeatedly in the nose but you get what I'm at: this is the world now and we spread the pop-culture 'round the web like so much manure. Methinks and mehopes that this manure will prove fertile ground indeed for the pop-pickers of tomorrow,- but I wouldn't be my anachronistic, crotchety curmudgeonly, Luddite self if some small part of me didn't think that back in the day of queuing outside record shops that the comparative inaccessibility of music meant that the music itself 'meant more'.
It must have, mustn't it?
Era I dunno... Either way the availability of all this musical output does make me feel perversely pleased if ever I go looking for summat and can't find it... It's like somehow the Borg haven't assimilated it yet, or something. But whose not there?
Once upon a time I couldn't find any MOMUS, but those days are gone.
Nobody is not there anymore it seems. 10 years ago maybe, but now everything's pretty much everywhere.
Today's blog, is an act of gratitude to the people* who reached into their vinyl collection and put the needle on the record so that they could introduce me to this work, (*you know who you are).
In the pantheon of pretentious 1980's pop-musicians; MOMUS makes Morrissey look like a member of Status Quo. Which is why you have to love him and also why nobody seems to have heard of him.
I searched the whole wide web, I searched the whole wide web just to find him, well one song in particular. Might not be your cup of tea, but it's my favourite by him and I do think he has some crackers.
In this one he uses the conceit of taking the wars of the 20th Century and making them just one persons life: They live, stuff happens, they die...as a story it's a bit like that film 'Synechdoce New York' I spose.
Please check it out 'coz it's worth the listen.
Clicky here for the song
Here are the words:
Three Wars
The first war, the war of 14 to 18
Begins with an uprising of adrenalin
The first war begins with the testicles descending
And desire assassinating the child
that you once were
The war begins at school
when you rebel against the maths teacher
Who touched you up behind his desk
And ends
when you've failed your final maths exam
And had your first success with sex
The war brings new discoveries
How to make dog fights
with your thyroid and pituitary glands
How the Zeppelin can fly at your command
And a generation lays down its life
When after all they've done for you
The good parents
The good parents die
Resurrected
as your enemy
And when the girl you've started wanting
More than all you've ever wanted says no
She is
She is your enemy too
But you survive
And from the trenches of your newly found opinions
Quickly dug, quickly abandoned
The white flag waves
for an armistice on Christmas Day
Then your voice rings round the family front room
Like a drill sergeant's in front of his platoon
Broken
Broken too soon
But you survive
The second war, the war of 39 to 45
Begins when you identify your own inner Third Reich
The second war begins with a sudden hypochondria
A visit to a doctor who waves a piece of paper and says
'This time...
it's just a false alarm'
The war begins at work
with some intoxicating news
When the letter comes that offers you promotion
And ends
when you decide to let them offer it
To younger men with more ambition
The war brings new perspectives
when you suddenly see through
The politics of power which possessed you
Through all your waking hours
And a generation lays down its life
When the whizz kids of the industry
Slow down
Slow down and die
resurrected
as your enemy
And when the woman who accepted you
When all the rest rejected you goes
She is
She is your enemy too
But you survive
And at weekends you get custody of an only child
Already adolescent and unreconciled
Who laughs at you,
you and your new-found piety
And his laugh rings round your faint desire for god
Like an order from an inner firing squad
Breaking
Breaking the ties of blood
But you survive
But the third war is the war that never comes
The war that never comes to everyone
Begins the second after next by accident
Ends everything except itself
The war brings nothing,
the unimaginable
That the old imagine all the time
Imagine
imagination dying
And a generation lays down its life
When it refuses the creation
of new ways
new ways to live
And when the great invention falls apart
Ripping through the atoms of your heart
The third war will start
Which no-one survives
Not exactly 'Walkin on sunshine', but I love it.
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