In current news: it is the Second Coming of Oasis. Adele is still counting (her previous album, if I have it right, was called $600,000; the next one is to be called $800,000). Ed Sheeran has some Beatles and Led Zeppelin records in his collection. Elvis Presley is triple-vaccinated, somewhere, but just won’t die. And it is rumoured that Christopher Guest or someone will update Spinal Tap to make it about a female singer-songwriter called Tinal Spap or Tinker Swallow or something similar, who has boyfriends, writes cold turkey songs about them, and becomes not only Bigger than Jesus but Bigger than the Beatles.
What is going on with music? Not the musicians, but the music? Yes, indeed, Julie Burchill, Simon Price, Stuart Lee, Marcus Berkmann and countless others think that the second coming of Oasis is good/bad/ugly. But, who cares? Apart from the cellos and brushed drums of ‘Wonderwall’ (“To die is gonna be the die”, is workin’ class Hamlet, innit?), their discography is not up to much, musically. “Mere zeitgeist stuff, my dear,” one imagines Noel Coward saying, “now be a darling and pass the gin.”
As everyone knows, dimly, music is finished. The best band I saw in Turkey (called Spitfire) played old Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons and Jethro Tull songs. The guitarist, Suleyman Bagcioglu, even played his replica solos with a cigarette moving between lip and headstock. They added a bass solo to the Hendrix classic ‘Third Stone from the Sun’. Why? Because the Axial Age of modern music was the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. We cannot forget this, but it is part of the problem. This is because the existence of recording and the survival of music on vinyl, tape, cloud has meant two things: 1) that we still have that classical 60s and 70s music, and 2) that from the 1970s onwards there was an evolutionary pressure at all times to ‘improve’ music, change it, sell more, convince the corporate men. In the 1970s the corporate men had stood apart, and invested in everyone, leaving Caravan and Soft Machine to record five albums and sell a hundred records. By the 1980s that was all over. The entire history of modern music is a double history: a history of the music and a history of the money. In the 1960s the music led to the money. By 2000 or so, nay, of course, the 1980s, the money was making the music: the music was playing to the soundtrack of the money. I defy anyone to dispute this hypothesis.
Music has always had some sort of relation to politics. Fanfares, fife and drums, are military. ‘The Last Post’, ‘Reveille’ etc. (used for the funerals of Churchill and Elizabeth II, as if they were to die, and then to wake). National Anthems: all oddly sub-classical, usually taking the form of a march. Back at the beginning of political philosophy, Plato thought certain modes were a threat to the polis. Classical music and choral music always depended on aristocratic and episcopal endowment. But modern music is the ultimate sign that our world is economic as well as political, and that economic imperatives have not so much levelled down musical tastes as levelled them across into superficially various repetitions on a theme. I expect we’ll be hearing ‘pop’ until our civilisation fades out.
Judging by our contemporary music, dominated as it is by certain four-chord rounds, one might say that our society is threatened not by the modes Plato hated but by the demonic insistence of I, V, VI minor, and IV – ubiquitous in contemporary pop, as demonstrated by the Axis of Awesome. This four-chord round is an inversion of the chord pattern from all those standards like ‘Poetry in Motion’ in the 1960s which cycled around I, VI minor, IV, V. Odd how we like our rounds. There are other four chord songs, the famous chopping four of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and Blur’s mocking ‘Song #2’. There are not many one chord songs, apart from Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’. A good example of a two chord song is ‘A Horse With No Name’ which da-dahs on forever. Most simple songs are three-chord songs, I, IV and V (country songs, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ etc.) These three are also found in the ubiquitous twelve-bar blues: a happy discovery for every young guitarist, when they discover that they too can write a song by repeating a melodic line, first over E and then over A. It’s all great music for monotony, for monopoly, and for Covid-n-Climate compliance.
Music should be much more complicated and much less compliant. Though Pythagoras liked simplicity in harmonics, it is advanced harmony that has usually, when on this side of disorder, been considered heavenly. Anyone who knows Bach or a hymn like ‘O Sacred Head Sore Wounded’ or any of Holst’s Planets knows that much music in the West has slipped around modally, so that the composer seems to be shifting from one scale to another as the music continues. Anyone who has, like me, tried to learn the Adagio from the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ will share my astonishment at how Beethoven modulated from C# minor to B minor to F# minor and round and back again. Anyone who has listened to the ‘Tristan chord’ (F B D# G#) – or, more likely, the ‘Hendrix chord’ (with its internal blues dissonance, clashing a minor and major third), or the ‘Bond chord’ (with its querying suspension of major seventh and minor third), or the ‘Chicky chord’ – that I play to my boys, as it is from a cartoon – (with its major ninth and minor third), or the ‘Hard Day’s Night Chord’ (which, I learn, after reading a scientific analysis, was a cluster of A C D E F G, with George Martin’s piano hidden behind George Harrison’s guitar, playing the rogue F) – has awoken to the magnificent scepticism and querying to be found in the greatest music.
Not only is there pitch and harmony, assonance and dissonance, there is also the other business of rhythm. Most contemporary music plods or traps around in a boring four-in-the-bar, 1, 2, 3, 4. (Repeat, repeat. Save? – Delete.) But, again, anyone who has admired ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd or ‘Cinema Show’ by Genesis has learnt to respond to sevens, and anyone who has enjoyed ‘Take Five’ or Holst’s ‘Mars’ or the ‘Mission Impossible Theme’ has discovered just how exciting fives can be. I was once in my office in Cambridge listening to ‘Flite’ by Cinematic Orchestra (which is in sevens), on repeat, when a friend summoned me to the night club below. I found the music there, though loud, almost overwhelmingly unexciting, stuck in a rut of fours. I cannot remember which one of the Mission Impossible films attempted to change the five-beat theme so it fitted by force into four beats, so it seemed to suggest that Tom Cruise was dramatically riding an electric milk float on behalf of Mission Laborious.
Now we have YouTube we can explore music, with the help of Rick Beato or Wings of Pegasus or any number of other adepts: these confirm the view that music was good, and now is bad. Years ago, when the internet was young, I read almost the entirety of George Starostin’s website of essays on the music of the 1960s, 1970s and after: and he, a Russian academic, made an argument I had never seen uttered before (certainly not in a mainstream book, where the pretence had to be maintained that we had never had it so good, “things could only get better”, etc.), but which I think absolutely correct, which was that music – and here I refer only to popular music, the music associated especially with the guitar and the vinyl album – came to its apex between around 1965 and 1975. Though there were interesting sonic innovations in the 1980s, there was almost nothing – except occasional songs – that got beyond the Beatles, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and some others. The two best singer-songwriters were women: Joni Mitchell and, in her first albums, before she was eaten by the 1980s, Kate Bush. The two best bands later on – in my opinion, of course – and much later, were, by contrast, almost entirely masculine and entirely reactionary: these were Transatlantic and Big Big Train (try ‘Suite Charlotte Pike’ or ‘Underfall Yard’), with perhaps Spock’s Beard and Neal Morse’s other various bands bringing up the rear, and with Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson getting an honourable mention (though he is overly dreary, lacking the human exuberance of Morse, Portnoy, Longdon and the rest). This masculine music really takes off from the 1970s, as if synth pop, dance, club, rap, hiphop and the rest never happened.
Anyhow, I diverge from the rest of the world about music: since the rest of the world appears to like things like ‘Adele’ and ‘Taylor’ and ‘Ed’, not to mention obligatory rap songs at the end of every film. (I shall ignore the nostalgists who simply replay old Iron Maiden, Queen, Bowie songs on their headphones.) Does anyone like music? Who knows what is going on? In an academic book on the changes to the nature of work, Axel Honneth says that work used to be about hands, and now is increasingly about the eye. Well, music has shifted, alas, from ear to eye. Consider Autotune, and pitch correction, which is more about eye than ear. The music may formerly have sounded great, but if Lennon, Mercury, Gibb, Bush etc. go even slightly above or below a G natural then there is now always some cloth-eared eagle-eyed cybernumpty who is willing and able and paid well to snap the singer’s vocal to visual exactitude on a screen. This is probably one more reason why music is not much good at the moment. It is being drowned by corporate mindsets of the sort we are familiar with in politics, but also by the fading out of the ear for music. Perhaps video did kill the radio star: by making everything about the eye.
Music has been of much unmusical significance recently. A month or more ago almost every article was about Taylor Swift. In the last week or so there has been much banter and bitterness about Noel and Liam. Taylor Swift is probably just the ‘vaccine’ in musical form: I don’t know. But what is interesting is that the argument against Oasis seems to be social or even political, as if ‘we’ are as tired of Oasis as we are of Iraq. Sounded good at the time, but in retrospect not so good.
Also political is the interesting contrast between Republican and Democrat in the United States. Trump can barely play a bar or two of a song without receiving twitter condemnation, public refusals to sanction the music and threats of legal action, whereas the Democrats can summon an incredible roster of names, such as Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Coldplay, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, to sanction the use of their songs at the DNC, or even, in the case of Wonder and some others, to appear in person. Why is this? Why are almost all pop stars on the boring Covid-and-Climate Left? Why did Rage Against the Machine supinely comply with the machine? (“Fuck me, I just done what you told me.”)
Well, I think it is because pop stars are the bards of “You have your troubles” and embodiments of – in the immortal phrase of Rod Liddle – “I have had my troubles too”. A songster sings, “I lost my love” or something similar, which resonates with all the others who lost their love, thus earning the songster vast amounts of money which enables him or her to shag with impunity, only later discovering that “they have had their troubles too”, as girlfriends talk to the papers, or boyfriends leave them, or the drugs work only too well: and there they are, on their island of gilt-covered plastic awards, lonely, talking to the piano or ukelele. In short, modern music is, and perhaps has always mostly been, about the hypocrisy of being rich and pretending to have troubles too, while also pretending to care about the poor, and singing for them, while not knowing them, and having only a dim memory of the three years of maturity which preceded fame. This ‘love’ gibberish which has dominated ‘pop’ since the 1950s is a vast distraction. Eventually, after 2000, it was so good it could distract us from the music itself. MTV played its part: and YouTube, by shifting us away from the ear to the eye.
I wonder if any children nowadays discover music by ear. I discovered music when I heard ‘Wonderful Land’ by the Shadows on the radio: I stood still, and couldn’t believe what I was hearing – I was 12 or so. For years afterwards I would hear things and have to ask what it was. What’s that? Prokofiev’s ‘Dance of the Brave Knights’. What’s that? Caravan’s ‘In the Land of Grey and Pink’. What’s that? The third movement of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto. Etc. I wonder if it ever happens now. Probably not.
Instead, everyone exists in a solipsism of four-chord-rounds and trap-beats, musing on how they have had their troubles too. It is the Matrix, the Machine. We can imagine we are raging against it, and then, probably while the headphones are still humming irrelevantly in our ears, and as we stare down at the phone in our hand, we can stretch the other arm out to be jabbed, chipped, fingerprinted, whatever.
[A one bar rest.]The only unhypocritical, and therefore quite possibly the best, modern song: ‘Taxman’ by the Beatles. Discuss.
(Ha, ha, Keir Starmer! Ha, ha, Rachel Reeves!)
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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That asteroid can’t come soon enough, can it?
A science fiction story I remember from the past starts with aliens landing on earth who then immediately proceed to butcher and process humans for some mysterious purpose in vast numbers. All attempts to stop or otherwise fight them fail because of their superior technology and the doom of mankind seems a certainty until someone finally manages to communicate with them. At this point, they immediately stop these activities and sincerely apologize for the unintendend massacre. The problem was that they had entirely failed to realize that humans were something other than contaminated water.
Some certainly aren’t.
Me next for the suicide booth, Bender.
Bloody hell, this is getting dark!
Well, I’ll be certainly be AVOIDing them with my charitable donations from now on.
I accidentally blundered into their donation site, not realising it was an echo-chamber blog, and asked a neutral question exactly what they fund, and whether the White Hats were involved, which led to my being set upon by a gang of virtue-signallers with blue-and-white profile filters. I made my excuses and left.
Can charities (or their employees) be held responsible for misappropriation of funds? If so, this would seem be a splendid opportunity to do that: It’s a safe bet that nobody who ever donated money to Oxfam desired to commission an Oxfalish: English Expertly Undone For The Postcolonial Age report.
It’s pretty clear that big charities have been engaged and proactive in furthering political agendas for decades. How individuals view giving money to charities is up to them but the huge amounts given to them via government regulated lottery monies and directly awarded tax payers money is matter of great concern.
But what should we expect from a fake Tory Party?
What language isn’t “The Language of a Colonising Nation”?
Stand in the Park – Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
What utter planks! At least people like this don’t work for the BBC and civil service. Wait a minute…
“The introduction apologises for being in and about the English language.”— Quite so! In future, please submit your work (woke) in Sanskrit or Coptic.
Or Klingon. More people would understand that, and as it’s the language of a fictitious “colonising nation”, presumably it would be OK for the crackpots at OXFAM.
“In future, please submit your work (woke) in Sanskrit or Coptic…”
because none of the rest of us want to firkin read it.
Perzakerly!
How about Esparanto?
The people at Oxfam must get smacked of their tits on crack, then hold a meeting to discussing the best ways to p off their donors!
I stopped supporting Oxfam years ago when they changed their job description to ‘fighting the anthropogenic 0.001% of a gaseous plant food that keeps everything on this planet alive.’
When they are not using charitable donations to pay for prostitutes they are using them to insult their donors. They pay their CEO a six figure sum to come up with this?
That’s just like the former Silicon Valley Bank: Once a single woketard has managed to get into a position where he can influence employment decisions, he’s going to use that to hire more woketards doing ever more woketarding at the expense of the company until all of the productive staff has been replaced with drones issueing language guides and engaging in performance politics celebrating other woketards for also doing this. This continues until the money has run out. Then, the parasites jump ship and find another host company/ organization.
This is Andrew Bridgen’s speech from this afternoon. You Tube have already taken it down because it’s too much truth for them to handle. Can’t be getting that much contradictory information to the masses now…But if you’re quick you will see at the very start somebody taps the guy with the white hair in front, he goes over to the other side and speaks to somebody and they all get up and leave! So Andrew is left speaking to a near empty room once more. Disgusting! They should be obliged to remain out of basic courtesy! And the guy who replies to Bridgen has nothing in the way of come-back and is a right gonk. See what you think;
https://odysee.com/@AwakenWiki:c/Andrew-Bridgen—Efficacy-of-the-mRNA-covid-19-booster,-17-Mar-2023:e
I don’t have the time to watch this completely ATM (it’s about 27 minutes), but thanks for posting it.
Actually I haven’t watched it all either, just skipped it along. My preference went instead with a dose of The Walking Dead.
Government minister does not answer any of Bridgen’s questions. Same old safe and effective. One day this is going to bite them on the arse.
It’s both disgraceful and insulting in equal measure. I listen to these sock puppets and just think they cannot possibly believe what they’re saying, they’re just toeing the party line.
Extraordinary if true. I have never heard before of a Member of Parliament, speaking in Parliament, being censored. I listened to him speaking on BBC Parliament Channel. What he says is based on ONS data. It at least merits a response from government if they have a different interpretation. Otherwise the impression is that they just don’t want to hear dissent.
Well I’m disgusted because it comes off as being blatantly snubbed by your fellow colleagues. It’s both rude and unprofessional. Also, if this is the sort of treatment Bridgen has now come to expect, does it come as any surprise that these same MPs have also zero interest in listening to the public’s concerns, the vax injured or even contemplating starting an investigation into the safety of the products that they bullied, threatened and coerced people to get, all based on lies and fraud? Their behaviour in Parliament just speaks volumes of their attitude and disinterest towards the British public. I’m not even a UK resident anymore and I feel very, very pissed off watching this.
Thanks
Nations are colonising, by definition.
Oh well, language is difficult and should be banned, to avoid offending people who are a bit dense.
So, as I haven’t colonised anything, I shall now write that in my language, as follows:
Erdle flinsbuk shert’bhi grees klus.
Literally, anything colonised have not I myself.
Hope that hasn’t offended anyone.
Does the guide have lots of euphemisms for sexual offences?
Aren’t Oxfam up to their necks in pedophilia and child abuse in those countries that they claim are victims of colonial power. I’m wondering how they square that particular circle. Perhaps they could take a leaf out if the good book which advises “And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” What is it with these hypocritical parasites that makes them think we should do as they say and not as they do.
Watch this 6min video from Truth Be Told posted 2 hours ago, thanking Andrew Bridgen. Very moving.
https://twitter.com/CoviLeaksCVVAM
Thanks
The Newspeak is getting more Orwellian by the day, it seems.
I stopped donating when the prostitute scandal broke. Also our local Oxfam shop has a very peculiar smell which I don’t like and the ‘holier than thou’ attitude of some of the staff adds to my dislike of it.
This latest stuff is ridiculous. So, it’s nevermore for me and I’ll bet they’ll lose donations.
As per Oxfam’s Annual Report and Accounts 2021/2022, the salary of the current CEO Dr. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is reportedly well over ₤120,936 and the company’s turnover is ₤400,000,000. After the CEO, the highest salary is of CFO who is paid around ₤108,703. Isn’t the term ” pounds” a left over from Colonial rule? Just saying
A charity that can afford to spend donated funds on producing such guff, clearly has forgotten what it is for, it appears in common with many organisations it believes it is more important to virtue signal, rather than actually perform the job it is supposed to be doing.
I will no longer donate money, clothes, things to Oxfam, neither will I purchase from its shops, clearly it is spending charitable donations on too many staff, with too little to do whilst the poor and diseased suffer for Oxfams vanity.
So the English language didn’t exist before the English set up colonies? Gosh, the standard of history teaching is really impressive.
I know. And Yorkshire folk spoke something quite different from Viking before those colonisers showed up. B*stards.
And don’t get me started on the French
Not even the french like the french.
English colonies had by-and-large ceased to exist by the 1980s, ie, about 30 years ago. Hence, today’s decolonizers are preaching to an echo chamber filled with themselves about a supposed issue which doesn’t exist anymore. Or actually, exists in the exact opposite of what it used to be: Colonization is nothing but immigration of foreigners with the intent to settle permanently in the area they immigrated into. Usually, they don’t care very much about the natives and just themselves up exactly (or as exactly as possible) as things used to be in the place they came from. Considering this, the England of 2023 is a heavily colonized nation, to a degree where large parts are barely recognizable as English at all. There are even – although this is still officially denied – Sharia courts operating here handing out covert death penalities to people they deem religious transgressors and the police is backing them.
Silly buggers.
NEVER allow this absurd wokery to influence your world view. At all times choose your own words and thoughts, for if you let these insidious central planners choose them for you then your freedom is LOST, and as Joni Mitchell would say “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone”.
Oxfam’s owes its existence to the UK’s colonial heritage as do many other charities. Oxfam is known for its high salaries in the sector but I suspect if you look at its diversity record, most of its leaders will be the children and grandchildren of those very same colonalists from whom they derive their privileged positions and continue to benefit from albeit by trashing their legacy.
I suspect those who wrote the guide know very little about history besides what they have been told.
Human history shows that the Western culture has created the most free, richest, equal and diverse civilization in the history of the world.