Dear Bobby Gillespie,
Re ‘It’s Alright, It’s OK’: it’s actually really not.
Not at all.
Look, someone needs to tell you! No
other fucker seems to have done it so I guess it’s down to me. I
appreciate that you’re trying to invoke the spirit of ’69 with the
B&W footage, the haircuts, the sound, the words… but this is 2013. I
know – because you’re opinionated and articulate enough to shout about
how despicable the Tory cunts running the country are in interviews -
that you’d welcome change. But it’s not going to happen by rifling
through faded snapshots of the glory days of protest and holding them up
to view, hoping that some of the cool of those mediated images of
counter-cultural youth will rub off on our hopelessness and inertia.
I don’t want to go back to the 60s and
70s, however cool they look from here. They were also sodden with
homophobia, sexism, racism, every other ism in the book. And despite the
cosmic threads dude, I wouldn’t want to be a mini-dressed flower girl
or a doe-eyed muse: the archetypes open to women 40 years ago are beyond
stale. Let’s not pilfer from the past for our revolutionary ideologues,
be they hippies, striking miners, riot grrls or Suffragettes; let’s
acknowledge them, incorporate their more pertinent points, learn some
lessons and move the fuck on. Find some fresh ones. It truly is the only
way we’re going to set anything ablaze.
The way things are now is new. The way
people are being controlled, set against each other, demoralised and
bled dry may have much in common with past eras of repression but let’s
have some historical specificity here; this moment is unique and
terrible and needs unique and terrible action to counter it.
Retro-gazing is counter revolutionary, Comrade. Get with the programme.
Plus, really? *That* sound again? Make something new. Please. In that Guardian
interview you speak passionately about how you see music as a
revolutionary force, as psychic resistance, but that there song is the
sound of utter resignation, the sound of middle-aged people giving up on
sex. It’s the sound of a life crunching to a halt in the
acknowledgement that anything glorious that it has ever been is behind
it and it’s only by the eternal pointing out of that one shining moment
when it thought it was astounding that prevents it from sinking into the
mud of mundanity. It’s leather trousers worn by men in pubs. It’s an
OAP still piling the remainder of his hair into his Teddy Boy quiff,
which has over decades thinned to the point where it’s just a flimsy
hint, a ghost of a style. It’s a desperate gathering of youthful
signifiers to shore one’s existence up against death. (Which does not,
in case you were under any illusion to the contrary, work.)
It is NOT the sound of revolution.
Fucking hell.
*rolls eyes*
Not OK at all.
Love from Lucy
I stumbled across this blog pretty randomly and this particular post interested me. I think you have totally misunderstood the concept of the video, I don't think for a minute the band are suggesting a return to the bad elements of the previous decades, but instead they are trying to evoke the revolutionary spirit of the 60s and 70s. The revolutionary spirit in this country has been lost, no doubt due to successive defeats of mass movements. The demoralisation of the British people is something that perhaps this song is trying, in its small way to counteract, there is no doubt this song is not going to start a revolution, but it could help to make people think and that is always a good thing. I believe your criticism of this being a predictable sound for primal scream is slightly unfair, admittedly if your only familiar with what the radio plays or they're most successful commercial hits then this fits into the Stones-esque mould. they're sound has been ever changing and is one of the great things about this band they're albums are non genre specific and they're music varies from techno to garage rock to stones-esque some times all in the same album. as for the old teddy boy surely just like the day when that was a revolutionary act to dress that way it still is in his own way a revolutionary act, in his mind he is still rebelling against the concepts society places upon people to conform.
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