I'm not throwing everything at the wall. Mark views all london music through the lense of predominantly white post-punk. That is not invalid but that's not all of our experiences. Sizzla and Electro are absolutely relevant to this, because they problematise the idea that music should ultimately serve as as a beatnik concern and not be avant-yob.
What's your favourite Adele song?
- Thread starter luka
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"Come to think about it... his name was... it was you! Damn..." masterpiece, up there with joker (2019)
But you see this is because she is a lifelong fellow gooner so I can hold her to account for not bigging up her crew. She is pure north, islington.
Anyway I don't dismiss Dido for not being London enough, I'm saying she doesn't resonate to my experiences and many others in London. It's that very everything for everyone aspect I find bland and stupifying. Especially after 9-11. I was not every man, especially when Mark's fidelity to the labour party meant he was able to conveniently brush aside labours implimentation of the counter-terrorism bill. It's a concept of a hermetically cealed off British community, a left authentocratism. I'm not everyone through choice, I'm just not. I'm not the common man, first I'm uncultured ethnic, (threat to british values) then possibly being surveilled for having implicitly terroristic sympathies, then possibly a friend, and then, very very possibly, (although highly unlikely) a lover and a comrade. What @blissblogger called the psychic armour of jungle.
Again I'm not saying she isn't relatable. I am not going to dictate to you what music you should or shouldn't like. But at least I'm going to defend why I don't like Dido if you're telling me I'm missing the point. I'm not because I reject the Thatcherite folk tale of the common man,
which inherently gives up its own secret.
which inherently gives up its own secret.
And that is precisely what angered Mark about hip hop, that it does not ultimately depend on his learned intellectual base. In fact if anything it consistently defines itself against it - even MF Doom when you get passed the comic book culture references spoke about some pretty bleak shit.
Dido is universalist in the sense that she is polite and inoffensive enough to appeal to anyone, but does not embrace the universal cosmos with all of its lumpen dog eat dog world outlook.
Dido is universalist in the sense that she is polite and inoffensive enough to appeal to anyone, but does not embrace the universal cosmos with all of its lumpen dog eat dog world outlook.
I don't think what Dido does is embrace the idea of the common man, and I don't think that by enjoying her music I'm doing that either. Her lyrics tell the story of someone trapped and constrained by notions of expectation and success and achievement: if life is for rent, and you don't learn to buy... then on a very basic and obvious level you've rejected the Thatcherite model of ownership and property.
By all means, unenjoy something for it not being your aesthetic taste, but if you're not going to engage with it on it's own terms then you're not really in a position to determine how successful it is by those terms.
By all means, unenjoy something for it not being your aesthetic taste, but if you're not going to engage with it on it's own terms then you're not really in a position to determine how successful it is by those terms.
I disagree that life is for rent (yes I know album title but whatever.) Life is to be chewed up. Either by your boss, or the state. And this is where my criticism of Mark's labourism comes in. His model might be anti-thatcherite in the very narrow sense, but state property is still fundamentally private property. It still requires you to be freed from the land and means of production and subsistance. The callaghan government broke more strikes than Thatcher ever did, and atley era labour nationalised coal in a completely capitalist manner. Jairus Banaji goes into this in an article titled the fictions of free labour. What we are talking about here is freedom from the peasants subsistance but this does in no way indicate that contracts themselves aren't coercive. It is not so simple as the state returning back to you that which it has exploited from you, but how exploitation is necessary at the level of force. Capitalist realism exists because capital is precisely a real abstraction of force that cannot be reasoned with. There is no alternative precisely because there can be *no alternative* until production breaks down. Revolutions are messy, violent things, not merely cultural or ideological transformations. This is why I found it utterly absurd Mark on his blog accusing people for capitulating to capitalist ideology because they saw Sex In the City differently, ignoring that Dido's existentialism itself is capitalist ideology, and even more cliche because it is trapped in self-pity - it took you this long to realise that life is meaningless? Capitalism has no concepts of its own, no ideas of its own, all it does is take other ideas in the service of its continued self-valourisation. To argue that Life is for rent is to argue that the landlords or exploiters are not also alienated, that they have conscious agency to oppress us. But this is not so. This laisez-faire model was eclipsed even towards the end of the 19th century with the undertaking of production by the state I.E: railways, postoffices, etc. Society becomes one collective capitalist. Commodity production contains cancerous growth metastasizing within it self. everything must be exchanged at all times. Uses for things can terminate when they are consumed, but exchange must be uninterrupted and ceaseless. It's production gone haywire, production for the sake of production and nothing else.
A more apt title then is 'life is for nothing' and will always be for nothing, and none of our labours, or those of our parents matters, and neither will our labour matter to our kids. The class war does not end in the desecration of our ancestors, that is where it begins. Let the dead bury the dead.
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I understand your point though. Every music critic must see music as a series of existential cliches to validate their views on society. It's why I'm not a critic but a dissector. Poptimism is depressingly mundane. It maybe meant something in the 1980s when you had to atone for your dads Pierre Boulez high serialist records, but today it's the orthodoxy of every music critic, even former rockists. It's the default. It needs to be destroyed. It's a church, it has too much structure. It's a disease.
woops
is not like other people
they were playing dido in the local flat white place when i went in there just now, and i thought, this is probably one of the natural environments for this music, it sounds alright in here, no high notes or histrionics, general emotional tone of resignation bordering on relaxation, so i'm with @boxedjoy on this one.
also reminded me - funny to think portishead were considered dinner party music when they came out,
also reminded me - funny to think portishead were considered dinner party music when they came out,
luka
Well-known member
There ain't no gold in this river That I've been washin' my hands in forever I know there is hope in these waters But I can't bring myself to swim When I am drownin' in the silence Baby, let me in Go easy on me, baby I was still a child Didn't get the chance to Feel the world around me I had no time to choose what I chose to do So go easy on me There ain't no room for our things to change When we are both so deeply stuck in our ways You can't deny how hard I've tried I changed who I was to put you both first But now I give up Go easy on me, baby I was still a child Didn't get the chance to Feel the world around me Had no time to choose what I chose to do So go easy on me I had good intentions And the highest hopes But I know right now It probably doesn't even show Go easy on me, baby I was still a child I didn't get the chance to Feel the world around me I had no time to choose what I chose to do So go easy on me
