Music used to be my proxy for talking, for expressing my feelings and thoughts. I needed high doses of Joy Division and The Cure to feed my weirdly dark and nihilistic mental processes, the guidance of The Clash to channel my ever-present anger and latent wish to destroy the status quo, and Tom Waits, well…
Predicting the past
The life of a trend watcher is pretty amazing. No matter how wrong your predictions, you are still right. Like a doomsday prophet you can always explain away wrong predictions, or twist facts in such a way the prediction was right after all. Move on to the next round, the next year, and all will…
This is not a loss
Subversive as ever, John Lydon equaled (the art of) writing love songs to entering the domain of big business. Nothing more commercial than a love song. Only fitting that PIL’s biggest hit was ‘this is not a love song’. Shows the irony of life, for some people the humour of the bearded man above. The…
Am I living in this movie?
I’m living in this movie…is it…moving me? First there was music and then, all of a sudden, it became a quest for identity. First a song was just a song, couple of verses, a refrain, maybe a bridge, over and gone in just over three minutes, then it all got much more serious. During my…
Missed Opportunities
One of John Lennon’s many contributions to everyday philosophy is his observation that ‘life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’. It crossed my mind when I read Glen Matlock’s affectionate words in a Pete Shelley obituary. Talking about the brilliance of the Buzzcocks and taking the time to go to…
I want to break free
With Bohemian Rhapsody in the cinema it is time to rethink and clarify my position on Queen and Freddie Mercury.I must have loved the band when I was young. After all, at primary school me and my friends imitated Queen on stage. I don’t remember which song we pretended to play. I only remember that…
Do they hear us calling?
The setting could have been awkward but felt completely natural. A bedroom, single bed against the wall, a small desk in the corner, no other furniture. In retrospect, the absence of furniture surprises me, but then again, that’s the way me and my friends were living. High school teenagers, still living with their parents, with…
Film Noir
I first heard OK Computer in the bus during a power outage that stopped all train traffic. I still remember the sensation of Paranoid Android hitting my brain. I first heard The velvet Underground & Nico on my Walkman, cycling to a sports event. The relative conventionality of Sunday Morning almost made me switch it…
It’s all in the movies
How many people knew about Jesus & Mary Chain before the release of Lost in Translation? Not a lot. What made ‘Don’t You (forget about me)’ such a massive hit for Simple Minds: the song’s quality or its presence in The Breakfast Club? Posing the question is answering it. Sometimes the soundtrack of a movie…
Observations of a luddite
Some words have a near-perfect harmony of sound, form and meaning. One of those words is Luddite. The word refers to people who are resistant to (particular) new technologies and is derived from a 19th century movement, the Luddites, a group of English textile workers who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The…
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