Worm
Taste the diffidence
Yes, we live in a world ruled by chance and nonsense; someone didn't get a message, someone threw a tantrum, someone didn't get enough sleep the night before. Suddenly our tender memories of those haunting strains of the final song are shown to be based on nothing more than the fact that someone took a bathroom break.
Which is why I find the statement of intent inherent in the fact that several members of a Killing Joke actually fought tooth-and-nail to carefully, deliberately craft an emotionally satisfying album to be very moving. Someone took the process seriously - what a lovely, romantic, uncynical gesture.
And yet the titanic "Blue Monday" was supposedly created when Stephen Morris randomly hit a button on his new sequencer to see what his new toy could do...
I think pop music is perhaps the most interesting of all art forms because of the way it is never pure and perfect, always adulterated and alloyed. Pop music is not different than other kinds of art. Rather, pop music lays bare the truth of all art, which is that it's always heavily marked by the historical circumstances from which it emerged. "Blue Monday" is both a lucky accident and the inevitable result of what happens when four working class naifs get a windfall of cash because of changing conditions in the independent music scene, buy some new equipment they don't know how to use, have the confidence (and drugs) to let technology shape their art rather than the other way round, and release the result, packaged in a money-losing but beautiful work of commercial art, into a cultural environment eager for a fusion of industrial noise and dance pop. Despite this, New Order get the credit as if they'd set out to make the best-selling twelve-inch single of all time with a strategy as easy as A-B-C. This is untrue. There was no strategy. The point is to consider the ways in which it could be taken as true, to wit, the ways talent and will, and identity itself, survive diffusion, multiplicity, chance, abstraction and commodification; or, expressed differently, the ways in which the story of The Smiths is not a tale of misunderstandings, stupid fights, accidents, distortions, betrayals and missed opportunities but instead, read properly, an illuminating case of what is necessary for art in the present-- in other words a story telling not of the death of The Smiths but of the survival of Morrissey and Marr.
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