Turning points

It’s difficult realising the significance of an event while it is unfolding, but I’m guessing 2020 will be one of those years that becomes identified as a historical land mark. We’ve already got the plague and economic depression, couple that with a sea change in societies’ attitudes towards institutional racism and you have a triple threat going on.

The first two obviously aren’t anything to cheer about, but potentially dispelling centuries of ingrained prejudice based on skin colour is a left field game changer. The fact that people are offended by the latest outrages so much that they will even ignore a global pandemic speaks volumes. It’s something people are willing to risk everything for, which is an incredible thing. Mind you, they probably felt the same when people got riled up about racial injustice in 1968 and 1992. The big difference this time is it’s not just the USA and it’s not just the racial groups affected that are standing up, and that’s a significant difference.

Like all births there is a lot of pain involved and some of the footage of the riots and looting is pretty stomach churning, from people on both sides it has to be said. Once the animal instinct takes over the cause is forgotten and we are back in the savannah fighting for existence. Some of it can’t be justified from any stand point, despite the nobility of the cause. But again this is nothing new. The French revolution was no squeaky clean fizzy party either as far as change management went, no matter how corrupt the aristocracy being removed were.

There is one small candle flame in the carnage though. The trend towards removing offensive statues is a great example of democracy in action, although the “silent majority” will say it’s just a bunch of scruffy anarchists causing trouble. For anyone who has ever experienced the “public consultation” process when public works are proposed, toppling a statue of some slave trader is the same reversed. The formal process forces something on you despite anything anyone says. The mob approach removes things without the need for any window dressing. I call that balance.

If there is one thing history tells us, it is that out of adversary something significant grows. So where is the world heading? Someone has coined the term “the age of bewilderment” to describe the current situation and I’d agree with that, so I have sought some input from above. No not Him, I mean my little guys. Now my little guys can’t predict the future, but their algorithms (based on historical modelling and the latest data) have coughed up a few potential outcomes, and any or all of them might actually happen:

Trump wins! Oh FFS – say it can’t be. But it might actually happen. At least 40% of voters will vote Republican no matter who the candidate is. They could put a goat up there and it would have a chance. And there are plenty of ultra-right wing religious nutters in the USA that believe he is a tool of God brought in to speed up the second coming of the Messiah, who will vote for him because they believe they will go to hell if they don’t. Well… at least they got the ‘tool’ bit right. So “democracy” in the states actually applies to a wafer thin section of the population who are classified as the ‘swing’ zone. They are the ones who decide elections and they generally live in states like Florida and Pennsylvania. It’s that specific. Trump won on the votes a few thousand of these people in 2016. That’s the fate of the world hanging on Joe and Jane Doe from suburban Nowheresville PA. No wonder there are tiny extremist groups developing online that want to short circuit the process. Another four years of this narcissistic clown will bring biblical results alright – but not the ones those right wing nutters are anticipating. Just poverty, paranoia and mafia-style politics spreading like an uncontained virus. Yikes!! Next.

The revolution will be televised. It already is. Phone cameras take you right to the heart of the matter and will either draw you in or repel you depending on how you feel about the ‘cause’. At this stage it isn’t anywhere near as bad as it has been at other points in history in other specific events (Northern Island and Brixton in the 1970s and 1980s and Paris in the 1960s for example), but give it time and anarchy in the UK may become more than just a song. Then the army will have to come in, people will form crudely armed militias and Bob’s your uncle – you have the Middle East in Notting Hill, or the Champs Elysee, or Nowheresville PA.

Armageddon. Taking everything to its logical extreme, you get a complete political, economic and social melt down. Trenches are dug, bunkers are built and it’s down to survival of the fittest, or the most desperate. The Great Depression of the 1930s didn’t lead to an economic recovery. It led to the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. People latched onto a populist leader with an insane agenda because they were looking for strength and a way out. Buying weapons made more sense than buying food and ‘the enemy’ was defined for all to target. The roots are already sprouting in Trump’s America, and he is already recycling nazi symbols for use in his own campaign. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Utopia/nirvana etc. Ah, the relief. Everyone will have a moment of clarity, the plague will have a vaccine and world leaders will start playing nicely with each other. Right after millions die of war, starvation and disease. It was called the 1920s. It lasted about nine years. Maybe it happens once a century. Time will tell.

So as this is intended to be a music blog – check out this Frank Zappa tune from 1966. Still as relevant now as the day it was written. And refresh your memory with one of ours.

From 1966 when the shit was flying in Watts etc. Frank Zappa hits you right between the eyes with a rock of his own. One that stills strikes the right chords 50 odd years later.

Amerikaemia. Lest we forget.

Bored? Anxious? Welcome to the new normal

Well folks, New Zealand has just started four weeks of lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s only taken a couple of weeks to go from “it can’t happen here” to “stay at home or else”, and the whole thing is pretty surreal. Just like it is for everyone in the world right now.

In keeping with the tone of some previous posts I could get all meditative and philosophical about the reasons why this has happened, but now is not that time. This shit is too real for that. Now is a time to focus on how to survive physically and mentally until this thing burns itself out, or until a vaccine is produced, whichever comes first. Either way it’s gonna take months.

The whole thing is nightmarish, but you have to look at some silver linings. It might make empathy a political priority. It’s going to put a massive dent in Trump’s re-election hopes. It levels the playing field between people so that everyone now has a common enemy, meaning people might see the similarities between them instead of the differences. And it will definitely sort the men from the boys when it comes to managing personal relationships. Girls: if you were wishing you could dump that selfish, leeching, control freak – now’s your chance. If he’s awol during this, you don’t need him.

A lot will also take this as a sign of the apocalypse, realisation of ancient prophecies and all that crap. The reality is this is what nature does. Microbes have been around for billions of years for a reason. The fact that there are now so many people in the world now brings us in closer contact with them more often. End result – newbies like e-bola, bird and swine flu and SARS, and all those ancient hitmen like TB and measles entering our lives like gate crashers at a share market convention. Even the bubonic plague is still around in some parts of the world, but it can be killed by antibiotics these days so its days of horror are over. The fact that this latest viral threat has turned the world upside down is one for the history books, but at least it can be stopped by simple patience and space.

Bubbles, that’s what we are

There’s a lot of talk about bubbles these days – the virus lives in a bubble, bubbles in the soapy water that can kill them, don’t step outside your lockdown bubble, speech bubbles in the media. The main thing about bubbles is they seal you off from the outside world.

I was putting together the basics for the next Hopkinsville Goblins product when this broke, but I’ll have to put that on hold. Some artists might embrace isolation as a space for creativity, but I’m not one of them. I get most of my ideas while I’m flat out doing stuff, so this is going to wrap all that up in packing tape. The new tracks were mainly celebrations of the undertow of humanity, and that isn’t possible when you aren’t able to see anyone. Boredom and isolation are not my muse. My little guys are. And they have retreated a million miles (literally). Human beings may have no resistance to this, but spare a thought for them. The common cold would deal to them, never mind some whacked out freshly mutated virus that doesn’t mind taking out its host.

So what to do instead? Apart from the invisible threat, boredom and anxiety are now our biggest enemy. So here is my guide to getting by. Purely personal and not too earth shattering, but hopefully you can relate to some of it.

Sex. And why not. That will take care of about 7 minutes and 35 seconds of most guy’s days. Hey fellas: why not treat this as the chance to practice a bit of extended foreplay. Find out if the female orgasm is really as elusive as bigfoot or if it can actually exist in your home. There should be plenty of reference material available with unlimited broadband during lockdown. Apparently Italians have been provided with unlimited porn for the duration. I think people in New Zealand have this one covered though, given the spike in viagara sales when the lockdown was announced.

Drugs. If you are stuck at home without much else on, no kids, no family, girlfriend stuck at her parent’s place, there’s always drugs. Not that they will be easily obtained during a lockdown, but I’m sure that won’t be a barrier to some. The only problem is most drugs aren’t really a cure for boredom. Anything that hypes you up is just going to make the walls close in. Booze similarly is not the greatest idea. It could be fun for a while but then you’ll hit the wall and need to escape. So you’ll head outside looking for stimulation on streets with none. And then the cops might ask what you are doing and you might end up getting really confined. Hmm… all things considered drugs aren’t the best idea. Unless you count wacky weed, which usually makes boredom positively fascinating.

Rock’n’roll. When I was told I was heading into a four week lockdown I thought I might catch up on some new sounds, get nostalgic on some old ones and generally have 24/7 music in the house. The only problem is, now I’m stuck here, I can’t find anything I really want to listen to. Nothing seems to really fit with what is going on. My usual go to of punk is too aggressive and this is not the time to be angry. Rock pumps you up with nowhere to go, and I don’t really feel like celebrating anything anyway. Going the other way, anything ambient is too unsettling and just makes the confinement even more pronounced. Especially something like “Zeit” by Tangerine Dream, which is literally the sound of your life draining away. I tried a bit of reggae but all that positivity just seems too trite right now. Don’t worry about a thing and all that. And if radio could stop playing gung-ho retro crap like “We are the world” all the time it would help a lot. I even heard “All by myself” on some classic shits station this morning. Way to help people going through isolation alone, Wolfman Dork. The only thing that’s resonated for me so far is “Truck drivin’ neighbour downstairs” by Beck. Not that I have one, but it makes me snigger thinking about the absurdity of that as a lockdown environment.

So that’s the holy trinity of passtimes knocked about without too much success. So what else is there?

Books. I have enough piled up to last me a lifetime. But you can’t share them with the people you live with so it’s a bit of a selfish option, no matter how appealing it is.

Videos. Better. Fun for everyone if you can agree on what to watch. And when you run out of DVDs there’s enough online to last several lifetimes, assuming the bandwidth holds up.

Wacky stuff. Hey I’m not an extrovert exhibitionist so I don’t have any ideas of my own, but there’s heaps of inspiration online so knock yourself out.

Working from home. Yeah, right. Like that really happens.

Sleeping in. Not if you are working from home though, you liars.

Avoiding the news. Definitely. Stick to half an hour a day if you don’t want your head to implode. And avoid social media whatever you do, unless you have the power to filter out the screeds of crap and misinformation. It’s the new water cooler for those working from home.

Arguing with your spouse. Obviously not a deliberate pastime, but it’s bound to take up at least some of your time if you’re locked up together for this long.

Yelling at your kids. Likewise to the above.

Talking to your pets. Not a bad alternative to the above.

Walking, breathing, meditating. Seriously. It’s good for you.

Sex. Oops, already said that.

Turning your living room into a gym. As an add-on to sex and breathing.

Learning how to cook. All the takeaways are shut so you’ll have to. Noodles will get pretty boring after a couple of days.

Teaching your grandparents how to Whatsapp. Now this one is sure to take up some time!

All those DIY jobs you’ve been ignoring for years. Yep. They will be unavoidable now. And you’ll even start to notice all the cobwebs on the ceiling.

Or taking a voyage of discovery to the edge of insanity. There ain’t nowhere left to go ‘cept crazy.

That should be enough for starters. 

I usually finish a post with a link to our product, but that seems a bit self-serving at this point, and I’m celebrating the lack of capitalism in the world at the moment. If you want to check us out during your lockdown, go for it and thanks. There’s links on the site. Otherwise, stay safe, follow the rules and hopefully it will all be over soon.

Whose reality is it?

Television is rapidly going the way of the dinosaurs. If there is an urgent climate crisis to attend to, it most immediately sits in how mass entertainment is delivered. There is a sea change happening there for sure. Back in the dark ages (ie the 20^th Century) when digital technology was still a dream in most places, mass visual entertainment was governed by TV producers who essentially had the power to dictate how culture looked and felt. Musicians careers could be made overnight by an appearance on a high rating, prime time pop show. It was their shot at the big time and you only got one if you were lucky. Sounds unfair and it was. People talk about #metoo in the movies, and true enough, but it was the same in the music biz too. Power corrupts and all that. You want it, here’s what you gotta do.

This description of the bad old days is not meant to justify or glorify it. It sucked for sure. Good riddance in fact. People are leaving in their droves to go with entertainment tailored to their lives. Yay for freedom of choice and consumer control. 'Say what?' to the cost of it … but that’s another post. 

So what now for TV? In the absence of a mass audience, it is faced with an increasingly desperate struggle for survival against them on-demand streaming services. It’s leading to a significant dumbing down of freely accessible culture as we know it. Anything with high quality production values is being canned as uneconomical. Sport is too expensive to get the rights to. Documentaries that need academic input and deep research are unfeasible. What’s left is endless, syndicated, deep-as-a-puddle news programmes and, most dread of all, reality TV.

Reality TV is cheap to produce because there are still endless lines of folks who want to appear “on the box” as their entry to celebritihood (is that a word?). You don’t even have to pay them, except for the occasional prize that your low-rent sponsor will pony up anyway. Finding a new concept for each one is the hard part, and that’s what raises the question – whose reality are we talking about? There is nothing real about it. You place people in an artificial situation with no parallel in the outside world and watch them struggle with it. The only thing that is real is the stress and desperation of the participants. Each new concept gets more and more absurd. There was recently a show that started in Britain where volunteers had sex in a big box in front of a live audience, then came out and talked about how good or otherwise it was. Then there are the shows with the plastic surgery disaster fixes in front of your very eyes. This isn’t reality, it’s closer to old Victorian freak shows than anything else.

Taking it to its logical extreme, you have to wonder how long it will be before Running Man or the Hunger Games become a thing. Maybe not with the death of the participants, but something hideous and damaging nonetheless. If the victims signed a disclaimer, the producers can’t be prosecuted. And the audience will love it. Surely not you say? Hey, we are the same species that watched Christians get eaten by lions in front of a live audience aren’t we?

It may not come to that, but when an industry gets desperate for survival, things can definitely get ugly and farcical before they are finally snuffed out.

The alternative to a desperate and random independent TV industry is a tightly controlled, state sponsored one. Like Fox News. Enough said.

What does this have to do with music I hear my gentle readers ask. Apart from the fact that there are likely to be ugly talent shows continuing on to the end of TV, not much I guess. Everyone is promoting themselves online now, so there won’t be any more overnight Top of the Pops stars. Even MTV doesn’t care about promoting new talent any more. Nope, what fascinates me is that this was all foreseen donkey’s years ago at a time when there was no digital technology whatsoever. Back then it was tied up with the approach of the Orwellian year 1984, but it is incredible how those nightmares expressed in songs have come true. The lesson being that as a creative artist you should never stop looking to the future and expressing your hopes, fears and apprehensions. Fore-warned is fore-armed and all that – if people are willing to listen that is.

Two of the best examples of this musical clairvoyance, for you to marvel at, are these:

Monitor – Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Written in 1981 and included on the awesome Juju album, this was aiming at 1984, but they missed and hit the year 2000 instead. Siouxsie and co-Banshee Steve Severin were big on committing Orwellian nightmares to wax, but this is so dead-on it’s scary. Think about the Big Brother TV show and 100 Survivor episodes since. “The victim looked up, looked strangely at the screen as if her pain was our fault, but that’s entertainment”. It’s almost like they had written it with their tea and toast while watching the ‘drama’ unfold.

Baby’s on Fire – Brian Eno

Going even further back, this one dates from 1973 and is from the essential Here Come the Warm Jets album. Eno here is writing about the paparazzi exploiting a celebrity sucker before such things really existed. “Photographers snip-snap, take your time she’s only burning”. Prescient and, again, dead-on. This track also features Robert Fripp’s finest ever guitar solo. So intense it will give you goose bumps, guaranteed.

And our stuff? Yep we do a bit of this, but not with the same level of crystal ball gazing. My little guys are mainly focussed on the here and now as the driver of the future. But feel free to check these out for accuracy:

 The future is a scary place if you let it be. It’s not too late for it to still be a choice.