CHAPTER 28

 

 

#73: SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR & WUH OH

"Hypnotized"

from the single "Hypnotized"

Released: July 2022

 

 

I really am not one for nostalgia. Why ought I be? There's more than enough happening now to engage one's senses and interest. There exists knowledge, but not the semi-abstract craving to regress to times when your hindsight component has convinced you there was nothing to worry about. Neither, however, am I so glued to Present Tenseism - the thoroughly misguided, if not unprecedented, belief that everything that happened before was but a mere prelude to our robotically perfect understanding of things.

Radio can't adequately deal with either. It's always the processed memories of times you lived through when you know in your bones that things weren't like they pretend they were. The same three hundred brightly bland pop songs - or, if you must (and I certainly mustn't), two hundred or so "alternative" "classics" spun around the inner circumference of the algorithmic washing machine. None of the awkward, allegedly fun-hating stuff. Nothing to distract or upset your school run or shed painting.

Or else radio breathlessly proclaims to you that everything of Now is "brilliant" and "well worth checking out." You already know from experience that you're dealing with costermongers, hustling for your aural trade. Bear in mind that I am not talking about radio stations aimed directly at young people, who don't give a damn about "heritage" - because pop was never meant to be Blenheim Palace - and just want the genuinely happening sounds of today. Knowing your Koffee, Okinawa Electric Girl Saya or Skin On Skin is obviously and infinitely more thrilling than being told that this was Simply Red's third consecutive hit to peak at number eleven, which latter is really anti-life. Young people want noisy excitement, true enthusiasm as opposed to a practised run-off of music industry tropes where disc-jockeys frantically endeavour to convince you that everything is fine, don't panic.

Nor have I any residual tolerance, nearly three years after the onset of pandemic at the time of writing, for the chimera of radio as audio keep-fit gym, its gridkeepers shouting at people and commanding them to dance in their kitchens (newsflash: most listeners don't have separate kitchens, as such) to some hoary old seventies disco dinosaur which, if you played it at the office party, would inspire the guy from I.T. to sidle up to you and ask with polite despair whether you had anything more modern. You can get imprisoned in that semi-derelict kitchen disco if you don't have a friendly guy called Peter Ferguson from Bathgate to help pull you out with a dramatic torch song, entirely worthy of 1983 Soft Cell (and for that matter 1983 Cocteau Twins), which, like John Barry's theme to The Persuaders, simultaneously looks to the ancient past ("Hypnoti-ZED," as William Byrd, whose modalities this song strongly resembles, would have phrased it) and towards the immediate future. Nothing renders me more depressed than the noun "positivity," the phrase "good vibes" (my understanding of good vibes is Milt Jackson or Bobby Hutcherson, thank you very much) or the adjective "uplifting." Sophie Kitchen-Disco batters her way out of the benign cell and tells heritage to sod off. About time, as well.