CHAPTER 96

 

 

 #5: EVERYTHING EVERYTHING

"Photoshop Handsome"

from the album Man Alive

Released: August 2010

 

 

Of course I always dreamed of being a pop star. Or a musician of any kind. But can you imagine what an inglorious mess I would have made of the whole endeavour? Any songs I had the cheek to write would have been gruesomely, as in unlistenably, complex and its words would have been overqualified, ill-suited to scansion or rhythm, because I would not think naturally as a musician ought and how dreary was that last fucking payoff?

I sat in on band rehearsals conducted by my scholastic peers and occasionally indulged in some abject jamming at home but if I'd had to sing for my supper I would have died of starvation in 1979. But I constantly wondered; what might pop music made by me sound like? I'd come across innumerable instances of songs, records that would fit the me template OH DO BETTER YOU MBA REJECT okay

so here's this song I heard on the radio and there were another couple before it by the same people and immediately I recognised the work as being so outside of any rational kilter that I could have come up with it. I didn't because I needed more musical training for that about thirty years previously, plus I lacked the naturalness, the friendly instinctiveness that has drawn out all worthwhile bands from the Beatles along.

I thought the song as natural as my breathing, which latter isn't in unfairness that natural. It was so unwieldy, weighed down with queasy qualifications and harrumphing harmonic shifts that it would have challenged most people to understand let alone love it. The guy singing it sounds like he's running in his underpants for a train that departed the platform twenty-four minutes ago. He'd like to get to know only he has to work out who he is first.

As with all good pieces of music, the song sounded like I'd written it, if I'd only had the ability to get on with other people and possessed the absented element of self-confidence in order to do so. Its animality - the cover of the album on which it finally appeared depicts a patiently anticipating fox - declares that this song (the album is called Man Alive, after all) is the True Self overcoming and superseding the False Self suit of armour which we all need to wear so that we might be able to exist.

Its singer howls and pants the overstuffed words in ways which from one side of things exceed the common human yet in others restores the human to its feared primitivism, the shame of being perceived as less than developed, and this ties in very nicely with the theme of the song itself, which in its ravenous semi-confusion concerns itself with the impossibility of human perfection and the evident danger of mass extinction as a consequence of trying to attain perfection, as though being human weren't good enough; for whom, or what, I for these purposes pretend not to know.

Perfection! the singer metaphorically screams. Why are you trying to destroy everything worth loving and caring for? Was love insufficient to encase and eclipse hardwired vanity and venality? Why don't we all just fuck off, destroy ourselves...and come back as something else, something better? enquires the grain of the singer's voice from which all cover of assumed immaculateness has been methodically excised.

Will humanity still exist by the time anybody considers publishing this ghastly, pretentious mess of a book with its recycled blog posts, its staid, tenth-hand observations and I'm only getting this in now to save reviewers the effort? Well of course it will, probably not as once you knew, recognised and for all its feeble foibles loved it but it doesn't possess the final enterprise necessary to wipe itself out. It's sufficient not to mention succinct to say that the song is the reply to the challange that I as an observer of music always in the end set myself - if I'd ever written and recorded a song, it would have sounded precisely like this and I suspect ah fuck it KNOW that its heightened presence near the nonexistent climax of this book confirms that i was actually right all the time ergo have won. Do I still get the £12 book tokens that you've been keeping for me since 1981, and what would they buy now anyway?