Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Republican is the new punk rock? Yes, that's about right
By which I mean, punk is dead and so is movement conservatism. Seriously, what is it with rightwingers trying to identify themselves with "punks" and their opponenents with "hippies"? Why would anyone want to do this to themselves?
Look around you at the world of popular culture. There are still lots and lots of surviving subcultures which are recognisably "hippy". There are next to none which are recognisably "punk". The hippies managed to cope with the rise in popularity of electronic dance music (which punk rockers rather spectacularly didn't). They inserted a lot of their main political issues and ersatz spirituality right into the mainstream. They even saved the fucking whale.
What happened to punks? Not a lot. Thrash metal, Green Day and that's about it basically. The only punk band that had any sort of longevity was the Cure. Michael Gove should be saying that the Tory Party are truly Goths at heart.
That is a strange one, by the way. If you'd been hanging around doing Paul Morley's job in say 1985, and you had to pick one out of New Romantic, Two-tone, Goth and glam metal to still be alive and relevant in 2009, who the hell would have picked Goth?
Update: Actually, while we're on the subject, now that five years' passing has somewhat diminished the emotional impact of the "Hurt" video, can we get a bit of reality with respect to Johnny Cash please? The simple fact that Rick Rubin says someone's cool does not actually make it the case. Cash made a small number of good country records (a very small number, and even "Live at San Quentin" has a hell of a lot of filler on it), and five or six very good tracks, spread across three albums, toward the end of his life. But he spent most of his career producing a vast amount of rubbish, of which this is entirely typical. Even the famous early country albums are country and western, not rock and roll and certainly not punk rock - if you don't like cowboy songs, you'll hate them. It's heretical to say it, but there was a most unimaginable amount of shit produced in Nashville between 1955 and 1958, much greater than the volume of execrable house music produced between 1988 and 1991.
this item posted by the management 2/03/2009 01:29:00 AM
|