Why haven’t I had my mid-life crisis yet? I hit 40 a year ago this week.
When I say “hit” 40, I mean that 40 kind of gushed over me and seeped down the back of my shirt like a tank of piss-and-spunk-based gunge on “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here.” The difference being that no one can get you out of here when “here” is that time of life called Middle age.
So, I’ve had a year in which to conform to the male middle-age-crisis stereotype by having my ear pierced, buying a sports car and finding myself a 19-year-old girlfriend.
I’ve done none of these.
Earrings suit a minority of blokes. If you don’t have the right overall look, the right hair and general dress sense, then there’s no halfway house with pierced ears. You either look good or you look like a dick. They’re as uncompromising as waistcoats. In fact, more so. I can’t think of any man who doesn’t look like a dick in a waistcoat unless he’s holding either a dinner tray or a snooker cue.
Sports cars? Sports cars are for WANKERS. Macho wankers. END OF FUCKING STORY. We all know it and the wankers who drive sports cars know it. They just won’t admit it. Which is another reason why they’re wankers.
And as for a 19-year-old girlfriend, I’m yet to meet a 19-year-old who doesn’t look like a kid from my chronological vantage point. Regardless of the legality of it, I’m not cursed with a desire to indulge in exploitative relationships; and although this wouldn’t quite be in the same drawer as paedophilia, it is in the same piece of furniture.
(For the record, the morality issue is the main barrier, of course. Adultery, misguided vanity and gratuitous machismo are all on the same playlist on every wanker’s ipod.)
All this isn’t to say that I haven’t experienced SOME changes on turning 40. I’m not trying to recapture my youth in the ways described above, because other than having the odd 19 year old girlfriend when I was that age (and by “odd” I mean an odd number, like maybe 3 if I’m being generous), I never wanted to own a flash car, drive fast or adorn myself in ear accessories.
But I AM trying to recapture my youth in other ways. Sad ways.
For instance, last week I bought a tin of spaghetti bolognaise and ate it on toast. A tin. Spaghetti Bolognaise in a fucking TIN. I hadn’t had such a meal since I was a teenager. I’m now on the look out for a tin of chicken in white sauce – equally delicious on toast. (When you’re in your teens.) Of course, anyone who knows about this will attribute it to a mid-life crisis.
Lots of things I do make me feel young again. Watching Dr Who. Wearing a Harrington. Having a stink bomb in my office at work and an intention to deploy it.
And lots of things I do make me feel old. Like getting out of bed. And breathing. And moving around. You know, all that difficult stuff.
Perhaps, as with the retirement age, the kick-off time for middle age has been put back by the government, and in fact I am still too young to embark on a mid-life crisis. That leaves you in a frustrating limbo period then really. A pre-male-menopausal twilight zone. A bit like half-past three on a Sunday afternoon.
Hmmm. I’ve lost the will to carry on now…
Thursday 26 May 2011
Saturday 14 May 2011
The Complete (Bastardised) History of Popular Music
Pop music was invented the day that Vera Lynn went electric in 1944. (She’d been using gas before that.) Judas!
But the seeds of popular music were sown hundreds of years earlier, thanks to the actions of one particular bastard, John Hawkins, who started the Atlantic Slave Trade triangle in 1562. Hawkins knew full well that three centuries of slavery would help African-Americans to invent the Blues. His was a rather controversial social experiment and would be frowned upon today by most of the UK’s main political parties. However, had he left Africans to their own devices and they’d still managed to influence what Europeans listened to today, then all pop music would sound like Paul Simon’s fucking “Gracelands.”
Blues music was all well and good if you were poor and black and generally pissed off, but it needed to evolve after the Second World War because of the invention of the teenager. Teenagers were white, unburdened by the experience of racial discrimination and had money to spend. They needed a less pissed-off version of Blues - and thus Rock and Roll was born. Rock and Roll singers were generally men in their twenties who sang songs about 16 year old girls but married 14 year old ones. No one minded this in the 1950’s, because you didn't have paedophilia in the good old days.
Some white people were just as poor as black people, though, and they adapted Blues to folk music, which had been sung mostly by men with beards and ugly people for centuries. Blues also spawned Jazz, because if you tried to dance to Blues then there was no way you’d end up shagging anyone at the end of the night.
And you also had gospel from generations before, because another intended outcome of John Hawkins’ social experiment was to make all Black Americans believe in Jesus. Gospel, Blues and Jazz thus led to Soul music, which allowed Black people to look cool while geeky white teenagers simulated masturbation by playing air guitars along to the angry child of Rock and Roll, who was just called “Rock” (probably after Rock Hudson, it is believed.)
The 1960’s were dominated by The Beatles, who were bigger than Jesus according to a claim made by John Lennon. Although this caused a lot of controversy among the people of the southern United States (well known for their good reason and tolerance), the Beatles WERE in fact bigger than Jesus, who was probably only 5’2” (typical height for your Roman-era Palestinian living on a diet of just fish and bread.)
The Beatles revolutionised pop music and are generally considered to be the best band ever. This is proven by the fact that they got away with putting Yellow Submarine on Revolver and Octopus’s Garden on Abbey Road; and no one minded. That’s like being on a date with the person of your dreams and not caring much if they shit themselves early in the evening and don’t change their underwear.
Meanwhile, Rock music started to split off into a number of strands much like a leper exfoliating with a cheese grater. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were like Dungeons and Dragons with sex. Glam rock gave transvestites a bit of breathing space until social attitudes made it unfashionable to laugh at them. Prog Rock was where all the wrong notes were played but in the right order. And Punk Rock was all the wrong notes played in the wrong order, plus phlegm. New Wave was required to sort out that mess, by putting ex-punks in suits and insisting on some degree of talent.
Pop Music then became increasingly sanitised in the 1980’s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan passed laws in the UK and USA banning the use of acoustic instrumentation and ushered in an age of mechanised pop music where machines did the work of humans. There were huge protests in the northern parts of England to these reforms. Supporters of Indie Rock clashed with police in bloody scenes that made the Miners’ strike look like a domestic tiff between sitcom legends of the time, Terry and June.
Eventually, Indie Rock won, managed to overcome the trauma of watching Grunge shoot itself in the foot (or to be more precise, the head) and set up the last golden period of music in the UK. This was known as Brit Pop, because for a few years all American bands were shit, so we had to make do with Blur and Oasis.
Meanwhile, record companies noticed that the section of the population who’d always eschewed song writing, musicianship, and talent for something more superficial and glossy were becoming even less discerning in their demands than in the days of The Monkees or The Bay City Rollers. And so Boy Bands were untied and rescued from the deeper recesses of Louis Walsh’s closet and marketed mercilessly at an audience that would ten years later financially prop up the TV talent-less show industry and it’s bastard offspring.
But the seeds of popular music were sown hundreds of years earlier, thanks to the actions of one particular bastard, John Hawkins, who started the Atlantic Slave Trade triangle in 1562. Hawkins knew full well that three centuries of slavery would help African-Americans to invent the Blues. His was a rather controversial social experiment and would be frowned upon today by most of the UK’s main political parties. However, had he left Africans to their own devices and they’d still managed to influence what Europeans listened to today, then all pop music would sound like Paul Simon’s fucking “Gracelands.”
Blues music was all well and good if you were poor and black and generally pissed off, but it needed to evolve after the Second World War because of the invention of the teenager. Teenagers were white, unburdened by the experience of racial discrimination and had money to spend. They needed a less pissed-off version of Blues - and thus Rock and Roll was born. Rock and Roll singers were generally men in their twenties who sang songs about 16 year old girls but married 14 year old ones. No one minded this in the 1950’s, because you didn't have paedophilia in the good old days.
Some white people were just as poor as black people, though, and they adapted Blues to folk music, which had been sung mostly by men with beards and ugly people for centuries. Blues also spawned Jazz, because if you tried to dance to Blues then there was no way you’d end up shagging anyone at the end of the night.
And you also had gospel from generations before, because another intended outcome of John Hawkins’ social experiment was to make all Black Americans believe in Jesus. Gospel, Blues and Jazz thus led to Soul music, which allowed Black people to look cool while geeky white teenagers simulated masturbation by playing air guitars along to the angry child of Rock and Roll, who was just called “Rock” (probably after Rock Hudson, it is believed.)
The 1960’s were dominated by The Beatles, who were bigger than Jesus according to a claim made by John Lennon. Although this caused a lot of controversy among the people of the southern United States (well known for their good reason and tolerance), the Beatles WERE in fact bigger than Jesus, who was probably only 5’2” (typical height for your Roman-era Palestinian living on a diet of just fish and bread.)
The Beatles revolutionised pop music and are generally considered to be the best band ever. This is proven by the fact that they got away with putting Yellow Submarine on Revolver and Octopus’s Garden on Abbey Road; and no one minded. That’s like being on a date with the person of your dreams and not caring much if they shit themselves early in the evening and don’t change their underwear.
Meanwhile, Rock music started to split off into a number of strands much like a leper exfoliating with a cheese grater. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were like Dungeons and Dragons with sex. Glam rock gave transvestites a bit of breathing space until social attitudes made it unfashionable to laugh at them. Prog Rock was where all the wrong notes were played but in the right order. And Punk Rock was all the wrong notes played in the wrong order, plus phlegm. New Wave was required to sort out that mess, by putting ex-punks in suits and insisting on some degree of talent.
Pop Music then became increasingly sanitised in the 1980’s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan passed laws in the UK and USA banning the use of acoustic instrumentation and ushered in an age of mechanised pop music where machines did the work of humans. There were huge protests in the northern parts of England to these reforms. Supporters of Indie Rock clashed with police in bloody scenes that made the Miners’ strike look like a domestic tiff between sitcom legends of the time, Terry and June.
Eventually, Indie Rock won, managed to overcome the trauma of watching Grunge shoot itself in the foot (or to be more precise, the head) and set up the last golden period of music in the UK. This was known as Brit Pop, because for a few years all American bands were shit, so we had to make do with Blur and Oasis.
Meanwhile, record companies noticed that the section of the population who’d always eschewed song writing, musicianship, and talent for something more superficial and glossy were becoming even less discerning in their demands than in the days of The Monkees or The Bay City Rollers. And so Boy Bands were untied and rescued from the deeper recesses of Louis Walsh’s closet and marketed mercilessly at an audience that would ten years later financially prop up the TV talent-less show industry and it’s bastard offspring.
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