(An extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod". One track out of 366 that I randomly shuffled through in 2012. There's another 365 in the book. A a matter of pure coincidence this is the very track that I wrote about exactly a year ago today ).
August 11th
Los Campesinos!-We Are Beautiful,We
Are Doomed-We Are Beautiful,We Are Doomed
Is there
ever a point when I’ll stop listening to new music and merely revert back to
old favourites? Is there a time when I become too old for anything different
and settle for what I know works for me? Will The Fall become the aural
equivalent of a pair of comfy slippers and elasticated waisted slacks? I
suppose that there may be a time when something new and different happens in
music and it will go right over my head. It may mean nothing to me and will
just sound like a tuneless racket. (Having said that, tuneless rackets have
always appealed to me, so maybe that’s not too bad a thing).
Maybe I have to
start questioning that at being over 50 years old, there is a point when a
lifetime of listening to pop music is a bit daft. On the other hand, the
alternative is too horrible to actually contemplate. I cannot imagine just
looking back with rose-tinted glasses to a mythical musical past when all was
perfect and never coming across anything different and new. I have a feeling
that even in my dotage, I’ll be persuading my grandchildren that the latest
Japanese thrash racket is the way to go. There’s that much music to hear that
even after forty years or so, I know that I’ve barely scratched the surface. It
wouldn’t be an easy option to wean myself off the pursuit of the new, but in
some ways it would give me a chance to catch up. After all, I’ve got at about
eighty Miles Davis albums to play at least once and over a hundred Frank Zappa
albums that have only have been given the most cursory of airings and time is
ticking I guess. I don’t think it’s really going to happen though. I’ll still
be looking at the music press in whatever form it’s in, and still be avoiding
Radio 1 and 2 like the plague years from now.
If I’d stopped at a sensible age
then I would have missed out on Los Capmesinos! and that would have not been a
good thing. Initially Los Campesinos! were well and truly slagged off in the
music press for being too “twee-core”, and it took the album that this title
track is from to kind of turn it around. If a band does get battered in the
fashionable press then I always feel that there is something worth looking
into. I don’t think that the twee core thing helped, but it was more because
that they were from Wales rather than London, that stood against them and that
they were erudite and intelligent rather than lumpen and provincial. I have
liked all the albums they’ve released and really do think that if they’d
originated from some fashionable area of the U.S. then they’d be bigger than
they are now. But there’s always time and I predict great things for them.
(One
other thing. There is that cliché about all policemen seeming younger as you
get older. Well, although that applies with me, the telling fact is that bands
get younger as I get older. I have already reached a stage when they are half
my age. In ten years time I may be into bands that are a third of my age and I
would be easily old enough to be their grandfather. Blimey).
Get/read/see "Totally Shuffled" here:
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