The Most Painful Admission I've Ever Made

Um. Shit.

Oasis was right.

Not forever.

I mean.

Not forever.

Because I get it.

You are a Blur fan or (better) a Suede fan or (even better) a Pulp fan or (even better) an Insides fan but.

I do agree with you.

I wasn't even in London.

Have only read the horror stories secondhand.

Have no dog in this fight.

Don't even like the smell of blood.

But there's something different.

About a band that believes it is the best band in the world when nobody else does.

And a band that believes it is the best band in the world when everyone else does.

Which is to say, the second album sucked, lived up to every nasty comment one could make.

Forget about everything after.

But the first one.

Oooh gosh.

Well. Really only three songs.

They have the swagger. Not of self-satisfaction, of millionaires staring into a $10,000 bottle of champagne and thinking, "yeah, I deserve this" but of a man staring into his pint, as flies dance around the bar and the only sound is the heavy breathing of old, un-repentant smokers coughing, saying, "yeah, I deserve better", and of some decrepit saying, "oh yeah, sonny, prove it" and this young man, staring harder, the beer getting warmer, the flies, more animated, "yeah, man, alright". And then he stand up and sings.

I get it now. I've had this album for twenty years and I get it now. Fuck you. That's it, that's it!

Nostalgia of the Day

Oh man.

This single was such a masterpiece. Shame about, well, most of the rest of the album. I really remember those years, 2001-2004 or so as being this magic period where everyone with ears seemed to suddenly find one another. I can't describe it better than that. But maybe this track is a great example. Depeche Mode-loving Ethiopian-American man writes a great song with British New Wave and American Alternative influences while collaborating with one half of the hottest Pop/R&B/Hip-Hop production team of the decade. It was this brief period where "everything" seemed to work, meaning that the total collapse of previous meaning systems expressed through genre actually seemed to unleash a short but beautiful burst of creativity before "everything" suddenly became nothing.

Yeah, it may just be nostalgia for my early twenties, but those days of listening to free jazz one day and, say, a Kylie Minogue record produced by Kurtis Mantronik the next, all the while saving up for the Greensleeves Diwali compilation seemed to point to possibilities that never seemed to arrive, a world that never came to be.

Yes, it could be, of course, that art is a lie, that that world could have never existed outside of my own perception, and yet, and yet, and yet, you know what, fuck you, you are wrong. Maybe the world will never live up to what I could imagine it being, but, at least at some point, I lived in a world that seemed to want to be worthy of the hopes I and others had for it. 

At least on paper...

... I am a genius but there aren't that many good jobs available for us so though millions are dead because someone somewhere decided to "liberate" something, well, there may, and I stress, MAY, be just a few less dead because I refused to participate, and I refused because of Ten City. Ten City changed my life. But not enough lives. But that's not Ten City's fault. I blame everyone else.

What I'm trying to say

I'd rather be a drunken bartender

than to have worked for the NSA

and I am a good liar so they must have missed me

THIS IS DRUNKEN HYPERBOLE

Same As The Old Boss

For a while 30 minutes tonight someone managed to convince me that I was necessary, needed. I don't know whether to congratulate them or excoriate myself. Because it was a deception, of course, in the end. But, whose.

Oh yeah, um, happy new year.

I love you.