Bring the Noise

It seemed like the sort of information that really ought to cause hip hop to implode through its own contradictions.

It’s also possible that white fans prefer it that way, too, that it’s part of the fantasy of real-ness they’re buying into, that doublewhammy of exoticism and authenticity.

When he was invited to produce U2 (a group that Carducci reviles as the very model of non-rocking fraudulence) Eno warned Bono: ‘I’m not interested in records as a document of a rock band playing on stage. I’m more interested in painting pictures. I want to create a landscape within which this music happens.’ As it turned out, this subordination of the aural to the visual was perfect for Bono’s ‘visionary’ vocals, The Edge’s stratospheric guitar and the inert rhythm section.

These are the people who only know what they do not want.

That’s why The Smiths and James have more in common with Husker Du and Meat Puppets than their own neighbours.

Our alternative scene contains two approaches to resistance. Some try to make sex dangerous again, linking it with sickness and debauchery and violence (the brutalists and immaculate consumptives and dark noise types). More radical is what I’ve described above – a forgetting of the body, a rediscovery of romance and of the psychedelic properties of noise.

A time when the idea of youth was young.

Childhood’s become important (again) because it provides a range of imagery that’s fertile in dissident potential.

An idea of innocence and childhood possesses and pervades the indie scene.

In fact, ‘serious rock’, from the hippies through to now, is a HEAD culture, oriented towards contemplation and bodily passivity.