Article Response: Consequences

With my usual capacity for believing two quite contradictory things at once (and for dimissively looking down on those who notice this as mere conventionalist nitwits), I had by abt the age of 12 adopted i. an extremely intense personal sense of sin, ii. lost the ability to look even slightly fairly or openly on the theories of sin others held out to me. I knew with utter certainty that desire led to disappointment at best and more likely disaster, and I spent most of my teen years — and really a long time after that — convincing myself I was above want (except in a routine motor-function way). Of course punk was lying in wait, and I snapped at it: the most incredibly severe puritan version (anti-drunk, anti-drugs, anti-sex, anti- distraction). I believed — pretty much — that the world had ALREADY ENDED (that great Charlotte Pressler quote: "we were promised the end of the world and we didn't get it"...)

So, without thinking too much abt the problems in the theory for the moment, I gotta say: yes. I love love love pop — and more to the point perhaps am sometimes very extremely snappishly defensive abt it — because it has ALWAYS been my respite from the above (my heaven here, if you like); a world which just blinks at consequence as if it wasn't there. Icon of what shd have been; utopian untime-bound bliss. The now, cut free from past or future.

The funny thing is, of course, that old teen habits die barely at all: I like this theory, therefore above all I distrust it, and cannot commit. It is what I want to be so, for patness' sake, so I warily keep my distance.

Tom E: first, it's good to see you writing things, for you do it well. Secondly, my usual comment: I find you somewhat hard to understand. Third, I have not heard the records. Fourth, Hefner to my ears are rubbish - an aural abomination. That does nothing substantial against any good theory you might have - it's just that I find it a tad harder to take seriously a theory of pop which is based on listening to this dreadful band.

>>> And this is why sin and pop so rarely mix: my hunch is that pop dislikes the inescapable, dislikes the notion of consequences. Pop is a sweetshop of situations, attitudes, experiences - some sour, to be certain, but none you can't turn your back on. To listen to pop is to play-act your way through a bottomless dress-up chest of possibilities: to feel a sense of sin is to feel possibilities hardening into dooms.

You put it well, with characteristic eloquence - but predictably I want to say: "Well, some pop might be like that. Some pop might be like something else. Pop is a very broad cathedral" - and so on.

Put it this way: pop doesn't like sin? That's because we don't like sin. We? Me, for starters. You?

I'm not sure that I want my pop to be about sin. But then, I don't think I want my literature, or my TV, or my newspapers, to be about 'sin' either. I don't want my LIFE to be about sin - a word that I would rarely use in the sense that you're using it. Hands up who wants their life to be about doom and damnation? And if 'we' don't, is it surprising that 'we' don't want to listen to those things in pop records?

david byrne's jsut released a new book entitled the new sins, out on mcsweeny's label - surprisingly relevant to this i think...

Hey Tom, nice article. I am actually going to seek out Hefner based entirely on this fine piece of writing, so you should ask Mr. Hefner for a %.

BTW, wanna take Club Sussed stateside? I'll let you DJ on my radio station. You and Maura can do back to back sets. Maybe we can get Ned down at the same time and have ILM day.