Tom Cox - Self Hater?

i have a certain suspicion of the way of thinking outlined above. i think its possibly because it characterizes periods of your past as 'development stages', and the present as a fully realised stage, able to laugh at the follies on the way there. but there is no thought given to the fact that the present is also a development stage (although i dont like the word development in this context)

or to look at it another way, cox seems to be saying, then i was silly, now i am sensible, as though this is how he is going to be for the rest of his life now. in 10 years time he might look upon now as silly, a period in which he adopted forced conservatism, and that the louche and vaudevillian person he might become in the future is the real him

i think i have a suspicion of people who 'grow up' because i wonder why they didnt grow up earlier. this is late to be growing up. you become an adult at 16 not 37

I'm not sure he's necessarily saying he's now sensible just that he's identified and recanted a particular style of silliness from his past. You're right though that you do continually discover that you were still silly even though you previously thought you had it beat. But perhaps the silliness becomes fainter as you go on as it's subject
to repeated filtering.

I think Hornby would say something somewhat opposite, though: as one grows older, the more one takes responsibility for the welfare of others, ergo, the less time one has for such "interior" pursuits as listening to Kid A or masturbating or whatever. (Though I might buy the idea that for some narcissists, "thinking about the welfare of your charges" = "thinking about oneself.')

I just thought the piece was really quite sad. i'm used to cox demeaning music and its fans with tiresome and shallow stereotypes and presumptions; its just kind of brutal (and heartless) to see him apply those same shortcomings and frustratingly cruel and blinkered rhetorical and 'investigative' lunges upon his own adolescence. i remember reading 'words that i ate' and much prefer it to the insulting and defeated writing he slouches through now. and to see a zine as sublime as 'and the living is easy' namechecked and then disregarded is criminal.

i also can't swallow the way the piece asserts that Cox wasted his time attending Archers Of Loaf gigs and interacting with fanzine communities when he could obviously have been doing something a lot more socially rewarding like, uh, going to the pub. its as though Cox went through electric shock therapy to absolve his sins of indie-ness, and the vaguest suggestion that such a lifestyle wasn't an entire waste of time cause his writing to spasm and sputter in bloodthirsty ridicule of his adolescent interests.

i'm not even going to go in to the glaringly obvious and insulting caricature of the girl he loved who probably listened to 2 unlimited and danced around her handbag at the local ritzy. Cox is a typically english writer, an inverted and convoluted snob forever on the outside, looking in upon himself. the ultimate tragedy is that he seems to view himself as much a 2-dimensional cliche as everyone else he writes about.