The Feelgood Cancer: a wandering thread stretching from Minus Zero to the Brighton Dome Pavilion

A free pint at Triggerfest to whoever can interpret any of this for me.

it sounds to me like nick cave's secret life of the love song lecture.

all songs = love songs. all love songs = sad or angry songs, despite the shiny veneer, and if they're not, that's not real music. (my rushed explanation with one foot out the door).

Marcello is saying that people who think music shd be nice will never be Top of his Pops... That's be three Babychams in a pintglass, please.

Done. Please explain two further points, if you could:

*) Tom Cox and DLT...who they/it/them? For some reason DLT makes me think of 'Dave Lee Travis,' a name I think I've heard of...maybe.

*) What the hell *is* a Babycham anyway? A miniature champagne deal?

DLT = Dave Lee Travis (good call), cartoonishly dreadful Radio One DJ back in the day. So awful I'd like to like him, just to see people's mouths open and no sound come out. But not possible. I liked Simon Bates, tho.

Tom Cox = no idea, tho very much feel I ought to know.

Babycham = v.uncool fake champagne in small bottles, drunk by trampy gurls in the 70s and also bolshy part-time queers (= me), to appal the Bittermen. Prob.no longer sold, as was completely disgusting. Brand- image was a cutesy litte deer. Snowballs: I would also drink snowballs. Why oh why did no one punch me?

Ned, Tom Cox is acknowledged by a number of people on LIM as the worst British music critic around writes for The Guardian, he likes "dull authentic rock" music.
DLT is Dave Lee Travis ex Radio 1 DJ that use to peddle MOR/boring adult rock to the nation Chris Rea/Eric Clapton/Tracey Champman/Terence Trent D'arby/Mike & the Mechanics etc - music for the travelling sales rep
Marcello asks "Well, everyone, it's time for ugly, awful, negative, dirty, noisy, inconvenient anarchy to make itself known again".
Check out this website Freq "The main focus of Freq is on the bastardized forms of music which are polluting Millennial culture so nicely - the forms which offer innovation, eccentricity and unashamed noise. Resistance to the pervading pop culture may not be original, easy or successful in the long term - after all, how long before any `underground' musical form is assimilated into the service of advertising cars? - but it just feels like the right thing to do in the circumstances."
Also watch out for the return of Zan Lyons in July. The saviour for British music in 2001, who will release a second album after the devasting debut - Desolate. More information at Foundry Recordings

In the meantime I suggest you listen to 2nd Gen - Irony Is or the very underrated Scorn album released in Autumn 2000 - Greetings from Birmingham - brilliant absorbing Dark epic brutal bludgeon breakbeat music. The perfect Antithesis to feelgood music and dull dry boring worthiness of the baffling world of Cox & his ilk.
DJ Martian

pretentious

dj martian, that 'freq' site you recommended has the ugliest design i've ever seen. i love it.

Are there any pop lovers on ILM who talk like this? Sometimes I think I'm on the wrong team. Hey Tom, got a spare jersey?

Content is more important than design.

Sure Freq is a badly designed site - I hate those frames.

but the Freq Links is impressive.

design is more important than content

Tom Cox is a long-term FT whipping boy not so much for his music tastes (which are standard-issue Uncut-writer) as for his one-man snidey war on all that is good and worthwhile about pop/dance/hip- hop/you name it. Just as his beloved Wondermints reapply old musical forms, so too does Coxy reapply old music arguments i.e. sampling isnt music, modern music is soulless etc. etc. That said one must give him credit for getting under my skin in ways that other crits have failed to.

Also he's called Tom, is younger than me and writing about pop music for a national daily newspaper. So that may have something to do with it.

But the Guardian has had unmatchably rubbish music writing (in all depts, tho in person and in intention John Fordham is a nice and an honourable man) since time immemorial. My theory: editorial management so hate and fear pop that they deliberately employ these [have no vocab dissy enuff], to round down the opposition. (This is of course part of my bigger madder theory: because if you allowed even adequate rock/pop writers on-staff, what they would write wd quickly impinge on the [grits teeth] "grown-up" political stuff.)

And Gary Younge btw must take his lumps with the rest. Grrrrr.

Curiously enough I was thinking about Cox last night and my opinion was confirmed that he is not so much the DLT of rockcrit (though I agree with Marcello on most of his actual tastes), as the Peter Hitchens - a hack whose entire ethos is built around nostalgia, yearning for the past, and tired disdain for the modern world, but who is in fact nowhere near as old as he wants to convince us; just as Hitchens was in fact a 13-year-old boy when the "disturbing music" of the offshore pirate stations hit (rather than an already-aged colonel as he sounds like), Cox was scarcely born even when punk broke, let alone at the time of the earlier 70s music he so adores. In one particular column, the apotheosis of his "art" (his equivalent of Charles Moore's rant against the Macpherson report), Cox spoke of lutes, mandolins, clogs, tank tops, gladioli, Roy Harper etc. in exactly the same terms (a dream of an imagined, supposedly "lost" world) that Hitchens talks of steam trains, stodgy British food and dandelion and burdock. I like the Pentangle, though.

FWIW: good call on ABBA, Marcello. Why are they still endlessly invoked by those who talk of "70s kitsch" as symbols of upbeat optimism? It's the chord sequences that do it for me; I even think of "Dancing Queen" as fundamentally melancholic, somewhere.

Tom Cox is young??? I have read some of his articles in Q (sadster confession, I know), and I thought him to be at least 40.

I guess he's like Patrick Swayze in his song "She's Like the Wind".

I even think of "Dancing Queen" as fundamentally melancholic

Almost all disco music sounds fundamentally melancholic to me. I think that's why I like it. OK, I know 'Dancing Queen' isn't really disco, but you know what I mean.

I think he's about 25, Nicole. I know, it's tragic.

Age has nuffink to do with, y'know, "age": after all, I'm at least 40.

oh, and if you actually want to endure Cox turning folk-rock into the new light orchestral music and tank tops and flares into the new Aertex shirts and gingham dresses (it's quite surreal in a disgusting way, actually):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3962288,00.html

100% agreed, Nick. That's the main reason why disco has some of the most inappropriate curators, among mainstream-nostalgists, of any music.

And with you, Mark; the analogy within political journalism would be the fact that P. Hitchens, as well as being the brother of the leftish Christopher, is younger than Polly Toynbee and Hugo Young. Hague, as well.

hey robin, don't get so pretentious. it's just music. you only gotta feel music, you don't have to look in the thesorus to find out 100 new words to write about it. tom cox is a bit of a prick really but at least he likes real soul not that machine r&b bollocks you all like. macy gray. yeah!

sorry i used your email address, but i've been smoking a lot today. just totally fucked off with it. what's a gingham dress when it's at home?

Do you know how to spell the word "thesaurus", Soulman?

Soulman = Trollman.

Stop it Robin. I've checked the IPs.

hey, don't patronise me. yer smirking down there in london, i know. bloody students.

dunno what a bloody ip is. aston villa ain't no good, though.

but i think i'm out of my depth here. too many ideas. too many fucking long words. not enough soul. coxy forever! i'm off. wanna listen to some good sam and dave? come round to my place in selly oak tomorrow. that's it.

I take it then that "soulman" will have no objections if I bulk- delete the messages from "soulman"'s IP address?

Tom: he has a *reputation*, shall we say. I wouldn't, if I were you.

No need to be coy, J -- is he some hypertroller who runs his own server and can't be stopped or what?

Oh, what's he going to do? Write a letter to the fucking Telegraph?

Robin, STOP TROLLING ON THE FORUM UNDER PSEUDONYMS. Please.

Robin, i went to see Pentangle in Ashington in the late 80's - 30 people at the gig, twas beautiful but sad - i have never felt that sorry for any band and vigrously applauded, much to their embaressment.

Saw Peter Hitchens' name mentioned somewhere... isn't he the most odious man in Britain? A little bit irrelevant to the thread, but y'know... he does make my skin crawl.

Yep Tom Cox and Peter Hitchins - would be sent into my version of Room 101.

I saw a funny story about Peter Hitchens -- he wrote it actually. He once saw a woman giving money to a beggar so he went up to her and told her to stop it. So the beggar proceeds to kick his face in. Hilarious. He wrote a snivelling piece about it in one of the horrid papers he writes for.

I'm sorry, Tom. I've had an utterly shitty and depressing week and I felt I might cheer myself up by the amusement of arguing with myself, so to speak. Note also my pathetic attempt at a cover-up when I gave the wrong email address. But, yeah, it was misconceived. I won't do this again on ILM, though there might always be other outlets ...

The folkish stuff that Cox likes I actually find a whole lot easier to take than the DLT Rock he loves. I think I'd have rather enjoyed the Pentangle gig recalled by the Racer, which could start its own thread along the "one man clapping" lines.

And, yeah, Hitchens is obnoxious. The analogy occured to me because, when Hitchens refers to "the Britain of the 1940s" or whatever, his entire tone is to pretend that He Actually Experienced It, just as Cox does with some notional "lost" 1970s. I think in both cases it might genuinely be a personal depression caused by not having experienced something they're convinced they'd have loved, but beware all own-lifetime-deniers even when their arguments sound tempting.

I actually remember that column, shamefully. His tone was more moral outrage than sniggering, but it all seems so incredibly, indiscribably mean-spirited from him, however he comes at it.

I'm afraid I have always found him rather entertaining. I used to love that thing with him and Derek Draper on Talk Radio. I think it's because I enjoy observing strange specimens -- there's something compellingly curious about John Redwood too. They strike me as fairly sick, deluded individuals... Hitchens is so completely certain that he's right about everything. I think that it's usually the most deeply immoral who have to make a huge thing about morality. See also that other strange Tory specimen, Anne Widdecombe.

Oh, I see what you mean entirely Jonathan; my interest in Hitchens, if you can call it that, came about precisely through a similar fascination with these extreme and deluded reactions, and what leads people to make them. I would agree that with people like him, Redwood (who actually had me screaming "cunt" at the TV during Question Time last night; admittedly I was mentally fucked out of all proportion at the time), Widdecombe etc. it is their own private, internal knowledge of their own moral flaws which causes this massive guilt which they take out on everyone else.

"it is their own private, internal knowledge of their own moral flaws"

I really really really doubt this.

Mark: it's maybe not so much knowledge of their moral flaws, but knowledge that they haven't always lived up to the "standards" they now fascistically impose and hatred of themselves for having reinforced (or so they think) the things they now despise. Paul Johnson edited the leftish New Statesman in the 60s, Peter Hitchens was a Trotskyist and broke through a line of police officers defending Enoch Powell from anti-racist campaigning students while he was at York University; both clearly feel guilty as hell of their more liberal past and *that* is what they now take out on the rest of us.

Also, I have a secret theory that Hitchens loved Fairport Convention when he was 18 or so (the time of Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief) thinking about the distinction he makes between "national poetry or song" (which young people refuse) and "the fashionable pieties of 'protest' music" (which young people allegedly love). By covering "Tam Lin" (which the BNP recently invoked) *and* several Bob Dylan songs (he being a so-called "protest" singer back in Hitchens's foreign land), Fairport proved such a divide to be a false concept; I can v. easily imagine Hitchens feeling guilty at himself now for thinking that the two could be fused and combined, back in the past which fuels his self-hatred.

It's always self-hatred projected on to the world with these people. It's also fear of their own flaws or uncertainties which makes them ever more dogmatic, thereby increasing their hypocrisy and inconsistency.

My God, Hitchens did this little piece on George Harrison a matter of days after he was stabbed two or three years ago. It really was the weirdest, most peevish piece of journalism I've ever read. As he and his ilk seem to blame The Beatles for most of our contemporary ills, it was kind of like... "Well, we gave peace a chance and look how it's ended up for you". In other words, because you sang about peace and love, George, you deserve a good stabbing.

Not that Harrison had anything to do with "Give Peace a Chance". But that's Hitchens for you.

I actually remember the column on Harrison. As vengeful as journalism gets, and a fine example of his self-guilt over his flirtations with liberalism in the 60s.

Is Hitchens the guy who just came out with that bio of Henry Kissinger? I saw the ad for it in the Voice, it had a picture of him saying "Wanted for crimes against humanity". If you write that about somebody in a public forum, all I can say is, you'd better have your shit together.

Nah.. that's Christopher Hitchens. He's not only a flirter-with-leftism, but a well known liberal voice. His book, from what I've heard, has astounding amounts of "shit together" particularly w/r/t Chile and Latin America.

Peter and Christopher are brothers. Christopher seems like a fair- minded, decent human being. The same cannot be said about his slimy little brother.

elvis costello said that he was driven by guilt and revenge ( sounds familiar ? )

paul heaton said hiz songs are sad cause when you is out enjoying yourself you don't write songs - you write em when you iz home anna billy-no-mates.

but they is crapola methinks !

compare my too favourit dancin' choons - 'save all your kisses for me' iz more dread pervo suicidal than ' love will tear us apart' - maybe IANK(urtis) knew this just as K(urtkob)AIN knew tha Vengabus was coming.

C.Hitchens has done some badass tv swearing - better than KeithnohopaAllen - also watched him + paxman savage some PC prannies once. his bro' is snivvly litterunt imcompharizon.

ok, so 'vindaloo' waz jack the biscuit but he iz the bad tooth fairy - tony wilson was spot on.