If A Recession Is Supposed To Produce Great Music, Then Where The F*ck Is It?!

So, the old chestnut is getting rolled out in every pub conversation and blog across the land at the moment. Yeah, sure we’re all broke, down and out but at least it will produce some great art and fantastic music. It’s a simple, neat equation isn’t it? Poverty and social unrest = good music.

I can’t help thinking that this is a typical crime of the kind of people that Jarvis Cocker sang about in ‘Common People’. Only cultural vampires and voyeurs would ever romanticize having no coin because we all know that it simply isn’t fun.

If it is the case then where is all this great music at then? You can point to the updated Spice Girls escapist vacuous pop of Little Boots et al but that isn’t what is needed right now. You can also point to Springsteen changing his set-list to reflect these troubled economic times but The Boss is 60 this year. Where are the young musical equivalents of Molotov cocktails?   

From where I’m standing, they are all playing it safe. There are fewer genuine eccentrics with an original vision and something to say as each year goes by. It’s gotten so desperate that the fucking flowerpot man from The Enemy is considered to be some kind of generational spokesman. Not on my watch, son.

I surprised myself completely by welcoming the new Manics album with open arms recently, if only because it brings into sharp focus the fact that no one is writing amazing pop songs about stuff like the patronization of the working classes or the considerable atrocities carried out by the last Conservative Government anymore. You don’t all have to sound like Gang of Four to be political you know, great choruses are allowed.

So, start demanding more from your bands to document the times we’re living in because the sound of Joe Strummer turning in his grave is keeping me awake at night.        

Our so-called musical heroes are depoliticized, apathetic, soulless morons and pop has lost its eccentricity and sense of social duty.    

This week, the BNP won two seats in the European elections. For Christ’s sake someone pick up a guitar, microphone, sampler, even some pots and pans, start playing them LOUD and prove that I’m not on some kind of bad acid trip.