A kung fu fighter in a disco

From an American perspective, it's not a misrepresentation at all. It must seem obsessive, and to be honest it often does to *me* when I look back at my posts, but that is Asperger's Syndrome again: single issues, assumption of universal meaning where it might not necessarily exist, conspiratorial tendencies ... I should be more subtle, more willing to let songs acquire their own meanings, to show ambiguity, to let my readers think for themselves, but I think I'm getting better in all these fields (compare the *unanswered questions* and conflict of my recent piece on New Musik's "Living By Numbers" to my early livejournal entries; clearly the work of a much more rational, balanced man). I often shudder to think at how incomprehensible my postings must be to non-Brits; even British people often don't get most of the references, although I think that a lot of people in the rest of Europe would feel reassured by my stance, and wish that more British people thought like me (a lot, but certainly not all: cult followers of Alec Empire, if there are any left, would probably consider me a neo-fascist).

To get back to the original subject, I'd hardly call the most widespread interpretation of "Ghost Town" Carmodistic, in that it was around - and very much the norm - long before I started doing this. I think it's just *blindingly obvious* in that case (and of course there's other stuff it can be analogised with; Charles and Diana as Official Distraction). It's one of the few cases where a connection is so clear as to overpower the usual residual impact of Great British Compartmentalism.