English Settlement

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My latest column for Pitchfork - http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/46485-column-poptimist-9 - talking about consensus in the UK music industry and its impact. (and talking about a few other things too). There is a lot of stuff which I didnt have space or time to explore and hopefully I will get the chance to write some of that up here or on FT later today.

EDIT: I did! http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Good thoughts though - the "punk as yr zero" thing is something that keeps niggling at me. I think your comment about No Wave is important - maybe because it tried harder to follow through on its year zero it couldn't break out of its location. Whereas with UK punk everyone got the Big Fact about its destructiveness but that destruction never really happened - it just became an acceptable stick to beat whatever you like with (the day I turned the copy in there was an article on digital music in the paper and lo and behold there was some 20-year-old myspace kid saying "oh its like how punk blew away prog" - it's absolutely accepted as part of UK pop history)

A column I started writing was about punk in Britain and DC Comics' "Crisis On Infinite Earths" series in the 80s, which was a rip-it-up-and-start-again move designed to stop readers being put off by 40 years worth of old stories. So they destroyed their old universe and started again, but of course they still HAD Batman and Superman running around, it was just a version of Batman and Superman with a 40 year published history which writers couldn't directly mention but could allude to or rediscover, and it ended up being a total mess. Anyway I didn't write this column because only about 40 people care enough about pop and comics to follow what I would have talked about.