Let us start with the big picture. We have been here for maybe 150,000 to 200,000 years. Not really very long in terms of natural history. Nature came up with a biped mammal – a sort of offshoot of the chimpanzee family. Actually there were three or four kinds but apparently Homo Sapiens quickly wiped out the other ones. Anyway, that’s us. We can’t run very fast, we can’t climb very well, we can’t swim very well, we get cold quite easily. We’re sitting ducks as far as any serious predator is concerned so Nature thought she would give us a fighting chance by equipping us with a cerebral cortex, or *something* in our brains that enables us to make predictions from our actions, make judgements, assess situations, you know, THINK. We figured out how to make fire, build dams etc etc etc. We are an aggressive species. We kill for fun – which is quite unusual in Nature. Until relatively recently, we tended to try and cooperate with Nature (I’m giving Nature a capital N and a female sense out of respect because that’s how I feel) but in more recent times a desire to compete with or even demolish Nature has held sway. This has led to our current problems with Climate Change, environmental damage etc which looks increasingly likely to lead to a major catastrophe within the next fifty to a hundred years or so. There will be bitter wars fought over high ground and drinking water and it will not be a fun time to be alive. The comforting idea that we, as a species, will come to our senses and avert this impending disaster has all but run out of time. Bummer…
OK. That isn’t really all that debatable – although of course many people would debate it. Let’s get into a conspiracy theory or two. Nature has a way of fighting back. She is not docile or passive. She doesn’t care about us. We are a bit of a failed experiment. We have done a lot of very impressive things with that cerebral cortex but, overall, we have made a terrible mess on the carpet. We are wasteful and ungrateful. We need to go. With this in mind, Nature comes up with a few solutions: Covid just being the latest in a long line. (For myself, I think Covid was a result of human error, but I won’t pursue that one here.) I think she wants to get rid of us. People are having a lot less sex than they were even fifty years ago, but I don’t really want to go down that road either. After all, in some parts of the world there are probably massive birth rates. But there are too many of us. My old friend Richard posited a good conspiracy theory at least 25 years ago. He suggested that the wealthy want to kill off the poor so that they cease using up valuable commodities: space, water, breathable air etc. I think he was on to something. I would love to eavesdrop on the Bildeberg group meetings, for example. (For anyone who doesn’t know about Bildeberg, look them up.) Obesity is an interesting example. Watch a few minutes of the “Woodstock” movie which was filmed in August 1969. There you have close on half a million American youths. How many of them are obese? Virtually none. If you gathered a similar sample of half a million American youths now, what would be the picture? Understand, this is an observation, not a judgement. There are specific political reasons for this. Richard Nixon knew that he would have to win the votes of the farming lobby to get elected. To this end, he offered substantial tax breaks for massive corn production. I don’t remember the details but I have been told the story. The upshot was an enormous surplus of corn in the US economy. Then some bright spark discovered that corn syrup could be used as a sugar substitute. Suddenly it was everywhere in processed food. And there are vast swathes of the United States where processed food is the only food available. Trouble is, corn syrup is very hard for the human metabolism to break down. It just sits there. And you get really fat. Heart attacks, diabetes, strokes etc. Premature death. But guess what? The wealthy can afford decent food. Of course they can. (Apologies if I have got any of these details wrong but you get my point). Another aspect of this is the lack of education surrounding what used to be called Domestic Science. People don’t know how to cook food any more. We are not taught how to cook food at school any more. We are not taught how to cultivate vegetables, or basic animal husbandry. Yes I know, you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car. You don’t need to know what a pizza is before you defrost a frozen pizza and eat it. But still… There are reasons for this too. They mostly boil down to:
CAPITALISM! Da da!! Were you wondering when I was going to use the C word? Capitalism is a relatively modern phenomenon, more or less dating back to the Industrial Revolution but MAMMON WORSHIP has been around for a very long time. (Anyone unfamiliar with Mammon as a god or a concept, please look him up.) This is one of my favourite hobby horses, so…Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Mammon is a real god – at least as real as Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha or Krishna or Yahweh. Mammon looks at all these other gods and realises that their fundamental problem is that their adherents have to *profess* themselves to be adherents. Imagine if instead, your worshippers could worship you without even realising that that is what they are doing. This is where Mammon really scores. So many people worship Mammon without realising it. They base their entire lives around this worship, as peoples of the past based their entire lives around the worship of their particular gods. I’m not talking about working to earn a living. I’m talking about what drives a person who works, say, in a merchant bank or an insurance company. Who isn’t necessarily a millionaire but who earns a very good living working for someone who is. Why do they do it? After all their material needs are satisfied they create more material needs. Give a man a hundred million and all you do is create a frustrated billionaire. The idea is that money will make you happy. Now I know there are people who will say that anyone who cannot see how to make their money make them happy is just unimaginative. I think that’s true, but I think that the very business of making all that money *makes* them unimaginative. They simply don’t have time to see beyond the next bonus. What’s it all for? Accumulate, stockpile, put the money where it’s going to be *safe*, invest, build – and to what end? So your kids never have to work? So they can blow it all? Is that all there is? (So let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.) But there’s nothing really new about this. So what *has* changed? Property prices, obviously. Used to be a middle class professional working in a big city could buy a place to live near to their office relatively easily. That’s no longer true. Political corruption has allowed international gangsters to park their money in property which has driven up prices at the top which has had a knock-on effect. Similarly, the very wealthy have been allowed to get much wealthier with similar effect. That which society values has changed. An ability to make money from gambling with other people’s money is probably the most highly rewarded talent but the parasitic greed and selfishness that underpins this is reflected out in all manner of ways from the phenomenon of famous-for-being-famous ‘celebrity culture’ to ludicrously overpaid footballers etc etc etc. Children grow up seeing that being selfish pays. You have to have a very strong moral compass indeed to see that hard work and generosity of spirit are their own rewards.
So let’s go back to the period immediately following the Second World War. We beat the nazis! Wah hey! Fantastic. But at a terrible cost. We needed to rebuild. We invited citizens of the “Commonwealth” to come over here and help us do it (then, when they had worked all their lives for minimum wage and were too old and exhausted to fight, we shat on them and threw them out, but hey…). The very wealthy paid up to 90% tax. 90% Think about it. Supertax they called it. But you know what? Eton and Harrow and all the other schools for the rich were not short of students, the Rolls Royce and Bentley showroom in Berkeley Square did good business, three foreign holidays a year, domestic staff, country estates etc etc etc. The rich maintained their lifestyles despite the high level of taxation and meanwhile, the NHS was founded and funded, libraries, public utilities, education – all of this was paid for with tax. Politicians went into politics for altruistic reasons. They really wanted to serve the public, the general good. There was a sense of Public Duty. Laughable, right? I daresay I am romanticising but can you imagine any of this happening now? What went wrong? Much as I love to blame Maggie Thatcher for everything I think in this case it’s justified. Thatcher, with her misguided devotion to the economic theories of Hayek and Friedman, ushered in a new philosophy. She moved the goal posts. Ironically, she had a very deeply rooted sense of Public Duty. It’s just that it was informed by an ideology of cruelty and spite and deep hatred for the working classes. By destroying working class communities and throwing literally millions of people on to the dole, she created an uneducated underclass of disaffected people who knew they had been robbed but lacked the wherewithal to see how it had happened. Their culture, their pride, their social context was destroyed as The Market that Thatcher worshipped dictated that their jobs be sent overseas to places where slavery and near-slavery were not illegal. This was a terrible crime, the ramifications of which are still playing out and the damage it caused will not be repaired with a smartphone and a Netflix subscription. Politicians became bought and sold by corporate interests, as in the American model of lobbyists. They no longer served the public in anything but cosmetic ways. From being a manufacturing nation, we became a service industry and a bespoke money laundering service. The fundamental emphasis of education changed. Instead of knowledge being perceived as worth pursuing for its own sake, knowledge became worthwhile only if it had a commercial application. Could you make money with it? If not, why bother? This is truly the poison in the well of Mammon worship.
But let’s talk about music – which I actually do know something about. When I was at school in the 1970s I got four years worth of free guitar lessons, two years worth of free flute lessons, a few piano lessons – all by putting my hand up in class and saying that I wanted them. This would be impossible now. Only those children whose parents can afford to pay get instrumental tuition. Of course, I had to learn what I was taught. I didn’t have a choice. I was taught Classical – or, to put it another way, music from the Western Tradition of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc. The great dead white males. I had to learn to read music and I had to play these pieces whether I liked them or not. “But, sir” I would say to my guitar teacher (Merlyn Bloor, wherever you are, I thank you), “I wanna play like Jimi Hendrix, sir.” “If you want to play like that,” he replied, “you have to teach yourself.” That was good advice. I knew I was going to be a musician from the age of 12. I didn’t know what kind of musician I was going to be, or how I was going to make a living from it. Nobody taught me. I had to figure it out for myself (or fail to figure it out). I think this was a better system than the one I eventually wound up teaching in. Like a great many musicians I had to start teaching to eke out my living. To my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it. I got a job teaching once a week at Highgate School, a medium posh public (private) school in North London. One day in the mid-90s, one of my students asked me if I could teach him “Anarchy In The UK” by the Sex Pistols. No problem. The utter absurdity of my position struck me even as I wrote out a rudimentary chord chart. I hardly need to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. It was better for me to learn Bach and Beethoven through gritted teeth than to be spoon-fed Sex Pistols songs by an impecunious musician working on Musicians’ Union teaching rates. I had to go out and find the music I wanted to play. And I did. (“Sometimes it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself” – Miles Davis) The popular music of a culture reflects the culture itself. I came along at the end of a period where music had been the primary mode of communication between young people. It had been profoundly important. The falling off of the significance of music is too big a subject for now but I would like to make one musicological observation. The popular music I grew up with was, to a large extent, based on a template of I – IV – V – the three primary chords. Subjectively, this has a questing quality. It wants to know what is going to happen next. What is over the next hill? Round the next corner? Let’s move forward and find out. Popular music of more recent times (especially in America) is founded on a template of I – V – vi – IV – the “No Woman, No Cry” or “Let It Be” changes. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this but it is essentially comforting. It wants its mummy to hold it and tell it that everything’s going to be alright. (Musicology itself provides an interesting example of how the culture of education has changed. When I was doing Music ‘O’ level in the 1970s a basic understanding of Equal Temperament was required. This is the nuts and bolts of why Western music sounds the way it does. Why harmony is possible etc. Sometime in the last twenty years or so I noticed it had disappeared off the syllabus. I asked the head of department at the school I was teaching at why this was so. “Too complicated”, he smiled.) Meanwhile, kids in the music departments of private schools can learn pretty much anything they want. It’s all up for grabs. Like the entire history of recorded music, it’s all just a couple of clicks away. But what are they encouraged to become proficient in? Ensemble playing? Listening to each other? No. “Music Tech”. In other words, how to use computers to make music. How to quantise musical elements so that they can be manipulated in conveniently uniform blocks while constructing a recording. Recording a performance, with all the attendant skills in microphone placement, understanding acoustic spatial awareness – “too complicated.” This isn’t just dumbing down or laziness. In my opinion, this is a deliberate attempt to dehumanise music (quite literally removing human elements) because humans making music together can lead to independent thought, spiritual satisfaction, the promulgation of subversive notions. Yes, I know. Aren’t I the paranoid one? Put it this way, I don’t hear any music being made that carries a hint of rebellion. Nowhere. Nohow. When I was a teenager, musicians could rehearse in squats whilst claiming the dole. This amounted to state patronage. Not any more. Squatting has been made illegal and signing on the dole is much more difficult than it used to be. Thus, music is effectively closed off to the poor. Think about that one for a bit. What would you rather? Genesis, or The Beatles? Mumford & Sons, or The Specials?
Meanwhile, back at all that STUFF that got outsourced. The manufacture of endless amounts of plastic goods, the mountains of cheapness. You can have whatever you want. Just a couple of clicks away. Give Amazon access to your money online and wait for it to turn up. And when you don’t want it any more, just throw it away. Primark for cheap clothes. Who cares who made it? Under what conditions. Just be grateful it wasn’t you. McDonalds and Greggs for cheap food. Stick it in your mouth and chew. Be glad it’s there. Consume, kid, and don’t ask awkward questions. My partner and I were wondering what had happened to teenage rebellion. To political activism. It got indentured, indebted. Tony Blair did away with the free university education that he and his generation had received and replaced it with student loans. Thus, young people in their early 20s are placed into debt to a level that would have been unthinkable when I was a youth. In order to pay these debts off, they must get a “good” job, they must devote themselves to servitude. In the late 1960s and early 70s, who were the most troublesome members of society? Who caused all the fuss? Shouted the loudest? Yep, students. Well, we sure shut them up, didn’t we? Keep their nose to the grindstone paying for their dumbed down education until well into middle age. That’ll work. But what about everybody else? Busy looking at their mobile phones. Glued to the little screens. So between student debt and the internet, all political activism is effectively stifled. Politicians are bought and sold. The police are openly corrupt. Scientists are at the mercy of their corporate sponsors. The ruling class are flagrantly above the law. Music and the arts in general are to a large extent toothless and the average citizens concentration span shrinks and shrinks. It’s grim. So… Gather ye rosebuds where ye may. Take pleasure where you find it and grin and bear the rest? Pretty much. So what of the cashless society? The surveillance state? The “Covid Passport”? The Metaverse? Opt out at your peril. Soon, you will not be able to purchase basic goods and services with cash. You will not be able to travel unless you can prove you have submitted to a syringe full of an experimental substance, the long term effects of which are unknown.
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
So that was written by some anonymous Jewish guy a couple of thousand years ago. It’s in the book of Revelations. Laugh if you want. But already in places in Scandinavia there are subcutaneous chips placed in people’s hands that enable them access to their work place. It’s happening, baby. Watch this space.
“It can’t happen here” – Frank Zappa
Interesting that in the 1950s it was the ‘jocks’ who were looked up to as models. Strong men, muscular. The Charles Atlas ideal. Now it is the ‘nerds’ who have inherited the human world. The clever ones, the ones who design the computer programs. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark would have us live our lives in his ‘metaverse’. He wants us there, where he can see us, where he can see any threat coming before it reaches him. Mark misses his mummy. He wishes he had not been thrown off the boobie so soon, that he had had more pretty girls wanting to sleep with him when he was young. This is his world. It is an irony not lost on me that I am using the platform he devised to publish this diatribe – if anyone cares. I say, reject the metaverse. Pay in cash. Grow your own vegetables or if you cannot do that, learn to cook your own food. Play music made by human beings, love, laugh and look up from your screens.
That’ll do for now.