my power pop addiction, no. 34 (106)

I’m not a huge Go Betweens guy, but I admire Robert Forster and the late Grant McLennan’s songsmithing, and the band has its scattered moments of lovely melancholia. When I say I admire Forster and McLennan, I mean to say that I appreciate what they do on an intellectual level even if I don’t really connect with it emotionally. The problem for me is that the Go Betweens are art pop, and my taste these days isn’t very arty or sophisticated. But things used to be different. Music for me is usually an extension of what’s going on in my life elsewhere. I got heavily into the Go Betweens when I first moved to California 20 years ago. I was living in Berkeley in a dingy walk-up on the corner of College and Russell. It seemed to rain every day in the East Bay that winter. I had moved to California to bask in the sunshine and warmth after the incessant rains I’d suffered through in England. The good weather would have to wait until I moved to Los Angeles… I had no friends in Berkeley and worked in a doctor’s office as a receptionist alongside nurses who lived in towns like Fremont and Concord. It was very alienating work. The phone rang all day. Every person on the other end was a whiner. I hated the patients and secretly wished death on many of them. They all needed something, an appointment for a pap smear or rectal exam, a prescription for Vicoden or Xanax, a sympathetic ear to listen to a long, boring litany of ailments… I took myself much more seriously in those days. I probably wouldn’t like that guy if I met him today. I was making plans at the time to go back to graduate school and saw myself writing many scholarly books on deep philosophical, sociological and aesthetic topics. I represented myself to myself as a Hegelian Marxist, molded in the image of Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch, but with a pessimistic streak I picked up from Adorno and his negative dialectic, which was an elaboration on the dialectic of enlightenment he developed with Max Horkheimer. I was also fascinated by the debates over the nature of postmodernity. I rejected Lyotard’s concept of le differend as the epistemological corollary to postmodern society because it implied irreconcilable discourses leading to political paralysis and stagnation. But these days it’s hard to argue with Lyotard’s vision. I’ve been told that postmodern ideas are passé at this point, but I really don’t see why. Descriptively they seem to apply now more than ever. Advanced capitalism is fractured and fragmented, but also technocratic and based on crisis management. Collective political action seems so untenable. I realize that this line of thinking only strengthens the existing structures of power but…I don’t know. I no longer have the energy for those discussions. I was so deadly serious in those days. I wanted to immerse myself in complex ideas and block the actually existing world out. I was sinking in the quicksand of my thoughts without knowing it. I was still so innocent and naïve. And this combination of seriousness and innocence made the Go Betweens just the thing for me. Hearing them now takes me back to that frame of mind. It’s not a place I feel comfortable being in for too long, but it’s not too bad for a few minutes once in awhile…