Behind the curve...

Sodcasting – you’ve got to love the signifier even if you don’t love what it signifies. I only heard the phrase recently. This is an article from almost a year and a half ago, so it’s clearly been knocking around (according to this the term was invented in 2007 – as usual at TtSD we’re well behind the curve).

Sodcasting is the act of playing music on public transport. Its young people do it. I have never encountered a bone fide adult doing it. Of course it’s infuriating and, of course, sodcasters almost certainly aren’t aware of how annoying it is and many probably think they’re brightening up people’s bus journey. It is another illustration of music used as ambience, sound as space.

Teenagers would make room for themselves in the family home by building a wall of sound in their room with a radio, cassette player or such. As far as it’s a conscious act I think it’s done firstly by young people living in such close quarters that privacy at home is impossible. I used to live in a block of flats where half a dozen lads used to regularly hang about outside. They’d smoke weed and listen to music in a car. They looked like every Mail-reader’s nightmare but were never any trouble. In fact they were being very considerate (whether they intended to be or not) as they certainly couldn’t do that indoors.

The second factor is our society has become much more hostile to young people. We have a government that actively encourages this. Conscious sodcasting is a way of asserting power and control over a space. We can berate young people for doing it, but then life, especially urban life, has been turned into an aggressive war of all against all, fighting for space, rushing from A to B. No one is innocent.

A more considerate society starts with considering people’s needs. In this case a place for young people of all backgrounds to meet and play music.

Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact...

We live in an age where it's better to look young, act young, but not be young. Post War rebellion ...and upheval was driven by prosperity, its bearers were the young. Who saw the no material reason why they must defer pleasure or self-realisation, as previous generations did. Anything that stood in the way, the class barriers, organised religion, the education system, had to be razed. An ambigous urge that could be just as much Thatcherite as socialist, you could see it as a class moving up or people moving up out of their class. 


That dream has been eroded almost to nothing. Neoliberalism means the end of the future. No one looks forward to the future anymore, compare that to the 1960s... The dream of ever expanding prosperity started to fade between the oil crisisand the IMF bailout. Punk comes after this, it comes in with all the other music trends that have happened since; plenty of good music, plenty more mediocre and awful music, but it does not have the spark, it is the Imitation of Life. It needs repeating. The constant worry about whether pop music and youth culture are vital any more is at best tilting at windmills. Youth culture today makes no impact on wider society because young people have been progressively marginalised.

Musings...

Musings on the politics of the TV series True Blood: oh dear! Of the three series I have seen the vampire/LGBT analogy is clear, this is one strand of vampirism in culture, sexuality, albeit a fairly original take. The other aspect of vampirism is aristocracy. This becomes clearer as the show progresses (and becomes more complicated). In this world vampires don't simply equal gay people, to imply such is to tinker with the reactionary. In America at least the vampire community is arranged into kingdoms, based, curiously, on the different states, republics. Can there be such a thing as a democratic vampire, could there a vampire revolution? Some of the vampires featured date back to the dark ages, and even ancient times. Their justice is appropriately arbitrary and savage, though this is barely touched on (and only to be lamented, by Godric or Bill Compton), compared to the amoral glamour of the vampires themselves.

Can there be a democratic vampire (I bet you were asking that question!)? Can there even be a democratic monster or supernatural being? We are dealing, of course, with a modern bourgeois culture appropriating myths from the Middle Ages (to some extent the vampires represent white southern aristocracy post-reconstruction: the opposite of an oppressed group). We're unlikely to find radical creatures. The most democratic being is probably the zombie, but zombies do not have personality, only a simple, destructive will. They are fear of the mob, in particular the colonial mob; little more.