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I agree. Watching those live grime DVDS, I feel simultaneously ultra-tense AND bored... all that aggression, but with no finesse, no means of transforming it into anything fascinating, sublime... just an oi-like assertion of the brute fact of existence... Much of it doesn't strike me as that...

This isn't quite what I meant by 'event' really. The Olympic opening ceremony, jesus god, the most boring thing in world history (I agree with Danny Baker, London shd say it isn't going to have an opening ceremony, it would win straight away!). The Olympic opening ceremony is a commemoration...

I think there's a problem of overavailability: that's one of the things that comes across very strongly in Rip It Up. How postmodernity in pop was very much about the simple availability of the past - many records we'd consider classics now were not very easy to get hold of in the post-punk...

Independent doesn't equal 'indie', surely that's a given?

Yes, and the Final Solution, love it or hate it, is one of the key political policies to understand the 1930s.

Yes: everything falsely claimed on of U2 - that they muster a panoramic, widescreen vastness - was actually true of Simple Minds circa New Gold Dream. Post NGD, Simple Minds managed the considerable achievement of sounding even more pompous and bloated than U2. But at least they didn't have Bono.

Surely it is... like Mr Agreeable in reverse.... take a loathsome, obviously oppressive corporate rock monstrosity of no conceivable merit and make a case for them....

case closed m'lud.

What is the supposed connection between the empty, flaccid pomposity of U2's music and 'life'? The point about postpunk was not that it was transcendently political (i.e. that it urges you to action after listening to it) but that it directly acted upon you - posing all sorts of question about...

I wholeheartedly agree with this. The reason I'm free to follow my own lines on k-p is that it is not subject to the demographic censorship of either academic publishing (which because of the Research Assessment criteria must now be at least as restricted and hidebound as universities in the...

I wouldn't say they were too long: they're just not ideal for 'screen reading'. But that's OK, like the woman you saw on the train reading CoM, I print out the very long ones ... As for Paul's point on closing comments: I think that has turned out to be right. As Luke noted at the time, the...

But that's not a matter of style so much as presentation: and I do pretty much, and quite self-consciously, stick to those criteria. Quite early on, Penman told me that he wrote in a different 'tabloid' way on the net: capital letters, short paragraphs etc. I've tried to stick to that ever since!

Yes, I think the failure of the music is a big part of it; quite honestly, I for one would be delighted if Simon started writing about old music; the new stuff isn't worthy of his attention in the main. 'Boycott mediocrity' Luka said a couple of years ago... that's right... There's no need for...

I think CoM worked better for two reasons: 1. It had a clearly defined concept, which was narrow enough to give it consistency, but broad enough not to be constricting. (By contrast, the 1974 thing, while interesting, is perhaps too narrow and too mechanically programmatic, especially for the...

Sure, i'll be there, this sounds great, thanks....

But of course this kind of widespread pompous relativism is its own form of judgementalism.... Why are non-definitive, movable non-judgements better than the reverse? If subscribing to the obvious truth that Futureheads are unspeakable trash makes me a snob, then, fine. It's better than going...

Yeh, we were desperate for new on this... hours and hours of empty blather and idiot extrapolation while they let their story slip through their fingers....

The effect these bands have is more social than aesthetic: 1. To convince students (who, as Simon Frith has rightly observed, are THE most conservative, reactionary and nostalgic consumers of pop in British society) of the innate superiority of their own rockist values. 2. To lower...

The Futureheads more good songs than The Fall? Bloc Party the best band of the seven years? Imagine living in a world where that were true. Would it really be worth carrying on?

But surely the whole point of Zizek's use of it is to demonstrate that it need not solely be about control? It might not only be other smokers though; aren't you equivocating here between 'actual social individuals' and the big Other, the superegoic injunction to enjoy? Yes, it is aimed at...