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I give up, really.... (Flashback to the Mick Talbot: where he is now column in MM, one of the funniest things in recorded history)...

I'm genuinely puzzled by this... what threat do Razorlight pose to anything, apart from to the credibility of anyone who likes them?

I agree with all that obv... but it would undoubtedly have been much better if it weren't in a pub. There was just that practical problem to do with the discussion at the end being drowned out by bloke-beer chat, which might not have happened if it was held someone nicer. It wasn't the ppl who...

An 'award-today, gone tomorrow' band, like Gomez. I fully expect them to win 17 Brits, all the NME awards and the Mercury Music Prize before finding their natural home, the boot of a car on a Sunday morning, on sale for 10p. The ritual slaughtering of 'Hounds of Love' alone deserves our...

Yes, well that e.g. was in my mind as I wrote actually. It did put a bit of a pall on things, as that inevitable tendency for ppl to engage in beer chit chat became more prevalent as the night went on, cloaking the discussion in that alchohol-fuelled dullness...9Kodwo and I were moaning...

Aha, so it's back to binaries is it? You've missed the point about faith being rewarded: the idea is that faith is IMMEDIATELY rewarded because of the meaning and purpose your life acquires (or seems to acquire). The PCF were an example of the ways in which Pascal's argument could be used...

But the point is that this is all on the side of hedonic consumerist subjectivism, for which the ultimate appeal is to what 'real' people actually do, which is, as you say, an inconsistent mess most of the time. From the side of political or religious commitment, it is (a la Kierkegaard)...

Meanwhile, back to serious and worthwhile posts.... I like this turn in conversation too. But I do have a different interpretation of this 'belief before belief' thing, I think. The move is Pascalian, but that follows Zizek's discussion of belief before belief in The Sublime Object of...

Ah, the service with a sneer we've come to expect from Henry Miller, whose contribution to this messageboard has been immense. 70,000 know-all posts, all of them carping and know-all supercilious...we certainly know what he doesn't like, but does anyone have any clue about what HE thinks? (I...

'Scenes' is going some way, but I think 'event' is better. Not all scenes produce events. Events are where the Impossible becomes realised - when the marionette theatre called everyday life is exposed as just one stage set. Clearly rave did some of that - but the rave dream died, not only in...

lol, but I prefer to think of it as a spiral I think! I agree with all of this, but that is why I would resist the thought that Pop is about 'music' or 'experiences'. As I've said above, I think that Underground Resistance go too far when they say that certain sounds are in themselves...

OK, so this thread arises out of discussions between Infinite Thought and k-punk following our trip to the Meaning of Theism conference at the weekend. (If you want to follow the trail, here it is, backwards:this, which was a response to this, which was a response to this.... (I could go yet...

It can, of course, be a source of fascination - but the political and ethical questions are what we do about that - whether we think that anatomising fascinations is enough, or whether we choose our fascinations and fixations on the basis of their transformative power. I guess in my case it's...

lol, yes I think so too... I'm interested in love songs too - but interestingly not because 'my own idea of love' differs from it. I tried to bring this out in my posts on 'Love Hangover' and the one I did at Christmas on Roxy: partly what interests me about love songs is that they reveal the...

k fair play Yes, but part of the problem I am having with what you are saying now - and I accept that there is no point arguing about fundamental positions, they are so different - is that the term 'experience' is being stretched to cover any response whatsoever to a cultural object. This is...

Are we reading the same Zizek? Clearly not Sterling: but in what sense have you read Zizek at all? Clearly you've read some of the words (with notable exceptions, see below), but to ask the question 'how dare you bring Zizek into this' actually beggars belief. I mean that literally, I am...

Part 3 Well, certainly positions can be wrong. But the most ideological position of all is one that refuses to take a political position; or worse, that assumes that there is some zone - in this case aesthetic - which lies outside the political. But that presupposes the very point at issue...

Part two Once again, this is the Nietzchean orthodoxy underlying Cult Studs. The fact that sometimes such positions can be 'pathologized' does not mean that all positions are pathological. Nor can all legislative categories be tied back down to experience because a Nietzschean relativist...

Well, exactly. And I wonder in which ways this postion differs from that of the so-called Popist straw man? Isn't the reduction of all discourse about music to aestheticist opinionism precisely what Popism was being accused of above? 1. That isn't answering the question, it's evading it. I'm...

part 2 But you sound to me as if you are pushing that in the Nietzschean direction - collapsing appearance into reality - when the other alternative is to push everything onto the side of the 'objective' (I'm none too happy about this binary either). To say, in other words, that the gaze...