(screams) aaaaaaaaargh!
I'm a fookin prisoner of my fookin reputation. I'm doomed to live my musical life by proxy. Doomed to the gentle charm of record company types too strapped for a PR budget. You'd better hang tight next year crew. If you thought I was winging it in the last twelve months, you're in for one hell of a surprise. It's going to be wall-to-wall bhangra. Just you see! Bhangra every day. I know even less about about bhangra than I do about Grime. Readers might be interested to know that I failed the Grime module at the Luke Davis Academy of Urban Music. More Heronbone bashing in a minute.
I'm a fookin prisoner of my fookin reputation. How come everyone else just gets to do a little informal speech, serve up some random ill-though-out waffle and I feel duty bound to produce these MAGNUM OPUSES. One after another. For no money. No money at all. I am a fucking idiot. A TOTAL idiot. Readers might be interested to know that my mentor Simon spends hours making his posts look informal, squeezing in those "authentically ardkore" spelling mistakes. Perhaps that's what's everyone is doing, though I doubt it.
If i want to write a load of shite I bloody well will. So here goes:
It's been an unusual few weeks at Heronbone my first suspicion that something was "a brewing" came on December 23rd, 2003. Part the cloud of your festive hangover and think back to that day just before Christmas. Young Luke, or Luka Vandross (as he quite occasionally refers to himself) accused senior dance music journalist Mr. Simon Reynolds of being "a moany old bastard". He proceeded to pepper his prognosis of the direction of the musical movement foreigners are referring to as "Grime", with what looked like cyrillic icons. Huddled amidst the more recognisable text were euro signs, letter "a's" appended with the french circumflex, dollar signs and the trade-mark icon. How very curious! I checked the esteemed Mr. Reynolds own daily journal and there seemed no attempt to rebut the young pretender's insult. No hint of annoyance, no sly post explaining that he was neither "old", nor "moany" nor "born out of wedlock". It seemed that young master Luke had failed to arouse the ire he seemed desirous of.
A few days passed. Mr. Davis presumably became involved with the business of Christmas. I'd hesitate before drawing comparisons between the firebrand and shit-stirrer we know and love and Tiny Tim from Dickens' Christmas Carol. Still loosening his belt from his hearty turkey dinner Davis took time to draw our attention to a squabble that had occurred a few weeks before between a Mr. Robin Carmody and a Mr. Nick Southall. It must have seemed to Davis that there was yet more fun to be had at goading these two highly-respected intellectuals into further infighting and mutual recriminations. Davis was careful to provide hyperlinks so inclined people would be enabled to soak up each person's arguments and mull over which polymath they would be most advantageously aligned with. Davis iced the cake with a scurillous truc of his own invention, a fight the two great thinkers were accused of having in the past: "sparked when an argument concerning the merits of Talk, Talk's maudlin magnum opus 'laughing stock' reached boiling point, Carmody accusing Southall of being 'a pussycleet' and Southall respoding in kind, calling Carmody 'a battyhole.'" Nestled in there, lest Southall assume he was the recipient of Davis's support (hinted at earlier in Davis's description of Southall's response as "spirited") was a below-the-belt jab at Talk Talk, widely understood to be Southall's favourite pop group.
On the following day, Sunday 28th December 2003 Mr. Davis started his "blog-du-jour" by tossing a compliment to Australian Blogger Mr. Jon Dale. Feeling perhaps that, amidst his already commited and subsequent posts, he would be wise to have the good Mr. Dale "on-side". Keen on this day as well to maintain his own "internet-image" as a high-minded gentleman, an intellectual at heart, Mr. Davis discussed a book he had been suggested might be worth perusing by one "jamie." There, however, once again, was that charmingly underhand heronbone compliment: "pretty (good/fascinating) as it goes" suggesting Davis, whilst aware of the book's virtues, might not feel to compelled to pack it with him on a long transatlantic cruise.
Yet Davis's hidden agenda reared it's ugly head once again on Wednesday December 31st, 2003. He backed Mr. David Stelfox into a metaphorical corner with this: "stelfox says 'I'm not particularly down with narcissistic, anarchic, undisciplined, self-indulgent ranting, wherever it may appear.' b-b-but, but, dave, i thought you liked heronbone!" Presumably Mr. Stelfox felt duly bound to approach the maverick Davis and insist that he did in fact "like his writing," that he was actually "down with the heronbone thing." Davis cackling from the sidelines, confident in his own daily journal, unconcerned (susbsequent to this political artifice he had constructed) of Mr. Stelfox's opinion of him. Very wicked! And then, dear reader, I too became sucked into Davis's psychopathological vortex. Upon first confronting Davis's comments: "matt's right of course, if you want to pretend to be a music critic this is the place to be" I felt delighted to receive such approbation from a colleague. To be linked by means of hypertext. Especially from a mind as sharp and widely-respected as Mr. Davis's. Then, however, the sentence, or "nearly sentence", as it was deprived the dignity of a full-stop, sunk past my outer-defences and troubled my own self-worth. Pretending to be a music critic, but, but, but... Davis went on to remark: "sometimes i like pretending to be a music critic, but it's not a role i inhabit with any conviction. sometimes i like pretneding to be a poet, and sometimes, when i'm really excited i like to be pretend to be divinely inspired." And yes, at that moment I too saw the genius of heronbone. All the other bloggers, why they're just "writers", wordsmiths, pen-pushers, plodders, ham-actors. The word "writers" i kept returning to. Yes, I'm just a "writer". I'm not touched by divine fire! I'm not a radio, dammnit, I'm a filing cabinet! All these dense feelings of self-doubt bore down on me.
The next day, Thursday 1st January 2004, Davis returned, not to wish us the best of festive cheer, but to threaten us not to "bite" his style: "for the new year, if any boy gets paid for ripping off heronbone i'm coming round your yard and busting up your hands with a nine pound hammer, you'll be typing up articles with your nose for the rest of your life. don't think i'm joking either, thats my resolution." Actually I was momentarily relieved, for though it was blunt I knew from whence this statement was issuing. I myself had recently expressed a thinly-disguised unease at being an amateur surrounded by the cream of the world's music journalists, and like Davis, seemingly unable to secure a proper writing attachment. Davis rounded off his day by remarking: "i had a couple of beers and a couple of zoots on me own last night and left it at that, and thats the way i wanted it so fuck off," which was, once again a legitimate expression of his own feelings. I myself had been in a nightclub in Glasgow (Optimo if you're curious) on my own, where I made the mistake of writing a post on my handheld communicator describing the scene as it unfurled before me before posting it on the internet, whereupon I discovered I was in the bar of the club, not the main room. Thus that the broadcasted statement was not only inaccurate but potentially hugely embarrassing. Yes, I too like Mr. Davis knew what it was to be "abstract" on New Years Eve. I noticed a day or so later Mr. Stelfox "big up" Mr. Davis, saluting his sound method of dealing with the worst night of the year. Perhaps here was David's heartfelt approach to Mr. Davis's earlier remarks.
On Friday January 2nd 2004, Mr Davis lay his cards on the table: "here's my prediction for 2004, the breakup (acrimoniously preferably) of the blogsphere. we'll alkl splinter off into little subgroups, which will split again and agin, getting smaller each time, like fundamentalist protestant sects, with a new schism each week. people will write things like, of sourse,now there is no 'blogspohere' as such, just a series of small sattelittes without a planet to orbit." Plain as day. And I'll wager the machivellian thinker Vandross sees his central roll in the coming the year as engineering this collapse in our wholesome communication. One might not like his dastardly tactics but his nerve is breathtaking. Davis proceeded by issuing a spine-chilling statement to the broader inkies: "the other thing i'm dreading is the amount of pure bollocks thats going to be written about grime in the magazines and the newspapers ('you can't defeat the griminess') i'm seeing it already and my heart sinks, please please please do a little research before writing down your ill-considered, ill-informed opinions to paper, if you don't know your plasticman from your wiley, your dubstep from your griminess, your jammers from your digital mystics", which undoubtably must have set many teeth on the "so-called-blogosphere" on edge. I know I was worried. Why? Because I quite patently know NOTHING whatsoever about Grime. I buy the records, oh sure, but when the chips or down that just means I have(n't) expendable income. People are now really worrying. Deuce magazine's subscriptions double in a matter of hours. Argos sells out of sturdy FM Radios. Davis proceeds by lauding the widely respected Spizzazzz crew, a husband and wife team, widely acknowledged on the Internet as well-versed in their particular topics, and thus a safe political harbour for many an internet skirmish. Once again I marvelled as Davis's acumen and astuteness, covering his rear so superbly. Finally, and bringing you up to date, Davis lambasted the press (and thus perhaps tacitly the Internet Grime contingent, Reynolds spared here): "hipsters were laughing at this music last year, don't forget that, probably still would be if it weren't for reynolds and the 'trickle-down effect' so if you realise that you're like that, that you have no real love for the music, you just namedrop it to seem like you're still down with the kids then you really need to take a long hard look at the contents of your soul, maybe take a couple of months of work, think about the direction your life's going, how did you become reduced to this? grubbing degenerate, pederast by proxy..." My lord he's scary.
Where all this is leading I have no idea, though don't be surprised if you see a serrid line of second-string internet music music fanatics swinging from ropes o'er Tower Bridge, the furious Mr. Davis roaring with delight and pinching prostitutes at a nearby tavern. Oh yes, I'll be there too, swinging in the chill January air, my tongue lolling from my mouth while seagulls peck my eyes.
Posted by Woebot at January 3, 2004 11:08 PM