Turns out Mellon Collie really is a good album. With a not-so-good half-album interspersed between the good bits. Which, I think, is what we pretty much said at the time. I saw a video of Billy Corgan going on about how no less a person that Marilyn Manson had said that Corgan was the better musical artist, whilst claiming that he (Manson) was the better visual artist. Well, maybe. Corgan is probably one of those people who are easier to get on with through their art than they might be in person, but there certainly is some great art in there. He wrote the lyric 'love is suicide', as well as 'youth is wasted on the young', and although the thought can't claim to be original in either case, I think the expression is. Courtney Love (like MCR, known for her subtle understatement) claimed that lyric from Bodies as being about her. Hmm. There was clearly some sort of relationship between them (it is supposed to be the case that Heart Shaped Box is about something Kurt Cobain found that had been given to Love by Corgan). But I don't think so. I think, given the timing and the subject matter of a lot of the other stuff on the same record, Corgan was not in the mood for a black joke like that one. Those of us who lived the 90s cannot fail to remember the subject of today's news, Keith Flint. His image (and his performance in the video for Firestarter in particular) made it cool for rock kids to like dance music. Another suicide, according to at least some of the news reports, and the detail that he had beaten his best in the local park run just a couple of days ago does make that just a little bit sadder. I wouldn't have been especially interested in the Prodigy at the time, because I think in my desire to be purist about all things alt. rock I would have rejected their dance-influenced music as being somehow selling out, specifically to those folk who were interested at their core in dance music as a genre. That's the sort of kid I was, I suppose. Obsessed by a load of things which actually don't matter at all. I would not have allowed an REM album into the house, for example, dismissing them as dad rock. Some irony then in the fact that now, as a dad, I think they're actually quite alternative... Yikes. So let's leave it to Billy Corgan to play us out, then...
8 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. 9 Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you. Round about the same time that I was hearing this from the headmaster at my old school (another club, one that at the time I definitely did not want to be a member of - the one whose members have all this C of E stuff woven through the core of their being - and would actively have done down), I was hearing this from the Smashing Pumpkins:
And, despite what my fifteen-year-old self might have said, they both have a place in whatever I have become as an adult. For the longest time I would have told anyone who would listen that my school experience was relentlessly negative and my redemption came from music (mostly; I refused to read fiction for the most part as a teenager because of hating English lessons). But I feel those verses from Philippians, especially now. It's not just a memory, or a flashback. It is as though they are carved through me, shaping me in a way that, as a teenager, I would have been disappointed with. Well, I'm not a teenager (and haven't been for some time) and though in some ways I'm spectacularly immature, I don't think that my immaturity is anything like what it is to be teenager. The main reason for that is that I think as teenagers and young adults the big thing is to be mature, grown up, have responsibility, the power to make decisions (even stupid ones), be independent. And, later, in (real?) adulthood, those urges that swelled - those needs to be more of an adult than current life circumstances allow - just matter less.
Perhaps it's the uniquely de-skilling process of having children. The need to draft in those same people who as a teenager I was so keen to cut myself adrift from has been humbling. And the sense of responsibility to another person, even a tiny semi-human degenerate psychopath (or 'toddler', as they are more commonly known), is equally humbling. And thoroughly knackering. Particularly to an un-aerodynamic, ill-tempered baby like mine. By way of a further and final point, it's worth saying that I would have been on the same side as Butthead when he's watching the video for Creep by Radiohead. I'd have been saying to Corgan and crew that they better start rocking or I'd really give him something to cry about. Which really tells you all you need to know about me as a teenager... You wander in, spot a load of names you recognise, then realise that these were actually educated at Magdalene. I incorrectly identified that Ussher - although it does say he was Archbishop of Armagh - as the bloke who decided the world got going at whatever time (evening) on 22nd October 4004 BC. Turns out the Magdalene one was that bloke's uncle. There you go.
Won't do the 'nostalgia isn't what it used to be' joke this time, as the only place that brought back any significant memory for me that I passed today being the Maharajah Curry House. "Mr Alex, you are a very bad man." He probably was. I spent less than 100 weeks in Cambridge as a student, followed by a year there working, and yet it has left a mark on or in me that will not be erased. Not the education itself, although that is significant, but the strange sense of belonging to something in some way historical. There's something about being part of it that appeals to that bit of all (some?) of us that wants to be part of the club. Was that membership truly significant? Perhaps not, in the grand scheme of things, but it's impossible to say with conviction. A club of 800 years of history, with some notable participants in These Matters named up there on the glass. But, as you might notice from the tag line, not (m)any women. So let's finish this brief item with a quotation: History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket. |
Andy RichardsonWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thought Archives
March 2022
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