Chapter Nine: Modern Life

Tuesday, 26 August 2008

I used to consider the authors of blogs colossal time wasters and their readers not much better.

Who are these wankers, I wondered. Why do they think can write? And even if they can, why do they feel the need to publish their ideas to the world? And who on earth wants to read them anyway? Bloggers. Useless!

And now here I am writing a blog.

Since I was 18, I've struggled with the realities of modern life. It’s funny though, “modern life” is one of those strange time-phrases, because it's always modern life, really. So I suppose I've always struggled with the realities of life, full stop.

When I was 18, all I wanted to do was live in other times and other places. The ones I heard about in songs. The ones I read about in books. I think America and England featured strongly and I believe the 50's was one period in time and the late 60's/early 70's was another. It was all tied in with romanticism and escape and nostalgia (for a time I'd never experienced, which is very odd in its own way).

This continued throughout my early 20's but with slowly receding strength as it became increasingly apparent that I wasn't going to be living in those times or those places but instead was going to remain right where I was, working in offices and not writing songs worth a damn with my youthful days disappearing at a rapid rate.

Reality came calling with a pretty vicious knock at the door, but strangely enough, after I accepted it, things actually got better creatively because I stopped pretending to be what I wasn’t.

Anyway, one of my favourite songs from those early days was the notorious Lou Reed/Velvet Underground track, Heroin.

I fell in love with that song the very first time I heard it, not because I was on heroin, or thought it might be a good idea to get on heroin, but because I felt the song in my heart without any heroin, which I happen to think is testament to its brilliance.

You don't necessarily need to have a junk habit to understand the horror, thrill, pain, joy and longing of life. You just need to exist. That's more than enough. You just need to be in love, or out of love, or lose someone, or gain someone, or need someone very badly, or feel like you don't need anyone at all.

The intensity of sensation described by Reed (and mind-blowingly played by the VU) in Heroin is all around us, all the time. In the song, Reed just happens to utilise heroin as the indicator. The switch-blade skill of the song isn't apparent if you concentrate on the title-as-subject alone; I think it only really works if you "get" the song in your heart.

Anyway, I loved it, because it spoke of pure escapism. It talked of leaving ordinary existence for some higher plane, of disappearing, of getting out.

Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils in this town
And of himself and those around

It talked of being entirely removed from life without actually dying. And that's not such a depressing or uncommon thought. To be somewhere else, to live in some other time, a thousand years ago … on a great big clipper ship / Going from this land here to that … of wanting to live inside some kind of fantastic and hidden-from-view realm.

I first heard Heroin when I was 19 and I thought it was evil and terrifying and beautiful and thrilling all at the same time.

Like any song that affects me deeply, it sounded the way I felt.

But even then, I knew the song’s Promised Land wasn't really possible. Even the song itself seethes with futility and loss. Maybe you can temporarily leave ordinary existence, and drugs are the certainly fastest route. But they don't last. Either you give them up, or they give you up.

One way or another, the party has to end.

So, you're left with your troublesome, mundane existence - again - and you either continue to delay the reality indefinitely, or learn how to function within its confines.

From what I've seen, and looking back even at myself, artists generally tend to feel marginalised. They don't believe they fit in. They don't think they belong. “I guess I just wasn't made for these times” as Brian Wilson famously opined.

It's a bit indulgent, but I have to say, I sympathise to some extent.

I remember once seeing a comedian who claimed that the reason so many artists, writers and musicians were screaming drug abusers was because they didn't " … have to get up in the morning and go to work". I thought that was pretty amusing at the time. But I think the reality is that it comes from the constant need to escape. And interestingly, art can also come out of that same need.

There's a positive and a negative side to this kind of self removal.

The positive is that you become a spectator on the human condition. A kind of commentator. You try and describe the act of being alive, and all the misery and bliss it entails, from your perspective. The negative side is that you give up. You use your art as a shield or a weapon with which to protect yourself. You try and raise your status above the mundane and the ordinary, set yourself apart from others, cut yourself adrift.

You engage or you retreat.

And engagement with life, with people, is very important, even if they sometimes hurt and frustrate and disappoint you. It's the only way you can really learn anything new about yourself. Nothing is learned in isolation, except how tiny your world really is. People bring a wider scope to your life.

A similar rule applies to technology.

Even though I understand technology, I'm not its greatest advocate. My concentrated knowledge of computers developed entirely by accident. I had a natural aptitude for understanding how they worked, the jobs paid well, it seemed I'd suffer much less abuse than if I worked in the service industry and so that's the path my gainful employment took.

But still, it took me a long time to get a mobile phone and I don't even own the iPod I use - it was supplied to me and will one day have to be returned. I've only recently started to take any real interest in it. But I'm slowly getting more interested and I'm starting to see its worth and potential, even if I still prefer listening to vinyl and CDs.

See, the core of the problem, of my problem in fact, is that I used to hold up all of these things as beacons of everything that was wrong with other people.

And now I am those people.

When mobile phones infiltrated society, I sniffed and huffed about their owners. When the streets ran white with iPods, I shook my head in disgust and disbelief. I directed dark scowls at puzzled Blackberry users in cafes. When people listened to MP3 files I cringed at the sound and attempted various informal (and uninvited) lectures on their disasterously low fidelity.

But people went on buying them. And using them. And listening to them. And enjoying them. And I realised that for all my fire and brimstone ravings, I had stopped absolutely nothing from happening. I hadn't held back the inevitable change.

And when I finally got down from my pedestal and looked at the situation realistically, it seemed to me that there were actually a whole slew of positives.

More people listening to more music in more places than ever before. Music in easily and widely distributable formats. An ability for artists to self-manage and self-release with nothing more than a laptop and an idea. So although I didn't join the ranks entirely without reservation or complaint, I at least saw the value of the change I’d previously resisted and tried to find a way to survive within it.

The depth in an artist's work comes not from constantly engaging with themselves, but from engaging with life. And the worth of technology lies not in the technology itself, but how, and for what, it is used.

Rather than retreat, rather than turn your back on it all, you have to engage and turn things to your advantage.

One of my primary pleasures in life is being wrong.

I take no real joy in being right because my world view tends, unfortunately, to skew to the dark more often than the light. The glass is generally half empty, not half full. So when I realise that I've gotten a person or an idea completely the wrong way around, and I adjust my stance, I feel alive. Like I've learned something new. I've changed. And adapted. And therefore survived.

I often think that not professing to know everything, not having a definite understanding of every aspect of life or of every person, is a great asset. If you can admit to your ignorance, you can start to get wise.

As Lou Reed sings simply in Heroin -

Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know

Until the next time ... stay tuned.