Attempting to order a much-needed Friday pint of Hoegaarden after work last week, I was disappointed to be told that there was none to be had. ‘Seriously,’ the barman told me, ‘it’s not just us, there’s a worldwide shortage’. Now leaving aside the possibility that this might be TRUE, and that mighty beer behemoth InBev, formerly Interbrew has just run out of its cloudy wheaty goodness, one wonders about the high risk strategy the barman was employing. ‘Worldwide shortage’ presumably implies ‘ so no point trying somewhere else for your pint, better choose something else here’. But blowback misfire response = ‘so it’s about to run out everywhere and you should immediately leave in search of the last remaining pints in Edinburgh’. Anyway, I figured that explained why the last time I’d had Hoegaarden in there it had tasted manky, and opted for a glass of wine instead, before discovering rare as golddust bottles of lovely lovely ORVAL in the off license on the way home.

(Also: mystery, why is their underground so sodding small? Because during the night it secretly doubles as transport for gnomes? Because the council ran out of money when digging it? Because the average height of a Glaswegian is several feet below the UK average due to poverty, poor housing and monstrous inbreeding?)

Do I feel a chump for spending five hours sitting in the rain until the match was finally declared cancelled at about 4pm? Yup. We were convinced that Cricket Scotland would find some way of squeezing in their statutory 10 overs to avoid having to refund the 4000 strong crowd (but give or take 1000 hospitality tent punters who presumably ate, drank and schmoozed their way through the day exactly as if Scotland and Australia had actually been battling it out with willow and leather.) Thank heavens for Deuchars IPA is all I can say.

The Scots propensity for laying claim to everything under the sun was in full evidence (Kant — Scottish, as my university tutor used to say): apparently they’re responsible for the modern game because bloke who captained the bodyline tour was Scotch. Excuse me while I choke on my balls.

But it was all good natured. My companions, more used to Easter Road, couldn’t imagine a football crowd sitting it out for that long with no promise of a spectacle. Nor would they have nipped out for sparkling wine and — I shit you not — caviar from the Stockbridge grocers. The best photo opp. was the point that the bloke dressed as a pint of IPA met the see-you-jimmy-hatted gang with the blow up kangaroo. Kids played, well, cricket behind the stands put up for the occasion. So someone was happy. Biggest spontaneous boo of the day went to the announcement that the First Minister was on the premises: Jack McConnell attracting more opprobrium than Caladon — fuck-awful cod-opera singers, imagine G4 off that there tv show doing Flower of Scotland and other sentimentalist fuckwit classics.

Disappointed though? Yes.

“I’m looking for lines you don’t expect coming at you. I’m driving along in my car sometimes, listening to the radio, and I can predict what the next line and the next line of a song will be — I can tell you what the writer’s going to say before he gets there. And I’m right. And if can predict it, anybody can predict it, and that’s mediocre writing.” Harlan Howard, Nashville songwriter, quoted by Nicolas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country.

But, but, but I can report one (so far) totally ace discovery (the lesser discovery is the numminess of sesame oil as an ingredient): the virtues of feathering. Chop yr chicken. Mix with flour and egg white. Refrigerate (20 mins, or as long as it takes to chop all the other ingredients, basically). Put the pieces into a pan of boiling water, off the heat (oil worked better the first time, but seemed an unnecessary extravagance, and since the first batch was breast, the second thigh meet, I’ve no means of comparing the effects). Stir for two minutes. Drain, and set aside. Do the rest of the stir-fry stuff and then chuck in chicken pieces at the end, cook for a little longer. And lo and behold — chicken with that great takeaway texture, cooked through but still soft and not at all dried out. Num.

Inevitably, no change on the job front after all, and although we’re moving, it’s literally 20 seconds walk away. So hopefully more experiments in the future: and, of course, you’ll be the first to know, dear reader.

Let me ask you a question: what did the death of John Peel mean? Not on a personal level, but on a cultural one. The fact that Peel could not be replaced might be due in part to the man’s enormous and unique appeal as a broadcaster, but what it really signals is a massive structural shift in the relationship between the popular music industry and the public sphere. Because criticism defines itself in relation to the public sphere, the inevitable result is a felt crisis for what we might call generalist critics: i.e. those whose role depends consists in taking an overview of popular music as a whole, rather than in specialising in one genre.

Petridis and Reynolds testify to the subjective side of these events: more records, higher quality across the board. This seems like a problem because for anyone whose job is to sift through the output of the music industry and identify the most important or the best albums of the year, this will seem like cultural entropy: fewer clearly-defined peaks in the year’s product making it harder to discriminate between releases. Of course, no critic has ever managed to keep all of the year’s music in view at once, or would wish too, as pretty powerful filters instantly rule out certain types of music from being considered for the kind of attention (broadsheet coverage, awards, mainstream TV) that defines this interface between the entertainment industry and public cultural recognition.

(An aside: my happy hardcore theory for which I have very little evidence, is that the happy hardcore and handbag tradition has been the most consistenly good genre in British music of the last fifteen years or so, and with a pretty strong track record of chart crossover hits. This is music based around basic rythmns, highly repetitive, and ultra-melodic, which has consequently never been seen as worthy of serious critical acclaim, and at the point where cheesy trance crosses over into Friday night office worker disco music, it is the most widely despised and abused form of British pop. Being blanked by the generalist critics, and abused by almost everyone else, has been the best thing that could have happen to it, although it’s subterranean influence can be felt all over the place (e.g. Crazy Frog, obv.) This also makes Dave Pearce the most important man in the UK!)

The objective side of these events is the increasing trend towards narrowcasting, not just in the media, i.e. the point of distribution of pop, but in the production of pop too. What Peel stood for was a space on Radio 1 for any — and more importantly ALL — kinds of alternative music. By the time of his death, this was completely anachronistic. The digital revolution in radio and above all the internet has made it more and more easy to direct what people want to hear straight at them. Why listen to all the reggae and jungle on Peel if all you want is twee indie-pop? Or why have to sit through cinerama when all you want is industrial and darkwave?

This seems like a bit of a shame to me: but then I’m aligned with Reynolds and Petridis on the subjective side of the dialectic. Most of the phenomena which obsess the bloggist/ILMweb fit into this pattern: the perceived decline of the charts, the weaknesses of the British music press, the tedium of miserabilist British rock (Coldplay/Keane etc.). The erosion of a central cultural public sphere cannot be acknowledged with that sphere, so what remains will feel and look hollow: the charts and the magazines both depend on a model where everyone has to take notice of some ‘event’ records. But the kind of popular rock music which has come to dominate that ‘centre’ is obviously a pompous and bombastic genre of its own, as more and more people simply ignore it, and its claim to grand cultural attention seems emptier and emptier. 6music for example, is a museum for old alternative musical forms, and there is a growing market for bands which don’t do more than sound like old bands, so their listeners can enjoy the sense of keeping up with the scene while not having to listen to anything unusual or unfamiliar. (And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with this).

So rather than thinking of the music world in terms of different genre categories, some of which feed into a central super-genre (which supposedly tells us about the nation’s cultural life as a whole), the decline of the centre means there are only the different genre streams, going stronger than ever. The division of musical labout inevitably means increasing specialisation amongst the workforce, and an increase in quality across the board. The law of diminishing returns will inevitably set in, meaning lots of very good but not brain-bustingly brilliant records being made. The renaissance of country, and of metal, are great examples of this I think.

This is good news for people who are obsessive about one genre, and for critics who focus on one genre. This is very bad news for anyone who likes to believe in the myth of a cultural centre (i.e. the myth which the cultural centre has projected about itself, and which generalist criticism has a strong interest in upholding, since its sense of cultural purpose is defined by it). However it is also good news for anyone who wants to hop across genres — pick pretty much any talked-about CD from one, and it’s liable to be relatively decent. Those critics who take genre seriously (e.g. obviously Eddy and Kogan) will not have problems dealing with this, in fact might not even have noticed the shift — which is not a new one, but one which has simply become more evident in the last year or so — since they weren’t so busy worrying about the centre in the first place.

I don’t really have a conclusion, and I suspect this will either seem obvious to you, or completely full of holes, so I’ll end with another aside, in place of ever getting round to writing about Rip It Up and Start Again properly. What it seems to me is the real motivation for the interest in post-punk is that this is a point at which alternative music as a shadow of the cultural centre / super-genre comes into being. So it allows the critic to fantasise an inverted world in which the alternative scene IS or becomes the actual centre: a pervasive fantasy in which Love Will Tear Us Apart beats Angels for whatever that preposterous award last year was. Simon is not simply imagining that things have changed, so the charge that he is being nostalgic is plain daft, but the most telling chapter of the book is the final one on MTV in which changes in media / distribution of music come into the foreground for the first time. There’s more to say about the ‘art’ question which overdetermines this and the nouveau-rockism issue. Anyway, this is all written through a hangover, so errors are inevitable!

As usual I’m probably the last person on earth to hear the MP3 that’s floating around of Lethal B dissing Wiley over ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ (“merk him with his own rhythm”). Needless to say it sounds fantastic, high NRG pop turning out to be just as appropriate a backing for the attention-deficit hyper-velocity schoolyard slang-slinging as anything more, ahem, grimey. Probably best heard in the context of this revealing interview in which Lethal stresses “the beef is real but professional still”. The whole point of the slur associating Wiley with Kylie is an attack made on ‘rockist’ grounds — “I’m an artist, you’re just a rave MC”. But the ultra-kinetic aesthetic of the track, the possibility of hearing the backing track as something other than dissonance, interposes to suggest that a ‘real’ grudge is always going to depend on its ‘professional’ context… “it’s all hype, we’re both business men”. I understand ‘pop’ to be the something like the principle of publicity which makes possible the release of a signal in the first place. The attempt to keep it real is always the necessary step to restrict or define the ‘proper’ communication of the signal, to separate it from the background noise: just as essential if I want to put my point across effectively to a reader as if I want to sell certain types of record to a particular audience. There’s no question of doing without the real, just as there’s no such thing as pure ‘pop’, no unmediated listening. But just as the signal can always be just noise if we’re not willing or able to hear it, so the reality effect will always be an epiphenomenon of the energies which make it possible but against which it has to fight for its survival. To hear Lethal’s tracks as pop, as more Kylie than Wiley, is not to reject their ‘contexts’ but to expose a more fundamental communicative ‘ground’ (exposure, errancy), but one which disperses the possibility of ranking one signal as more fundamental (‘realer’) than another.

The genius of “Babies” is that the harder you try to make sense of the story the less sense the song seems to make: and the more you think about the song the less the story matters. This is a confession of what ‘happened years ago’ which is also a seduction; an attempt to rewrite (Freud might say ‘cathect’) pre-lapsarian companionship as the prehistory of today’s desire. But the urgency of the chorus – ‘I want to take you home’ RIGHT NOW – suggests that teenaged fumblings are not the prelude to but the truth of mature sexuality, hastily hidden under the mattress when adulthood knocks on the bedroom door. Making babies is the coverstory: “Babies” doesn’t just make the family the centre of precocious sexual experiment, but makes home, kids, boyfriend-girlfriend, everything else, an excuse for it.

Story: curiosity becomes desire (‘I wanted to see as well as hear’); fellowship ‘we listened’) is abandoned for solitary vice (scopophilia); the act of entering the wardrobe (shades of CS Lewis?) becomes both enclosure and a seemingly paradoxical kind of exposure. Shut in by our desires, we’ve also effectively cornered ourselves: ‘I fell asleep inside, I never heard her come’, I was hiding, but there was nowhere to hide… And then repetition: she caught me inside; you caught me inside her, and although this time I heard you stop outside the door, I still couldn’t do anything else!

Song: a hymn to the aimlessness of undisciplined teenage desire, not yet running along socially sanctioned lines, in which one body can be substituted for another, one sister for another, one sex for another. Desire which expands to fill the time (after school) and space (bedrooms detached from the houses which enclose them, which literally do not belong: sex before marriage as sex before mortgage!) available. Which is why this story can never add up: what’s unsettling isn’t just the substitution of one sister for another, but of me for the boy from the garage up the road; ‘I had to get it on’, driven not only by my displaced lust, i.e. lust itself, but by hers.

Excuses multiply guilt rather than rescind it, and “Babies” produces the fact of substitution – that for sex one body is as good as another – which love’s particularity seeks to tame and subdue. I want to take you home. Now. We can make up for all that lost time. So I was watching your sister; and I was listening while you went with Neve. So we never. Although we wanted to really. It was you all along. But we never. Until now. Now? If the chorus is supposed to make amends for or cancel out the past, it’s not just unconvincing, but a radical failure. The indeterminate ‘you’ to which it is addressed is never just you, never only you, never really you at all: it’s you or your sister, you and your sister, you and/or whoever else were to be sitting across the table from me now.

…And of course, YOU: and you, and you, and you? This is popular music and like the sound of one couple in the block shagging, as Jarvis recounts in Sheffield Sex City, one of the tracks that partnered “Babies” on the original Gift release, pretty soon it’ll have everybody fucking.

I’ve always been in two minds (ha ha Janus-faced) about writing in books. On the one hand I’m suspicious of the fetishism of trying to keep a page clean, rather than treating a book as a machine for thinking (and for living, which is pretty much the same thing), as an external harddrive for our own memory. But I abhor writing in library books, which makes them a machine for not reading, as it becomes impossible to read without reading the marginalia, or to scan a page picking up only what’s been underlined by someone smarter, or dumber, or just with a different agenda to your own. I’m intrigued by the possibility of palimpsest, of rewriting the text, and of layering your own revisionings on each visit to a book, and fascinated by the chance to confront your own earlier thoughts as alien and obscure: why did that matter then? Who was I? Yet it can be shaming and embarrassing to do so. No really, what was I thinking? So I rarely mark up books unless I am working on them for a particular project, and with deadlines looming, it’s become a necessary shortcut for my current project. But on picking up my copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the new & improved translation, in a beautiful Stanford UP edition) this morning, to be confronted with the ugly scrawl of pencil underlinings, I felt an intense sense of melancholy. I’d forgotten they were there, and it felt as if I had vandalised my own possessions.