Give Me the Bong!

Maybe it’s since John Peel died and Simon Cowell took over or my art school training and east end education but the UK currently feels as deeply domesticated as cows in a milking shed. It’s taken my recent awareness of the Australian music scene to realise the paucity of chi in our silage. It’s as if groups like One Dimension, Freudian slip there, have become our ‘new and improved’ straw from which we are expected to produce our daily quota of happy milk. Lyric after lyric induce our youth into the wonderfulness of facile romance and the fun of being abstracted by alcoholic good times. Tune after tune reduce the equally tempered scale to at most a major pentatonic with one syllable per beat. Music as straw, no nutriment, just bedding. Music has always been a form of social theatre airing stories of pith and portent but now we have become the laughing machines first introduced in the US to help bored neglected housewives salivate in their vacuous passivity: the best of times yet the worst of times. Then there’s this track from the depths of the bovine heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=utAAnDFAum8

Unruly, belligerent, real and humorous that speaks of mud under foot, rain on the back, humping and running, grazing on unfenced grasslands obedient to no master. It’s said, well I’m saying it, that the best prison is one you don’t want to leave. Lets hope we make it. Give me, give it, give me the bong!