11.47am Monday

I am listening to Julee Cruise. I bought some CDs from Amazon, some old, some new.

So I have Julee Cruise, and I like it, but it's not going on heavy rotation. It's going to be on the C list. You know what I mean? You have some CDs that you gravitate to, your A list. For me these are usually new CDs that I'm playing heavily, but also ones that I listen to a lot because I get more out of them than usual or I feel I haven't sucked them dry. An example would be the Rapture's Pieces of the people we love, which I bought recently and have been playing to death. It's a fantastic album, much better than Echoes. Often a second album disappoints (I've mentioned the theory that a songwriter has songs they have worked on since their teens, songs that they poured everything they had into, which makes their debut special) but this takes their ideas up a notch. It's serious funky, which doesn't hurt. Another example would be Amon Tobin's Out from out where. Intelligent techno is definitely my cup of tea, and I can count on Tobin's albums as background music. Not that they don't have anything to offer to a deeper listen, but they are sufficiently good that I'm not irritated by duff tracks. I find I get a lot of work done when I have a couple of Tobins on! The B list are CDs that I might pull out quite often when I'm looking for something to play. They'd tend to be either newish records that have come off the A list or older ones that say play me when I spot their spine. Mono's You are there and the Psychedelic Furs' Forever now are very good examples. The former is fairly new and I'm still thrilled with it. The latter is one of my favourites. I have a ton of postpunk in my collection, and I love the Furs' clever, cynical take on modern life. If the guy out of Bloc Party was as smart as Richard Butler, their second album wouldn't have been so shit.

The C list are albums that I listen to from time to time but might go months without. Sometimes I'll bung five on at a time, to remind myself why I have them in the first place, and I'm often pleasantly surprised by how much I like them. And then don't listen to them again for a year. You know the kind of thing: Never mind the bollocks, 156, Do you like my tight sweater? (A point for anyone who can name all three artists without using Google.) The D list are the "oh dear" records. The DJ Shadow one where he went all rock and ballady. (Yuk!) That pisspoor Mercury Rev effort. The dodgy trance compilation that you don't know any of the producers on. Most remix albums. (Here's the problem with remix albums: decent remixes are few and far between. If you know the original song, you rarely feel the remix is an improvement. If you don't, you are not always sure whether the duffness is in the original or the remix. There are good albums that are all remix: Aphex Twin's 26 mixes obviously (mostly because he does his own thing -- to the extent of subsituting one of his own songs for a Nine Inch Nails song he was supposed to be remixing but hated too much to bother with) and I just bought Four Tet's remix album, which is intermittently good -- although the album of remixed Four Tet that companions it is useless. The Rest of New Order that companioned the Best of is mostly decent too, but the band themselves were mostly responsible for or involved in the remixes).

I don't actually have lists, by the way. The height of my anality is to put my CDs together, As with As, Bs with Bs. They're not even in alpha order (but I do clump together all the records of a particular band, if I have more than one). They wouldn't be in any order but I got sick of asking where the fuck I had put Brotherhood or Rock action (both B listers) and made it a bit easier on myself.

One has to laugh. Tony Blair says shut up about Will and Kate, which is, erm, not shutting up about Will and Kate. You'll note that Yeah whatever is taking a digified stand on the issue by not saying anything. This is because I don't care. Some rich prick splits up from his gf. Yawn. I am only ever going to care about Kate if the Sun prints tit shots. I do not care about her privacy. Why should I? She is nothing to me. This is the key to understanding why Craig Ferguson was wrong about Britney. I'll try to explain. Generic people have no meaning for me and no one would expect them to. Mr A, a citizen of Chad, is nothing to me. I don't know him, have never met him, have no connection to him. He's just another African. Of course, he is not at zero. He has the residual "score" that anyone would have, by virtue of being a human being. I feel it is fundamentally wrong to begin your consideration -- your weighing -- of what people mean to you at zero, which is how it seems to me many people do begin (usually, for people who think like this, co-nationality imparts a score but co-humanity none, which doesn't make any sense to me: a fellow Briton doesn't mean any more to me prima facie than some guy in Chad). But when Mr A is shot dead by the janjaweed, he rises in meaning, because of his intersection with my feelings about Darfur. Now, see, Mr A pretty much ''only'' has meaning as a victim of the violence in Darfur. Pretending otherwise would be ridiculous, because I was not much concerned with his life when I knew only that he was a citizen of Chad, and only that I know him to have been a victim has elevated him in my reckoning. (I do not keep lists of people either! This is simply the process I think we go through practically subconsciously when working out what we give a shit about.) Mr A did not matter to me much as a human being.

If that strikes you as grossly cynical, I'll ask you how you can realistically claim to believe that everyone means something to you. Life would be pretty fucking intense if they did.

But Britney would be Mr A for me if she didn't appear in the media. Her only media for me is that she is a celebrity. Her life means nothing for me except that it makes the news. That she has feelings about it means as much to me as Mr A's having feelings about his life. I know she does and he does, but I cannot be concerned about them because they are not salient. If Mr A was interviewed, his feelings might increase in salience, just as Britney's do when she appears on Oprah.

I'm not doing a good job of explaining this but I prefer my view to a muddleheaded niceyniceness that pretends that Will and Kate actually matter. They only matter because they are in the papers. Without that, they would just be another couple of young people splitting up and never mind.

When I was a teen, I thought I was ill, because I didn't seem to care as much about others as my peers. It took me years to figure out they were bullshitting, and that saying you care and caring are like different planets. It's easy to say you care, whether you are bunging on faux outrage or trying to pull chicks. It's much harder to be honest about not really giving a shit.

I am thinking about the Don Imus thing, which of course I don't give a shit about. I am not totally sure who Don Imus is, and I already know that radio personalities can be arseholes. It's not the kind of thing I get all that worked up about. (I'm much more concerned that people who do mean more than nothing to me make horrible false steps in their analysis of the whole thing.) The substance of it is pretty thin. Some arsehat was rude about some basketballers. So fucking what? The what is obviously the huge media-created furore (Imus himself is entirely media created; he would be of no interest at all, obviously, if he was not a media figure -- we expect some of the people who live among us to be fuckwits, but it's not on the whole a big deal because we know that history and circumstance have conspired to create a confusion of ideas and attitudes about black Americans that are not healthy but are symptomatic of a deeper malaise rather than the problem themselves; in other words, you won't cure American racism by treating people's speech while leaving the underlying disease unaffected). You begin to realise that Baudrillard was right when you see the girls themselves giving a press conference. What teh fuck? Okay, if he had been in the front row of the crowd, maybe I'd care what the girls had to say. But he wasn't. Okay, the girls are offended when the tape is played back but, hang on, their offence has just been manufactured by, erm, playing back the tape. I doubt any one of them much cares about being called "nappyheaded", however offensive it is, and they probably get called a "ho" daily if the young men on the interwebnets are anything like representative of American adolescents. (Where the right are mistaken is not in believing that blacks like Al Sharpton are hypocrites for being outraged what Imus says and not caring about what rappers say -- a ridiculous standpoint, which I can't even be bothered backhanding, but utterly typical of rightist moral equivalators, but in not realising that there is absolutely no outrage involved in any quarter here. Everyone -- Sharpton, the media, the Rutgers girls, the wingnuts, the many bloggers who've bloviated on it, including me -- is pretending to care and having a whale of a time doing it.) The meaning of the whole incident is manufactured by the media.

In a sane world, Imus would have been quietly sacked by the management, and another fuckhead employed, admonished to stick to more implicit racism... because let's face it, low-grade hatred of other people is what fuels even the least virulent talk radio. We do not care to hear goodwill with our cornflakes. No one would have noticed the difference because we're not short of fuckheads, and they're pretty much interchangeable. If every celebrity in the Western world disappeared tomorrow, we would not miss them. We would simply promote the next tranche of wannabes. There is little differential in talent or appeal. Celebrities only mean something because they are celebrities, not because they have earned meaning with their output. The world would not be poorer for missing Britney's songs, nor Craig Ferguson's "comedy" (least of all that, given that Ferguson has never been and probably will never be remotely funny). You and I would be no poorer for missing Will and Kate either. They are nothing to us bar their media presence. And when Blair makes a statement about them, he, like the Rutgers' girls, is simply part of the dance of pretending to give a shit.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:46 am