did an interview with a Swiss journo, no idea if he used the quotes... here they are (waste not want not as me old mum likes to say... another maxim of her's appears later)
- Since we buy these CD boxes with all the extra tracks but rarely listen to those because there was a reason at the time to not publish them my question is: Do you see the power of the fetish at work here?
I don't know if it's as psychologically complex as fetishism, it's more simple greed - you've consumed the major works by the artist you love, and maybe all the stuff released in their lifetime, and you think, I want to keep consuming. I want to keep eating this good stuff, and maybe even the less good stuff will still have some flavour, some nutritious value. So you convince yourself that all these unreleased tracks - the alternate takes, the demos, the live versions, the tracks that the artist didn't consider good enough to release at the time - that these are worth listening to. And there is a psychology of consumerism where it is enjoyable to spend money - so these repackagings are excuses to get the credit card out.
There is a great English expression, a sort of maxim: "Enough is as good as a feast". It's the kind of thing my mum would say, basic common sense wisdom. What it means is that once your belly is full - there is little further to be gained from eating anymore. The satiation point should be your stopping point, regardless of all the tasty looking things arrayed on the table. It doesn't quite apply to music, because it's not a physiological appetite. But if you think about in those terms, you might decide "actually the Beatles put out in their lifetime all these great albums, and non-album singles with awesome B-sides like "Rain" and "I'm Down" and so forth. That really ought to be enough for anyone. Why not stick at that - however many hours of consummate brilliance that all adds up to? Why feel like you need to hear the alternate versions of tracks whose definitive form was achieved and released? All the prototypes for "Strawberry Fields Forever"." In other artforms, only scholars have interested in the draft versions that authors wrote of novels, or all the things they cut out and discarded. Only a very few cineaste fiends want to see the Director's Cut of movies, or the out-takes and bonus bits on the second disc of the DVD or Blue-Ray. In music, though, there seems to be a larger appetite for all this extraneous material.
- The sixties still cast a spell over our present, especially music-wise, why? Because of the baby-boomers who have money to spend - or because the music was better at the time?
I think there is a romance of the early days of something - when it is emerging. The Sixties was a tremendous surge of innovation in songwriting, lyrics, guitar playing, what could be done in the recording studio, even what could be achieved in terms of live performance and amplification. There's was incredibly rapid evolution, and a lot of people trying things for the first time - like the Beatles and Byrds with their Indian music experiments. But mostly the music revolution seemed to be in synch with a larger revolution. People talked about the Movement, or the Underground, or simply the Revolution - and music was right in the centre of things but so were a bunch of other things. It was like a pan-cultural surge of innovation and transgression and emancipation. It matters to the baby boomers who can remember it, but it also has a powerful pull on the imagination of subsequent generations. Even as I was into punk and postpunk, I was fascinated by the Sixties and read books about it and listened to the records. I am technically a babyboomer by age - born 1963, the last year before the cut-off point. But really my generation is the next one, Generation X. And the 1960s seemed to me not a discredited thing but really the previous great revolutionary phase that punk and rave and shoegaze all had some kind of relationship with.
- „We will never agree as we agreed on Elvis“, Lester Bangs famously wrote in his obituary of the king. Don’t you feel as a writer about music that the fragmentation of the genre in the age of YouTube will make the narrative more difficult, even obsolete?
It makes it more difficult but also more urgent and essential. You can enjoy music from the past without any sense of history, but if you want to understand it, you need a sense of chronology and of context.
What has gone - and what young people can't understand - is the idea of adversarial energy in pop culture. The idea that being into punk meant rejecting progressive rock and Steely Dan sophisto-rock - it doesn't compute for them, these kind of schisms and divides. Streaming culture and the internet culture has eroded this idea. You can be into anything, you don't have to take sides. People still have things by which identity formation takes place, but music is not really part of that process. You can be into punk and alternative type rock, but also into rap, but also into dance music - all at the same time. . It's all there for the feasting on.
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