Now imagine this: a climate activist marches in here a moment ago and pours a bowl of pumpkin soup over my PET SOUNDS LP, which thank God I keep behind glass. No, just kidding! In a normal LP plastic sleeve, of course. snort! Yes, sorry, I might as well make a grandpa joke about the “radical” climate protests that are currently causing so much – but in the end probably not enough – excitement and with which I, by the way, fully express my solidarity.
But what do works of art have to do with CO2? asks the concerned cultural citizen. What can Van Gogh do for our global warming? Well – little. But he has to serve now, maybe it’s good for SOMETHING. For example, it’s not my fault that my son listens to Survivor, but I have to deal with it now. Yes, Survivor – it’s a YouTube thing. And my daughter reads survival manuals. You can now consider which of the two is closer to the pulse of the times, in the year 2022.
Tanning with brain mass – is that still pop?
Did you know that all mammals except buffalo have enough brains to tan their own skin? Well, not by means of a special intellectual power – but you just take the brain, smear it on the peeled skin, and then tan it. Only in buffalo is the brain too small resp. the fur too big. We humans are so brainy that you could probably tan two buffaloes with a pearful of us – but not enough to listen to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Yes, that’s right, that’s a bit scary now. Tanning with brain mass – is that still pop? And so close to Christmas! But speaking of disgust – we are all sensitive listeners here at the ME, and I wanted to ask you whether you feel the same way: When I hear Mark Zuckerberg speak, this often-broadcast sound bite “Facebook is now meta”, then everything turns inside me, then I want to slip apart like the monster in “The Thing”, then my innermost part turns inside out. So: felt. Or when I hear Lord Of The Cringe Elon Musk laughing. Or the worst sound in the world: Jeff Bezos laughing. That awful sound.
Sensitive people who still have their Fritz Rau by heart (“it’s the singer, not the song”) now notice that the problem here is probably not the laughter, but the laughter. The Laughing Ones. Because they are in the process of destroying our climate, our culture, nature, democracies, etc. with the power of their wealth and are now even messing up Middle-earth, their laughter doesn’t come across as contagious.
As I said: We prefer to listen to Survivor here as long as there are still Tiger Eyes. And one of the most beautiful sounds the world has ever known: the duet of Mimi Parker and her husband Alan Sparhawk. Mimi Parker had to die in November at the age of 55, one – at least I – could race with pain and anger at the injustice of the world. Or listen to Low’s “Christmas EP”. Or both.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 01/2023.