Old hippies never die, they just get a little mouldy round the edges

One reason why MCM kicks MTV's ass, apart from the clever French pop, is that I have just been treated to AC/DC ("Hiiiiighway to Hell!"), Deep Purple and, best of all, the remnants of Led Zeppelin performing Kashmir with a bunch of Morrocan musicians. Two thoughts emerge from this.

1. All this stuff about Western music pillaging Third world traditions as a form of colonialism is about as convincing as accusations of demonic possession. Real musicians share music like real programmers share code. People who have nothing better to do than write for the NME (or whatever the current equivalent is) might think it awful that Western musicians are using Middle Eastern music, or that Turks are playing heavy metal ("Please, people, stay in your ghettoes, and we'll work out a Fair Trade deal with Oxfam") but I'm all for mixing it up. I remember doing a gig in a culturally diverse (read poor) part of Leeds, when a woman shouted up at me "How dare you steal Black people's music?" "Thanks," I shouted back, "that's the best compliment of my musical career" (the funny thing was, she wasn't black, just vaguely off-white - probably a wannabee Black).

2. Despite all the jokes about aging hippies and rock dinosaurs, the hippy/rock phenomenon managed one thing that no other youth culture achieved - it gave people a sustainable culture (that's not an original idea, by the way - it was told to be by an old hippy). Not only are Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger still strutting their stuff, they are doing it as well as ever, and people still go for it. The only difference is that in the 1970s, everyone was lapping it up, whether they understood it or not, whereas now it is for the more discerning. Cultural stuff aside, Kashmir will always rock because it goes

DUHduhduh, duhduhDUH, DUHduhduh, duhduhDUH, DUHduhduh, duhduhDUH, DUHduhduh, duhduhDUH!

Is this over the top?

In a marathon feat of raki-fuelled speed-writing, I've completed the next section of my Matrix essay. However, given the late hour and the amounts of raki consumed, I'm worried that it's more of a rant than serious academic writing (remember that this is going in a course book, and is implicitly a model for my students). Anyway, here it is - comments very welcome, especially from teenagers.
( Read more... )

Semantic nit-picking

I've been listening to George Bush speaking on his African tour. He just said: "They asked the self-evident question." How on earth can a question be self-evident?

There again, that's a mild example of Bush semantics. Earlier, I heard a BBC newsreader say "Australian businesses seem to be somewhat super-confident." Isn't that a teensy mega-understatement? Or am I being ever so slightly ultra-critical?

Fun with LyX

There are at least two good things about writing in LyX. The first is that when you're caught up in your writing, you don't have to mess around with fiddly formatting details. No tabbing, bolding, adjusting margins or any nonsense like that (a bit like styles would be like in Word if they worked properly). The second is that when you can't think of what to write, you can have hours of fun working on your index or fiddling with your bibliography.

More semantics

After a president who thinks a question can be self-evident, we now observe a prime minister who doesn't understand hypothetical cases:

Asked if he would concede that if no weapons of mass destruction were found, the case for war was faulty, Mr Blair replied: "I don't concede it at all that the intelligence at the time was wrong.

"I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes."