“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, July 5, 2015

Opening Theme Tune

...for a pic having to do with anyone from my generation in the mid-eighties. Peter's Friends used “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” which is roughly contemporary with this one. But this one, someone, nails it for people a bit younger than Stephen Fry's generation. Uncanny to see now the grey puce world of Thatcher's Britain imposed everywhere, even by the finance people of Germany of all places, against whom Thatcher was determined to stand later on.

Waterloo Station and the Embankment--used to walk there every day, in the holidays, and every day at the weekend in any case. Genius German synthpop divided by a deadpan queer version of “Rapture” (not sure about that “Message” allusion Wikipedia) about what is now called neoliberalism, I feel, a competitive war of all against all, and the weird melancholic pleasures therein. The suicidal feeling invoked in lines one and two...

Like, okay, the hairdos are a bit different, and there are uncannily fewer people--but what's more uncanny his how it isn't different...

That walkway, by which you can get to the South Bank Centre--it's like the Pet Shop Boys' version of the railings from which the Beatles are looking down on the covers of the compilation album...

I remember thinking at the time that this was a song different from the ones I'd heard around it, somehow ultra definitive of something big.

 

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