About April 2016: And then Prince died

After the initial shock (for those of my cohort) of Bowie falling off his perch, 2016 settled down to be just another year. There was going to be a referendum on Brexit (but the only question was how big Remain’s majority would be) and in November the Americans would catch up with the rest of the world and elect their first female president.

In retrospect, it wasn’t until April that 2016 really started to happen, that it became The Year When Famous People Died. Not that other famous people (Antonin Scalia, Umberto Eco, Tony Warren, Asa Briggs, Sylvia Anderson, et al) hadn’t died since Bowie, but it was as if we suddenly noticed the strange intensity, the feeling of “wait, not another one” when the news came in. And the thing that woke us up, that prompted the same sort of generational, communal grief that Bowie brought, was the death of Prince. As I said at the time (on Facebook, because 10 years ago Facebook was still a useful way to share pain and condolence, rather than a weaponised cesspit):

The thing is, a lot of us (by us, I mean nerds, obviously) have been imagining that the God Who Only Exists For Us When Famous People Die has been creating a heavenly supergroup, with Lemmy [who’d actually died in the last days of 2015, but retrospectively felt like part of the continuum] on bass, Maurice White on drums, Bowie on vocals, sax and oblique strategies, Victoria Wood on piano and wry Lancastrian one-liners, plus George Martin to produce and keep them all in order. But now Prince, who can do all of that, is up there, will God be sending the others back? 

And as we shared tearful memes relating to the purple imp of sexy fun, we also thought, hey, I guess this is as bad as this year can get. Oh well. 

One more thing. In January there had been a moment of dark levity in the Celebrity Big Brother house, when Angie Bowie was informed that her ex-husband had died but Tiffany Pollard (no, me neither) thought the news referred to fellow-inmate David Gest (who was asleep). Piquantly, the whole farrago got more coverage than Gest’s actual death would attract a few months later, in April. Needless to say. I didn’t find a place for him in my celestial band. 

About SMiLE

Ian Penman reviews a new Brian Wilson biography and raises the vexed question of whether the Beach Boys’ Quixotic project known first as Dumb Angel, then SMiLE, should ever have seen the light of day: 

For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop.

Penman’s writing in the London Review of Books so maybe he doesn’t feel it necessary to explain a reference to Walter Benjamin, because the readership would get it (or feel too embarrassed to admit they didn’t get it). That said, given his previous form, I suspect he’d have done the same thing when he was writing for the NME.

About staples

A fun interview with the Pet Shop Boys, focusing on the visual aspects of their work, in which Neil Tennant is egged into saying “Gesamtkunstwerk” as if it’s a big, dirty swear. He also muses on which magazines have survived the protracted Death Of Print, and which have withered: 

The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.

I love the idea of a magazine having an instinct. But could it also be that a perfect bound magazine (essentially, one with a spine), more closely resembles that most toxic of things, a book?

About the post-literate world

And I thought I was feeling a bit apocalyptic. By Will Self, via James Marriott: 

We began in a world with twice as much literacy as we have now. We’ve lost 50% of literacy in the last fifteen years. So, that epiphenomenon of writers like me being attacked and abandoned by our friends running scared of social media was part of the progression towards illiteracy and the fundamental inability to morally deliberate, which now characterises our society and which will propel us into authoritarianism, like America... Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat – particularly humans who, instead of conceptualising in isolation and being able to think inside their own heads, only think through their engagement with others. That’s where fascism gets going, or social movements that depend on a kind of hysterical level of identification. What books and the ability to read books do is present a barrier that prevents you from being able to avoid moral deliberation at some point... We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence, which is when we were brokering the integration of different ethical systems into some kind of workable, decent country. Instead, we’ve abandoned reading books. We’ve abandoned deliberating.