They come downstairs and tell you to turn your music down, moan ‘cos you don’t wear clothes when it’s 90+ outside and have CD collections that would shame your grandparents. They ignore the environmental crisis, smoke like 30s northerners and want to be entrepreneurs. Who are they? Teenagers!
When did it all turn round? How did Jennifer Saunders get it so right when she depicted Saffy as being twenty times as square as her mum in Ab Fab?
Can we blame Thatcher? Probably ... but more likely it’s Blair and his middle class prefect fascists trying to get everyone into work.
Now, when I was a kid we knew how to live and we knew about music. That it should be raw and powerful and actually say something about the real world. The early 80s really caught the zeitgeist after Thatcher told us all to ‘stop working and go home - the state will provide’. The dole was great, they’d give you hundreds of quid NOT to work, and it was all spent on champagne and four month holidays abroad. And visits to bands of course - sometimes three or four times a week. My car was constantly packed to the roof with people I hardly knew driving over to Brighton with the stereo blasting, hanging out of the window yelling abuse at everyone and drinking huge amounts of cheap beer and expensive champagne. Summers were spent lolling on the beaches of Rousillon drinking cheap French wine and champagne, winters in the Swiss Alps drinking cheap beer and Swiss wine and champagne.
What do kids do now under the head prefect? Study for BTECs, listen to manufactured pop and ‘indie’ rubbish and moan at their parents and grandparents having a good time. They have one half pint of cider, think they’re drunk and shout about their careers to each other whilst giggling.
Poor sods. Perhaps we need a new Conservative government that will give us all the freedom to not work again, so we can start living instead. And perhaps, just perhaps, music will respond again as it has in the past. Stranger things have happened.
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