Tuesday 15 January 2008

"Excess Robert Pollard albums will destroy the universe"

Not just a 'clever' riff on the opening line of The Young Plaything's super ace debut album (still not heard it? go here), but also the subject of a piece that popped up this week in a Stateside publication.

this picture is stolen from the Scottish Green party's website, and it's terrible. 1) The continents are NOT THAT SHAPE. 2) Fire CANNOT BURN IN SPACE. YOUR PICTURE IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD. It's hard to tell if the piece is tongue-in-cheek or not - I'd say it is, Bob Pollard superfan Jamie of The Runout Groove says not, the comments at the bottom certainly don't think it is - but regardless of this, it does certainly raise an interesting issue. Considering how fast the world seems to be drunkenly staggering towards the roaring fireplace, having fun but completely unaware of just how close it is to horrible pain, how can supposedly intelligent (which, y'know, I like to think we are) people justify expending even more of the world's ever-dwindling resources on something as "trivial" as music, especially when we don't even have the 'decency' to focus on music that could at least enable us to make a living?

It's something that really does trouble me, but also something for which I don't have an answer. However, two things are for certain: firstly, the world would be a much greyer place without music and art in general, as "wasteful" as it may seem, and secondly I deserve to suffer a lot less guilt over getting a thousand Alan MX CDs pressed up than Interpol should do for unleashing two hundred times that amount of their last stagnant record on the world. 100% truth!

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