Glastonbury has been and gone, and this might be an age thing, but I’ve watched far too many bands performing old hits of little relevance to today, and many of them out of tune. And bluntly, it wasn’t the most gratifying experience of all time.
Except that it reminded me that that’s pretty much like what neoliberalism is now.
Candidly, is there anything this cunt isn’t an expert on?
This is why I don’t worry about him. He can only spend a very brief window in the company of other people without starting an argument which leaves them wanting to punch his fat head in.
He’d disagree with Einstein about physics in the morning, patronise Shakespeare about comedy and tragedy over lunch (cooked by Raymond Blanc, to whom he would witheringly point out the correct way to make choux pastry), contemptuously dismantle Christopher Wren, da Vinci and Bach over tea, and offer magnanimously to coach Dupont on the finer points of scrumhalf play during the evening session.
And every normal onlooker would come away thinking what I said at the top.
And now he’s an expert music critic, where does he find the time to develop all these skills?
My guess is that he’s tone deaf and been listening on an old tin box*.
*Kudos to anyone who get the Tubular Bells reference.
What I do find funny is the notion that his ideology and associated policies , which were tired (and tried as nauseam) in 1981 is ‘fresh’
Agree fully with Interested’s assessment of his inability to hold in his temper for more than 2 minutes but it would be dangerous to assume he has no influence. His kind of evil is always seductive to the power hungry.
“… performing old hits of little relevance to today …”
Like some bloggers do maybe? Except they weren’t hits and they weren’t relevant in the first place.
I assume Glastonbury was televised/streamed or something that he got to…Judge… the performances?
Because I can’t see him cough up the dough for the tickets without screaming his head off about the price..
But he’s, as usual, wrong about Glastonbury, and other such mega-scale festivals: They’re not about Music at all.
They’re large commercial ventures that feed off the nostalgia of Youth of affluent middle-classers who cough up tons of dough for the Experience. So the originality and quality of the music isn’t a first concern, it’s the Band Name ( whatever is left of the band to begin with ).
And because those Names take most of the Budget, te quality of the Lesser Gods …well…. it’s not pretty..
If you want quality, and the occasional pleasant surprise, in a festival you’re better off visiting the smaller regional festivals, or the scene-specific festivals.
Much more bang for fewer bucks, and you generally get a better crowd to hang out with.
“comment awaiting moderation”
Has someone been pushing Buttons again?
I guess he’s trying to get down wiv da yoof. The spokesman for the next generation.
I picture him sitting on the sofa watching Glastonbury writing notes with his original thinking. Except he sounds like most of the left wing tossers who go Glastonbury.
Glastonbury is a festival of hypocrisy – oh so caring and save the planet, a commercial festival wrapped in a green agenda
For an excellent summary see here..
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/02/glastonbury-exposes-middle-class-left-hypocrisy-immigration/
Obviously I don’t have enough time, and interest, to read his blog but from the few allusions to his aesthetic tastes that he has made in the past , it seems that he is drawn to childish, simplified, derivative crap. Rather than Glastonbury, which serves an eclectic and very varied mix of old and new stuff, he would be better off watching a kindergarten playground. Then he would be able to feel the joy of being arrested
Obviously, I don’t have the time or inclination to read his blog extensively but from the few aesthetic judgements I recall, his tastes are for simplified, unsubtle, hectoring. Glastonbury supplies a varied diet of old favourites and the new pioneers so it is obviously not going to please him. He ought to watch a kindergarten playground and enjoy the feeling of being arrested
Glastonbury has been and gone, and this might be an age thing, but I’ve watched far too many bands performing old hits of little relevance to today, and many of them out of tune. And bluntly, it wasn’t the most gratifying experience of all time.
This from a guy who has Acker Bilk’s entire catalog on 8 track tape.
@Grikath, we attended the Holland International Blues Festival in Grolloo last year. I didn’t go for the headline acts (John Fogerty & Beth Hart ). Once I saw Christone Kingfish Ingram and Joanne Shaw Taylor were on the bill it was enough for me to shell out for tickets the two day festival.
This year however, there were no weekend tickets and the festival had been extended to three days at EUR100 pp per day. Despite Ally Venable and Buddy Guy appearing I decided that EUR300 wasn’t worth it. Shame really as last year was a blast and the Dutch have a great appreciation for Blues.
My observations are that contemporary music is becoming very bland and mass produced and, because of streaming and stuff like Tic Tok, young people are finding all kinds of old stuff which as a consequence is gaining new relevance. I read a story about a couple of teenage girls who were shocked to discover that Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf wasn’t new.
100 stages in 900 acres and he can summarise all the acts in a paragraph!
Diogenes
That did make me ROFL – genius
This from a guy who has Acker Bilk’s entire catalog on 8 track tape.
OI! Don’t you knock Acker Bilk. There was a geezer always bought his round. And if you ever heard him, mean on the clarinet. If he’d heard of the Spud being a fan, he would not have approved.
Grikath,
“But he’s, as usual, wrong about Glastonbury, and other such mega-scale festivals: They’re not about Music at all. They’re large commercial ventures that feed off the nostalgia of Youth of affluent middle-classers who cough up tons of dough for the Experience. So the originality and quality of the music isn’t a first concern, it’s the Band Name ( whatever is left of the band to begin with ).””
I really wonder how many people actually go and see Band Name and really leave thinking “god they were shit” but pretend to their friends it was amazing, just because they can say they saw Band Name.
Singers voices don’t last forever. Male tenor is about 60. Elton John now sounds like Vic Reeves’ club singer doing Elton John. It’s dreadful.
As I remember, people used to say “Monetarism”. But at some point, they realised that the people they called Monetarists weren’t really following the ideas of Milton Friedman any more. So the word “Neoliberalism” was invented as an analog to “Neoconservatism”.
But Neoconservatism was a real thing. NeoCons were mostly ex-Trotskyists, who advocated for a muscular US Foreign Policy, and they were happy to be called NeoCons. I’m thinking of people like Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle.
But Neoliberalism simply means any economic policy anywhere that is not positively hostile to the market, and which finds itself talked about antagonistically by the left. It’s too broad to be analytically useful.
When Lenin replaced War Communism with the New Economic Policy, that was arguably “Neoliberal”.
” Elton John now sounds like Vic Reeves’ club singer doing Elton John. It’s dreadful.”
Did anyone else see the video EJ made during covid, of him playing the piano on his patio and singing ‘I’m still standing’? Or rather he sang ‘I’m dill dandin’ over and over again…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUUNuD2apZc
Saw Jeff Lynne’s ELO a couple of years ago, he had a couple of singers helping out with the vocals, knew he couldn’t hit the higher notes and left it to the younger ones
Worked well, nostalgia, great songs and well performed
georgesdelatour said:
“the word “Neoliberalism” was invented as an analog to “Neoconservatism”.”
T’other way round, surely?
Neoliberalism goes back at least to the post-war 1940s foundation of the Mont Pelerín Society (I think Milton Friedman used it as a term back then). Possibly further back to the ‘30s arguments about the response to the Great Depression, although I don’t know if the term was used then.
Neoconservatism didn’t really exist until the 1960s, when the moderate Democrats got scared by the increasing radicalism of the anti Vietnam War protests, the Black Power movement, the Marxist academics and the general counter-culture ideas that were infiltrating the party. And I don’t think the term actually gained traction until the late ‘70s or even ‘80s.
Someone once commented that he thought that tribute bands were now so good that they were often better than the real thing. I’ve seen quite a few over the years and I was usually pretty impressed. I’ve seen pretend versions of Abba, The Beatles, ELP, Pink Floyd and Queen. I also worked at a Butlins holiday camp in 1981 and remember there being a resident band that could recreate contemporary hits live with amazing accuracy.
As a frequent Murph watcher, I’ve noticed his face getting thinner, along with the background books, and a transition to looking like a Chinese Uncle due to the polo shirt.
Bongo
It would hard to say which of Pai Mei (martial arts instructor in Kill Bill 2) or Richard Murphy was the bigger sociopath and more unpleasant character.