A Child's Claim To Fame
(20.02.2003 - 3:59 p.m.)

he was the lone wolf you could see it in his eyes
the way he held his heart the way he held his lies

she was a scarecrow the way she always looked around
for something she once had and never could be found

oOo oOo oOo

Should I be worried that a large number of the albums in my music collection have black and white or sepia toned photographs on the covers? What exactly does that say about me and the music that I like? I always thought that I was born in the wrong decade, but I never really noticed this trend in album artwork until now. What is it with the images of rusty pickup trucks, men in fields with oversized moustaches, psychedelic collages and ornately scripted print?

I was having my hair cut earlier and, as I sat there, two of the staff at the salon got into a play-fight. One ruffled the others long, black hair, making it look as if it had been back-combed into a perm of towering proportion. I found myself joking that she looked like Joan Jett in her heyday. My question is this: does any other self-respecting 23 year old guy even know who Joan Jett is?

Do I live in the past? Do I long for some rose-tinted spectacle that never existed? I�m beginning to wonder. They say that people who long for the past are compensating for something that is wrong in their present, or for a lack of future. But as I have absolutely no experience of these timeframes, why is their music so appealing?

The truth is that I currently have no answer. A vast majority of the music that I really love, and even the contemporary music that I listen to, music that has been released this year, is grounded in constructs of the past. And yes, I appreciate that you can say that just about all contemporary music is grounded in the past, as pop music was all but invented in the 50�s and 60�s. I suppose what I mean to say is that it is not so much grounded in the past, as deliberately seeking to emulate it.

I think that I am old fashioned in many respects. I love the meta-narratives of old; a time when meaning could be attributed to action; a time when postmodern irony hadn�t rendered things so shallow; a time that was about depth rather than surface.

And wouldn�t it have been great to be alive when Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds were reinventing rock n� roll; when Bruce Springsteen was the future rather than the past.

I�ll pull myself up there, because I don�t really think that I live in the past. I look to it to provide meaning in the present, but I don�t want to live there. I delve into it to understand heritage, but I don�t want to get lost in it.

oOo oOo oOo

I think that�s why people take themselves off on adventures. They add depth and meaning. They are about discovery and purpose. They aren�t about romanticism, they are about digging below the surface that we are presented with.

And they are about love and good food.

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