Yesterday I went to see Spiritualized perform their
critically lauded album Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space. This is an album that had a huge impact on me
at release, and I have listened to sporadically throughout the years. An album I like enough to wear on a t
shirt. But I feel now that it symbolises
a sort of crisis of individuality, that who I am is not unique to me, but a
subscribed set of signifiers lifted from the proverbial peg.
The show was the second of two
consecutive nights where they played this album in its entirety. From the rousing, cyclical opening title
track to the more understated closer Cop Shoot Cop (which sounded slightly like
an afterthought, one of my less generous reactions to the show) we were taken
on an amazing journey. It was a
fantastic performance, touching in its quiet moments, and becoming tangibly
intense as squalls of free noise were regularly dealt like pummelling blows
from an angry musical mob.
But when I
walked in something puzzled me. I
thought it was to do with the majority of people being men in their thirties
and forties. But it wasn’t just that. It was a stylistic homogeneity that was apparent. In Hereford I feel I belong in my group of
friends but I feel that the way I dress suits me as an individual. I feel I have some sort of identity that is
uniquely me. I don’t see myself as
belonging to any particular type or clan.
But who does? Maybe goths
identify as goths for example, but they probably feel like a unique type of
goth. I don’t know. What does being a goth signify? That you value sadness and paradoxical
nonconformity. I could get down with
that, but all the make up seems too much like hard work. I suppose I’m ‘indie’? It seems sort of pitiful when you label it. I chose the most bookish glasses in
Specsavers because I think of myself as a nerd, and value literary
expression. I wear a cardigan because
I’m sensitive and like to make a nod to grunge.
Corduroy doesn’t really clash with the twee programme. The addition of a band tshirt that nobody
will have heard of featuring white geometric outline shapes on black serves
only to feed the cliché of cultural superiority. To see the collective expression of
everyone’s quite similar aspirations towards hipness and intelligence was
frankly disorientating, and calls to mind the swimming abyss of noise conjoured
by the Spiritualized song The Individual.
It is not well defined. There is
nothing to hold on to. Under the
conditioned desire to be seen as alternative and cultured is a vast and
terrifying abyss. My sense of who I am
is as brittle and shallow as it is arbitrary.
It is predictable by a Spotify algorithm. The identity I pursued in record shops and
charity shops is simply another demographic.
I don’t know what good it does admitting this. I don’t know who I can become. I feel like a husk hung with fabrics.
It makes me think of the live
version of Jeffrey Lewis ‘The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane’ when he
details his lysergic thoughts on identity and taste, particularly a notion of
‘coolness’, which is, in his then view, constructed from at first an
influential person defining a song (or book or painter or whatever) as ‘cool’
and then you collect a load of things that resemble it in the same box marked
‘cool’ in your head until someone updates or upends your notion of cool and you
throw everything out and start collecting different stuff. But in the end none of it means anything. They’re all just sounds that you’re ascribing
meaning to, and that meaning changes.
But listening back to this album for the umpteenth time I do feel there
is something inherently beautiful in it, that it transcends its time as well as
spanning genre, and that, all in all, it’s as good as any to wear on a tshirt.
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