Sprezzatura

I hate the 1975. If you follow me on Twitter you already know that, but it's been a while since they've done anything and it always bears repeating. The only good attempt at a defence of The 1975 I've read came from, I think, Steven Hyden: the 1975 are important because there need to be big, fun, hateable rock bands. I see the logic in that: people have to play SOMETHING at parties, and weirdo kids like me need SOMETHING to rebel against. But do them Wilmslow cunts fit the bill? Big - probably the biggest in England, only Arctic Monkeys could really fight them on that. Hateable - my lord, yes. But fun? If I'm remembering rightly, two of the first three songs on their recent album Notes On A Conditional Form  are a plodding orchestral overture and a song where Greta Thunberg tells you to stop littering. Not exactly Van Halen- or Aerosmith-esque party animal good times. And I'm pretty sure Guns 'n' Roses never released an eighty-minute double album full of UK ...

Trigger warnings, lads. If you don't wanna hear about blokes being cunts, look away now. 2016 was " Rock's not dead, it belongs to rap now ". 2017 was " Rock's not dead, it's the perfect reaction to [Brexit/Drumpf] now ". 2018 is "Rock's not dead, it belongs to women now." Towards the back half of the decade, lots of female artists and female-fronted bands came to the fore in a way they hadn't really in previous decades of rock and indie music. This isn't to say there weren't any women in bands before, but they were either well spread out or ghettoised into 'riot grrrl' or ' Lilith Fair shite'. 2018-ish is when you could confidently say that the biggest indie rock acts about - St. Vincent, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, and so on - were pretty much all women. How'd that happen, and why should you be arsed? This is, weirdly enough, kind of an outgrowth of emo, and it is thus instructive to read " Wh...

There is a famous anecdote that during a Conservative Party policy meeting, Thatcher removed her copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.” Oof, it's been a while. It's been over three years since I wrote an intro to the blog - technically my second post, but the first post where I thought about what the fuck I was doing on a long-term basis. I've gone on a lot of tangents since then, and taken a LOT of breaks, but since I'm going to try and get back into writing on a more consistent basis around here I thought I'd go back and check what still rings true and what's no longer important to me. Let's see how I did. I'm going to do things in a weird order, but hopefully it will be clear why once I have finished. 2. On Sprezzatura The key to this entire blog is not JUST Sprezzatura. That gets first billing because it's a particularly snazzy name. The key is what I'll...

I had used all the porn on the Internet, so I started torrenting 90 Day Fiancé, and as I watched it got me to thinking: this is exactly the kind of thing mid-period The Last Psychiatrist would've written about. You know, after the 'psychiatry inside baseball' posts from like 2006 about drugs neither of us have ever heard of, let alone used, but before the knotty late-period posts where he tried to explain the entirety of society in the 2010s. I mean the bit where he was writing about, like,  random ads, or random music videos , or Hop. "Hop?"  Seriously . Mr Teach has, of course, moved onto writing actual books, and I promise I'll get around to reading Watch What You Hear  once 90 Day Fiancé is done, but in the mean time I need my meaningless nonsense fix. And I suppose, if you want something done properly, you do it yourself, so here goes. Grant me that reality TV is fake as hell, that I am not any sort of psychiatrist, let Alone the Last, et cetera et cete...