Listening

She said, there’s never any noise,

unless I make it myself

it’s cold, it’s empty, it’s

sad

She said I’m sick I’m sick I’m

sick to death

of turning around

inside

And she said, there’s a picture of a hill on my wall

and it looks a bit

like home, that’s all

it’s just that

sometimes I feel

like I’m my only friend

And I said sorry what?

Say that again?

Fandom

I’ve never been a fan of Robbie Williams. A bit too self-conscious, and constructed. Arch, even. A bit too…Benny Hill. Although I have to confess I was quite taken with the story I once heard, of how he asked to be driven to a pub in the middle of

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nowhere after this film shoot, dressed in this costume. Wandered up to the bar, ordered a round of drinks, then frantically patted himself down for his wallet, before running out into the night giggling.   

I suppose as a feminist I should thank him for commodifying himself to the same degree that so many women performers do; could be he’s a subversive activist, whose cheeky chappy career has been all about highlighting the disparities between male and female identities in the spotlight of commercialised sexuality. But, he’s probably just a dickhead.

So I wasn’t too disappointed then when I heard his latest song, which is, frankly, rubbish. Worse: it’s divisive, privileged, ignorant rubbish. Honestly, how dumb and sheltered is he?

It even got on the news for being so awful, and a Russian commentator was quoted as saying that there were, sort of, some recognisably Russian elements to his caricature of the culture, if you went back to the 1950s. Research, Robbie, research. (Check out the bit where he sings ‘revolution is in the wind’, as if it’s not 99 years later.)

My cringing reaction to Party Like A Russian was thrown into sharp relief for me the following evening when I went to see the movie 8 Days A Week. Didn’t expect much, as I’m not a huge Beatles fan (UNLIKE SOME OF THE AUDIENCE OMG), but actually, what a bloody good film.

  

In amongst the 1960s footage it was very touching to hear a present-day Whoopi

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Goldberg talk about how much Beatlemania meant to her, as a child in New York. How inclusive their music seemed, and how for her it transcended the bitter racial divisions that she was growing up in, and made her feel part of something that was for black and white alike. And that was even before the Beatles refused to play to a segregated audience in Jacksonville. Mind you, also before John Lennon’s unfortunate remarks about Jesus. And before this.  Can’t please everyone. 

But listening to Whoopi in particular, I was reminded of the feeling I had as a child when I first realised that the story I was reading – the rich, exciting, adventure book I was enjoying so much – was not written for me. It was written for boys. Something jarred, and I realised I wasn't the audience the author had in mind when writing; this voice I loved so much was not speaking to me at all. I felt betrayed.

It’s a feeling that’s never left me, because every day there’s a song, or an ad, a newspaper article or a painting, that reminds me that I’m not the audience. I’m scenery.

I expect that’s how any Robbie Williams fans in Russia are feeling right now; whoever he thinks he’s communicating with, it’s clearly not them.

But then, maybe he’s only ever been communicating with himself. So to speak.

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The Anthropocene

This week, to my surprise, it was all over the news that we’ve entered the Anthropocene, a new geological era marked by the extreme effects that human activity is having on the planet. I thought we figured this out years ago?

Tearing myself away from the comments (We had a frost last week, how do you explain that then?), and boggling at the thought of a geological layer composed almost entirely of KFC fossils, I began to worry.

What if we do survive?

I mean, pretty sad if we don’t. The human race’s great achievements, art, literature, music and technology (just as we’ve been warned, in the entire body of twentieth century dystopian sci fi) all gone. But at least there’d be no one left to shed a tear.

But on the other hand, what if our species lives on, and kids grow up wanting to be archaeologists? What a stink job. Will

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they unearth the bones of their ancestors, and piece together the complicated rituals of the past? Find beautifully crafted artefacts that hint at the magic of a long-lost culture? Doubt it. Chicken bones. I don’t think they’ll even reach the chicken bones, to be fair, they’ll get down a couple of metres and find a planet-wide layer of melted plastic, marking the point of a great catastrophe like the Iridium Anomaly.

All our packaging, our clothes, our furnishings, our kids’ toys, every bag you ever brought a frozen chicken home in. All fused together into an impermeable, multi-coloured layer.

Could be highly sought after, like the Detroit Agate. Beautiful, dappled colours. Miners of the future might dig it up and make it into earrings.

Or maybe the relics of our era will just form a layer of dark, uniform ooze, solidifying over the millennia into a super-hard mud-coloured shell. What will they think, our future archaeologists? That we loved plastic above all else? Or that we loved our world with a passion, every tree, every elephant, panda, tiger and kakapo, loved it so much we wrapped it up in plastic to keep it fresh. Good job, humans. Looks nice.

Bad dreams in the night

What is it about Kate Bush and her breakthrough single? I thought she was kind of ridiculous when that song first came out, but I liked it in spite of myself, floppy sleeves, overwrought mannerisms and all. As I got older it came to represent a certain kind of romanticism and female strength, and a connection to ye olde English tales and landscapes. Not just the Bronte connection, but the long tangled thread back to Herne the hunter, talking badgers, lions, hounds, and unicorns. Maybe it was those misty trees.

Kate Bush herself was uncompromisingly individual and unpackaged, and quite apart

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from her sheer musicality, there was the furniture-chewing drama of her videos, the romanticism, the female-centric stories of her songs. Now I can’t tell – is my ongoing fandom ironic? Or am I invested more deeply, retrospectively approving my younger self’s taste; celebrating my own successful transition into adulthood after an adolescence full of darkness and gothic misery.

I expect all women of my vintage had similar struggles as teenagers, sulking alone in our rooms, but this week we all got together in the park, on a bright wintery Wellington Saturday, to recreate the famous Wuthering Heights dance. Thank f*k we made it through, we could be saying with every flouncey spin, because that adolescence could have gone horribly wrong. But here we are: all of us who used to prance around in private, imagining we were as powerful, as confident in our weirdness and our talents, and our silliness, as Kate Bush.

The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever: Wellington.
Photo credit: Joanna Holden

She was only 18 when she wrote Wuthering Heights; no one can say she didn’t own her own twee-ness as a teenager. She celebrated it. At an age where the rest of us were self-consciously trying to hide our more goofy facets, Kate Bush was in full flight, emoting wildly. She was unrelentingly herself, in a way that the cookie-cutter mouthpieces who dominate pop music have never been brave or intelligent enough to be.

While she surely had her influences, you couldn’t say she modeled herself on them, and although there were some great songs on the charts in 1978, in pop music terms she really was out on her own: a unique talent. She might not fit the stereotype of punk but she embodied its ethos more authentically than many a spiky-haired hobby band that followed.

So thanks, Kate Bush, you gave me something to admire and giggle at in the same breath, through some very tough times. And thanks, adolescence, you made me who I am. I hated you (I loved you too).