Song, by Toad

Steve from Festive Fifty kicked this off, but god knows how. I assume he doesn’t read the UK’s broadest toilet paper The Daily Telegraph, but he spotted their scathing article about John Peel nonetheless.  I am not linking to The Telegraph because this sort of nonsense is just that – link bait – but the text in its entirety is on Steve’s site if you want to read it.

I don’t intend to spend this post criticising The Daily Telegraph, which is basically The Daily Mail for people who know a few long words. Nor do I have any need to defend John Peel from people who think he was a bandwagon jumper because quite frankly making such baldly ignorant statements really just makes you look a tit and does pretty much nothing to the legacy of the Big Man, so snipe away, pygmy, no-one gives a shit. If you want to read a passionate and erudite defence of Mr. Peel, then read Ed.

The one thing that struck me, however, whilst reading Michael Henderson’s dismal article was how revealing it was of him personally. He represents the sort of utterly depressing human being whose presence on the planet sucks all life out of the human race. I’ve hated pricks like him all my life, it’s only now that I am sufficiently his equal in basic societal measures that I feel unchallengeable in saying that no, I am here, I have attained all you fetishise in life and no, you are still a spineless weasel. I am not jealous, you, mate, are a cunt.

The first and most petty of Henderson’s, erm, well, arguments I guess he’d like you to call them, is his paragraph-long forgiveness of grammatical errors in John Peel’s epitaph. It’s a quotation of course, so the grammatical errors should really be taken up with the writers of the song and thus have nothing to do with Peel. But they suffice to establish both an imagined moral high ground and a condescending generosity on the basis of someone else’s errors. Well done Michael.

Apart from picking on one of Peel’s most ill-considered quotes – “I wish I had the courage to be a terrorist”, which is not as bereft of merit as Henderson thinks: do you believe in anything that much? And if not, why not? – his main beef with Peel is that the man “never really grew up”.

And this is why I hate this article and hold its author in utter contempt. If you want to know why, then try this awful quote on for size:

Self-deception is exactly what is wrong with that memorial. Its banal sentiment is not child-like, merely childish. Pop music speaks to teenagers because, green in judgment, they lack the emotional resources to respond to anything deeper. With helpful instruction, and a bit of curiosity, that should come with age, though in this case it didn’t.

Pop music speaks to people, in much the same way that classical art forms do, because it has a fucking good tune. For those intent on creating something more meaningful out of it, then it can also appeal to the innate snobbery of the listener, which is helpful. The pathetic illusion that classical art forms are in any way superior to or more sophisticated than popular ones is just the same kind of infantile snobbery that indie-kids employ to persuade themselves that no-one but them really gets it. Art forms are different and require different parts of our brain to interact with them. Joseph Conrad may have been a technically brilliant writer, but fuck me his books are dull to read. Are you saying that his intellectual pretensions are innately superior to George MacDonald Fraser’s jarring Flash For Freedom? If so, then I think you are looking for the veneer of smug superiority above actual intellectual or artistic merit.

If ever there was a sound reason to entirely dismiss the attention-starved ramblings of this clown it is here:

People in their fifties and even sixties are seen on our streets every day behaving like teenagers. In their eating and drinking habits, clothing, language, and leisure pursuits, they can be hard to distinguish from people young enough to be their grandchildren. No wonder those youngsters fail to grow up.Funeral directors across the land have spoken with sadness in recent years of the lack of respect shown to the dead. The passing of loved ones used to release feelings of love, loss and reflection. Now they are just excuses to have a bit of a larf.

If this poor fellow had ever read any books he would know that lamenting the digressions of today’s wayward youth has been a favourite past-time of the unimaginative since god was a boy. The world, believe me, has always been going to hell in a hand-basket. And Peel was also a football fan, don’t you know, and they’re all thugs and sheep. Ooh, Betty!

I’ve had this quarrel with people who claim age as a virtue since I was about four years old, and I haven’t changed since then. I am better at certain things, and worse at others, but I am no cleverer nor any better a person. The article implies that you actually become more intelligent as you get older which is simply factually incorrect. Any teenager with a brain knows that real life forces you to compromise on your ambitions and your ideals. Teenagers are not stupid, they just know less and that isn’t always a bad thing. If your teenage dreams were so divorced from reality that you have had to abandon them in order to accommodate the real world, Mr. Henderson, then it implies that you weren’t a very bright teenager. And if you can’t see how someone who looks at the world with different fundamental premises than yours might come to different conclusions as to how to inhabit it, then I can only conclude that you aren’t a very bright adult either.

I have made some compromises due to the practical facts of life, but I have no illusions that I was forced to make them. You can always be an iconoclast if you choose, Henderson, but have the courage to acknowledge your compromises for what they are. I accept the discipline of a 9-5 job not because the world is more complicated than I realised, but because I have looked at the options and decided that the restrictions on my personal freedom are worth the sacrifice, and I make no apology to my teenage self for this decision.

What Michael Henderson manages to come across as, and I would be amazed if this weren’t accurate, is morally vacant with no courage, no principles and no integrity. We have all made the same compromises as you, Michael, but we do not try and pretend our cynical self-interest makes us better people. And we treat that as cause to admire the idealism of our youth, not denigrate it. For who has the greater courage, you spineless turkey, the man who knows no better and yet believes in idealistic principles, the man who surrenders his idealism at the first sign of conflict with his own self-interest, or the man who accepts that his ideals may never be achievable, may be at odds with the world, and yet strives to live up to them nonetheless?

And yes, there is a right and a wrong answer to that question. People like you, Michael Henderson, make the world a significantly worse place simply by lumbering about in it in your own snivelling, cowardly little weaselly way. As I get older the more I realise there is less and less excuse for giving in to the multi-nuanced ‘real world’. That is basically just a limp excuse for abandoning moral responsibility, and I would far rather deal with a futile idealist than a successful cynic.

Teenage dreams are hard to beat precisely because they are naive, but that is a good thing and any attempt to paint them as infantile, rather than occasionally just wrong, is almost invariably the work of someone sniffing about for any justification for his own selfish moral capitulation. They take their fat corporate salaries and pretend that they actually earn them, but that voice in the back of their heads never quite gives up whispering to them that they might just have turned into a dull, insecure, spiritless little lickspittle. People like this just depress me. What the fuck purpose is there for this sort of depressing individual, with his cowardly outlook and childish obfuscation? If you have no moral courage, Henderson, and you’ve surrendered your ideals to pamper your vanity then just fucking admit it you spineless bimbo.

It’s nearly lunchtime and christ I need my pint!

Billy Bragg – From Red to Blue
Tom Waits – I Don’t Wanna Grow Up
Frank Turner – Once We Were Anarchists