Friday, May 04, 2007

something I may have already said before

This isn't it: what a wonderful moment it is when you see light at the end of the tunnel of a journal article you've been fretting over for aeons - I am actually going to get a kind of admittedly largely empirical in content draft finished tonight, and I am going to send it to my co-author, and it'll be their turn to hum and hah over the damn thing for a while. And I will feel like progress is occuring while I do nothing.

What I wanted to say, and writing about Ray Burgess reminded me, I may already have said it, but I just wanted to say, as a cautionary tale, and those of my generation will likely mainly agree with me, that there is a central flaw to a lot of writing about culture's recent past, and when people talk about the 70s or 80s it is so easy to generalise, because really, I always thought Gary Numan was shit, even in 1980 when the Kiss fans suddenly became Gary Numan fans (I hadn't been a Kiss fan either). And when I watched Countdown in the 70s with my brother (4 years younger) and sister (5 years younger), we didn't suck it up like vacuum cleaners, we ridiculed a lot of it. I specifically recall ridiculing the following:

Daryl Cotton's 'Same old girl'
Kim Wilde 'Kids in America' (this is a little problematic as my sister ridiculed the set, and my brother and I ridiculed the way she phrased her ridicule, but whatever)
M-maybe Mi-Sex's 'Space Race'?

We-e-ll I can't remember any others but when I do I'll add them in and take this sentence out, and put some in, or I'll just make a phew up.

2 comments:

Wayne Davidson said...

My sister and I used to mercilessly ridicule Young Talent Time, especially 'Tiny' Tina Arena. However, when she sung her final song on the show (MacAthur Park) I assure you there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

David Nichols said...

I don't know whether to believe you or not.

what a week

  It really was a huge week, with not exactly three new lectures to deliver but let's say the equivalent of two (split one in half to ma...