Lots to unpack and it probably lends itself better to a pub conversation, but I’ll have a go anyway over the course of a few posts. Btw - for clarity to differentiate between Mike Skinner and the protagonist of the story, I’ll refer to the protagonist as ‘young mike’
At a basic level ‘art’ should hopefully elicit a response and in fairness it’s certainly achieved that with both Rob, and Gornik! Though not mandatory for success, if you aspire to make great art you probably have to take risks too; sometime it works sometimes it doesn’t but I think this album takes a number of risks the first of which I’ll cover in a moment.
Btw
@RobMCFC, apologies if this response sounds like I’m trying to psychoanalyse you, I’m not it’s just that you were first in and raise some interesting points so please take in the spirit intended.
Rob’s response to the swearing is a really interesting both in what he is hearing compared to me and his response to it. I was slightly surprised by how much it irked Rob, so I did the rather geeky thing of counting the amount of swearing. Now clearly when Rob said what he didn’t like was the swearing "every other line" it was deliberate hyperbole for effect but nonetheless it does suggest the overwhelming impression he came away with was a bit foul-mouthed diatribe for/to the ‘yoof’ of Britain. Objectively speaking, of the eleven songs on the album seven of them actually have two or less swear words in the entire song. The maximum number one any one song is seven. I would suggest that in our everyday lives we hear more swearing per sentence than we do on this album, certainly at the Etihad I hear way worse than this and for better or for worse I’m sure that is also true in the playgrounds of the nation’s secondary schools.
But nonetheless it has really disengaged Rob, and he makes two great observations that stuck out to me. Firstly, the comment about why would you want your artistic legacy or record to include such a level of profanity? and secondly the comments about the banality of the swearing. I’ll come back to the nature of the language (including the swearing) and what I think it’s trying to do 'artistically' in a later post but for the time being I want to focus on the banality, which I think Gornik also alluded to.
Why I Love This Album #1 – The Utter Banality of It
I absolutely agree about the banality of this album, in its subject matter it is undoubtedly the most banal album I own. The swearing is banal, much of the language is banal, the story is utterly banal.
Where we may disagree is the implications of that banality and the fact that for me the banality is a core part of its brilliance.
IMO the truth of the matter is the vast majority of us lead utterly banal lives. Most, if not all, of the people who read this thread and the forum in general will leave little to no broader legacy. We are not destined for fame or infamy and almost certainly not on any meritorious basis because such people are a vanishingly small number.
Sure, some of us will accrue a bigger size pension pot than others and the lucky ones might get to go on some nice holidays and even see a few wonders of the world but in the scheme of things these are a mere bagatelle. Most of us are cosmically insignificant and beyond possibly being a line on a family tree that a handful of descendants might look at, we will leave little to no footprint or cause for celebration. Especially in developed western countries ’banality r us’.
Except that’s patently not true and at best a highly partial view that I‘d like to think most people would rage against.
Because for all our undoubted banality, the vast majority of us try to do something both completely everyday and at the same time completely extraordinary that defines and gives meaning to our lives. We strive to make connections with other humans, we fall in and out and back into friendships, we try to find love, to be loved and to love, to find that ‘special one’ or maybe two or three or four.
We try and understand and connect to others and through that we understand ourselves and develop ourselves more fully. We aren’t innately adept at this, we learn as we go, we learn from our mistakes sometimes small ones we can laugh about later, sometimes huge ones that are hard lessons learnt. We do all this with our friends, our workmates and if we are blessed, with people who come to mean everything to us. We mostly do it in what looks from the outside like utterly mundane interactions. Now and again, we try and make grand romantic gestures or do something a bit spectacular but even when we do that the reality is that someone will have done it better, more eloquently, more stylishly than us. But that doesn’t matter because any grand gestures we might make are really the performative window dressing that gives us something to look forward to and maybe show off a bit. The bits that really count are the mundane details, the ferreting for a tissue for your snotty nosed friend who has just had a bit of a meltdown, the cup of tea quietly placed on your desk late at night when you are struggling to finish a piece of work, it’s the stilted hug that you give your mates mum at her husband’s funeral because even if it’s a bit awkward you want them to know you care about them. But these are all, hopefully, things for when we are a bit older.
When, you are young and not very confident in yourself, it’s the nervous fiddling with a beer mat because you’re quite keen for the girl sat opposite to like you but you’re not really sure that you are interesting enough and that nervous energy has to go somewhere so it goes into picking at the beer mat. It’s the dilemma of trying to be present in the moment whilst your inner monologue is being a bit of an evil demon and pointing out that your hair might look a bit crap.
In the case of ‘Young Mike’ he’s just starting out on his journey of beautiful banality. In the utterly mundane story (although when you are that age a grand is not insignificant) that we eavesdrop into he does nothing of merit or real interest and screws up more than once. However through his experiences he does manage to grow as a person; admittedly not very much, but a little bit which is progress and is ultimately all any of us can hope for. Without wishing to create a spoiler for anyone who has not yet listened*, in the second of the two ends of the album he tries to positively organise his thoughts, these are not massively eloquent but then he’s a young lad who’s not always the most articulate as evidenced across the previous 40 odd minutes. He thinks he’s matured a bit in his view of friendships and relationships and he has; but he’s still got a way to go. His newly ‘grown up’ view of friendships and love is informed by his recent experiences but my hope for him as he signs off in this album is that, through his experiences to come, he finds out that his take on what happens in the “last garrison” isn’t actually true.
Rob mentioned potentially spoiling your legacy through profanity which raises the question what legacy is an artist trying to create? The answer to that always ends up in the eye of the beholder and not the artist as can be evidenced by mine and Rob’s (and others) polarised view of this record but presumably there is some conscious or unconscious intent when an artist commits something to posterity.
Music can do all sorts of wonderful things, it can create huge joy and provide great comfort, it allows us to transcend our physical and temporal situations. Mostly music takes us away from our reality; even gritty protest music or country ballads about real tragedies typically create an abstracted poetic image in our mind.
Very rarely does it lean into, let alone seemingly rub our faces into the utter banality of most people’s existence. But this album does and it does it unapologetically and with a level of determination that makes it clear that it is not denigrating our collective ordinariness or rubbing our noses in it but is actually celebrating it; not in a nihilistic way but in an affectionate way.
It’s very unlikely most of us will have anything written about us because our lives are not considered sufficiently special but this album acts as a counterpoint to this. It basically says that however ordinary we are, in our mundane humanity we are all extraordinary and worthy of an album being written about us. In that sense I find this one of the most uplifting pieces of art I own.
* if you haven't listened yet, ignore the 1/10's they're all wrong ;-)
