An aeon ago, I was asked to do a thing on BBC Radio 6 and the preparatory stage involved filling in a questionnaire on "Good Day Bad Day" music
First Single You Bought:What was it, where, why?
The Theme From ‘Sting’ aka ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin, as recorded by Marvin Hamlisch
WH Smith in Berkhamsted
Liked it!
First Album You Bought:What was it, where, why?
Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Do It Yourself
Probably the local little record store in Berkhamsted
Loved Ian Dury – New Boots and Panties, along with Never Mind the Bollocks, changed my life.
First gig:What was it, where? Any particular memories/stories?
The Slits, Aylesbury Friars.Not as good as the album Cut (second album I bought), a bit loose they were as a band. But still a big buzz.
Best Gig:What was it, where, why was it your best?
Either My Bloody Valentine at ULU around the time of “Glider” (1990?), or Animal Collective at the Bowery Ballroom, New York in 2004 I think it was. Both transcendent and engulfing.
What you’re listening to now:What music are you currently into?
The new album by Woebot, Hallo. Maria & the Mirrors’s “Gemini”. Traxman’s The Mind of Traxman.
Good Day Record:What and why?
Kraftwerk, “Neon Lights”.Wanted to pick something electronic and dance-related as that’s a huge part of my listening. And of course, spoiled for choice there. I could have picked something by Aphex Twin or Ultramarine or LFO or Omni Trio or Wagon Christ or Orbital or…But let’s go with the godfathers: Kraftwerk. Electronic music, groove-based music, is music that I tend use as a pure mood-modifier, the emotions in it are quite abstract. If you’re having a good day, you probably don’t need your spirits elevated that much, but the rhapsodic flutter of this song is the perfect soundtrack.
Bad Day Record:What and why?
When someone really bad has happened in my life music tends to drop away completely, it is inadequate. So I have to rephrase the question in my mind: what songs do I know that contain “healing wisdom”? And one of them would be The Byrds’s “Everybody’s Been Burned” off Younger Than Yesterday. Apart from its beauty, the lyric offers good counsel: don’t respond to set backs or traumas by retreating into yourself, stay open.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text is probably my favoritest. A joy to read, broken up in nice little aphoristic short sections, a mind rearranger for me aged whenever it was (21?). A Lover's Discourse is wonderful too - similar style and structure - but less applicable to other things as Pleasure, as it is so focused on romantic love. Then there's that hardy perennial, "The Grain of the Voice". Mythologies, I still remember certain perceptions - the chapter about the court case against the allegedly murderous farmer, the literary way the prosecution wielded rhetoric against the simple-speaking man.... the stuff about strip teases, about wrestling..
Jean Baudrillard wrote about 50 books (I've not counted but that's what it feels like). Yet - and this is just a hunch - I suspect the kernel of most everything is contained in this fantastic short essay, "The Ecstasy of Communication". Which must have been written in the late 70s or early 80s but in a feat of unintentional prophecy explains the internet and its effect on culture and psychology. (The other things I've read, I found overly abstract - a lot of sweeping assertions ("power no longer exists" - hmmm, you think so Jean?)
One of JB's books in that highly fetish-able Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series of black pocket-sized volumes was titled Forget Foucault - which always tickled me, the French-crit-theory equivalent of a diss track. But I could never forget Michel Foucault - the prose is arid next to Barthes, but the ideas have so many applications. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is not a sexy read, but it rearranged my mind - put out of contention, out of their misery, all those lingering Sixties ideas about Eros as inherently revolutionary. The Archaelogy of Knowledge is tough going - it's extremely abstract, he proffers even less in the way of evidential support than Baudrillard. A grim grinding slog, to be honest - until the final chapter, styled as a dialogue between ice-veined Michel and an imaginary humanist interlocutor whose objections are patiently and remorselessly demolished. It ends with a wonderful flourish of chilling anti-humanist rhetoric. I struggled resolutely through the whole thing during my lunch breaks while working a summer job in a factory, packing aerosols of fly-spray. This final chapter felt like the pay-off.
My brother Jez "riveted" by The Archaelogy of Knowledge
Foucault was a better interviewee than a writer and the anthology of dialogues Power / Knowledge is a very good way in.
Julia Kristeva made a big impression on me with The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection... and a medium-sized impression with Black Sun and the book about love. She's slogging on, does a book every few years, seemingly with zero impact.
Can't forget GillesDeleuze & Felix Guattari - their concepts seemed to have a lot of applications to music and music culture at one point. Now, I'm a little befuddled as to their use value - in any context.
Paul Virilio - Mark Fisher hated Virilio, or found him extremely frustrating. And it's true, there's little in the way of sustained linear development of argument - the text jumps around all over the place. A paragraph ends and the next one is a complete non-sequitur. Sometimes the next sentence is a non-sequitur. Fragmentary and disjointed as it is, though, I found a fair amount to ransack and redeploy in his work, in particular with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Like Baudrillard (and Kristeva), another one of these extremely productive, churn-out-a-book a year almost, types. A lot of reiteration (and self-cannibalism maybe).
Georges Bataille. Got Visions of Excess in hardback - a copy without a dust jacket, going cheap. Mad stuff. It seemed then to have all kinds of applications to what I was listening to at exactly the point of reading, which was the Butthole Surfers! But the one that really has proved enduringly useful is the three volumes of The Accursed Share, his relatively straightforward and analytic book about economics and human psychology. (At one point I had loose leaf pages of all the Acephale writings, I think an advance copy had come into Joy's possession when she was a book's editor. I chucked those out eventually, though. Can't be grappling with an unbound book).
Now I have read some really interesting books in the last decade or so - things that have sent me down unexpected thought-paths - but they tend to be more like obscure scholarly works, discovered through project-oriented research. They don't really fit the category of "Cultural Theory", and nor are they the kind of stuff that is setting the pace in academia nowadays. Things like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Daniel Patrick O'Keefe's Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic (that one a Phil Knight tip), Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (which you can see the Woody Allen character suggesting as some light reading for Annie Hall in the scene below - what a dick!), Esther Newton's Mother Camp, Donald Meyer's book about the history of Positive Thinking, Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image....
But nothing hits you quite as hard as when you're young and mind-malleable. You're hungry, then - and an indiscriminate forager for mind-food.
So for me it would be the French lot, largely. In the late '80s, early '90s, it also seemed to work really well with what was going in music at that time. Or at least it was irresistible for me to glom one onto the other, and there seemed to be a fit, or a friction that created a spark.
And it had style as writing - whereas much that has followed in later phases 'n crazes of theory (cyber-theory, postcolonial, queer theory, affect) is dry and often rather tortuous. There also seems to be a common style of taking very particular texts as a starting point- an obscure poem, or a film or a photograph - and using that as a prism from which to zoom out. (As opposed to a macro vision, that sweeps up a lot of evidence to support its sweeping claims). I find this zoom-out-from-something-small approach often feels a tad tenuous; it requires your credence to support itself on something that might just be a rather particular and private obsession. Which is fine for blogs (I do it all the time, obviously - reading massive significance into something minor and obscure) but seems less so for a bound book of scholarly argument.
Strangely though, much as I love all that French stuff still, and if my eye happens to fall on a patch of it I'll slip very easily into being as swayed as ever by it, thinking it Truth... it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power with current popular culture, little in the way of resonance or purchase....
What does? Affect theory, maybe. Although probably in terms of the 'what's hot' stakes in academia, that might possibly already be a bit passe.
Other fave thinkers and theorists:
Harold Bloom, mostly for The Anxiety of Influence - so so useful - but I do like to marinate in his windy locutions about the Western canon.
Susan Sontag, mostly for "Against Interpretation" and "Notes on Camp" and "Fascinating Fascism"
Dick Hebdige, mostly for Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Simon Frith
Norman O. Brown
JG Ballard
Klaus Theweleit
Brian Eno
Nietzsche
Fred Vermorel
Joe Carducci
E.M. Cioran
Oscar Wilde
I suppose I would have to say Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, they had a huge impact on the unformed moi (although as a model for living, or a practical politics - I'm unconvinced, these days. The analysis of boredom and alienation seems perennial up to a point, although the idea that watching TV or films or spectactor sports is necessarily passive and isolated is woefully uninformed - typical snobby outlook that comes from living inside a purely literary culture, there's that disdain for the mass medium and thus an ignorance of the possibilities for sharing that exist in the collective enjoyment of this stuff - all the ways in which we literally make fun together out of this supposedly unilinearly-imposed pablum).
Fredric Jameson (although it's a bit of a slog, a tad arid, as prose - loves a long sentence, loves to use punctuation). (What isn't a slog - and actually is easily my favorite of his things, is the short book on Wyndham Lewis, Fables of Aggression)
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive. Kind of an unhinged book - in a weird way it reminded me of the mindset I'd managed to get into circa Blissed Out, this apocalyptic-nihilistic bliss-as-ego-death mysticism. But reached through a completely different angle: Leo Bersani's radical negativity, opposition to all breeders (aka "reproductive futurism"). (Disappointing to discover that Edelman has been married to a fellow scholar for decades - but then who of us really lives out our principles?)
Talking of apocalyptic-nihilistic I'm afraid I would have to give the nod to N. Land's Bataille-book The Thirst For Annihilation. There's something about the anti-life, anti-human, anti-everything mindspace that has an unleashing effect on the prose.
Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae. One of those books where it's the prose and the force of personality that is utterly swaying in the moment of reading. You get a high off the vehemence.
Recent years:
Berardi's After the Future
A couple of things by Nicolas Bourriaud, e.g. The Radicant
I will say though that an awful lot of the theory and academic stuff I've read over the years - the preponderance of it, honestly - has left no trace whatsoever - no ideas-trace, and no memory-of-pleasure trace either.
So in a way, maybe nowadays I'm "after theory" - I've taken in enough fuel, transmuted and distorted it, that I can now sustain my trajectory, for my remaining years. That has not stopped me, however, from repeat-visiting this site I came across recently and downloading a couple of hundred titles - books that will almost certainly never be read, pdfs that in many cases will never even get opened. So clearly some kind of theory-itch remains, a vestigial limb from those young hungry days.
Overrated
Derrida - I've found little of use to me in there, really. And there's a lot of fannying about and irritating play with words. Spectres of Marx is a disparate collation of meditations on quite far-flung subjects. Each component seem to relate to the other ones only tangentially. It's also extremely short. Now I'm not a believer in length per se - but you definitely get a bit of a "will this do?" whiff from it. Yet equally you also feel it could have been briefer still - vastly more succinct. In terms of actual ideas, it could have been boiled down to a few pages.
Archive Fever - the title is a wonderfully poetic, mind-triggering phrase, but the book (another very slim effort) is actually about something else altogether than what you think (or at least, what I thought it was going to be about). There's stuff about circumcision. And the closing chapter is Jacques having an intellectual tussle with an obscure scholar of Judaism, who's written a book about Freud in which he tries to insinuate that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. Although Jewish himself, Derrida's not having this. Yes, it's that esoteric.
Lyotard - some great phrases ("the desire called Marx") but very hard going indeed. Extracted very little of use for my particular purposes.
Haraway - I suppose the cyborg woman essay is a classic. I tried with the OncoMouse TM one, but had to give up after 8 pages. Same with the one about dogs as companion species. Kinda felt "look, I get it - you're a dog person. But there's no book to write here". (And in fact it's exceedingly short - a monograph). Reminded me a bit of my first girlfriend's dad, who used to talk to his dog when out walking him, confide all his problems and grievances. (Necessarily he was a good listener, this dog). He would pay tribute to his canine companion, say things like "'there's people in this town who aren't fit to lick my dog's bumhole!"
