Taste Like Honey: Reminiscences from the Αlbum Εra

 

Television Personalities – Part Time Punks

 

Music made consciously unprofessionally for an amateurish audience, that was the deal with the Television Personalities. We were all, both group and fans, ideologically driven over this matter. No one felt like raising any objections though.   

Since we couldn’t easily find to buy their albums we had to settle with the very best of. The indie pop/rock band from London, self-described “Part Time Punks,” enjoyed a strange cult amongst us:

“we few, we frustrated few, we band of indies”.

Retrospectively, I think we must have been fascinated by the idea of being part time punks. With the focus on the “part time;” nothing in the world was cool enough to demand our full commitment. Back then, we felt we had the option of being part time lovers, students, bohemians, employees, art aficionados, friends. So why not even punks?

Personally, I fully endorsed my punkhood in the early hours of yet another fervent Saturday night full of good vibes and unmet, always unfulfilled countless as they were, expectations. As I returned home early in the morning, it must have been around 06:00, I armed myself with strained yoghurt and eggs. I threw the yoghurt at the entrance of the newly founded offices of the ‘Coalition of the Left and Progress’ across the street (reformists! reformists!). As for the wasted 3-egg omelette, it ended up at the windows of a Land Rover Defender that belonged to an army Major living in the neighborhood (fascist! fascist!).

The Television Personalities “Could Have Been Bigger Than the Beatles”. That was the time of irony and emotional safe distance. Currently, we are passing through the phase of melancholy and physical safe distance. In any case, the distance remains.

Television Personalities were embraced by Greek indie-pop rockers and venerated by C86 indies, devotees of bands such as The Pastels and The Wedding Present. Coined as ‘shambling bands’ by John Peel, this particular urban subtribe probably numbered two or three dozens of Athenians and exactly eleven enthusiasts from the rest of the country. Due to their anoraks and their strict eating habits the British C86 indies were once dubbed as ‘anoraksia nervosa’:

“the scene’s asexual, childlike fashion codes created a new bohemia based around purity rather than debauchery (even though, contrary to this puritanical image, these cuties were actually at it like knives)”.

 

So the years went by and their purity became puritanism; and as for the eggs inside my fridge, I fry them with asparagus and coconut oil.

 

 

 

 

 

Taste Like Honey: Reminiscences from the Αlbum Εra

 Jeff Buckley - Grace

 

 

Jeff Buckley died swimming in a river at the age of 30. Tim Buckley, his father, died aged 28 from a heroine and morphine overdose. In both cases, the question, just like any human enquiry that matters, is left unanswered. The world will never know if Jeff felt like defying the Gods and/or the odds and if Tim thought he have had enough already of a life lived in vain. Every sudden and unforeseen death, whether its related to drugs, speeding at more than 130pmh on a highway, or climbing a steep mountain cliff, leaves behind a mystery. No resolution. No final verdict. And so be it.

‘Grace’ is the only studio album Jeff Buckley ever recorded. After his death it became an essential listening for all of those craving for ‘Lilac Wine,’ inspired by the ‘Grace’ of humans, reluctant to say  “The Last Goodbye,” willing to put everything at risk for a night that felt ‘So Real,” for people passionate about "the hallelujah of the orgasm," as Buckley himself ascribed the meaning of Leonard Cohen’s song that he sung wholeheartedly; they call them drama queens…

“but you don’t really care for music, do you?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taste Like Honey: Reminiscences from the Αlbum Εra

 

U2 - Pop

 

‘Pop’ was released in 1997, exactly 10 years after U2 conquered America with the guitar riffs of ‘Joshua Tree’. I received the cd album as a present by an older cousin, my mission was to like it.

Truth be told, U2 were reasonably cool for the first years of my secondary education, not as much for high school. At that time, contrary to Bono, a victim of his personal greed, I had found what I was looking for:

not the mythical America of the open road and of National Parks such as Joshua Tree but the real America, the one pictured in the movies that were filmed at night in New York. Not the desert; the streets of Harlem and the CBGB. Fuck Hollywood, get neighborhood.

As I remember clearly, I was rather puzzled by Pop, meaning the word itself, not the music. The album, characteristically for U2, had a few pretty decent hit songs, the rest were second-rate though.

A question mark hanged over there: why did a rock band chose ‘pop’ for the title of what essentially must have been a typical pop/rock album?

By that time, pop was, for me at least, something fairly specific. It was music broadcasted by MTV that I wasn’t interested anymore. The Backstreet Boys, Madonna and/or even the camp aesthetic of Army of Lovers, that’s what pop was all about. When I thought of pop I thought of electric blue. Or pink.

 

In other words, I could have never have imagined that this three-letter tiny little word would have ended up signifying an ocean of interpretations and meanings,

stirring innumerable futile disambiguation efforts,

provoking never-ending misunderstandings and debates,

generating literally millions of written words seeking to decrypt its meaning and/or reveal its higher purpose;

 

Who could have thought that one day all culture would be pop and that popular culture would be all that we presently have.

 

MOFO

https://youtu.be/nQtITWp3ua4