Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

I am sure you must have wondered what someone else was hearing in something they love but is absolutely mystifying to you. Could that not be down to the fact that the actual activity of searching out and buying the artifact might be satisfying in itself and that the actual music could not help but be enjoyable with that kind of opiated thrill behind it?

Or...could it also be they just like something you don't like? They have different sensibilities borne from leading different lives. Stop trying to explain away other people's tastes because they don't match up with yours. The vast majority of music-listeners aren't feigning passion. They genuinely adore the music they love. This objectivism is objectionable. Every person is a different world.

Hang about, I'm not the one whose proud to be elitist. I've always hated any form of elitism, particularly in the arts.

I don't like the politics of CC because at heart many of its exponents that I have conversed with do not seem to respect any other way of working. They see other ways of working as an act of submission to capitalism and the market. At best.

"Seriously, when I see kids in Iron Maiden shirts, or even worse with Jim Morrison on their chest, I fear for the cultural future of us all."

No, not elitist at all.

Yes both is possible. Of course. All the time and that cuts both ways. People listening to mainstream music aren't faking it either. I am just saying music (even the cool bits) is not immune from consumerist impulses. I've been there and bought the box set(s) that now gather dust. As have most of us here have I would imagine.

... That dizzying euphoria when you want to keep on playing a thing at every opportunity because you love the world you're in while the record is playing- I could never make that up. I've had those affairs with the mainstream and the underground, the new and the old. I don't really think of music as a product of a time and place so much as a transportation to a variety of worlds via the medium of sound, but I'll accept that's probably not an especially common attitude, though not quite rare either. I'm not really qualified to say what drives other people towards music, but I do know that a pose alone can't inspire a person to spend day-in, day-out with a piece of music. Well, unless they're really, really desperate to get noticed.

Holy shit how far back did you go to get that, and why the fuck did you bother ? Oh my word. What are you like dear ? 'meh, meh, you're as bad as me really, meh, meh' You child. I despair of you. Just stay where you are, cast your judgments on the rest of us and all of music and we'll carry on blissfully untouched. Stay happy.

Oh and yes, I think kids jobs is to rebel and create, not listen to their grandads music. Our cultural future is fucked if we're going to get only retreads of the Doors and Iron Maiden. Onwards is bestwards.