Over the past month, it would appear that the word “nonchalance” is making a comeback into the vocabularies of the youth. 

It surprised me for two reasons. First, because it’s hard to spell, and the word that was on their lips prior to that was “Rizz”, which I assumed was a contraction of “charisma”, and the reason for the contraction was because most kids do most of their social interaction online, and I assumed “Rizz” was just easier to spell than “charisma”, and also shorter for messaging.

I have to say that, in general, I’ve been disappointed by kids’ slang for some time now. “Rizz”, as I say, just seemed to be to make typing it easier, so barely counted as slang.  The worst example I’m aware of is “glazing” which, for the older readers of this blog/website/whatever it is, means being obsequious. I was disappointed with “glazing” because it’s worse than what my generation, and the generations prior to mine called it, which was “brown nosing”, because “brown nosing” is infinitely better than “glazing”, being more creative and, crucially, a lot funnier than “glazing”, which is relates to glazing, like you glaze pots in pottery, whereas “brown nosing” comes with connotations of getting your nose firmly up someone’s backside as you’re kissing their arses.  I’ve told my classes about my disappointment at their enthusiasm for new crap at the expense of getting rid of something older and better, but that’s life for you.  In fairness, being teenagers, when I told them about brown nosing, they seemed to like that a lot better.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, I was reading some text to a class, and the word “nonchalant” was in it, and a couple of them laughed, and said, “Heh! Nonchalance”.  I asked what they meant, and they told me about how they use it, which appears to be in the traditional sense of the word., although they’re under the impression they invented it.  I showed them how to look up the etymology of a word, and that “Nonchalant” had been doing the rounds for the last two hundred years or so, and they were horrified.  Like Mick Jagger sang in “As Tears Go By”, “Doing things I used to do, they think are new…” The wheel keeps on turning, doesn’t it?  Well, almost. They pronounce it like they’re French, which is fair enough, and I don’t, but that’s what happens when new words are introduced to you via text, isn’t it?  The curse of the autodidact.

 Anyway, so what, right?

 Well, I started thinking about how something like “nonchalance” could possibly be a new concept to people who are in their teens, and then it hit me.

 I say, “it hit me”, which implies that I’ve worked something important out, and currently, it feels that way, but whether it turns into anything or not, I don’t know.  Anyway, here goes. After the history and context anyway…

Part One – Jarvis Cocker & The Britpop Nerd Fightback.

Babies, the Pulp single first came out on October 5th 1992, which would have been a week or two before I went back to York for my final year at university.  I saw the video on 120 minutes, the MTV alternative programme on satellite television, because my parents had Sky, at some point during the long summer holiday, in-between having a great time and a terrible time with Clare, my girlfriend at the time.  Anyway, I bought it straightaway and I I thought it was great.  I liked the b sides as well – especially Sheffield, Sex City.  They were funny, above everything else.  Maybe even a bit arch. Suede had brought out their first two singles by that point, and there was an air of early 70s revivalism in the air.  ABBA Gold had come out exactly two weeks before Babies, and that went down a storm in the mainstream.  ABBA had been uncool through most of the eighties, and ABBA Gold seemed to remind everyone what a fantastic set of records they’d put out.  Disco revival nights had started cropping up all over the country.  

Personally, I put it down to the twenty year cyclical thing that seemed to be the case since I was a kid.  When I was born, 1971, there was a fifties rock ’n’ roll revival.  As John Lennon said, Glam Rock was “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on,” and it pretty much was, although with an early 70s sheen.  That went on right until just after punk, and new wave was, erm, a spindly version of punk that was a bit more intricate.  The early to mid 1980s continued the fascination to an extent, although the electronic technology getting cheaper meant that electro pop was a genuinely new take on pop’s sound really.  The design of the era reflected it – all greys and thin red diagonal lines intersecting bedspreads and wallpaper in harmony with the thin bleeping and gurgling of the synthesisers of the New Romantics.  Even indie was in thrall to the 50s – The Smiths’ quiffs and Levis 501s were all about James Dean and that sort of thing.  Towards the end of the 80s, with the 50s and early 60s having been bled dry, the mid 60s revival picked up speed with Baggy, which was the Indie world’s latest idea – and that was when The Beatles’ records from Rubber Soul onwards started to be talked about in terms of how wonderful they were.  And they were.  And are.

Baggy was a bit one dimensional, what with that drum loop doing most of the heavy lifting, but it was a reaction to the bleak authoritarianism of The Smiths and the holier than thou approach of 80s indie.  The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays arrived and asked people why they weren’t enjoying themselves.  Ecstasy’s arrival might have been that era’s version of acid turning up in 1966 to turn everyone on.  Although, like acid in the sixties, I’d be surprised if all that many people were actually dropping Es at the weekend.  I certainly wasn’t.  Not for lack of trying on my part either.  There was a bit of pot about, but that was more or less it.  Ecstasy returned in the early 2000s, and it was much more widespread then.

Anyway, late 92, and the 70s revival was beginning to show itself.  I put it down to The Stone Roses’ popularising flared trousers again.  Wearing flares in a world of straight trousers was a surprisingly radical act in the late 80s, early 90s.  People were horrified. I enjoyed it.  But with flares came listening to funk of the late sixties as well as the Beatles, and naturally things like Glam Rock, which was uncool, even though The Smiths had started to look like they might be going down that road with Sheila Take A Bow and a fair bit of Strangeways Here We Come.

Suede were lauded from the weekly music papers as soon as rumblings of The Drowners were heard. Pulp, either because of the zeitgeist, or perhaps more cynically, although I doubt that a bit, were very much early 70s too.  

Perhaps it was because of second hand shops.

At that time, second hand shops were full of clothes, books and records from the early-mid 1970s.  I used to go in a lot, because I didn’t have any money and everything was cheap.  Pay £5 for a new edition of a novel from 1971, or buy one of millions from Dove House’s charity shop for 10p, with a groovier front cover?  Why wouldn’t you?  The same went for clothes.  All of my trousers were second hand at that point.  I bought new t shirts and socks and underwear, but trousers came from the late 60s and early 70s.  Most of my records are second hand too.  Because they were cheap and available.  The reissue market wasn’t really a thing.

Nowadays, charity shops mainly have things from the early 2000s in them, don’t they?  The older stuff isn’t “second hand” anymore because it’s “vintage”, which means you pay through the nose for it now, whereas it was dirt cheap back in the early 90s.

Anyway, whatever the reason for the 70s revival in late 1992, Pulp’s Babies didn’t set the wider world on fire, but it was by far the best thing they’d ever done, and I kept my eye on them and I was pleased for them when they took off two or three years later.

Jarvis Cocker was, in a way, like Morrissey, version 2.0.  Still parochial, still awkward, still funny and clever (relatively speaking), but the humour wasn’t so bleak – it was a bit, but not like Morrissey’s gallows humour.  The difference was that Jarvis was ironic.  He was taking the piss, and Morrissey didn’t ever take the piss.  He’d puff up his chest and wearily dismiss whatever it was with pithy, sub-Wildean bon mots, with his nose in the air.  Jarvis Cocker didn’t do that.  He didn’t seem literary.  He didn’t really push the intelligence angle, except in their worst record – Mis-shapes, which really is dreadful.  Jarvis offered a detached eye, an outsider’s eye, on the world and that outsider masked his bitterness most of the time with self-deprecating humour.  Babies is an embarrassing, kitchen sink drama about watching someone else getting what you want, until the end, which always sounded a bit unlikely to me.  Jarvis was hiding in the wardrobe watching two people having sex, and then he got caught and was asked to have sex with the sister until they got caught by his friend who he really fancied?  It’s funnier like that, but the impression I got was that it was probably a true-ish story up to the point of him being asked to have it off with the sister, at which point, I thought, yeah, alright then.  I mean it was probably entirely made up, wasn’t it?  Anyway.

The point is that Jarvis Cocker, in particular, wasn’t your typical front man.  I don’t mean he was the very first geeky, bespectacled frontman to do well – take Morrissey – but he Morrissey wasn’t ever “cool”, or even if he was sort of cool in that studenty way, he was never nonchalant. And neither was Jarvis.  

By 1994, Britpop was happening.  I’ve written about this before, but what that was wasn’t just about music.  The music was pretty much the soundtrack to everything else.

People often write about the death of nuance in the modern world – I say “people”, meaning “me” – and I think it’s probably almost always been the case because most people just aren’t capable or interested enough in the subtle but important differences between things – but I think the problem with Britpop – among the problems with Britpop – is that Britpop means both the era and the guitar bands that would have been Indie bands five years earlier, except Indie entered the mainstream and were called Britpop bands.  The problem, if it is a problem, was that The Spice Girls were pretty much Britpop, and Trainspotting was Britpop, and Tony Blair was Britpop.  Everything was Britpop, because that was the era as well.

So, in addition to people being sniffy about Britpop on account of Embrace were embarrassing – which people should have noticed at the time, frankly – they’re also snotty about it because it was all about optimism and summer, and nothing dates like that.

But, as everything was cool, providing it was Britpop, which meant more or less everything British was cool, except Robson and Jerome, and they were still massive, doing their anodyne covers of the Righteous Brothers and other MOR sixties hits, giving Simon Cowell his first big success, and he wasn’t cool either.

But apart from that, Britpop meant that not only were the barriers between Independent music and the mainstream were broken down, what else came with it was the idea that even if you were geeky or dweeby or nerdy, you could still be cool because you were Britpop, and that was what cool was. It was, in a manner of speaking, anti-fashion becoming fashionable and deciding that it liked being fashionable, but still wanting to be anti-fashion, which was allowed because Robson and Jerome were unfashionable, and that made it alright.  Or something.  I don’t fucking know.  It was a fine line.  Or something.  Having your cake and eating it too. Or something.

The point is that Britpop meant a broadening of what counted as cool, and what that meant was that everybody and everything – within reason – was cool.

And when it became apparent that the optimism of 1994-6-ish wasn’t entirely justified – death of Diana, New Labour not really turning out to be that different from what came before (with some caveats, there were some improvements, in fairness), Britpop collapsing under its own bloated sense of self importance as a result of cocaine and mainstream success brought on by Oasis becoming the new kings of the revitalised Power Ballad following Wonderwall’s dominance of everything.  Following that with Don’t Look Back In Anger, and then the ubiquity of Stop Crying Your Heart Out and whatever else followed, the record companies fell over themselves to bring out bands who sounded like that, which meant Embrace, The Verve’s entry to chart success with their power ballads, and Travis making Radiohead more palatable by aping their power ballads that were the ones that were really big hits – Fake Plastic Trees, things like that.

I mean, Britpop started out as fast, short, happy optimistic records about having a good time – Alright by Supergrass, Girls & Boys by Blur, Roll With It by Oasis, Disco Down by Shed Seven, Girl From Mars by Ash, Trash by Suede, and all that – until it just turned into Power Ballad central – The Drugs Don’t Work by The Verve, Wonderwall, The Universal by Blur, All You Good, Good People by Embrace, Why Does It Always Rain On Me by Travis – that’s what happened. 

And that was it, really.

And then the internet happened, and then mobile phones happened, and then everything changed forever because all the people whose interests were all a bit niche could find each other on the internet and feel a bit better about themselves because they weren’t alone, and what that meant was that culture fractured, and something like Britpop couldn’t happen again because Britpop was about everybody and everything being cool, until it was mainly about men crying in groups.  Which was sort of important in a way as well, although, like everything else that ever happens, there was a downside that people didn’t anticipate.  You know, men have always been open to the criticism of not being in touch with their feelings, and the second, power ballad, half of Britpop was all about that in a way, even though what it actually meant was pissed up, coked up groups of lads crying about football with their arms around each other, shouting Oasis ballads.

Diversion – The Internet and The Amplification of Niche Voices.

I was brought up with the attitude that there’s a downside to everything.  Not explicitly, but near enough.  What that means is an expectation that with the benefits, come the downsides, and that’s where Cost-Benefit Analysis comes in.  I spend half my life telling kids that they ought to try doing that – think before you do anything: what will it cost, and will the benefits outweigh the costs, and if not, don’t do it.  I do that because most kids just blurt out whatever pops into their heads because they’ve been told that they’re wonderful and confidence is the most important thing in the world which is great until reality bites.

Anyway, the internet is exactly the same as everything else – there are upsides and downsides.

With about 30 years experience of it, I’d suggest that the main upside is the possibility of finding a niche tribe of like minded people who make you feel less alone in an uncaring universe.  

The main downside, apart from towns dying on their arses because you can get everything you want delivered the next day from Amazon for cheaper than they could manage on the high street – oh, and second hand shops dying because of EBay – is the possibility of finding like minded individuals who make you feel less alone in an uncaring universe.

What that means is the people whose voices wouldn’t have been heard no longer bumble along in their own world, quietly getting on with their lonely pursuit of whatever it is that the mainstream isn’t very interested in, because they find everyone in the world who’s into whatever it is, and they encourage each other.

Which doesn’t sound all that bad, until you realise what it actually means.

What it actually means is this, if you’ll bear with me.

If your toilet could do with a fresh lick of paint, and there’s a hole in your roof, the painting of the toilet can wait, can’t it? You’ve got more important things to worry about, so you deal with those first.  Right?

Okay, bear that in mind.

Now, if we’re looking at something like politics, exactly the same logic applies. You need to deal with the biggest, most pressing issues before you can start, metaphorically, painting the toilet.

What the internet has done is this…

Let’s say we’ve got Group A and Group B.  Group A says, say, Trans rights are important, and Group B says, no Trans Rights are stupid.

The supporters of each group then pipe up on the internet, expressing their individual thoughts. Someone from Group A will say something like, “Trans people shouldn’t get beaten to death”.  And someone from Group B will say something like, “You shouldn’t let Transwomen fight biological women in boxing.” 

To me, both of those things sound fairly reasonable.

But then what happens is that someone on the internet who’s in favour of Group A will say something fairly brainless like “Biological women who don’t want to have sex with a Transwoman who has a willy is a fascist.” And then everyone from Group B points at them and says, “Everyone from Group A thinks like that, they’re all fucking maniacs.”

And then someone from Group B says something like, “We should make all Transpeople wear a pink hat, like the Nazis did with the gays.” And everyone in Group A says, “Everyone from Group B thinks like that, they’re all fucking maniacs”.

And, returning to the leaking roof/toilet in need of painting metaphor, everybody deals with the most pressing issue and ignores the less pressing issues, meaning, everybody spends their entire lives dealing with stupid crap that’s been amplified by the internet.

What’s the answer?  I don’t know, just for a change.  I don’t even know if that’s the entire problem.  I suspect that’s more a symptom than a result.  Meaning, the problem is, as it always is, fucking idiots who can’t comprehend subtlety and nuance.

Is the internet good?  Yes.  And no.  It’s here now.  The cat’s out of the bag, and it’s not going to go back in it, but on the whole, I’m not entirely convinced it’s been very helpful.

End of Diversion.

But after that? The major players limped on for a bit before collapsing and moving on, until they reformed 20 years later, and the cycle continues in a way.

Anyway, the point is, the likes of former social outcasts such as Jarvis Cocker, Brett Anderson, Thom Yorke, and Graham Coxon being accepted as cool was probably the most lasting change that occurred as a result of Britpop’s ubiquity.

And, I would suggest, that has been the most lasting impact of Britpop – the redefinition of what constitutes cool.  From, basically, nonchalance, to whatever you say it is.  Which, in itself, had a much bigger impact on the world – not least self-identification, which isn’t going very well, I’d say.  From self-identifying as a woman or man, to self-identifying mental disorders.  You can’t have people self-identifying.  Well, you can, but you can’t have it that everybody else has to agree with whatever you say, because that’s fucking stupid.

Part 2 – Generation X Self Identifying As The World’s Cool Kids

When I was about 20, my friend Dave told me that every generation views the one that follows theirs as being the worst generation, and that stuck with me.  I think it’s quite wise, and Dave was wise, quite a lot.  He probably still is.

Recently, what with the Twitters and all that, I regularly see people from Generation X telling everybody how great they were because they didn’t have the internet or mobiles phones, and we woke up in the morning and went out and drank from hosepipes and did stupid things, and nobody knew where we were, and we were, basically, feral.  And a lot of that’s fairly true, for a lot of us.

However, I’m not big on saying “This generation’s this, and that generation’s that”, because it’s more complicated – nuanced – than that.  Everything’s coming back to that, isn’t it?  I work out what I think as I’m doing this sort of thing.  I haven’t made my mind up or anything.  This is me dumping my brain to make room.

Anyway, what I mean is, I’m Generation X, pretty much slap bang in the middle of it, and I can tell you without fear of changing my mind, that some people in Gen X are great, some of them are colossal dickheads, and most of them are somewhere in-between.  Just like white people.  And Black people, and all races.  And both sexes.  Stereotyping is simultaneously inevitable and unhelpful.  We do it because everything’s so complicated, and wee want to understand, but we need to simplify it to understand it, but in doing so, we lose the nuance, which means we don’t understand it as it actually is at all.

Diversion – How Not Everybody In Generation X Quite Grasped The Concept.

My favourite Gen Xer who was complaining about the youth of today was – and I can’t find it, but it happened – a bloke on Twitter had made a video complaining about how Gen X just got on with it and didn’t make a big fuss about everything, unlike modern kids who make stupid videos complaining about everything and upload it to social media. Despite being from the generation who brought the concept of irony more deeply into their hearts than any before or since, that chap hadn’t quite understood the concept of irony as much as he might have believed, or he probably wouldn’t have made a video of him complaining about the youth of today making videos of them complaining and uploading them onto social media, and uploaded it to social media.  Like I say, every generation has its idiots, and most of them think they’re geniuses.  Dunning Kruger – there’s something that’ll never go out of fashion.

End of Diversion.

However, cool, as a concept, for Gen X kids meant, more or less, “nonchalance”, the same as it had meant that since the late 1950s, when cool first became a pop cultural thing.

Following the internet, “cool” didn’t mean “nonchalant” anymore because after Britpop, “cool” was anything you wanted it to be.  Including geeks, nerds, dweebs, and the rest of it.

And, at that point, I more or less checked out because I was too old to worry about being cool or anything like that, and I just got on with doing whatever I wanted and didn’t worry about whether those things were cool or not.  Walking in the countryside, birdwatching, writing songs, reading books, watching old films, painting – whatever I fancied when I wasn’t having to go to work.  Sometimes, people would say, “Oh, Middlerabbit’s cool because he went to the Yorkshire Dales and saw a pair of Oystercatchers and he knows what they are, and what it means.” And I thought, “Pffft.  Alright. Whatever,” because I didn’t care about being cool anymore because, to me, being cool meant not knowing about birds and enjoying solitude in a bucolic environment because it was about being nonchalant, even though I wouldn’t have put it in those terms.

And then, this weekend, I thought I’d watch Glastonbury on telly, because I always used to watch it on Channel 4 in the 90s, and I liked it because it was largely Britpop, even though that was everything anyway.  Radiohead were Britpop, because that’s their era.  It doesn’t mean that they were singing about Spangles or Bri-nylon shirts, it just means that was what else was going on while they were going on about whatever it was they were going on about.

The first, relatively important, thing I ought to say about that is that I’m totally out of touch.  I don’t listen to the radio, I rarely hear any new music at all.  Little bits and pieces here and there, but mainly I don’t.  So I don’t really know what it sounds like.  My daughter’s a lot more in touch than I am.  She’s 20, and currently at Glastonbury with her long-suffering boyfriend, whose parents do something there, so she got free tickets to stay in the bits where performers are staying.  Her boyfriend’s parents do something there, I don’t know what.  I say “boyfriend”, she dumped him last Monday, and he still took her.  She’s brutal. I say she gets it from her mother.  Sort of…

Anyway, I thought, I’ll have a look.  As it turns out, there are quite a lot of Britpop bands on anyway – the aforementioned Pulp, but also Ash, Shed Seven and Supergrass, at least.  Maybe others, I don’t know.  I’ve had a look at those, and I thought Pulp were pretty much the same as they always were, I didn’t see much of Ash, so I can’t comment, Supergrass sounded weary and past it, and Shed Seven were competent and nunty.

What I really want to see though, are what da kidz are digging, at least for a bit.  Not just so I can slag them off and go on Twitter and complain that kids today don’t know what proper music is because they didn’t drink out of hosepipes or something, no.  There might be a bit of that, but I want to see what it is that headlines Glastonbury.

Having said that, social media seems fairly split about Glastonbury, with Group A saying how wonderful it is, and the occasional maniac piping up about Palestine, and Group B fucking hates it and everything it stands for, and has pointed out how everybody at Glastonbury wants all the Jewish people in the world dead because someone had a bench with “Free Palestine” painted on it.  You know, like I said happens.  About everything.

Diversion – Palestine and Israel, and How Everybody’s Wrong About Everything Except Me*.

Ooh!  Eh?

I’ll tell you what I think about Israel and Palestine.  I think that what we have there is what happens when you let the outlying maniacs on the internet coming out with their maniacal take on the issues of the day be in charge.  Which is to say, it’s fucking pandemonium.

Whose side am I on?  Neither.  I think both sides are run by fucking lunatics.

It comes down to the same thing as it always has for me – anyone who wants to be in charge should automatically be banned from being in charge, because what kind of fucking maniac wants that?  Have there ever been any good leaders?  I’m not convinced, frankly.

But what’s the answer to that, then? Who’s going to be in charge?  Like Churchill said – another indifferent leader – Democracy is the worst from of government, except for all the others.

Nobody’s addressing that really, though.  I do have the answer, unusually.  The problem is living in groups.  People can’t handle it, and it leads to sterotyping, which makes everything wrong and worse.  In short, we’re a species who think we’re social, but we’re not really.  We’re kidding ourselves.  We don’t really like other people.  We pretend that our friends are alright, but really, they annoy us as much as everyone else does, except we get to see their better sides sometimes, whereas we don’t with the people we don’t like.  Although, you’d probably find something to like about your mortal enemy if you gave them chance, wouldn’t you?  

It makes no odds.  We’re in massive groups and we fucking hate it.  What happens when people get rich?  They get big houses in the middle of nowhere so they can avoid everyone else.

There you go – I’ve got the answers, but nobody wants to hear them, and I don’t blame them. 

*nb: satire.

End of Diversion.

Anyway, so I had a look at the 1975, because they were headlining, and therefore must be a big thing.

Diversion – Glastonbury Over The Years

I ought to say at this point, I’ve never been to Glastonbury, and have never had any urge to.  When I was old enough to go if I felt like it, it all just seemed a bit of a Hippy thing, and I’m not a hippy, even though I like a lot of the gentle hippy music of the late sixties.  I don’t like camping, and even if it wasn’t hippified, it’d have been Crusty, and that’s even worse than hippy.

Crusty, as a thing, was an early 90s thing.  My understanding of it is extremely limited because I didn’t know any Crusties anyway. Crusties meant The Levellers, and southern public school boys called Jeremy who were slumming it and putting off going into Daddy’s business by being new age travellers, not having baths, putting their hair in dreadlocks and shouting, “There’s only one way of life, and that’s your own” in a field with thousands of other people who were doing exactly the same thing.  See?  Generation X – no fucking idea about irony, despite never talking about anything but.  It’s like banter, about which I currently can’t decide whether I hate the people in favour of it more than the people who are against it or not.  There’s a sign up at school that says, “It’s never banter”, and I don’t like that because sometimes it is banter, isn’t it?  Again, it’s the death of nuance and the acceptance of stupid ideas as being just as valid as everything else.  Things are complicated.  Try harder.  And if you’re trying your best, and that’s the best you can do, don’t fucking bother. 

Anyway, that was in the 80s and 90s, and I didn’t want to go then, and I didn’t want to go at any point in-between then either, so I’m probably not the ideal audience.  I don’t get freaked out in crowds, I just can’t be arsed, really.

I have been to a festival.  Once.  My Middlerabbit made me go to a V festival in the early 2000s, and I can’t remember all that much about it.  Apparently I’ve seen all manner of bands who were playing, but I can’t remember them.  Apparently I’ve seen Coldplay – this would be about when their first album came out – no recollection at all.  Kylie Minogue too.  Again, no recollection.  And I’ll tell you why.

Diversion Diversion – How I Stopped The Man Socking It To Me In A Field In Staffordshire.

I used to tell a version of this story to kids at school as a lesson in how to get what you want, but I haven’t for years.  Anyway…

We – Mrs Middlerabbit, our friend Trevor (not his real name) and I – drove down to Staffordshire for this V Festival from Hull.  To get through the weekend, I’d bought some speed and quite a lot of pot – dooberage – which I’d just shoved into my bag and then in the car boot with everything else – tents, bags and what have you.

We got to the site and were queueing – in the car – to get in. I’d never been to a festival before so had no idea of any of the protocols. We got to the front of the queue where a policeman directed me to head in that direction, away from the carpark. Eh? I did as I was told and was stopped at some cones by another copper, who told us to wait.

About thirty yards in front of us was the back of an articulated lorry with a ramp leading up to the back of it.  The lorry back was open at both ends and, parked in the middle of it was a Volkswagen Camper Van, with Police  who were engaged in searching it from top to bottom, with dogs and mirrors on sticks and all that.

My heart sank. I was fucked.  They were looking for drugs, and I had a car with tonnes of them in a bag in the boot. I didn’t tell the kids that bit. It was before I was teaching, so I let myself off a bit for that.  It’s not like I’m like that now.  Young and daft.  Lessons learned, etc.

Anyway, the copper motioned for me to wind my window down, and I did.

He said, “Hello sir, we’re randomly searching vehicles for illegal substances.  If you have any, you can tell me now, hand them over and you can go home.  But if we find any and you’ve not told us, we will prosecute.” He said something like that, I can’t remember exactly, but that, basically.

I looked to the future Mrs Middlerabbit and she looked terrified and shook her head.  I thought, fuck it, and said, “No, we don’t have anything like that.  Do you mean drugs?” Trying to look innocent.

He said alright, and we should just wait there.  I left the window open.

What happened next saved us, basically.  There were a group of crusties from the camper van who were hurling abuse at the police – “You fucking pigs, man”, “Hey why don’t you go and solve some genuine crimes, instead of hassling innocent people, man?”. Things like that.  They were going on at the police.

The net result of that, was that the coppers brought the toolbox out, and started dismantling their camper van, to further, louder protests and abuse from the crusties.

The copper who’d asked me to confess was standing by us, presumably to make sure we didn’t start hiding big bags of heroin somewhere, so I thought – right, now’s the time to try it on a bit.

Anyway, I said to him, as casually as I could muster, “It’s a shame you get all this, isn’t it?  It’s a nice day, people are going to have a nice time at a festival, and you probably have to do this sort of thing so they can get the license to hold the festival in the first place, don’t you? I can’t be nice, having to put up with all that.”

And he agreed with me.  We had a nice little chat about how V Festival wouldn’t even be able to be held without having some police presence – for everyone’s safety, that’s right, officer – and how everyone was safer as a result, and all that.

After a couple of minutes, he said to me, “Would you mind getting out of the car, sir?”

And I thought, I’ve either blown it, or we’re on here.

He said, “Would you mind taking your shoes off, sir?”

I was driving in a pair of ancient deck shoes, which had a hole in the sole of one of them.  They were comfy for driving in though.  I did have others.  I took them off, and poked my finger through the hole in the sole, and commented, beaming, “I wouldn’t have much joy smuggling contraband in these, would I officer?” And he laughed.

Then he started moving the cones leading us to the lorry out of the way, saying, “Don’t worry about it, you can go and get set up.”

Always one to push it a bit, I said, “I don’t want you getting in trouble, officer, we’re quite happy to wait.”

“No, you’re alright, you have a lovely weekend, and he waved us off.”

And off I drove, towards the carpark, with our enormous bag of illegal drugs poking out the top of my bag in the boot.

The reason I used to tell kids that was to illustrate that it wasn’t worth shouting abuse at people in positions of authority, because they would just do things to piss you off even further, because they could.  Like the crusties from the soon to be dismantled camper van found out.

You’re better off being smart about it.  That was, basically, why I told them that story. It didn’t make much difference.

I must have been on fire that weekend, because you weren’t allowed to take booze into the bit with the bands on because you had to buy Virgin drinks.  My to be wife had diluted about half a litre of vodka in a two litre bottle of Virgin Cola and was stopped by security, trying to get it.  

“That’s got Vodka in it,” they told her.

I looked confused, asked for a sniff, and said, “There’s no vodka in that!”

The security gave it another sniff, shrugged, and said, “Alright then, in you go” and gave her it back.

Jedi mind trick, innit?  These are not the droids you’re looking for.  It’s surprising what you can get away with.  Nobody knows anything, do they?  Thank you William Goldman.  I tell you what though – it doesn’t half help when there are other people who are bigger dickheads than you are around you.  Like I said, there’s a downside to everything.

End of Diversion Diversion.

Anyway, I was off my tits the entire weekend.  I was convinced the whole place was on a slope, but I guess that was mainly because I was shitfaced, which probably helped.  It rained the entire time, which didn’t help, but you can’t have everything, can you?

On balance, I preferred watching it on telly, at home, away from the dickheads, the crusties and the coppers, so I’ve never been to another one since. 

Camping, isn’t it?  I don’t love it.  I like the countryside, but I don’t like shitting in fields if I can help it.

So, I used to quite enjoy watching the Festivals on telly when I knew about the bands and what was happening because I was an Indie kid, and Festivals were largely Alternative things for Alternative bands.

With Britpop, things changed though.  Because Britpop was the mainstream, it meant that Glastonbury had mainstream bands on – Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, and all the second and third division bands too.  But also Robbie Williams…

When Oasis played Glastonbury in 1995, Robbie Williams had left Take That – boyband and mainstream – and was dipping his toe into the world of alternative music, sort of.

In 1995, Robbie Williams, in the eyes of the Indie kids, was basically a joke. The Fat Dancer From Take That.  Zero credibility in the Indie world.

Three years later though, in 1998, he played Glastonbury with his band and, let’s not beat about the bush here, his band was fucking shit hot at that point, and he triumphed.  Went down a storm, as well he might have.

What Robbie Williams was doing, was meeting the Indie/Alternative crowd on their terms: live band, no miming, no backing dancers, loud guitars.

And that, I would suggest, opened the floodgates for pop performers to reconsider.

Since then, there have been a lot of mainstream pop stars playing at Glastonbury, and some of them do it like Robbie Williams did – playing the game – and some of them don’t.  There’s pop stars miming their vocals to backing tapes – Charlie XCX, backing dancers – tonnes of them, and no guitars at all.

Which means, basically, Glastonbury’s sort of an Alternative Festival, but also isn’t really.  Another thing that’s Britpop’s fault, I suppose.

What that means is that, I’ve said repeatedly on here, following Britpop, Indie Music ceased to exist because it was just another part of the mainstream, until the mainstream decided to revise the 1970s for itself, and decided that Opportunity Knocks was the best thing about that decade, and so we’ve had 25 years of The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, and all that middle of the road shit that Simon Cowell understands because, at heart, he’s a moron who understands that all the rest of the morons are just looking for some other moron to tell them what to buy.

End of Diversion

Which brings me to the 1975.

I don’t know anything about the 1975, except the singer’s called Matt Healy, and he’s the son of Dennis out of Auf Weidersehn, Pet, and Denise Healy, who was on Coronation Street before she started having controversial opinions for money on Loose Women – an ITV lunchtime slot for dullards to take themselves seriously on.

The first thing I though about the 1975 was that they should be called the 1983, because everything they played sounded like middle of the road pop music from 1983.  If they wrote Midnight Shadow and put it out, their fanbase would fucking cream themselves. One sounded like Curiosity Killed The Cat, another sounded like Cutting Crew.  Just slick, over polished 80s pop music.  If you’re young and incensed at reading this, I’d find Now That’s What I Call Music 4 on Spotify and thank me later, because you’ll lap all that shit right up.

They’re a tight band.  Slick.  Slicker than owlshit, as Stephen King said.  Not about the 1975, but as a metaphor in general.

And that’s part of the problem for me.  I don’t like bands that are too slick.  I’ve talked about “Tight but loose” before, and that’s the dream, and it’s hard to get that, and the 1975 are, very much, not that.

As a singer, he was sort of alright for that sort of thing.  As a frontman, I thought he trying far too hard.  I gather he thinks he’s hot shit to a degree, although he might have been having a go at that elusive irony from the 90s when he said how great he was. I don’t know.  Or care that much.  Whatever.

There was a bit when he sat down with a cigarette and a pint of Guinness, and a lot of people had a lot to say about that.  From how terrible an example it was, to how super cool it was, basically.

What it showed me was how little you need to do to be edgy these days, and I put that down to Group A and Group B’s desperate need for authoritarian control about whatever it is that they think ought to be clamped down on.

But, basically, it’s not for me.  It’s not aimed at me, is it?  I’m a 54 year old middle class man, I’m not going to get it, am I?  And I don’t, really.  Nobody ought to be surprised at that.

Then I saw The Script, and they made me nostalgic for the 1975.  Bono, for example, was never cool. Or Britpop. He tried being ironic for a bit, but he didn’t really get it either, so went back to what he’s more comfortable, which is sanctimonious bombast.

Anyway, The Script?  Jesus Christ.  I don’t know how the singer is, but he looks like an extra on an episode of Bergerac, playing the part of a second hand (vintage?) car salesman, who’s about to get sacked from the role because he’s overdoing it.  I expect Bono’s his idol, and he probably thinks the same thing that I think, which is, he’s not as good as Bono.  The difference being, I really can’t be doing with him, and never have.

I saw a bit of Charlie XCX, who I don’t know anything about either, except the Brat Summer thing, and she didn’t have backing dancers, but she probably should have.  She was playing to a backing track, which I don’t think really works live – and the same thing goes for Ian Brown – and equally obviously wasn’t actually singing everything, and had the backing tape cover up gaps.

A lot of the bands I’ve seen this weekend have been pretty much the same – everything sounds really slick and early 1980s.  The tunes are okay up to a point, but they all go a bit X Factor by the chorus.  I don’t know how to put that any better.  I mean it’s a bit Saturday Teatime Television.  A bit shit.

Alanis Morrissette? I didn’t know anyone who was into her at the time. She was dismissed by everyone I knew as being corporate America’s idea of Alt rock, and nobody took her seriously.  Still, there are plenty of Glastonbury kids who seemed to dig it.

I’ve just seen CMAT, and I think they might be the perfect example of what I’m getting at on the whole.

Again, never heard of them, don’t know anything about them. Having watched them on telly, I thought two things about them, and I’m not entirely sure how to process either of them.

1. Periodically on Twitter, you get people putting a video of Taylor Swift dancing onstage, and people say how terrible she is at dancing.  Personally, I don’t mind that. I don’t care about Taylor Swift really.  She seems alright.  I quite like her inept dancing because she looks like she’s having a nice time and sort of taking the piss out of her crappy dancing because she doesn’t care, and I like that.  Like I liked Bananarama being a touch amateur.  I sort of prefer amateurism in the arts, if the choice is that or slickness.
2. The singer out of CMAT was pretty much the same sort of thing, except Taylor Swift’s fairly slim, and she’s pretty fat.  She was doing her crappy dancing, and digging it, and I don’t mind that, but she seemed to be singing about being sexy, and how the internet has meant that there are standards that are impossible to achieve for most people, and I’m with her on that, although I also think that there have always been unusually sexy looking people around, and it’s the Group A and group B thing all over again, isn’t it? Mainly though, it was shit. As I say, I can sort of get behind the idea of it a bit, but it seemed to also typify the 21st Century Ideal – as bequeathed by Britpop – that everyone’s cool.

End of Diversion.

In short, Glastonbury – as I understood it, and I might have grasped the wrong end of the stick again – was a festival of Alternativeness, and now it’s not. And has been since 1998 and Robbie Williams’ reclaiming of it for the ordinary people, I suppose.

Which is alright – I never wanted to go anyway.  It doesn’t bother me particularly.  But I did think, if these bands had been around in 1983, where most of their hearts seem to be, then there would be absolutely no chance that they would play Glastonbury.  The bands playing at Glastonbury would be kicking directly against the bands who played music like that.

Funny business, isn’t it?

Still, good old fashioned 1990s nonchalance, eh?  Matty Healy out of the 1975 seems to be flirting with the concept.  CMAT are flirting with nineties irony, plenty of Britpop bands are playing, and the 21st Century Bono is as pompous a dullard as the last one.

But here’s the thing: if nonchalance is coming back, my problem is that I wasn’t really paying attention when it was sent home in disgrace.

I’ve said I don’t really have any truck with stereotypical interpretations of complicated groups of people – which is pretty much all groups of people – I will say that you might be able to generalise a little bit, and the way I’d generalise the current youth – from little kids to people in their late 20s – is as the least nonchalant generation in history.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily their fault, because I don’t think it is, but what I’ve seen recently is a bit of a change in their attitude to an extent.

Diversion – Citizenship/PSE/PSHE/Community Studies

I’ve been a secondary school teacher for a long time, and I’ve taught all the above subjects, which are all the same thing.  They’re all about not smoking, and being responsible citizens and all that.  I don’t mind doing it, it’s alright.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, I was teaching one of those classes to my form, and it was about LGBTQI++, or whatever it is today, or then, rather.  This class were a nice bunch, and they had opinions on absolutely everything, and that makes teaching those lessons a lot easier.

I say they had opinions on everything, and they did, except on LGBTQI++, and they were resolutely stony faced.  All of them.  I asked what was going on – they had opinions on everything, and now, when it comes to LGBTQI++, nothing? Eventually, one girl put her hand up and told me that they got into trouble if they voiced any opinion outside of those officially sanctioned, and that didn’t happen with anything else, so they just kept their mouths shut.

Like I said, Group A vs Group B – they’re both enormously authoritarian – and they’re a bit scared of being taken away for reeducation.  And that does happen.  I had a trans person in a class, one kid made a rude comment about them, and they missed the next two days because they had to be educated about hate crimes.  Maybe that’s fair enough.  Be nice to people, that’s what I say.  But not being allowed to offer a different opinion? I’m not into that.  You don’t stop people thinking what they’re thinking by shutting them up, you entrench their opinions and a sense of persecution to go with it.  It doesn’t work. You’re better off having horrible people feeling free to spout their bullshit, because it’s easier to avoid them if they’re doing that.

I don’t like the idea of any authoritarian group deciding what can and can’t be said.  That’s the bottom line, because then you’re going to have to explain how and why you’re different to Stalin, Hitler, Kim Jong Un, Pol Pot, and the rest of the fucking lunatics who’ve made their names doing stupid shit like that, and when you have to explain that, you’ve had it.  I’m an idiot, but I don’t find myself having to explain subtle differences between the things I want and fascist dictators because I don’t think authoritarianism is a very good idea.

Anyway, last week, with my current form, who are a lot younger, the same thing happened.  It’s Pride Month, so I was delivering the lesson on that, and it was exactly the same.  Nobody had anything to say, and they’re full of their opinions.

Again, I asked what the problem was – this lot are 12-13, so they didn’t say about not being allowed to voice alternative opinions – one girl – a nice girl – put her hand up and said, “I think people just need to get on with it really.” And I thought, fucking hell, finally.

End of Diversion

But the kidz have been raised with the basic ideal make a big deal out of absolutely fucking everything for their entire lives, haven’t they?  The central tenement of their existence has been to avoid nonchalance to such an extent that they’ve never even heard of it, let alone made any attempt at being it.

I’m not even saying nonchalance is great.  Like everything else, it’s got a downside.  Generation X are probably the most nonchalant generation in history because of being raised in a world in which imminent nuclear destruction was a permanent threat.  World in which you were going to die of AIDS if you had sex with anyone.  That’s what faced Generation X every day.  And, apart from wearing a condom when you had sex, you couldn’t do anything about it, so why bother worrying? As long as there was a hosepipe around in the middle of summer, you’d be more or less alright.

I’m being facetious about the hosepipe thing, but that’s because it’s only a symbol.  What it symbolises is what’s forgotten, and what that is is self-reliance and stoicism. Neither of which figure very highly in the early 21st century either.

If you’re self-reliant, you’re probably going to be nonchalant about it.  You’re not going to run home and tell your parents about it because if you could do that, you’d drink out of the kitchen tap instead of slurping out of a hosepipe in someone’s garden.

If my childhood had one central theme, it was – don’t make a fuss.  Don’t be a bloody nuisance.  Sit down, shut up, do something to entertain yourself because you might as well get used to it because nobody’s going to entertain you when you’re older.  Fucking get on with it, as the nice girl in my form said.

I think the younger generation are at a bit of a turning point, and it’s taken long enough, frankly.

I remember the first kid who told me that he couldn’t help his behaviour – it was years ago – and I laughed at him.  Since then, that idea’s grown in popularity.

I had a kid two years ago who was in tears, obviously upset about something. I told him to go outside and blow his nose, and then went to see what the problem was.  He said this, through sobs, “I just don’t think I can be my true self.”

I asked him who or what his true self was, and he didn’t give me much in the way of specifics.  I said this to him, more or less: when I’m teaching year 7, I’m a bit different to when I teach year 11.  When I talk to my mates, I’m different again, when I talk to my parents, I’m different again.  If I talk to a policeman, I’m different again.  Which one of those is my true self?  Because I don’t know.  They’re all aspects of me because, like everybody else, I’m not just one thing.

I don’t know if it helped, but he calmed down.

And that’s to do with Group A and Group B, isn’t it?  Which side are you on?  Pick one?  Binary choice.  And we’re not like that, as people, are we?  We’re more complicated than that.

Diversion – Another Reason Why The Internet Ruined Everything

Social media has meant that a lot of people like getting likes and followers.  What that means is that such people are looking to market themselves to maximise the chances of getting likes and followers.  What that means is that a lot of people – and when I say people, I mean kids and adults who haven’t matured much – decided that they needed to market themselves, and what that meant was that they needed to think of themselves in terms of a brand.  What do you stand for?  Who are you aligned with?  Who are you against?

Basically, putting your complicated, nuanced self into a little box with a neat label on it so you could market yourself with algorithms.

Okay, I get it.  But the problem is that a lot of the people who did that started to actually believe it.  That they were those things.

And then they started crying in my classroom because they were worried that they couldn’t be their true selves.

End of Diversion

So, when the kidz learned about the existence of the concept of nonchalance, the first thing they thought was that they’d invented it, like Mick Jagger sang in the sixties, more or less.  Which should show us how it disappeared.

The second thing they thought was, nonchalance is cool.  Which brings us right back to the point at which it was considered non grata.  Because nonchalance was what cool was.  We didn’t call it that particularly, but that’s what we meant.

I’m not a very optimistic person, as should be abundantly clear by now, but I’m letting myself be mildly positive about nonchalance coming back, after so many years of everyone being encouraged to make such a fucking song and dance of everything.  I mean, it’s not really helped, has it?  Everyone making a fuss about me, me, fucking, me.  What’s happened?  Millions of kids convinced they’re mentally ill because they’re encouraged to think about themselves constantly.  It’s not healthy.  I’ve half written a post about how that’s the fault of the psychology world, or at least some of those people, and it is.

Diversion – Psychology’s Crisis, Solution and Destruction.

First things first.  I understand how academia works, which is more than you can say for the man on the street.  The man on the street is under the impression – again from a stereotype – that scientists, for instance, all think the same things and agree about everything, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Academia is about arguing, and academics spend their lives arguing.  One academic publishes a paper saying “This means that”, and half of the people in their field agree with them, and the other half spend their time disproving that, and publishing papers to the contrary, and then the first lot write another paper addressing the complaints, and on it goes forever.  Group and Group B again, isn’t it?

Anyway, about fifteen, twenty years ago, Psychology was in crisis.  In fairness, it had been in trouble for a while.  The problem was this: psychologists can identify what problems someone’s having, but they can’t do anything about most of them.

This wasn’t even a new problem, but it was one that most psychologists had done their best to ignore for decades.  It started with David Rosenhan’s classic “Thud” experiment.

Basically, he got a load of people to say that they had a voice in their head that just said “Thud” in order to get put into a psychiatric institution.  Once they were in, they had to say the voice was gone.

What happened was all of the participants were admitted into psychiatric institutions, and all of them were kept in, one person for 52 days.  On average, they were kept in for about three weeks.  They were all diagnosed with schizophrenia and were released, saying their schizophrenia was in remission.

That’s a problem for psychology, because it means maybe we can’t even tell who’s mentally ill and who isn’t.

The other problem in general for psychology was that sometimes people with mental illnesses get better with therapy, sometimes with drugs, sometimes they just get better by themselves, sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily, sometimes not at all.

What that means is that psychology was in danger of being no better than butterfly collectors, and maybe not even that useful.  They might not be able to identify problems accurately, and even if they can, it doesn’t mean they have any idea how to fix things, because they don’t.

So, what’s a social science to do?

The solution was, in a way, ingenious, but in another way, fucking moronic.

The solution was this: we can’t fix people’s problems, but what if we tell everybody else that they should make allowances for mentally ill people?

In a way, it’s brilliant.  They can’t help it, so the people who can help it, should help those who can’t.  Makes sense, right?

Oh yeah, it makes sense alright.  It makes perfect sense providing you’ve never met anybody. 

Most people can’t be arsed to literally lift a single finger to indicate which way their car’s turning at junctions or roundabouts, but the psychology world thinks they’re going to go out of their way to make life easier for people who are mentally ill?

Fucking morons.  That’s half the reason I got sick of psychology when I was doing my degree in it.  A lot of the lecturers just didn’t seem to even entertain the idea of how most normal people are – which is self-absorbed, basically.

Anyway, the result of telling the world that everyone who’s not mentally ill needs to be bending over backwards to help people who are mentally ill has backfired spectacularly because it’s a lot more appealing to have everyone running around after you than to be running around after everyone else, isn’t it?

The other problem is the issue of cyclical mental illnesses.  In the 80s, anorexia and bulimia were, I hesitate to say “popular”, maybe “prevalent” is better.  In the 90s, some people still had eating disorders, but there was a greater prevalence in people cutting themselves. Later in the 90s, multiple personality disorders were more common than they are now, or they were before.  Now, ADHD and autism are more prevalent, and in a few years, it’ll be something else again.

I taught a girl who told me she probably had ADHD last year.  I asked her what that meant, and she said, “I just don’t like doing certain things.”  I said, “Isn’t that the same for everybody?” She looked like it had never occurred to her.

Some people suggest it’s greater awareness of mental illnesses that have resulted in their increase, except it’s not.  People are aware of ADHD and autism now, but before they were aware of multiple personality disorder, and before that, they were aware of cutting themselves, and before that they were aware of eating disorders.

What should this tell us?  I would have thought that it should tell us that if you tell people about some mental disorder, they think about themselves and decide they’ve got that, dependent on what they’ve been told.

You could invent a mental illness and some symptoms, put it on the web, and within minutes, thousands of people would diagnose themselves with it.  Especially if the net result was that everyone has to run around after you, making things the way you want them.

Not all psychologists buy into this, but they’re not the ones with the loudest voices, sadly. 

End of Diversion.

So, in a world were nonchalance went AWOL for over a decade, in that time, the kids were encouraged to be the opposite of nonchalant and to make a fuss about fucking everything, especially themselves and to be under the impression that the rest of the world’s population were going to be falling over themselves to change everything so they’d be happier.

And it’s starting to sound a bit like they’ve had enough of it.  Of course they fucking have. 

I’ve recently seen people talking about black fatigue, white fatigue, you name it fatigue, but I think it’s more straightforward than that.  I think people are just plain fatigued, full stop. And, when you’re fatigued, you need a rest.  And that’s the time to be nonchalant, isn’t it?

I’m not saying that everything’s going to be great providing the kids start being nonchalant, because there’s a downside to everything, including nonchalance, but I’d rather put up with that than what we’ve had for the last fifteen, twenty years.

I guess it doesn’t bode well for two groups fighting to be the iron fist of authority because another word for nonchalance is apathy, isn’t it? Maybe that’ll get worse, but maybe it’s like the old hippy saying, “Imagine if they had a war, and nobody went?”  That’d be nice.

On a more facile level, I’d be pleased to see a bit more nonchalance in the pop world, and at Glastonbury.  The virtue signalling’s tiring, and nonchalance’d be a nice change from that.

The problem is, nonchalance and social media are uneasy bedfellows, aren’t they? Social media’s all about making a fuss, and mental illness, and virtue signalling are social media’s lifeblood.  How can a shrug compete with that?

So, there’s my pessimism coming back, eh? I sort of live in hope though, and if it means a few years of pop stars not giving a fuck, that would be a welcome change from all the little Bonos we’ve filled full of empty confidence, wouldn’t it?