Like a dead bird in the dirt
Like a rusty can on the ground
I don’t believe in stardom
Machinery in actionFull of experts
Full of experts
Same old order
Same old order
Same old order
So sang Vini Reilly on the powerfully melancholic/weird/lovely/otherworldly Durutti Column album LC back in 1981. The record’s title was always a mystery to me. My (admittedly daft) guess was that LC stood for listening comprehension. But the initials stand for something far more interesting than that. I eventually read someplace that they stand for Lotta Continua – either graffiti on a wall in ancient Rome, or the name of a far-left organisation in Italy from around the same time that Paris was undergoing a short wave of prescient Banksyisation: „La beauté est dans la rue!“ „Sous les paves, la plage!“ „A bas le réalisme socialiste! Vive le surréalisme!“ etc.
I don’t know that there’s a beach under the flagstones. But beauty is definitely in the street. If you set your psychogeography filters before leaving the house, the city holds a limitless amount of interest. I believe this is why JG Ballard chose to live in Shepperton – it was far enough away from all the mental static to allow him to describe its effects.
Can artforms have experts? They can have practitioners and appreciators, I guess. The loftiest classical or pop critic at a broadsheet may be an expert in setting thoughts down on paper, and on the cultural specifics of the space-time that the art is projected onto. But the art itself? I don’t think so. Art is democratic* – just go back in time and ask your 3 year old self and the answer won’t be anything other than that art is democratic.
Everybody’s A Fuckin Expert by Shit and Shine is a good listen. The label (Editions Mego) uses the interesting phrase „inverted tranquility“ in the blurb. I like this phrase but I don’t know what it means. The record isn’t tranquil but it is controlled, and its sonic textures don’t have really the kind of ‚ardcore vibe the title suggests. I’d be reluctant to try and guess what this record is saying. Music For Real Airports by The Black Dog had a kind of „this is the way things are“ thing going on, which didn’t work for me. I don’t want to fetishize airports anymore than I want to fetishize their tedium. Everybody’s A Fuckin Expert seems (maybe) to be describing London in 2015 – but there’s no social realism here, and also no ghost of dubstep. The dark humour of the record is its principal weapon – biting cynicism’s like so 2012. This is the present.
*For the appreciator of art. The next time you bang your head against a brick wall, ask yourself who the bricklayer may have been and once the pay cheque was cashed how much he cared what happened to that wall – whether it was people banging their heads against it, or doing a spraypaint stencil of a rat on it, with dollar signs for eyes.