A trenchant position on various noises.

There is nothing more boring in the entire world than men arguing about music. Talking about music would be fine, having opinions on it, cool. But men are always the fucking Highlander: when it comes to correct opinions there can be only one. 

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. 

It's fucking stupid for a start. Music is a movable feast, there's not one correct way of assessing it. There are cultural and temporal factors at play, but also music, as the highest of the Parnassian arts, is the most intimately idiosyncratic. It's made of smoke. You cannot nail it to a tree. It's all about you, as McFly would have it. Your interpretation is as valid as anyone else's. Assuming that, because you own a lot of vinyl, your word is the last word on the subject is just an embarrassing admission of your own limitations. You're drooling down your tie at the dinner table, my friend. Farting while ordering wine. You're drowning, and no one will save you because you're still going on about "Exile on Main Street" even as you tread water in the icy depths. Push him back under. Hit him with the oar. "Oar? What a great, neglected album by Skip Spence. Let me glub glub glub..."

Good. 

Even if you're skilled at shutting other people down, if you can produce the facts and figures to support your tedious claims, and if you have in your own head the canon of all Western popular music in a precise order (and Christ, what a lot of free time you have. Are you in prison?) what difference does it make? You might win an argument, or more likely, grind someone down, so they run the fuck away, but you wont change their mind. Music is special to people for lots of reasons. You can't tell them they're wrong by bandying about a book of rules. It's just not cricket. 

I've had these arguments in the past - I'm a man in recovery - but I'm not going to have them again. So you think Prince's version of "Nothing Compares 2 U" is better than Sinead's version. I don't care. No one cares. Elvis Costello's version of "Shipbuilding" is better that Robert Wyatt's, and I can prove it on graph paper. No you can't. Dave Bowie is a failed sixties singer who struck it lucky in the 70's cause all the 60's bands had broken up (I have heard this said). Good luck to you, fella, you're an idiot, and you're welcome to your idiocy. 

I'm too old for this now. After all - it's not like it fucking matters. Who cares? If being correct about who is better out of the The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays is important to you, then I am envious of your hazard-free life-style. Either that or the worst thing in the world has already happened to you and this is the pathetic life-raft you're clinging to. Either way, I'm not going to do this anymore. I've argued my last defense of the brilliance and majesty of Fox. 

Noosha, I'm afraid you're on your own.