its worse as Jason Jesse once famously stated.
Do want a chocolate? No thanks I'm alright.
A beer? I'm alright.
You want to stop and let me drive for a bit? Nah, I'm alright?
Want to get high? No thank you, I'm alright.
Are you going to paddle out. Nah, I really am alright.
You know, I'm starting to question you're 'alrightness.'
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It seems to me there is a lot of hedonism in Western youth/ popular culture. And a lot of denial. A lot of party time, head in the sand pap that passes for art. Rock and Roll is just shit these days. There's very little real commentary. Little summation of the current atmosphere to get us riled up. I think in part its because we are all so easily distracted from the state of things. We know so much about the world these days due to ease of communication, travel and technology but seem so unmoved by it all. The more interconnected we are supposed to be the more alienated we really are. We all know about the eleven year old Pakistani girl who go shot in the head, because she wanted to go to school. We all know that the Arctic melt is worse than initially thought. We all know the current 'system' won't willing help us work towards a more egalitarian and sustainable 'culture.' Even those of you that will vote Obama and have continued faith that he's a decent chap, know he's completely impotent when it comes to meaningful 'hope' and 'change.' I feel like a sixteen year old writing this. I really have not grown enough to express this shit in a more mature manner but, oh well.
Most of the time, like you, the only way I can cope with it all, is to hide. Hide in a can of beer, paddle out and hide in the surf, hide while consuming, hide while social networking, all the while (not)watching my attention span, shrink by the day.
Where's this going? I don't know I was going to review the new Godspeed!YoublackEmperor album...
Do yourself a favour have a listen. Don't wallow. It's not about wallowing but don't hide so much. Something really beautiful could come out of this current shit stack in time.
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In a lot of crucial ways, it's easier to find common cause than it was 10 or 20 years ago. You talk to strangers in bars or on the street, and you realise that we're all up to our eyeballs in it, right? So that right now, there's more of us than ever. It's a true fact. Every day it gets a little harder to pretend that everything's OK. The rich keep getting more and we keep getting less. Post-9/11, post-7/7, there's a police state that tightens more every day, and in our day-to-days, we're all witnesses to the demeaning outcomes of debauched governance – random traffic stops, collapsing infrastructure, corrupt bureaucrats and milk-fed police with their petty intrusions. Our cities are broke, they lay patches on top of patches of concrete, our forests cut down and sold to make newspapers just to tell us about traffic that we get stuck in. You get a parking ticket and you waste a day in line. Cop shoots kid, kid shoots kid, homeless man dies waiting to see a doctor, old men lay in hospital beds while a broken bureaucracy steals away what's left of their dignity. Folks flee to our shores, running from the messes we've made in their countries, and we treat them like thieves. Mostly it feels like whatever you love is just going to get torn away. Turn on the radio, and it's a fucking horror show, the things our governments do in our name, just to fatten themselves on our steady decline. Meanwhile, most of us are hammering away at a terrible self-alienation, mistreated, lied to and blamed. Burning fields and a sky filled with drones. The fruit rots on the vine while millions starve. -GS!YBE
