In current news: it is the Second Coming of Oasis. Adele is still counting (her previous album, if I have it right, was called $600,000; the next one is to be called $800,000). Ed Sheeran has some Beatles and Led Zeppelin records in his collection. Elvis Presley is triple-vaccinated, somewhere, but just won’t die. And it is rumoured that Christopher Guest or someone will update Spinal Tap to make it about a female singer-songwriter called Tinal Spap or Tinker Swallow or something similar, who has boyfriends, writes cold turkey songs about them, and becomes not only Bigger than Jesus but Bigger than the Beatles.
What is going on with music? Not the musicians, but the music? Yes, indeed, Julie Burchill, Simon Price, Stuart Lee, Marcus Berkmann and countless others think that the second coming of Oasis is good/bad/ugly. But, who cares? Apart from the cellos and brushed drums of ‘Wonderwall’ (“To die is gonna be the die”, is workin’ class Hamlet, innit?), their discography is not up to much, musically. “Mere zeitgeist stuff, my dear,” one imagines Noel Coward saying, “now be a darling and pass the gin.”
As everyone knows, dimly, music is finished. The best band I saw in Turkey (called Spitfire) played old Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons and Jethro Tull songs. The guitarist, Suleyman Bagcioglu, even played his replica solos with a cigarette moving between lip and headstock. They added a bass solo to the Hendrix classic ‘Third Stone from the Sun’. Why? Because the Axial Age of modern music was the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. We cannot forget this, but it is part of the problem.