“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. - Banksy 

 Better over the top under the top

" I don't write music, I invent it"

- Stravinsky

"A man climbs a mountain because it is there

"A man makes a work of art because it is not there"

- Carl Andre

bonus Andre-ism 

"Twenty years ago [Clement] Greenberg was listening to painters; now he's talking to them. The result is a formula for what painting should look like"

 That’s funny, I don’t like The Shining either. I’ve never watched it all the way through. Find a lot of Kubrick rather ponderous actually. But that’s the classic thing, though isn’t it, when a writer is so good, the way their mind works so compelling, it’s not really relevant whether you actually like the thing they’re enthused about, they’ve created this sort of surplus value - not quite the right term - but (from your point of view as still unconvinced or unmoved by the spur to the writing you’re reading), they’ve created something out of nothing. 

Same, actually, when they attack something dear to you - the critique is so well done, so provocative, that it creates a supplementary value - you don’t resent it, it’s a challenge to argue the defence.

 One thought for you - what values does the deconstruction of a dance music form add to it? The original deconstruction (ie Derrida, et al) was critical  - it involved very close work on philosophical texts, intended to unsettle and undermine its precepts, expose the hidden assumptions, the cognitive blindspots - showing how, for instance, one term in a binary was in complicity with the other term and dependent on it. Essentially the goal was to reveal the shaky foundations on which a philosophical or ethical or political argument was made. How does that transpose to the practice of making a "sort of" house track or a not fully functional jungle tune? Wouldn't it be more valuable - literally more constructive - to actually build a new form of dance music, rather than create this off-kilter, defective version of an existing dance form, which if nothing else does the job it was designed for? 

 

Peel is an odd one because he was absolutely vital for me during a short period of my life, when I had hardly any money and you could hear all this stuff every weekday night for free. But soon as I had a student grant and/or dole I could afford more records and started to make my own way with music, or rather, I was finding certain music press figures more reliable guides than Peel. And then when I became a music journalist, I didn’t need a filter / curator figure - I was doing that myself, for myself. So from about 1985 onwards I hardly ever listened to Peel - and I confess started to find him, increasingly, somewhat of a de-intensifier or de-libidiniser, to use the terms Mark would probably have applied, as a cultural presence. His flat, dour presentation had a deflating effect on what he was presenting. Okay, sure, on Top of the Pops, that unimpressed manner was a tonic, in contrast to the bubbly blandness of the other presenters. But a whole two hours of it on the radio... 

He was also fairly erratic as a filter/curator - if you go back to the old Peel shows, including those done during the absolute white heat of postpunk, there’s the well known great things he championed like the Fall and all kinds of bizarre oddities that had no other home on the radio, but it’s striking how much subpar generic stuff and outright rubbish  he played. And by the mid-Eighties the show was just too eclectic to have a coherent vibe - shambling shite next to African music next to electro next to hardcore punk next to something folky next to…  Mark would probably have found Peel’s approach to have not been sufficiently nihilatory - the ragbag eclecticism with an non ideological slant towards the DIY and regional added up to a sort of unpop version of poptimism, in fact.