beginnings . . .

the blog started this morning when i woke up early on a saturday and couldn't get back to sleep. i lay under the covers for a while, listening to Adam Green's 'Friends of Mine' and sang along intermittently with my sleep-sore voice, got up for a second to whack off to some cartoon lesbians making sexy in their school-girl outfits.

then downstairs to the computer listening to some of the whitest pop music around: Magnetic Fields, Arcade Fire, the Concretes . . . and reading about musicians in England making music that mirrors their slow and inevitable demise . . .

Burial, Kode 9 and the Dubstep activators in South London there have been watching their culture disappear and rearrange and eventually exhume itself as this spectral echo of former, well, not happinesses . . . this isn't music of nostalgia. Its not recreating dub and soul and rave with a look back on brighter times, its putting those floating pieces together and making a ghostly collage of distant echos and slow, affected electronic trails. They're the smoky sinews of a city in a gloriously weighty decline.

Labels like Ghost Box and Mordant Music are also progenitors of this death. Odd samples from children's television programs, a reversion to the pantheistic through acid-folk, and the ghostly dawn-time echoes of a grey grey city all make for a spooky re-editing. Its all a bit wierd and disjointed. Perfectly English. Boards of Canada-style melody, loop and rumble. Intriguing, deathly-pale ambient wonder.

But by far the largest, in terms of ears hearing it, and, I suppose the most accessible of these aural manifestations is Radiohead's In Rainbows disc. Yes, obviously it has been months since this thing came out and made the internest make the news again and again and again but I never seem to hear or read any proper critical words on Radiohead apparent significance. I only just started this blog half an hour ago but these questions have concerned me for some months.

Now let it be known that I was enamoured with Radiohead when I was young and rather impressionable. What is it about guitar wankery and high-flown ideas that makes schools full of fourteen, fifteen year old kids lose their shit and want to get lost in concepts their never likely to understand or properly engage in? Too much time to themselves, maybe? Will someone please befriend these kids! Give them Sonic Youth and Beat Happening and Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine. The ideas in those bands (girls, music, drugs, blood, sex, feedback) are a lot simpler and easier to grasp. But I'm straying from the topic by foisting my own favourites upon you.

I used to like Radiohead is what I was trying to say. I used to like them until I discovered the ideas surrounding punk and noise and the timeless DIY aesthetic and realised that 'OK Computer' was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. A cultural end-point if you will. Kids whacking off guitars for years in their bedrooms trying to re-create what they thought was the hieght of musical excellence and ambition isn't going to move us forward in any way, shape or form.

The band themselves are not - have never been - interested in making music for music to be made in its wake anyway. They've been influential, yes, but never by their own admission. They have, for at least fifteen years, considered themselves, as I said, the hieght of musical excellence and ambition and care little for what comes in its wake. And 'In Rainbows' is no exception.

But I've moved far from my original point with this band bashing. 'In Rainbows', whilst being greedy and posh and just plain English. But its also another musical map that is part of this nation's long, protracted death.

The guitars this time are ghosts of themselves, played by sure hands but dead hands nonetheless. The songs are caverns of the same distress and tiredness that Yorke and Co. have been at us about for years. But here they are calling home the spectres and spirits that haunt their long-familiar cities. They pull these spirits from the their homes haunting the cobblestone corners of a Shoreditch tenement in the quiet hour before dawn.

London is dying. Has been for the last sixty years. But at least there are a few out there who are keen to represent and to wallow in its final, wonderfully protracted demise.