Bring the Noise

In The Smiths, for instance, the refusal of maturity is as much a rejection of the strictures of adult sexuality as of work.

Moreover, latent in our indie scene are ideas that echo the concerns of the sexual/psychoanalytical politics of the sixties. The flirtation with androgyny and camp, the prevalence of love songs with genderless love objects and free of fixed sexual protocol, the defence of sensitivity and ‘the wimp’, the refusal of performance-oriented sex – all these connect not just with feminism but with radical psychoanalysis’s project of a return to the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the child (an undirected and limitless sensuality).

The irony is that these indie hipsters tend to be more politically aware than most, more keen to align themselves with anti-racism, yet are totally estranged from black culture.

Green once described the music of indie groups like The Smiths as ‘racist’, and, in a sense, he’s right – there’s a hopeless lack of exchange or communication between hip white rock and black pop.

‘Serious rock’ has never been so white, mainstream pop so black, so exclusively based in R&B, soul and disco.

It seemed like the sort of information that really ought to cause hip hop to implode through its own contradictions.

It’s also possible that white fans prefer it that way, too, that it’s part of the fantasy of real-ness they’re buying into, that doublewhammy of exoticism and authenticity.

When he was invited to produce U2 (a group that Carducci reviles as the very model of non-rocking fraudulence) Eno warned Bono: ‘I’m not interested in records as a document of a rock band playing on stage. I’m more interested in painting pictures. I want to create a landscape within which this music happens.’ As it turned out, this subordination of the aural to the visual was perfect for Bono’s ‘visionary’ vocals, The Edge’s stratospheric guitar and the inert rhythm section.

These are the people who only know what they do not want.

That’s why The Smiths and James have more in common with Husker Du and Meat Puppets than their own neighbours.