For too long too many have toiled for the promise that music is somehow imminently poised to change the world. ‘The’ world! There’s barely a ‘the’ world left for music to change, and even if there were – supposing there will always be some thin strand of empathy knotted round our necks – why would it choose to surrender now to the morass of men with stubble and guitars and morals? Why is it always stubbled, guitared, moralled men who so sorely ache to change ‘the’ world? Maybe it was possible for them once, I don’t know. 1965? You can’t help but think that if it’s time for a change of anything, it’s a change of tack, boys. Regardless, I for one (and not for all) very rarely feel like part of ‘the’ world for anything longer than a few hours. Part of my world? Yes. Near-constantly. That much should be obvious. But my world’s ‘a’ world and there are an infinite trillion of those for music to alter – and if it wants to it can, with relative ease. It can change tens of thousands of ‘a’ worlds at once if potent enough, irking reality for a moment to sink upon brain or room or field like a dubious vow – one that alleges, ‘Yes, we are together.’
What?
‘Look, how this groaning bass swell rattles our teeth and wobbles eyeballs in their sockets. Can you feel that synth cutting up under your ribs? It is the sound of a jet’s chrome heart slapping blissfully against the horizon, great, big bird on window, slithering down slow leaking silver unity ooze. I flung the jet heart. You are the horizon. I know you know exactly what I mean.’ If it’s convincing enough you go with it for a while, permitting – maybe even reveling within – the bounds of its tampered reality, and why not? When ‘the’ world grows tedious – tedious labour, tedious water, tedious air, zzzzzz – it’s only natural to seek its transformation. Clubland is designed with this in mind – it will provide you booze, drugs, steam, stairwells, darkness, lasers, confusion and sweat-wet skin, all of it to help obliterate the distance between you and everyone else.With any luck, a skewed, liquid empathy ensues, one in which dancing, speaking too loud and financial and chemical oblivion are weapons to tote in the glad pursuit of oozy union. Eventually, though, that logic will desert you, in the glare of house lights or the morning or just before 3 p.m. the next day, parched and contorted on somebody else’s mattress like it was a beach you washed up on, and suddenly everything music had you convinced of in the dark seems completely fucking absurd.
It’s in these collisions, though, that music finds perfection, a type of invincibility. When it gets the chance to impose its very own ‘a’ world, the necessary collision with yours should be swift, rare, hidden, confusing, absurd and oozy.
