Gen X Suffers Mainstream Culture Constipation
In today’s overstuffed, mainstream culture of recycled “art”, nothing old moves and nothing new gets through. It’s enough to make a Gen-Xer pretty damn cranky.
Mike Cormack
Perhaps best known as the author of 'Everything Under the Sun: The Complete Guide to Pink Floyd', I've also written extensively on Chinese, US,
and UK politics, as well as music from Kraftwerk to the Beatles.
‘Cheers’, Cosiness and the Illusion of Companionship
Cheers‘ characters float side-by-side as if suspended in a mug of amber-colored beer, going nowhere and befriending no one, least of all one another.
Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ and the Three Ghosts of Subjectivity
Every brick in Pink Floyd’s The Wall shows that haunting lies not in wailing and chain-rattling but in trauma, alienation, and absence.
Edmund White’s Longing for Being and Nothingness
The sexual world in Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty expresses the tension between being and nothingness: the body insists on presence, yet the self remains elusive.
The Stone Roses, Experience and Memory
The Stone Roses’ songs remain capable of summoning emotions of extraordinary power. You can dance all night, hold the future in your arms, and drink from the well of youth.
Kraftwerk’s Seductive Post-Human
The power in Kraftwerk’s music lies in how they persuade us that the human – sweaty, inefficient, psychologically noisy – is the least necessary component of the future.
Capitalism’s Moral Rot in Three New York-Centered Films
Capitalism’s moral rot is tracked in three NYC films: from heroin dealers who risk arrest to insider traders who risk indictment to men in masks who risk nothing at all.
The ‘Shōgun’ Series Is Like a Beautiful Car with No Engine
James Clavell’s Shōgun is about profound transformation through understanding, but FX’s Shōgun is just a spectacle of surfaces with no meaningful drive.
‘The Shining’ and the Power of Murderous Narratives
The Shining endures because it conveys all horror, real and imagined: Stephen King’s horror of the collapse of Man, and Stanley Kubrick’s collapse of History.
Adrian Mole’s Very English Portrait of Male Anguish
In Sue Townsend’s hands, comedy doesn’t soften despair; it sharpens it. Her creation, Adrian Mole, is a most perfectly flawed portrait of loneliness and failure.
Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Hell
Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible is fastidious in its religious intensity, but rather than giving moral uplift, it is rock music’s deepest dive into the human abyss.
Bad Wisdom’s Artful Offensiveness
Bad Wisdom is a brilliantly savagely offensive, gleeful parody of the rock ’n’ roll messiah complex, the seeker-narrative, and the entire tradition of male spiritual self-aggrandisement.