All The Time In The World
LAMF/LSMFT - Le Moribond/Seasons In The Sun
Who's got the time these days? By these days I mean, eschatologically speaking, the end ones, the receding tide of observable time seeming to cause days to both stretch and contract, the ebb or flow of moments adjusting according to each individual's unique and sublime sense of physical, mental and spiritual elasticity. And by time I mean Time as an elastic thing, not the days in themselves, but time as we all experience her. Time as the ever feminine, ever giving yet ever subtracting receptacle into which we jerk our experiential material, and hope to retain in that strange terrain some memory or memories of time past. And by who I mean, of course, us, which is whoever we or you want it to be at any given moment, identity itself no longer a given but a taken or claimed thing. But let us, pray, exclude those who use phrases like "the optics aren't good" when what they mean is that he or she meant well but looked at with objectivity and without the benefit of the doubt is obviously guilty of some unimaginable faux pas at the very least.
Time for what though? In this instance, I'm thinking specifically of "discovering" "new" music. Who, it occurs to me to wonder, apart from the spiritual kindred of Roy Cropper, those anti-social, brilliantly observed obsessives who inhabit the nooks and crannies of the further reaches of the fictional niche market layer of the hellosphere, has the time? Like, you have to be on the spectrum, it seems to me, to give a flying one about any music produced this side of the millennium. Or even for several years before that much trumpeted but in the end somewhat anti-climactic epoch ending date. If you do give a toss, get a grip. As has been with immaculate reasoning articulated time and time again, with ever greater justification and attention to objective truth, there ain't nothing new under the sun or on god's green earth. We're all, at best, stating and restating the obvious, again and again.
The observation, btw, that someone or other is "on the spectrum" ranks up there with "the optics aren't good" as among the most annoying faux-wise things incredibly misguided people say to appear less at a loss than they almost certainly are. If you're one of those people......again, get a fucking grip! Don't refer to "the spectrum" unless you're a physical scientist primarily concerned with the study of bands of colours, as seen for obvious example in a rainbow, those bands produced by the separation of components of light by their different degrees of refraction according to wavelength. At a pinch, you're ok if you just want to use spectrum to indicate a sliding scale ranking random objects or ideas of your choice, but where the neurodevelopmental conditions of Autism or Asperger's Syndrome are concerned, the term should really only be used by certified neuro-linguistic experts or neurological practitioners, not by everyday laymen wishing to sound authoritative or knowledgeable. In my considerable experience, there are few things more soul destroying or enervating than laymen wishing to sound more authoritative or knowledgeable than they really are.
Conventional wisdom, by which one means that which everybody else seems to be in agreement about even if they haven't given it that much thought but just accept it as likely to be true based on the idea that everybody else seems to hold it to be true even if they have a sneaking suspicion that it's a load of old bollocks, has it that the only music that sticks with you, which really touches the sides and continues to nourish the soul, is that which you hear when you're 14. Not necessarily made when you were 14, just music that you first heard when you were 14. In my case, in either sense, that's 1974/5. So that music would in my case include Roxy Music's All I Want Is You, Queen's Killer Queen, King Crimson's In The Court Of The Crimson King, Van Der Graaf Generator's Pawn Hearts, and Seasons In The Sun by Terry Jacks, a massive and unprecedented earworm hit adaptation of a much darker earlier (1961) song, Le Moribond, by Jacques Brel, which was loved by everyone who ever mattered, specifically and principally Scott Walker and David Bowie, who both held an artistic candle for the tragic and desperately cool Belgian chansoniere.
David Bowie's Sorrow (1973) in fact had as it's B side the Brel drinking/whoring song "(Port Of) Amsterdam", which was my first introduction to the fascinating and compelling Brel oeuvre. Le Moribond/Seasons In The Sun is the elegaic/plaintive (in Jacks's take) or bitter/sarcastic (in Brel's) lamentation of a dying man, addressing those who have meant the most to him in his soon to be over life. Le Moribond focuses with bitterness and sarcasm on the adultery of his wife with his best friend, enjoining them, and everyone else who presumably was aware of the affair, to laugh, dance, sing and generally go crazy as they lower his corpse into the ground. Seasons In The Sun, on the other hand, loses any reference to adultery, and focuses instead with exquisite nostalgia on the joy and the fun the doomed protagonist used to enjoy with those he addresses from his deathbed, in particular in the spring season, observing that the stars that they together reached were just starfish on the beach. And that they had joy they had fun, they had seasons in the sun, but the wine and the song like the seasons have all gone. Either way though, bitter/sarcastic or elegiac/plaintive, the ruminations of a dying man, calling out those who've wronged him even as he "forgives" them, or reflecting in melancholy fashion on shared times past, would seem to be unpromising material for a potential world wide smash hit. And yet that's precisely what Terry Jacks's sanitised version of the morbid lanentation proved to be, a massive world wide hit, the toppermost of the poppermost in innumerable countries.
Meanwhile, in the USA, the Lucky Strike brand of cigarette was in 1974/5 continuing to outsell it's rivals, thanks in no small part to the advertising slogan "LSMFT" (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco) that had assisted in catapaulting it to the top of the tobacco top ten best selling list. Many alternative, satirical, versions of the acronymic slogan had, over the years, become popular, for example Loose Suspenders Mean Falling Trousers or the even racier Loose Slips Mean Falling Titties, or the frankly nonsensical Lowered Sideburns Make Furrier Tonsures. But a mere three years later, when the dregs of the New York Dolls had mutated into the altogether seedier Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers, the debut LP of that punky outfit was released under the title "LAMF". We were no longer 14, my contemporaries and I, but we might as well have been, for the talk of the 6th Form common room was all feverish speculation as to what the letters LAMF might actually stand for. Conventional wisdom, or common knowledge, had it that it was merely an anodyne updating of the 60s romantic codeword SWALK (Sealed With A Loving Kiss), thus LAMF = Let's All Make Friends. But the kinds of kids who'd later, in mid to late middle age, go on to talk authoritatively about people being on the spectrum, or of the optics not looking good, of course insisted that anyone who knew anything knew that in reality it meant Like A Mother Fucker. Which is quite probable, or at least common knowledge, or at the very least conventional wisdom. Either way, of course, it makes no sense, or at least as little or as much sense as contemporaneous references to the secret Sex Pistols gigs of the time (furtively arranged to get around the widespread bans that group had suffered as a result among other things of McLarenesque media manipulation resulting in a common belief that they were the enemies of society) which were being talked about by those who had inside knowledge as performances by "The Spots" (Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly, obvs). As though to confound the authorities at source, the less charismstic members of the group (Jones and Cook) guested with the same Heartbreakers who'd started the whole cryptic acronymic game in the first place. I know because I was there. Because it was a time, possibly the last time in my life when, like George Lazenby at the heartbreaking, uncharacteristically moving end of the film that constituted his one and only performance as James Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service - OHMSS) when his newly wed wife played by the divine Diana Rigg is shot through the head by vengeful Spectre agents and dies in his arms, I seemed to have all the time in the world.