Look what they've done to my song ma!

Yesterday I took myself off to panic buy some layout paper in order to experiment with Andy Warhol’s inkblot drawing technique. It was a more homely version of the screen prints that made him famous. Having now tried it I can report that the best results come from the technique’s mechanistic detachment from what you are actually drawing. This is actually what good drawing does anyway in the sense that the drawer is removed from the linguistic concept of the subject. Anyway, I didn’t intend to talk about that, but these things have a way of entangling their way into the subject. The event always decides the subject no matter how much we post rationalise our intentions. So quite by chance I made my way to Ryman’s (a shop I habitually use for self-soothing) where the layout pads were an inordinate £9.99 but still they seemed good and I couldn't be bothered to walk to Smith’s. When I went to pay I remember that the shop does not allow contactless payment and patted my pockets as I briefly fumbled for my actual debit card. A brief conversation ensued with the check-out boy who assured me that contactless was on its way. I imagined Rymans staff rooms abuzz with the ins and outs of this forthcoming progress. The checkout-boy told me it costs a lot to install – literally thousands per unit. Wow I replied (sadly I use this vacant utterance of incredulity a lot).

This morning, as I lay dozing in bed, I found myself wondering, how much money Theo Paphitis has lost himself through his own tight fistedness and then I thought about how I was seeking a meagre recompense for the simmering fury I feel when I watch the dragons in their chairs making judgements over the proles, serfs, clowns, quacks, bootlickers, opportunists, jesters, grafters, sinners, etc etc etc who make their way into their court. I’m hearing courtly sackbut tunes in my head even now. So, I realised, I am playing their game. These people who I picture as ten year old consistent victors of monopoly, sponsored homework, and writing to Jim’ll fix it who have risen to the top of the heap. As  a child, now I know I say this a lot, I always imagined that grown-ups chuckled at the inanity of competing in real life on the level of Monopoly and that, whilst one or two people couldn’t escape this mode of being as adults, they were a mentally ill exception to the norm. Instead what we have is an entire adult culture run as if it was a supremely complex digital boardgame.

So where is this going? Well as I waked to the local shop to buy something to soothe my corona throat I began to think about a song. It was a song I learnt from the book that came with my casio vl-tone one christmas. The song was Look what they’ve done to my song Ma. When David Devant and His Spirit Wife first formed we all learnt a version of this. I think it was influenced by my recent purchase of Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub. I’ve always liked the tune and the use of simple French lyrics as the song progresses towards a tumultuous sing-a-long. But this morning something about it seemed to go further and I realised, as I strode onwards picturing my soon to be purchased fisherman’s friends, that the song was about life itself. Look what they’ve done to my song ma. Look! Look what Theo and his mummy’s boy boardgame literalists have done to the song. The song that we feel. We feel to be so full of meaning and have erroneously been repeatedly informed is just a pleasant but necessary illusion – an appendage to the really real world of linguistic concepts. Human this and human that we hear as if all humanity has always subscribed to this symbolic processor model of the Copernican brain at the centre of the known universe. Look ma Theo has broken up the song and packed it away like a Lego set with instructions so he can sell it on eBay for a higher price. 

But now look ma! Behold the total human organism strolling through the unremembered gate singing a half-remembered song and even Theo is skipping as he strips off his suit and hangs it on a nearby branch to join the others in a dappled clearing for the job of building a geodesic domed future.