Why the new 1950s-themed threads? Recently, I’ve been finding something strangely fascinating about the 1950s. Perhaps a picture will help explain.

To me, at least, this version of commercial design as a neon-inflected industrial heroic is bizarre, but also oddly inspiring. Now, the 1930s were also a time of inspiring aesthetic and political movements: but perhaps too inspiring. The inter-war years had a level of radicalism I find difficult to imagine, and so it seems to me that any left-wing enthusiasm for the 30s runs a real risk of being nostalgic in a paralyzing way. What’s so interesting about the 1950s is that many of the things that appear so radical in the 1930s—technological progress, social democracy, modernist design—reappear in the 1950s as banal.

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Incredibly, this manages to get funnier all the way through:

Is John McCain’s creepy linguistic tic an attempt to cash in on those rather annoying Dos Equis adverts?

A while back, last.fm repeatedly played me Calvin Harris’s “The Girls.” So I downloaded the album and promptly forgot about it; but I remembered it, and started listening to it, a couple of days ago. It’s pretty good; but it is odd to hear what is basically Fat Harry White doing Audio Bullys covers.

Still, it does mean that, as a bonus to remembering Calvin Harris, I also remembered the Audio Bullys. In fact, listening to the Audio Bullys in the context of Calvin Harris makes hear something I think I missed the first time around, which is the nostalgia that pervades their records; they don’t so much make dance music as make records about a certain relation to dance music, a relation that I’m not sure exists any longer. It seemed an odd connection when it first occoured to me, but the more I think about it the more plausible it seems: weren’t the Audio Bullys doing something rather similar to Burial?

If Zoe Williams thinks chavs are poor or victims of deprivation, she clearly knows as little about them as she does about the basis of comedy. Chavs are rarely lacking in disposable income and if they’re deprived of anything, it’s taste. Why do we have to be subjected to Ms Williams’s unsubstantiated Islington/Hampstead/Putney view of the world?

As opposed, you see, to the view of the world held by the author of the letter, from Sutton-at-Hone, Kent.

You can tell, because KRS-One made a record saying that it wasn’t.The funny thing about KRS’s track, and (even more) the video, is that it’s all about the past.

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