“Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.” - Desiderata
“A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, ‘What is Buddha?’ Dongshan said, ‘Three pounds of flax.’” - Zen Koan
“Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” - Bono VoxWe are here today to witness chart history.History, Marx tells us, repeats first as tragedy then as farce. Thus, tragedy arrived at about this time last year, when that nice young man Joe McElderry was denied the number one hit he’d wasted hours pretending to flirt with Cheryl Cole for. This year, the farce: another mounted charge at the Christmas Number One spot, this time armed not with Zack de la Rocha’s tween angst war cries, but with John Cage’s silent “4′33″. Cue Mr Hudson and 20 people people less famous than Mr Hudson decamping to a Soho basement to “record” for four minutes and thirty three seconds, while two dozen journalists look on via Ustream, because there is no physical space for them to watch nothing happen in the place where nothing is happening.This is the original seed of John Cage’s parody of meaning, filtered through a grotesque parody of charidee records, coupled to a grotesque parody of the way the modern media operates. It is a siamese twin-set of cackling nihilism, magnified by the fact that the media people who are here will, by the end of play today, have their reports of watching nonentities doing nothing plagiarised by dozens of wire services and bots, that will feed this information down the arteries of the internet into dead-eyed page impression-boosting news-mulch, to arrive at the ultimate ur-form of the joke: “People Who Weren’t There: Nothing Happened With Nobody Significant Present”. So yes. Eat your heart out, Uncle Karl.It’s mid-afternoon as Mr Hudson stands being interviewed at the top of the corridor of Soho Studios. Looking at him, you’re aware that you are looking at someone who has not only met Kanye West, but who has repeatedly interacted with Kanye West, whom Kanye West has clasped to his increasingly man-titted bosom and called “protege”. He has touched greatness, yet here he is in a room full of bands so obscure they couldn’t be identified with a copy of Indie Who’s Who and a very fast indexing-thumb. You can practically hear the Compton Street queers at the top of the road mocking him: “Mr Hudson! Who the fuck are your new friends? Infadels? No one’s ever fucking heard of them, duckie. My, oh, my: how the mighty have fallen…”But then again, Mr Hudson, you sense, is also the sort of milky-pleasant well-bred fop who would have heeded the basic advice to be nice to those you meet on the way up because you’ll meet them again on the way down. He mews softly down the lenses of successive cameras. He offers Radio 1 Newsbeat a few tasty morsels on nothing-in-particular with both self-awareness and self-deprecation. He can walk with king and commoner alike. Another talent to add to his prodigious rapping gifts.By 3PM, the bursting, sweltering den of Soho Studios’ reception room is thick with hacks reduced to snapping the desk staff by general lack-of-stuff-to-do. Mark Jones, the maverick head of Wall Of Sound, has turned up in a – by his standards – rather demure flannel pink jumpsuit, and is holding up a series of cards with simple words or phrases on them, in preparation for his brief Trappism. Eddy Temple-Morris – Xfm’s generic-brand Erol Alkan and, along with Mark, today’s patron – is yammering down an iPhone to Billy Bragg, who has failed to turn up: “I’ve taped your picture to a rock. So when the time comes you’ll be there to record.”Pete Doherty, along with most of the upper reaches of the bill, is also showing his solidarity with the cause by being an invisible cipher, having failed to show. A few mince-faced paps still linger round the doorway in diminishing hope that he is just running late. And despite getting flattering billing, Imogen ‘Big On Twitter, Yah’ Heap is also notable by her absence (she “phoned her part in earlier in the day”).There is a Suggs. There are Guillemots but no Fyfe. Gallows but no Frank. “I dunno. It’s weird, yeah, when you think about it, y’know it’s like….” Luke Kook stammers to reporters with his usual eloquence, grappling with Cage’s zen ideals and sonic koans as only a man who wrote “Jackie Big Tits” can. He, of course, has good reason to be here – he was pals with Ou Est Le Swimming Pool’s tragic Charlie Haddon, whose charity will benefit from sales.Monarchy arc through the atrium in their post-Hurts dinner jackets and black-fishnet facial-topiaries. The band began the year by playing Cape Canaveral, for which their ‘Recession? What recession?’ label flew over a junket-load of journalists to watch them ‘beam their music into space’, via a device which bounced a signal from the gig into the highest heavens. This, then, is already their second big art prank of the year. “It’s very KLF – we like the KLF-ness”, they enthuse. Cage never gattling-gunned Covent Garden’s front row, or plonked a dead ewe on the doorstep of Leonard Bernstein, but it’s nice to imagine he would have been KLF enough to appreciate being covered by Guillemots.After much kerfuffle, these human rest-notes are herded into the studio, while the media Blackberry-tappers are given the opportunity to view proceedings on a tiny computer screen showing the Ustream. Down one side, online commentators post chatroom backchats: “Oy SUGGS u fat basterd… stop talking!!!”… “Has it started yet???” “I saw his lips move!”. Time passes. One minute. Someone offers us cake. Two. The cake is finished. Three. We the gallery suck the marrow of meaning out of their emptiness, and in that moment, are transformed. Yes: in the stifled coughing of a Guillemot, the arc of history has been bent. Their silence has allowed us to live. Like IRA men in The Maze, their silence speaks volumes. Their silence is their weapon, just as surely as a carbomb outside a Brighton hotel. Their silence will shake empires, bring down walls between people, kick in the door so that the whole rotten edifice of the biz may come tumbling down.In the great chart race, how can something win, when nothing will always be more powerful than something? It can’t. It won’t. Cage Against The Machine is unstoppable, its logic irrefutable. Matt Cordwangle – get ready to sob into your floppy hat come December 19. Reggie Yates – get ready to explain why you can’t play the nation’s most-popular record on your sham of a chart countdown. Great Britain – prepare to have your collective value system comprehensively realigned. History concludes. The party dissolves into applause. Domino’s deliverymen spill in with pizza. This frail travelling coincidence is loosed with all the power that being changed can bring. All that post-modernism has left us drunk on paradox, and only the hair of the dog will snap us back to reality: as the sun thins, we trawl Soho’s porn dens, looking for a man fucking a woman dressed as a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.HENRY COWELL
“A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, ‘What is Buddha?’ Dongshan said, ‘Three pounds of flax.’” - Zen Koan
“Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” - Bono VoxWe are here today to witness chart history.History, Marx tells us, repeats first as tragedy then as farce. Thus, tragedy arrived at about this time last year, when that nice young man Joe McElderry was denied the number one hit he’d wasted hours pretending to flirt with Cheryl Cole for. This year, the farce: another mounted charge at the Christmas Number One spot, this time armed not with Zack de la Rocha’s tween angst war cries, but with John Cage’s silent “4′33″. Cue Mr Hudson and 20 people people less famous than Mr Hudson decamping to a Soho basement to “record” for four minutes and thirty three seconds, while two dozen journalists look on via Ustream, because there is no physical space for them to watch nothing happen in the place where nothing is happening.
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