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julcoh's review against another edition
5.0
I came to this book after hearing Higgs on the Ezra Klein podcast, and his opening comment to Higgs is much more understandable now: “just who the hell do you think you are?”
This book is absolutely fascinating... and I’m having difficulty describing why and how. I could tell you about the contents of the book— the KLF (a band I’d never heard of that topped the charts in the 90s), their antics and eventual burning of a million Pounds, weaving in the psychedelic concepts of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels and Alan Moore’s Ideaspace, Discordianism and Operation Mindfuck and the novels Illuminatus!, material rationalism and inflationary economic systems, and the creation of our 21st century.
But that would only be a model of the book, and models, “after all, are significantly less detailed than what they represent. Reality is ablaze with infinite connections: every particle in the cosmos affects every other particle. It’s Too Much, it really is, and seeing reality in all its innate finery would be so overpowering that you’d be in no state to nip down to the shops when you need a pint of milk.”
This book is absolutely fascinating... and I’m having difficulty describing why and how. I could tell you about the contents of the book— the KLF (a band I’d never heard of that topped the charts in the 90s), their antics and eventual burning of a million Pounds, weaving in the psychedelic concepts of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels and Alan Moore’s Ideaspace, Discordianism and Operation Mindfuck and the novels Illuminatus!, material rationalism and inflationary economic systems, and the creation of our 21st century.
But that would only be a model of the book, and models, “after all, are significantly less detailed than what they represent. Reality is ablaze with infinite connections: every particle in the cosmos affects every other particle. It’s Too Much, it really is, and seeing reality in all its innate finery would be so overpowering that you’d be in no state to nip down to the shops when you need a pint of milk.”
ursineultra's review against another edition
2.0
For some reason, I keep getting stuck reading these books where white men hitting 50 go on and on about raves in the late '80s and how transformative a time it was and how the 'man' crushed it and some sort of second coming of 1967 was supposed to happen, but instead we all started going to costa coffee. The problem, of course, is almost everything that came out of the Summer of Love is as bad as everything else in life, only worse because the sanctimonious old hippies like to pretend they aren't as bad as their fathers, so the whole thing is sort of predicated on a lie. Spoiler: we are ALL as bad as our fathers. That's how life works. You get old, you suck.
Anyway, gen X'ers are now doing just that (getting old, I mean, not coming to a meaningful understanding of how rubbish they are) and getting book deals and proving this point again, because a load of cod philosophy and wistful talk about taking drugs, getting laid and buying white label 12"s is just dull. And it's not that the police stole your revolution, it's that it never was a revolution. The thread with a lot of this stuff is that something was crushed that would never come back - no, it's that you were too old to understand what came next, just like the people YOU were railing against didn't understand you. This magical rave time was a bunch of young people kicking out at capitalism, which is what some of every generation of young people do. I dread when people my age are old enough to start writing these books and tell me how the Iraq War protest marches were the last bastion of civilised society etc. etc. because, again, it's all bullshit and we were just as bad as this lot.
Yes, Bill Drummond is a bit mad and had some clever ideas about how to make money and then decided to burn that money, but he also seems to be almost entirely elusive and so not in this book, really. So, in the absence of much to actually say about the KLF other than a wikipedia entry dragged out over 300 pages, this book can't help but surround that story with so much inane bullshit that it feels like you're trapped at a never-ending party where someone has accidentally invited their uncle and he won't bloody leave you alone because you made the mistake of commenting on his Altern 8 t-shirt. I don't go to parties and even when I did I hated them, so I don't want this to happen. Ever.
Anyway, I guess it is tough when your children leave home or the music press contracts so much that you can't get paid to write this shit in the paper anymore, so more power to this dude, and all these dudes writing the same book again and again - go, make money, talk about this stuff at any number of micro festivals, DJ to your friends in bottle shops. I just hope to all that is holy that this is the last time I get tricked into reading about psychogeography and the sun coming up when you're on pills.
(also, this version has a 'commentary' track in the footnotes which is exactly as nauseating as it sounds)
Anyway, gen X'ers are now doing just that (getting old, I mean, not coming to a meaningful understanding of how rubbish they are) and getting book deals and proving this point again, because a load of cod philosophy and wistful talk about taking drugs, getting laid and buying white label 12"s is just dull. And it's not that the police stole your revolution, it's that it never was a revolution. The thread with a lot of this stuff is that something was crushed that would never come back - no, it's that you were too old to understand what came next, just like the people YOU were railing against didn't understand you. This magical rave time was a bunch of young people kicking out at capitalism, which is what some of every generation of young people do. I dread when people my age are old enough to start writing these books and tell me how the Iraq War protest marches were the last bastion of civilised society etc. etc. because, again, it's all bullshit and we were just as bad as this lot.
Yes, Bill Drummond is a bit mad and had some clever ideas about how to make money and then decided to burn that money, but he also seems to be almost entirely elusive and so not in this book, really. So, in the absence of much to actually say about the KLF other than a wikipedia entry dragged out over 300 pages, this book can't help but surround that story with so much inane bullshit that it feels like you're trapped at a never-ending party where someone has accidentally invited their uncle and he won't bloody leave you alone because you made the mistake of commenting on his Altern 8 t-shirt. I don't go to parties and even when I did I hated them, so I don't want this to happen. Ever.
Anyway, I guess it is tough when your children leave home or the music press contracts so much that you can't get paid to write this shit in the paper anymore, so more power to this dude, and all these dudes writing the same book again and again - go, make money, talk about this stuff at any number of micro festivals, DJ to your friends in bottle shops. I just hope to all that is holy that this is the last time I get tricked into reading about psychogeography and the sun coming up when you're on pills.
(also, this version has a 'commentary' track in the footnotes which is exactly as nauseating as it sounds)
turnipforthebooks's review against another edition
challenging
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
sarahfrost18's review against another edition
4.0
4.5
“From the rationalist materialist perspective, all we can really say about the money burning is that it occurred because Cauty and Drummond are a pair of attention seeking assholes, and note that the path of chaos is always going to lead to a meaningless end”
↳ Perhaps the idea that there is no connection between burning the money and the real world & that burning the money had a personal meaning to them [Cauty and Drummond] can both be true and coexist. If magical thinking has no power over the “real world,” maybe it does hold power over the scope of our own personal, individualized worlds and has a very real power to change our lives.
- Note I left on this book circa August 2021
“From the rationalist materialist perspective, all we can really say about the money burning is that it occurred because Cauty and Drummond are a pair of attention seeking assholes, and note that the path of chaos is always going to lead to a meaningless end”
↳ Perhaps the idea that there is no connection between burning the money and the real world & that burning the money had a personal meaning to them [Cauty and Drummond] can both be true and coexist. If magical thinking has no power over the “real world,” maybe it does hold power over the scope of our own personal, individualized worlds and has a very real power to change our lives.
- Note I left on this book circa August 2021
deedledoodle's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Especially good for anyone who was conscious during the years 1991-1994, and wonders why no one recognizes how uncanny that time was.
nowheretopark's review
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
4.75
This book is so much more than a biography of a band, Higgs weaves a fascinating tale of synchronicity that might just have you questioning the nature of reality.