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A review by ursineultra
The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs
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)