(Part of a series of ‘Noughties’ excavations that will eventually be worked into a much larger project).
I’ve been a doing a lot of ‘unearthing’ of late, most likely because I turn 40 in around 3 months.
I’ve been trying to do a bit of excavation and salvaging of works and creative former selves, that became subsumed under other creative selves. To own what I used to do and be, without feeling that somehow they were errors in direction that needed to be buried. It’s been an act of reclaiming and redeeming my past.
Over the course of 20 years I have invested an incredible amount of time to making and thinking about making.
I wrote a stupid amount of songs in a four year period right in the middle of noughties, and coincidentally stopped making music more or less around the same time as the financial crash in 2008. We all knew something big was happening, but nobody could foresee how it would pan out. But I could sense a change in the wind, and decided that my visual art was more equipped to blow with the new wind.
Perhaps if I’d had carried on I’d be in a different position now. Although I suspect my lack of self-belief at a level that has caused so much self-sabotage would have caused identical issues of inertia.
Also, because the wind was changing in September 2008 – the time when I decided to stop being an aspiring songwriter, I encounter these songs as a time-capsule for the Geist of the Noughties.
Now, the Noughties are going through an excavation of their own at the moment, largely precipitated by the sudden rush of allegations being made about celebrity Russell Brand, who, in the mid-noughties was every bit a personification of the culture and norms of that time, especially in the knowledge that he pushed the ‘norms’ to their extremes.
These songs remind me of writing specifically about trying to function with depression, anxiety, fluctuating in a moment from self-disgust to self-obsession. They remind me about what mental health meant in the noughties, when it was certainly an issue on the rise, but wasn’t to the level of near-universal acceptance that it is at now (responses like “needs to pull him/herself together” or “he’s/she’s making it up” were still very common responses).
But the songs also remind me of then-unexamined attitudes that I sometimes expressed in my songs, which have since become socially-unacceptable, and thus self-scrutinised. Passive mysoginy, attitudes now ascribed and ghettoised into the ‘incel’ culture. And a ‘punching down’ culture aimed at those who made you feel uncomfortable in an age where it was harder to physically avoid those you didn’t want to associate with.
The noughties were the ‘after-party’ after the last party of the 20th century – the after taste of 90s hedonism. The new century hadn’t yet found itself, and was populated by attitudes and actions of a previous one, but with emerging technologies that was allowing them to spread like never before.
Insulated into my home town’s reverberated manifestations of the noughties white boy indie scene (as it was almost entirely white), when I look back I see a distorted sense of my place in the scheme of things, which is also possibly an outcome of youth. I recall having a sobering moment of realisation in 2013, after enough things had gone wrong in my late 20s, and I realised my total insignificance: I wasn’t special and nobody really cared if I was an artist. In my 30s I encountered people who said they didn’t dare come to speak ‘us’ back then – our ‘group’ of young scenesters. The attitude is reciprocated by those in their early 20s now, who can see your desperate strain to stay young and relevant a mile off.
The Noughties feel like this wierd time capsule sandwiched between 9/11 and the financial crash, in which I became a young adult. Their last whimper was stamped out by the time the Tories began asserting their reality agenda on us in 2013.
It must also be added that I am excavating to repurpose many of my life-relics for a personally large show I’ll be doing in a couple of years – so vague in detail as of yet that I can’t even begin to give any detail.
That these songs touch upon personal and socially problematic subjects makes them important to the story/projects I intend to develop over the coming years.
One song, for example, the first on the ‘Ooon Badger’ set of songs above, would probably get me cancelled these says (although I think the song is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously tbh!). But, to be honest, the song after, about living in a perceived Nanny State, shows that I had swallowed some of the kind of right wing opinions on the welfare state, the kind of shared attitudes that would go on to justify the absolute criminal damage the Tories would do to society in the 2010s. It’s uncomfortable to hear passive attitudes that would be weaponised in the forthcoming decade to roll out austerity, for example.
I slotted into the ‘arty oddball’ persona, an acceptable masculine archetype of sorts in the noughties, with beta male meditations on women of interest. Expectations no less problematic than more violently expressed ones, ones that are currently being interrogated as we pathologise and scrutinise our behaviour and the behaviour of others like never before.
The Noughties were like a ghost dance of 20th century icons, wishing our boring semi-detached upbringings would be possessed by dead rock stars of previous decades. I thought I was a star, but I was merely the dust of its aftermath. Yet, this conviction drove me to to create at a rate I could never achieve now. An impulse that resulted in many naive mistakes that I find it hard to retake. But the last thing I want to do is pretend it never happened.
Anyway, for now I’ll leave it there. And leave the YouTube videos up this time!
John B Ledger 