Dessert-island discs

Songs are extremely suited to being put in a meaningful sequence centred on a single idea. It is nigh-on impossible to find a set of songs that would not gain in aesthetic significance merely by virtue of being put on the same album together: The whole will always miraculously outstrip in meaning the sum of its parts. Audiences have been conditioned through centuries of opera and musicals to listen out for a uniting principle in even the most seemingly random of song collections.

When compiling a list of ‘dessert-island discs’ one ought, as indicated by the term, rightly to give no thought to the world at large. However even if the list is not meant for broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s eponymous programme, most of us will keep the world firmly in mind and attempt with a witty and surprising choice of, by turns, wonderfully sensitive and noisily alienating music to demonstrate the profundity of our character. Who can resist impressing even an imaginary audience? Anyone who has ever gone on actually to make a tape or CD of such a compilation will undoubtedly have been struck by the significance of the play-list as a whole. Listening to it years later, one might find the mood of a particular phase of one’s life perfectly captured.

Geeks have been trying to impress girls with mix tapes of their favourite songs for years.

Typically, geeks are weaklings with innate high self-esteem, who go on to develop a tremendous capacity for self-loathing in school: released from the stranglehold of their adoring parents, they are perplexed and offended by the lack of recognition and adoration afforded them in the classroom. The CDs these boys compile for their objects of affection usually attract and repel in equal measure. Their apparent purpose is to impress: the geek wants to show the girl that he understands her. He means to convince her of his sensitivity: what else does he have? However, the fear of being himself misunderstood, compels the geek to pre-empt his inevitable rejection by including music choices which are deliberately repugnant and confusing. When a boy grows up as a geek, he eventually comes to view the crowd’s acceptance as more frightening than his comfortable isolation – and turns self-sabotage into a way of life.

Mix CDs compiled under such, or comparable, circumstances cannot fail to contain a revealing portrait of the compiler and might in some cases succeed in expressing a personal worldview of sorts. Some of the guests (geeks) on Radio 4 certainly appear to be aspiring to nothing less.

The act of compiling such a tape is about as close an approximation of the artistic endeavour as possible without actually being one.

Now that popular music is no longer considered a serious profession, the task of writing songs has fallen to young enthusiasts and hobbyists, geeks, in other words, whose albums, despite the fact that they were written rather than compiled, come out sounding like ill-considered mix CDs: all expressing the same nauseatingly narrow worldview, that of an indignant mummy’s boy, desperate for attention, but too aloof to ask for it in a straightforward manner. Pride married to self-loathing: Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke.

This is the minimal level of ‘concept’ to which most recording artists attain these days, no matter how much they try to distance themselves from the term: an album has a subject, whether they like it or not, and most albums these days end up having the artist’s personal worldview as a subject. This is an artistic cop-out: through an inability to provide an objective concept, the artist is powerless to prevent the art form from putting the artist himself, at the centre of the material.

Today’s self-obsessed artists are more than happy to be at the centre of their own material, and by now audiences are perfectly accustomed to buying albums that give an insight into the artist rather than anything else – like life, for instance, just as a random example.