lightning visit by Simon Aulman

In 2039 thousands of people will fill chatboxes and letters to the Wire and Hornby-esque Mojo drivels with how they scoured BC every day for the new exciting music - but they'll all be lying - there's never more than 4 doing it - really deeply - like the ones who tell you they were into Can in the 1960s, they lie too - but I was one who really did it, it is nothing special, it's just as sad a displacement activity as reading the online newspapers and comments and Twittering - so I was doing it over the winter and it came quite easy and so I restarted my blog and it got harder and at the end of three weeks in March I wasn't finding anything.

The net has taught me humility, but I am going to ditch it for now - I'm going to arrogantly assume that my feelings/experiences are shared by lots of other people. I've been broken - my love of music has almost died. It took seven years on the internet. This is the itch. During one whole day I must've sampled several thousand albums and couldn't find one to enthuse about - or even feel it was worth pretending to feel any kind of enthusiasm.

People would know I was lying. They always do - even when they pretend to share your enthusiasm. It's what's kept all the dead scenes alive for a hundred years. You know how everyone claims to share that feeling of not being part of the party - of walking into the crowded room and not knowing anyone and not being able to break into any of the happy conversations. I always gravitate towards the other person alone in the room.

Except there usually isn't anyone. There never is. People claim to be striking out alone - whether socially or on BC - but almost everyone compromises enough to fit in with the others who compromise. I'm not claiming to be a hard strong-willed independent individualist. I'm not. I'm very weak - a serious non-confrontationalist who always agrees with whoever I'm with. Anything for the quiet life.

But I don't have the strength of character to remember what music I'm pretending to like - to remember any of the theories I've built up. Instead it's just like-it or not-like-it. And at the moment I don't like any of it. Very little after 1980, and almost nothing after 1995. And if someone tells me that they like something new I can never believe them. Not really. But "liking music" is cool. I remember on Desert Island Discs decades ago Auberon Waugh said that he didn't like music. And then he proved it by choosing something by Mozart and I shall prove it by making noise and other lazy kinds of wank. The reason there've never been more than about four of us who are prepared to mooch round BC sampling hundreds and hundred of albums by complete unknowns every day is that there are only about four (now three) people on the planet who don't share these usually-hidden feelings.