A Song from a Band You Hate (30 Days of Music)

AqualungJethro Tull

I’m not really sure about this one, to be honest, but it’s taken long enough for me to get around to writing anything for this category, so here goes. Can you really withstand six minutes plus of this?

“Sitting on a park bench….I don’t know the words, except park bench!” Jack Donaghey, 30 Rock

There’s something traditional about rebelling against the culture of your parents. Whilst this isn’t true in every aspect of my experience, it certainly hits the spot here. I was born in the eighties. It’s generally accepted to hate pretty much everything from the eighties now, whilst the seventies remains, it seems to me, culturally dominant (to be fair, in the nineties, the sixties held sway, so I’m sure this is a consistent time lag thing).

Mainstream nostalgia and notions of ‘golden ages’ of childhood all seem to hark back to the seventies. Things like ‘the future we were promised’ of jetpacks and so on, all seem to be couched in the brown/orange haze of the seventies. But this never rings true with me. Because I’m not from the seventies. So all those people claiming things were much better then, or trying to ‘connect’ with me through seventies iconography – no thank you.

One of the rough parts of going to watch football regularly, is seeing the makeup of the crowd – mostly late-middle-aged men, again, nostalgic for the ‘better times’ of hooliganism and so on. As a kid, my brother, my dad and I used to hitch a lift with one of my dad’s friends-through-work. And on more than one occasion, in their frankly ridiculous Bentley with shag-pile carpet, they’d force us to listen to Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album.

For me, it’s symbolic of indulgent, and frankly, boring, rock music. It has that false-folk-mystical lyrical style, which now seems creepy. It goes on and on, never progressing. To be fair, it’s probably wrong to say I hate the band, not being overly familiar with their work, but then this is more about that style. It means nothing to me, and it reeks of nostalgia, and an imposition of one generation’s culture on another. Give me some KLF or Coldcut any day.

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