Salon.com > Andrew Goodwin

The new infidelity

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 20:33:00 +0000

Send me an e-mail
And tell me
I love you.

-- Pet Shop Boys

When I see my girlfriend's name in my inbox these days, I get excited. I anticipate arrangements -- dinner, a movie, a long walk together. I am caressed by her beautiful use of language, stimulated by her rock 'n' roll prose, and delighted by her deft deployment of irony. I keep watch for shared jokes, references to things that are known only by us two. And if I send an erotic message and she responds with a request for me to get charcoal for the barbecue, well, that's sexy, too.

When I reply, I put on my writing hat and do my best to be amusing, clever and real. I am courting her all over again, after four years, and I know perfectly well that the skillful use of language turns her on. When we were first dating, pre-e-mail, on the telephonic apparatus, she used to correct my grammar. "You mean I, not me," she would say, a little harshly. I would often joke, although I am not sure it really was a joke, that I started falling for her when I realized she cared so much about language that she was prepared to jeopardize a perfectly nice phone conversation by arguing about syntax.

Radiohead’s “Kid A”

Wed, 25 Oct 2000 22:00:00 +0000

Andrew Goodwin: The critic Theodor Adorno, dismayed by the possibilities for classical structures in a broken world, once argued that "art of the highest caliber pushes beyond totality towards a state of fragmentation." He wasn't writing about rock music in the 21st century. And he didn't write the liner notes for "Kid A." But his words were, as ever, prescient in the extreme.

Alongside Oasis, Elastica, Pulp and Blur, Radiohead were one of five candidates to head up the so-called British Invasion of the 1990s, and if Blur's Damon Albarn isn't choking on his press cuttings right now, I for one will be surprised. Like Blur, Radiohead took one look at "success" and decided to rewrite the rule book.

Think about it. Elastica? Six years to follow up their debut album, and they come back with ... more of the same. Pulp? The inspiration for a thousand sad bedroom soliloquies have been silent for over two years. Oasis? Their implosion was as ugly as it was predictable. Only Blur and Radiohead have lasted the course; and their tactics, like U2 before them, consisted of following up a brace of smash-hit records with a barrage of dirty, spaced-out noise.