Black Sky Thinking: What We (Don't) Need is an Alternative Oldster | The Quietus

Black Sky Thinking: What We (Don’t) Need is an Alternative Oldster

Kill all the baby-boomer music journalists. Line them up on the edges of mass graves (that they’ve been forced to dig themselves by AK 47 toting tweens wearing black pajama bottoms and sandals made out of old tires, and Los Campesinos! T-shirts) and then neck-shoot the moldering, old, in-the-fucking-

way, saw-the-fucking Clash-at-Victoria-fucking-Park-in-1977 fucking geriatric bastards. And then send their weeping mothers the bill for the bullets.

That, in a nutshell is the radical plan to reform music journalism proposed by 25-year-old gunslinger Dom Passantino in a blistering attack on the generation of festering music-writer zombies that the snarling young turk says are cluttering up the music journalism landscape with their annoying Werthers Original sucking noises and their constant tedious fucking non-stop muttering about how it all used to be Fields of the Nephilim around here when back they were lads.

Dom Passantino in action

Passantino is part of a new exciting wave of fresh young writers who argue – with some justification – that they are being smothered by a festering, piss-reeking, wrinkled-flesh blanket of old cunts who, if they had even a shred of self-respect, would just fuck off and die and leave the dance floor to the juves.

Dom Passantino and his fellow oldsterphobes are calling for a new year zero – A Dom’s-day if you will. And the date they have chosen isn’t 1977 (oh will you shut the fuck up about punk fucking rock you boring old tart) or even 9-11 (which yet another generation of-used-to-be-radical old farts like Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and Dennis Miller have chosen as the-day-that-changed-everything).

No, the new year zero – says Passantio – is 1997. Why? Because that was the day Britpop died (at fucking last) and paved the way for the seminal (in the literal sense of that word) album of the fucking millennia, the record that made Lemmy out of Motorhead say: "That’s it, I retire": Belle and Sebastian’s epic, epoch molesting, planet shattering, cosmos birthing, atomic thunderclap of a stone cold rockin’ classic Chicks, Drugs and Harleys – Bring it the Fuck On.

Passantino’s logic is impeccable. Why are all these old cunts with their Weller haircuts and coke-guts and eyeglasses and badly-fitted dentures that make a really creepy clacking noise still fucking writing? Why aren’t they fertilizer? Why aren’t they literally pushing up the daisies – daisies being an artful metaphor for a fresh, young, exciting, new crop of writers who don’t secretly do the baggy-trouser skank to Madness’ Greatest Hits when they get home to their disgustingly pokey piss-and-cats reeking old people’s flats after a hard day’s kicking the shit out of Los Campesinos! for an audience of similarly senile old punk cunts who should just fucking die of cancer or AIDS or Alzheimer’s or some other fuckin disgusting old peoples fucking disease or ah who gives a shit just die you old cunts just DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE.

But does he go far enough? I have argued for a long time for the state-subsidised mass-murder of all music journalists over 25-years-old. True we’d lose some cracking writers and cause a lot of human misery and suffering, but on the plus side we’d live in a universe where Q didn’t exist.

And when I say "we", of course, I mean you. Because I’d be dead.

Frankly I think it’s the only way to shut me the fuck up. I mean who gives a fuck what I think anyway? I certainly don’t.

And next year I’d be joined by Dom Passantino. Can I request now that we be buried together, intertwined like Ancient Greek warrior lovers, thus causing the alien robot squid archeologists in the year 4012 to scratch their throbbing giant computer-brain-cages with their super-advanced semi-liquid-space-metal tentacles as they wonder how these two obviously brutally murdered men – one old and the other, like, rilly rilly rilly old – were intertwined in life as they are in death?

Or even better, every year open that grave up and sling in the next generation of 25-year-old, past-their-fucking-pontificate-date music hacks so that when the Angel Gabriel blows his horn to signal the dead to rise on the day of judgment, this huge interlocked mass of creaking hack bones will rise from the grave like some enormous skeletal super zombie which will then engage is a mass fuck-in-a boney post-mortem sex and drugs and tediously over-told fucking anecdotes fucking orgy where slime encrusted femurs rasp chitinously into flyblown sockets and worm-gnawed fists are rammed repeatedly into crumbling pelvic girdles. Oh fuck me I’ve just come all over the fucking keyboard. But it was worth it.

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