We were never being boring

Normal is as Normal Does
Every society can be seen as a social experiment, building laws, economies and economic systems. Then we chaos monkeys live in these societies and often follow real or imagined rules and norms, consciously or unconsciously. This produces a mix of comedy and tragedy, depending on your situation and point of view at any given moment. Mostly tragedy at the moment. With some fabulous bursts of unintentional comedy in the mix.

In individual and social terms the word normal relates to any situation or behaviour that is usual, expected, typical or conforms to a pre-existing expectation. Even for an individual we would have to say normal is an average as chaos monkeys can and do act out of character, sometimes in alarming ways.

In statistics we talk of a normal distribution, the bell curve. The most common behaviour is sometimes thought of as the norm. We continue to see that ‘normal’ behaviour can be very strange. Individuals and societies can lose their way and act out strange scripts for bizarre reasons, often unconsciously.

Social conformity can be experienced at home, at work, wherever your life is on show and available for comparison. By you, by others, by society. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs talked about status needs, once we have food, shelter and a few friends to talk to. This conforming and comparing can happen anywhere in society.

Don Draper a.k.a. John Hamm stars in Your Friends and Neighbours. This show has a wonderfully crazy opening montage, set to the track Keeping up with the Jonses. We hear reports that some of the billionaires can have a terrible time if their ranking slips by a position or two. What is it with us chaos monkeys that we play so many status games?

The Selfish Meme
The world is a noisy place. One way to think about how signals break through noise is via the BBC Radio 1 chart show, broadcast on Sunday evenings since 1967. It now has algorithms to allow for streaming, but when life was simpler it was based on the sales of 7” vinyls. Mostly teenagers would spend their limited funds on vinyl and wait for Sunday to hear which song had sold the most, and was therefore the most popular song.

How to Have a Number #1
Bill Drummond, the co-founder of KLF, wrote his book The Manual. His ideas about making a number 1 included:

• Watch Top of the Pops - a.k.a. do your research
• Don’t get tied down with a straight job - a.k.a. make time to focus
• Don’t have too much money - a.k.a. scarcity drives creativity

Bill was being satirical. How to create something middle of the road, normal, that will jump to the top of the charts. The law of unintended consequence is and always has been alive and well. To Bill’s surprise, an Austrian band carefully followed the process rules carefully, and the outcome was Bring Me Edelweiss which reached Number #1 in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland & New Zealand in 1988/9.

Paradoxically this is one of the strangest videos I have ever seen. Jason Roth of NPR described the video as a cleavage soaked Alpine fever dream. So much for tapping into normal.

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"Music is Prophecy”
Jeremy Deller

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As Jeremy Deller has mentioned music often has a predictive function, and we can see Edelweiss pressing many buttons, perhaps inviting involuntary attention by its crude sequence of madcap scenes. These buttons are now pressed repeatedly by social media. Blip. Buzz. Flash. Beep. Watch this. Outrageous. Erotic. Hateful. What are we becoming?

In case anyone is wondering the Biggest Selling Single is White Christmas by Bing Crosby. 50 million sold. Released in 1942. Retained for decades. So that is normal. Apparently.

The Shock of The New
Robert Hughes delivered an 8 part TV series in 1980 about The Shock of The New, and Matt Collings updated the perspective in his wonderful series This is Modern Art.

MTV Launched in 1981, with a perfect Marshall McLuhan The Medium is The Message embedded signal. The first song was Video Killed the Radio Star. Some of the lyrics feel very prescient.

They took the credit for your second symphony Rewritten by machine on new technology And now I understand the problems you could see

The legend Trevor Horn worked on both "Video Killed the Radio Star" and "Pop Muzik" from the Pop Music post. He co-wrote and produced "Video Killed the Radio Star" with the Buggles. He also produced "Pop Muzik" by M.

Trevor said this lyric was inspired by the novel Concrete Island by JG Ballard. In the book there is a vision of the future where record companies would have computers in the basement and manufacture artists. Again speculative fiction is so often on the money, either predictively or by creating some kind of unconscious blueprint that we all follow.

The lyric just put the blame on VCR feels nostalgic as VCR technology is now itself a museum item. So it Goes. And so on and so forth.

Beyond Logic
No attempt to rationalise, but The Pet Shop Boys Being Boring seems to catch the essence of breaking free of convention to live our own lives on our own terms. The title was from a Japanese review that accused the band of being boring.

This review reminded Neil Tennant (the lead singer) of a quotation from Zelda Fitzgerald: she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring which had been on a party invitation he had received. As a teenager in Newcastle, The Pet Shop Boys agreed that they wouldn't settle for boring lives. They now regularly perform in Opera Houses, are style icons, and Big in Japan. So alls well that ends well. Voila, le video:

Thanks for Reading. Your Life. Your Rules. Buy The Ticket. Take The Ride. Follow the Rabbit.

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