AFTER THE GOLD RUSH
I work in audio now.
In part because it’s the last frontier of a certain kind of creativity. In part because there’s a gold rush on, don’t you know. I have managed to be too late for the last five gold rushes, so I am determined not to miss this one.
We hear a lot from the late-millennials: who constantly claim that their future was cancelled before it began — by the crash and the tuition fees and the housing squeeze.
But I am of a slightly different set. I am of the geriatric millennial generation that was at least allowed to spend a couple of years getting a good look at the old economy, before the hammer came down. Like Moses leering across the Jordan river at the promised land, it was all the crueller to see it, then see it evaporate.
Indeed, I am of the unique micro-generation where some of us trooped off straight from school to get an ‘MCSE’, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer qualification, that at a certain point in the early 2000s seemed to guarantee an obscenely well-paid, obscenely easy, entry-level job in them-thar computers. Oh, the endless folk tales of 19 year old South Africans landing in Southfields, being scooped into the bosom of the British economy, suckled on the stoinking sum of two hundred pounds a day.
I remember the era in the life of NME, just before The Crash, when there was still a decent expenses policy. Every year, Al Stonehouse would take a tent to Glastonbury, having expensed it. And every year, having expensed it, rather than unpeg it and drag it home, Al Stonehouse would simply leave it in a sodden field, before expensing the next one, a year later. The system worked.
Until it didn’t. The Crash skittled all that. Suddenly, you were being nickled and dimed everywhere. Browsing my inbox a few weeks back, I came across an old email from Mudhoney’s PR, rejecting an expense claim for a single hamburger, after I’d travelled up to Manchester to see them. By then, the always thin veneer that you were a ‘professional’ was over. You were the literary equivalent of the DPG guy. Just leave it in the shed.
Around the same time, sensing how nigh the end was, I went for a job interview at a company that did futurology. Trend forecasting. The stuff ad agencies pay big money for. “Our cool-hunting scientists have isolated the new variant of hot sauce that will be all over Homerton by summer of 2014” sort of thing.
The main guy there was a former journalist who’d got wise and migrated into proper jobs. As he consoled me for being completely unfit for the role, he began to tell a long and misty tale about how, once, journalism had been a land of plenty. In the 90s, his mate had been on a retainer at the Evening Standard. A hundred thou’ a year, he said. And that was just the retainer — he was still free to take other commissions as topup. Things just weren’t the same, he told me. So I was well within my rights to come begging for jobs I couldn’t get in industries I probably held nothing but cold contempt for.
The music biz was full of similar stories — of how once people would burn on a single video amounts that now constitute the entirety of record deals. One reason the 2010s were marked by their lo-fi aesthetics is simply that lo fi was all there was left.
Now, we’re about to enter a downturn beyond the last downturn, which was itself a downturn to end all downturns. The public imagination has only vaguely caught up with where we’re headed.
The ritual sacrifice of Elizabeth Truss was one early marker of quite how much blood must soon be let: why not blame a crisis fifteen years and a £400 billion debt overhang in the making on one hapless deer in headlights?
The only question is whether we have a hard landing or a slow one: whether the economy blows its brains out, or if it continues to blow them in. One route involves endless slow strangulation. The other at least holds the promise of an endpoint - but first, a reckoning.
Nothing is ever quite as bad as tuning into the Today Programme for twenty minutes would have you believe. People get by. They change jobs, they freelance more, they make do and mend.
But once again, the world is about to get thinner, and more stretched. We used to have cliff-faces of unemployment. Suddenly, a thousand Sheffield steelworkers would be on the dole. Suddenly, the pit gates of Derbyshire’s collieries would be padlocked. Even in the 90s, downsizing meant whole divisions gathering their things in cardboard boxes while someone who’d been nicknamed ‘The Hatchet’ addressed them on video link from Boston.
In the 2020s, mass industry is much less prominent. The sheer fluidity of the labour markets means that conditions get trimmed, pay frozen, quotas upped, hiring freezes held, overwork, stretching, rot. Everyone takes a haircut. Inflation does the rest. If pain is to come, this may even be the more civil way to inflict it.
But it also accounts for how the modern world feels, a feeling that is only starting to be articulated by policy thinkers on middle class shrinkage. It feels like the bedclothes are too small to cover head and legs. Like the whole country is creeping around in the Primark version of a Topshop coat. Like someone has been watering down the vodka. It’s unplaceable, but unmissable. A mode that stays the full-frontal revolution, but leads to the kind of restless unpredictable groundswell we’ve seen in recent years. Call it Brexit, Corbyn, Podemos, Meloni, Le Pen. Out of sight, another cloud is swelling, drifting to who knows where, getting ready to burst.
THE POPSICLE
A man who based his whole persona on a gigachad meme has been rescued after attempting to climb Mont Blanc, unaided, no crampons, only a tracksuit to cover his bulging latissimus dorsi.
Feda Hussein, 26, an aeronautical engineering graduate from Portsmouth, was close to death when he was rescued by helicopter from the Italian flank of the mountain.
Hussein’s core temperature was 25 degrees. Ten degrees lower than the threshold for hypothermia. Yet still five degrees higher than the serving temperature of a good merlot.
Now, the mayor of the town that sent the rescue party is now pondering whether to send him the €1500 bill.
The unprepared taking on the unwise is a wonderful hardy perennial of news. Bozos in bathtub boats suddenly unable to see the shoreline. Dickheads in Death Valley with only a litre of Valpré. Japanese tourists plotting a nighttime stroll through Compton. These are modern folk tales. They are the grasshoppers, not the ants. Hansels, not the gingerbread-housed.
If you look at the elements of story structure, it’s generally presented as a kind of hero’s journey. Hero goes out into the world, battles dragon, comes back with treasure. Campfire-centred tribe is improved by treasure, and more so by information on how to defeat dragons. Somewhere, in the vestigial cortex of our half-animal past, we’re all taking notes — and that’s what makes storytelling so vivid to us.
But another version is: hero goes out into the world, wearing baked bean cans for armour, launches headlong charge at dragon, is flambéed. Also great info to spread beside the campfire. Also tickling to the reptile-mind. Just doesn’t make for such good Jerry Bruckheimer films.
THE STAR GOAT COMETH
One of my favourite metaphors in the Hitchhikers Guide books is where a humanoid planet, the Golafrinchans, makes up a fake emergency, in order to shift the useless third of their workforce — to wit, ‘hairdressers, florists, marketers and telephone sanitisers’, to a new planet.
This, they calculate, will result in vast efficiency savings back on Golafrincham. So they tell this ‘middlemen’ class that "the entire planet was in imminent danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star goat”, and ship them off on a starship to nowhere.
Last week, Suella Braverman vetoed attempts by the Truss administration to secure visas for foreign ‘hairdressers, florists, and town planners’.
We are the duff planet. Come, friendly star goat, and fall on us now. Get us ready for the plough.