Believe it or not, I was planning to hit “publish” early this week on a post entitled ‘Collective Deathblog’, rounding up thoughts on the passing of several noteworthy musicians over the past few weeks. Needless to say, following certain tangentially music-related events this weekend, that title now hardly seems prudent.

To give the elephant in the room a good kicking then –

Whilst I am painfully aware that the events that put a damper on most of our weekends are directly comparable to those that currently hit a number of nations in the Middle East on a semi-regular (or indeed actually, definitely regular) basis (usually directly or indirectly supported by one or more Western or Eastern power blocs, and almost never accompanied harrowing eye witness accounts in Western media), it nonetheless hurts like a blow to the stomach to see such violence perpetrated within, I hate to say it, ‘our’ world - within a context that’s familiar to any of us who have spent time attending big-ticket gigs in capital cities.

As a friend pointed out to me on Saturday, we might not know anyone who likes The Eagles of Death Metal enough to go and see them in Paris, but, as people who have ended up drawing the majority of our peer group from among fellow music fans, how far do we need to go through degrees of separation before we find someone who does, or maybe did?

Complacent and over-protected as we – ahem - ‘young people’ on this side of the world generally are, the uneasiness and hollow-stomach feeling prompted by running such thoughts through our heads is not welcome, and the idea that said feeling may eventually become a pretty common one as the now-officially-noticeable slide toward global chaos continues is something I find very difficult to face.

There may be everything left to say, but there’s also nothing to say. Having no desire to add to the mountain of disposable chitter-chatter any more than I already have done, let’s just say that we here at Stereo Sanctity second the words of Simon HB at XRRF for rhetoric, and refer readers to Jeremy Allen’s piece at The Quietus for purposes of sobering personal context.

The post I was originally going to write today will hopefully be up soon.

Labels: bad news, politics