Differences..

At some point you just have to accept that all you can do is your best to resist, rebel and royally fuck-up every social convention you can.

Just because everyone does something one way does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that you should too.

Some people seem acutely aware of this. These norms become so routinized, so integral, so fundamental to our sense of 'being' that they become meaningless. The utter irrational nature of lots of aspects leads to the never-ceasing questioning of it.

Maybe that is how I got into sociology in such a big way. Or why I can't help but listen to multiplicity of music genres. Or why I don't get on with groups on people, where the need to conform is ever more pressing. Or why I love my mental, swearing, manically happy, innuendo driven mother past the natural maternal bond. Or why I will only ever wear odd earrings.

It could go some way to explaining these things. But what is still left is the question of why others so willfully make their lives as awkward as possible to simply adhere, stay in line, never be more than all of the values and norms that have overhung them from before they existed and will go on to do so after their death.

Some form of behaviourial anarchism, and the like, isn't just protesting, forming social movements that ultimately still conform to social rules, demanding miniuti changes within the same framework, complaining about neo-capitalist rule (yet, God knows, I do), this just isn't enough, or even where to begin. Be honest and shock someone with a heart-on-the-sleeve tale of a past life event, don't feel obliged to buy a house because your parents did, be nocturnal, snub over-done and boring cultural forms, extend your knowledge and be creative. Be difficult, contensious, brutally honest, absolutely perfectly polite, live as a contradiction, be multi-faceted.

And do it all to a song, album or soundtrack to a new lifestyle.

But please, tell me what it is that you are listening to, yea?

Billion Dollar DJ's

A brilliant idea. Take songs that have only been made available so far as downloads through MySpace. That way you'll mash up a lot of 'unknowns'. Call it The MySpace Mix.

The Billion Dollar DJ's have created something wholly unique and actually really bloody enjoyable. Including the eclectic sounds of Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya, Blamma! Blamma!, The Twelves and Glass Candy, all of which are experiencing much love and hype from the blogsphere.

This mix will throw you up against the wall and love you.. hard.

Billion Dollar DJ's - The MySpace Mix [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

Tell them yourself how much you enjoy this party-incuding mix by adding them on:

MySpace.

AND

The lovely, clean-cut and stylish Virb.

Das Pop

Really. Just really. How great are Das Pop? There must be a parallel universe that my brain has been inhabiting for me to have only recently come across this wonderful Belgian electro-pop band. Thrashing in parts and subtle in others. They'll make you fall in love even on the bleakest of days in the grimmest of times.

And what will you fall in love with? Other than Das Pop themselves? Well, the way Tired makes you feel, bloody, God-damn everything!

Here is my very favoured SebastiAn remix of a track of theirs.

Das Pop - Fool For Love (SebastiAn remix) [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

Another BA Hons degree after this one? I must be mad.

That sinking feeling..

I drink too much coffee. I don't exercise enough. I'm never nice to anyone. I don't do enough reading for my course, no matter how much I do. And I have neglected Pop Cultureddd. I apologise.

So yesterday I did the 'spend Sunday working as a retail slave in Teesside and then carry heavy bags of books back down to York' thing. And the journey always taking three times as long, as Sunday apparently means that the world goes into shutdown, I managed to fill my swirly brain with the glorious sounds of Alfie, Radiohead and Belle & Sebastian. All of which made me very happy indeed.

I woke up feeling obliged to share this.

Belle & Sebastian - The Stars of Track and Field [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

A little something combat that feeling a lot of us feel on a Monday morning.

Spektrum

Spektrum - Don't Be Shy

I hadn't heard this in ages.

And its just made my morning.

Now The Boy is rummaging through CD's.

Tuesday morning party?

Spektrum's MySpace.

Camera Obscura

A great chasm in my chest. A hole. It has always been a joke I have a heart of stone and that my blood runs black, not scarlet red. I've never had the best opinion on humanity. Great heaving, categories, swarms of people. The faceless mass. But I very definately build great friendships and relationships with individuals regardless of anything to do with them and their value systems. Some people find this weird, others find it weird and wonderful. And once I found someone who understood this, innately, never discussed, just known.

Camera Obscura have written the sounds, not lyrics, that parallel some of my feelings of regret, guilt, loss and mania in a tiny part. Lots of wide ranging music does this to me.

God knows why.

This is divine.

Camera Obscura - Razzle Dazzle Rose [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

A ghostly white pale, dark flowing haired girl, spinning delicately watching the hem of her floral-print dress pucker and lift.

My Architects

Once upon a time, My Architects supported some band that I don't care to remember, at Empire in Middlesbrough a long while ago. So capitivated was I that I bought their CD from the merchandise stand.

Not expecting much I was blown away and for the flowing three months it resided in my CD player whilst everything else changed in its natural progressive way. Their tracks kept finding their way onto my monthly compilation CD's.

And this track has such a beautiful resonance that will sweep everything from your mind and fill it with the gorgeous echoes of a voice and band that really should probably have a little more credit sent their way.

My Architects - Under The Pines [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

They've got some new stuff floating around too that I've been a bit too preoccupied to give a proper listen to, but it is on my musical agenda.

Poverty and wealth.

Right now I seem to have plunged into the literature on wealth, poverty, deprivation, social exclusion, materialism, consumerism and acquisition.

Last week I wrote a 5,000 word essay on why the wealthy and their wealth should be of interest to sociologists. As much as you'd assume that it would be of interest the focus appeared to be on the relative poverty stricken that an idiotic distribution of income and wealth generate. Every book I'd find that had even a section on the wealthy were concerned on the deprived and poor.

I became fairly annoyed at this. I realised the importance of the marginalisation that comes with concentrated wealth. But could no one do more than a bit of conjecture in the form of the Sunday Times Rich List. They just have to make guesses at the sheer total of someones wealth. Why is it so difficult to study the rich and calculate their wealth? Because they don't want it declared. They don't want to be studied. Keep the focus off the top spot. Scapegoat those at the bottom of the social hierarchy for all of the problems in society.

Visit the tax evasion section of the HM Revenue and Customs website and you do not see a man in a suit talking to his financial advisor discussing the best ways to moving his money off-shore to avoid being taxed the millions that could be poured back into society. No, not at all. You see a manual labourer by a cement mixer who is probably doing a bit of cheeky cash-in-hand work whilst claiming welfare support and cheating the system out of about £30 a week.

I'm beginning to sound polemic.

Maybe this is the true nature of the wealthy. The ability to evade the spotlight. Shift the blame. Control the paths and messages of ideological propositions through mainstream media. People will eat it up. God knows no one is going to read dry literature that indicates that a policy shift should be adopted by the government. Not many people are going to have the access needed to realise what it is that blights their lives and leads them to be never-satiated, unfulfilled and constantly wanting. The consumer dream.

Golly gosh. The bureaucratic fuck-up's that are the Student Loans company are certainly holding back my consumer dream. Even to have the means to acquire a nutritious meal is beyond the realms of capability. Could that ever be an issue for someone with more wealth than descernable interesting personality traits? Possibly if one's gourmet meal was sent back for containing processed food-stuffs.

But I'll go to my under-paid and measely 4 hour contract job to be able to buy some pretty trainers, or cute band merchandise, or splash out on a takeaway one night. Why? The consumer dream, but of course.

And I don't half hate myself for it. I'm a product of the society I was born into. I can see that and for all the companies I boycott and refrain from doing business with I'll question it all for a pretty neckscarf.

This makes no sense. I apologise for even posting it. It started well enough. But its hard when someone is screaming "STEEEEEPH!" in your ear. I hope no one managed to get this far reading this.

I may edit/delete this.

One too many expletives..

Awkward return. Hardly the triumphant, buoyant feeling I had envisaged. But -- shrugs -- there you go.

After a rather horrible summer and the loss, my University work had been left in tatters. I was kindly granted an extension due to my circumstances and on Friday afternoon I finished.

The feeling is of, well, I don't know. But it hasn't been the rollicking great celebration part of my mind was demanding it be.

Anyway, to get myself back into the swing of things is this glorious Pop Cultureddd neck of the woods, here is a track that really cheered me up when I was on me knees begging for literature on wealth.

Elbow - Mexican Standoff (Spanish Version) [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

Clapping to it is fun.

Anyone any ideas for how I can celebrate? And, how I can stop swearing so much?

If the link doesn't work please let me know. I've got a feeling. YouSendIt was being gay this morning.

Sleep deprivation and coffee induced hysteria..

I am beginning to lose ability to process the world around me. Unless it is written on a sheet of paper and contains the words "relgious ethic of salvation", "cultural sphere" or "Weber set out clearly.." then my brain is refusing to deal with it.

I'm starting to get ill.

But this made me happy.

Kylie - X Mix Album Sampler [via YouSendIt for 7 days]

And, yes, it has come to this. I am in fact the last person on the face of the earth to have heard it.

I need some T.L.C.