The Campaign For Real Rock. Edwyn Collins. 1994. Setanta.

 Similar in tone to the Neil Young elegy My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue), Edwyn Collins’ seething harangue begins on a note of sadness. Whereas Young cast his vision of modern inertia across an all-encompassing scope, Collins’ focus is smaller, and he works to reduce his subject even lesser by denunciatory, cathartic means. The sadness, it turns out, was only a hint of smoldering rage. Collins’ target is the rock and roll poseur in his natural habitat, Glastonbury, maybe, or Coachella; Reading or Bonnaroo. Collins’ recitation of his indictment is spellbinding; you’re drawn in by his assurances as a performer, despite them sometimes failing him in his effort to make lyrical points; what the hell is a “Zimmerframe”? The song’s greatest pleasure comes from its most obvious contradiction; Collins neatly tailors his musical backing track to his vocal, seamlessly using FM radio rock song conventions which give the record a tonal impersonality similar to what you hear on, say, Animals-era Pink Floyd. Singing about the effects of capitalist rot from the inside of an industry that fosters it is one of those ironies that major label artists sometimes like to claim independence from even when the temptation to exploit the trappings of class privilege and recording studio budgets looms large. We are never so bourgeois as when we’re activating the “buy” command on a streaming service, thereby preserving the consumerist compulsions we’ve been conditioned since childhood to follow. “You pay for this but they give you that,” Neil Young warned back in 1979, giving voice to what has become, almost half a century later, the shallow reality of our national ambition. Two years before him, Pink Floyd worded it this way, “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.” Outmaneuvering the systemic contradictions that threaten the future of democracy in pursuit of the smaller, comfortable ones that make life bearable used to be known as modern life. Lately it’s become our primary mode of escape from the lethally transmutating airborne virus, and we’re running out of moves.