ON BEING A CONTRARIAN

I’ve always been a contrarian. It’s not a conscious choice, I’m not being deliberately elitist when I go against the masses, although I’ll admit that I do sometimes enjoy standing aloof and turning my nose up at those who go for the Lowest Common Denominator.

In the 90s I started to grow a beard, a nice goatee type, described rather charmingly by a Japanese acquaintance as a ‘circle beard.’ At that time absolutely nobody had one. I was a trailblazer! Then, fast forward a couple of decades, and suddenly everyone and their grandmother has some kind of hairy facial decoration.

Now, those of you who know me might say, “but Andy, you, as a self-proclaimed contrarian are leaving yourself open to charges of rank hypocracy as you are still sporting a beard - shouldn’t you be setting a razor to that mangy-looking thing?” Well, I would if I could, because heaven knows I don’t want to be seen as a bandwagoneer, when it was actually me who was streets ahead of the lumpenproletariat in the first place. But, damn it, I have a skin allergy, and any attempt to eradicate the fuzz with a shaver just results in excoriation and suppurating boils, so I’m stuck with it.

Even among cultural niches of unorthodoxy I manage to find myself…unorthodox. A case in point would be music. Most folks who like The Fall opine, in a sickening Orwellian lockstep, that the best album is “Hex Enduction Hour.” I say bollocks. It’s clearly “Grotesque.” People go doolally over the track “Eat Y’Self Fitter” on 1983’s “Perverted by Language,” a track which apparently made DJ John Peel faint the first time he heard it. Me, I hate it! It’s shite!! Six and a half minutes of a two-note riff that a child could have written. Pah!! The best song from that album by far is “Garden,” and of course I’m the only one who thinks this.

American punk / alt rock - I’m a huge fan of your Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Flipper, Minutemen and a bit later Nirvana…..but those who adhere to the Holy Canon all sycophantically swoon over two bands in particular, Sonic Youth and The Pixies, who I find to be utter crap. The mIndless experimental tuning bollocks of the first and the squeaky histrionics of the second leave me cold.

Books too! Everyone’s favourite Brontë novel is always ‘Wuthering Heights” Guess which is the only one I don’t like? Yep. Modern literature: Haruki Murakami? Fuck off! (I’ll be writing a post about this fellow in due course…)

I could go on, but you get the point.

It can all get a bit draining at times, but somebody has to do it. Somebody has to stand up and cast their critical eye over the flood of received wisdom and platitudinous drivel we are all drowning in.

[I should note here that my wife has an alternate term to denote my stance: according to her, I’m just a grumpy old man.]