Kindle Notes & Highlights
After all, what was there left to say that hadn’t already been said, and where had it got us?
Keep it simple, play with conviction, make sure you are in tune and let the technicalities present themselves in the glorious overtones that only ever ask that you get out of the fucking way a little bit.
‘Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.’ This seems to be a phrase that people have taken to heart regarding Spacemen 3. It is fairly shocking, I suppose, and it certainly was at that point in the eighties when the overwhelming message being beamed at us loud and clear from every billboard and public information broadcast was: ‘Just say no.’ Just say no.
It was like saying, ‘Just accept life is shit and get on with it’ ‒ at least for those us with the fever to change our minds and no idea how to do it any other way. Just say no. I love the ‘just’ in that phrase. ‘Just say no,’ like it was the easiest thing in the world. Although ‘just’ saying no might have been an ideal, we were living in a far from ideal world.
Making your natural opponents illegal was an effective way to make life difficult for them.
We were too far into defeat to even dream of any resistance beyond keeping ourselves entertained. It wasn’t ambitious. It was survival. At times it was a very self-destructive form of mental self-defence and, like many survival strategies, it eventually became a problem in itself after it had outlived its usefulness.
‘don’t ever change’, ‘stay with me for ever’ … there is a longing for something even as it slips away. Perhaps especially as it slips away. That junkie’s longing to stay high. A desire for things to remain as they are and to never change. To never come down. Life isn’t like that, but some things are constant, and if we can only remember what they are, then maybe we can find some of that security that we feel we lack and search for in all the wrong places. In money, in drugs, in other people’s opinions. In our fear.
listening to ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ and it sounds like everything which nobody ever told you was true and beautiful in life.
They say that craziness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the outcome to be different,
