antipopper

Today I had a really weird argument with a friend from work about Blur vs Oasis. He’d just seen the Britpop documentary Live Forever, and made the casual observation that in the interviews, Oasis came off sounding rather clueless, with an overinflated sense of their own historical importance, while Damon Albarn seemed more reasonable, reflexive and real about the past. This rather got my goat, and I started off on an extended rant about smug middle class wankers and the retroactive continuity of false graciousness, with extra added fighty goodness about how I preferred Oasis’ superficial overt racism to the snide, know-better, liberal racism of Blur.

It actually got quite heated, and voices were even raised. I insisted that the “Blur are cleverer than Oasis” discourse was actually a form of class war, and even how this this was connected to Israel’s assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Oh yes. I said the idea that “Blur are smarter and more gracious than Oasis” is a direct reflection of how liberal discourse and the rhetoric of reasonable statesmanship have allowed mass murderers to appear enlightened. I brought up how Shimon Peres rewrote his own history on TV last night, with his all-so-reasonable claims that assassinating Hamas leaders was “counterproductive”, and how this reasonable rhetoric was placed next to footage of crazed Palestinians in the streets of Gaza, calling for Israeli blood. (This despite the fact that Perez himself ordered provocative assassinations of Hamas leaders while he was Israeli Prime Minister, and that under his Labour Party, Israel established more colonial settlements in Palestine than previous governments.)

I ended up pushing my own buttons, I guess.