never sank into begin with.
rather insignificant, but not up to writing protest songs. I wrote one song after a particularly egregious shooting incident in an American school. I don’t know if it was any good or not. It came out as a B-side. But I was relieved to actually just be churning out whole songs again, because it’s what I know. It’s what I will myself to do.
What about the upside, or the beauty, in our herd behavior? You know, we are sort of herd animals, and there’s some times where that’s a wonderful thing to see—when people are help- ing each other, rather than when it’s 10,000 people in jackboots saluting some power-crazed individual in a stadium—then it’s not so nice. Any totalitarian display of strength is repulsive. But there’s this domino nature that power has, which I think is the most dangerous factor in our makeup, and that’s why the world is still largely run by bullies, rather than by enlightened people. You know, the ‘one rotten apple spoils the barrel’ thing. A couple of thuggy individuals, who are well-armed, can dominate 1,000 people who have no way of defending themselves. Of course, the NRA says, ‘Give everybody a gun.’ Maybe it was good 50,000 years ago for alpha folks to be able to take over the tribe and say, ‘This way up the hill, we’ll slay the weak, and we’ll slay our opponents, and we’ll take the stone tablets,’ but those sorts of people aren’t helpful now.What we need now is a telepathic shoal of people who come together because they sense each other’s needs, and we don’t really have that yet, but I think we need an injection of mild telepathy. Some people are empathic. I’m not particularly, which is why I probably keep banging on about empathy, be- cause I’m a very solipsistic individual…but it seems like whether you could get it from microdosing, or whether you could get it from opening everybody’s third eye…I don’t know. ‘Enlightenment’ beyond the buzzword? I think so. And I think it might have to happen rapidly, actu- ally, like a physical form of evolution. The way that supposed- ly—I’ve never understood this—did reptiles keep jumping to their death off cliffs, and then suddenly grow wings? Did they just suddenly glide? They kept leaping over longer and longer chasms, and then their arms began to grow membrane? Did this happen over hundreds of thousands of years? There must have been a lot of lizards with vestigial wings, you know? And what happens at that half way point of the leap… You know, we’ve reached a point where we need a drastic evolutionary leap. And it’s possible that the iPhone will provide that when we start to merge with it, but you know, far be it for me to be a prophet of the phone. It’s just really interesting that Artificial Intelligence is coming up at the same time as we re- alize that we’ve set forces loose that we can’t control, and we’re making our planet uninhabitable. Are you prepared for Artificial Intelligence? There’s a thin line between hope and denial. Personally, I can’t wait to become a songwriting app in a second-generation i-droid. Everything I wrote will be subsumed into the cultural bloodstream of the world, even if there’s no blood involved. Regarding adaptation and uptake, would you agree that things that take longer to absorb, or settle in, are arguably easier to process? Is that like a storm you can see far away in the distance, versus a flash flood? Well, it’s harder to deal with sudden shocks. I’ve delivered and occasionally received some awful news regarding love. To your point, the human heart can turn like a weather vane in our psychic storms. Nothing and nobody is safe from the deluge of emotions once the downpour begins. But love is a resilient flame that can rekindle endlessly, given enough oxygen. If ro- bots mimic us properly, they, too, will learn to love… And one must ask: is the robot us or did we find our way to the robot? It’s a bit like the sub-personalities on SHUFFLE- MANIA! … They might have just come to me.You know, you never know what comes out of you and what’s coming into you, I suppose. That’s the story so far.
That’s your fluency. Yeah, it is my fluency and my currency.
And how about touring? Are you noticing a marked difference in reception to live shows than you were before shutdown? I think people who make it to shows absolutely love it, and I re- ally appreciate it. I was traveling insanely before I was stopped. So it was quite something to be catapulted back the opposite direction and told, ‘Well, you know what, you’re not going to cross the street for three months. And if somebody comes run- ning past the house, you’re going to go in, you’re not going to stand on your balcony with a cup of tea.’ And it shows how fast we can adapt. Is that herd mentality? The kind of speed with which that adaptation can occur? I think it’s human nature and maybe herd mentality, but during the pandemic, we were not—at least physically—part of the herd. I mean, we were all connected to the outside world in a way more than ever, because everybody was on the net the whole time, talking to people who weren’t there. So it accel- erated our dependence on the internet. And also our corre- sponding inability to relate to people who are actually in front of you, because there wasn’t anyone in front of you. But I think it’s adaptability—a human adaptability. And it means we can probably adjust to other things. Unless they’re too extreme for us to do it physically. How do you mean? If everybody had to live underground for 20 years, well, you’d have to have a lot of underground dwellings prepared for that to happen, or you’d have to have the time to prepare them. But perhaps it means if there is a gradual rise in water level, rather than a sudden, apocalyptic, ‘Okay, the seven meters as proph- esied is happening tonight’… if it was to come slower rather than fast, if it was more like Waterworld or something, then we probably will be able to adjust to it: ‘That was the time before the stilt houses. That was the time before houses floated, we still got footage of all those cities, which are now underwater.’ Where is the learning curve? There’s limits to our adaptability. If things change too fast via all that the conventionally anticipated apocalyptic means, then it wouldn’t be so good.You know, I don’t think we would do too well after any kind of even vaguely large-scale nuclear war, and I don’t think we’d survive a big tsunami. You know, will we sur- vive artificial intelligence knocking us off the number one spot? Will we survive the inevitable merger with our phones, which is going to have to happen, because if you lose your phone, you cease to exist. There’s an awful lot of, like I said before—putting it politely—‘deadlines’ coming up. Where do you see example of resistance to adaptation? Definitely in the division between town and country, you know? But you know, a sort of understanding of multiculturalism, and LGBT, all that stuff, the developments that have happened in the sexual and gender world in the last 60 years… legalizing abortion, just where it all moved. Civil rights, all of that, moved too fast for a lot of people. And there have been lots of count- er-attacks ever since. You know, that was Margaret Thatcher and Reagan in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. And, you know, the blue meanies 1 keep coming back. That’s a really insightful remark on the speed of uptake, you know? So, in a way, maybe those things
1 The Blue Meanies are a fictional army of fierce though buffoonish music-hating beings and the main antagonists in the surreal 1968 Beatles animated film Yellow Sub- marine . They allegorically represent all the bad people in the world.
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