19 June

By far the biggest billing at this launch of the Obama Centre is musos. It’s a big gig. Like all countercultural political movements, it’s just another leftover Woodstock movement. Not only is modern popular music just the same political games as war and energy and gender and everything else, who you actually *like* is also mostly determined by status games. The thing we swear is ‘purely subjective’, our own personal tastes, in music or in anything, are part of the same status games. Absolutely obvious in things like clothes/fashion, we just hold music so dear because it’s right at the core of modern status and identity. Thus the violent opposition to the idea it’s not subjective at all. It’s our most invisible status bedrock. Like water is to fish.