PROLOGUE
'I know, or I dream, that pop music can search out limits, mock restrictions and divisions, exorcise cultural nightmares, contribute to revitalisation of people's thinking, disturb and inspire if only through its unstable mobility, its readiness to pursue apparently irrelevant links and private associations.' Paul Morley
Launched in 2012, initially as a form of therapy following the death of my soldier son in Afghanistan, Green Inc is a website dedicated to astute, informal writing about the brilliant, madly spinning globe of music culture past, present and near future. Not that I have any particularly innovative ideas, theories or theses to impart. After all, I’m just a slightly irregular, curious chap who knows what he likes and knows what he doesn’t.
I guess the seed for Green Inc was really sown some years before 2012, when, as comfortable as it was, my life had slowed to a crawl. With my half-century fast approaching, and having invested a lifetime in live shows, records, cassettes, CDs and iTunes playlists, I began to question my long-standing commitment to the power of music and its place in my future, if indeed it had one. As James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem so eloquently put it, I was ‘losing my edge’.
As recently as the nineties, popular music had been the mainstay of modern culture, a medium so powerful it could define, devour and emblemise it while also sparking debates, changing attitudes, starting revolutions and stopping wars, at least so it narcissistically believed. And yet, in the face of an ever expanding abundance of 21st century leisure options, that influence gradually faded. Sure the big selling artists would continue to sell to those whose idea of a record shop was their local branch of Tesco’s. And clearly there was never going to be a shortage of willing boys and girls raking through the dying embers seeking their own post box to the world. But offering little more than a comfy kind of reassurance and standing for nothing but itself, the pretence of music as a force for change was well and truly over.
Of course, in the cracks between the generations, hidden deep within the racism and the sexism, the haves and the have-nots, there was still the odd voice of dissent, but they were being almost completely overwhelmed by a tidal wave of greed, intolerance and corruption. Even the tiny amount of politically engaged, meaningful music I did manage to find tended to sound horribly irrelevant and indulgent, lost and lonely in the vast retail park of consumerism.
Determined to rediscover the potentially life changing alchemy that had inspired my adolescent voyage of musical discovery in the early seventies, I began to document my own, very personal set of influences and musical insights; an alternative aesthetic that refuses to apologise for not being old enough to like The Beatles, Dylan, the sixties and a trad rock culture that continues to ignore huge swathes of black, electronic and cutting edge music. In so doing, not only did I seek out and listen to music both old and new, I also restored my own faith and reignited a literary spark I thought I’d lost. I even formed a ridiculous, pretentious plan to compile my own history of modern music culture, La Historia De La Musica, for my children, their children and all future children. I was gonna do it for the kids man!
Not surprisingly, I’ve moved on quite a bit since then. These days I write about whatever takes my fancy at any given moment, although I always have a couple of bigger projects on the go, the most prominent being The Core Curriculum and my more recent Soundtrack For The Decades series documenting over fifty years of songs that have informed every part of my life no matter how randomly. Scrapbooks of memories, opinions and reviews, the experiences, songs and albums I write about have left an indelible imprint, shaping and scarring me in ways I would never have believed possible.
Common sense and the cynic within tell us that music can’t affect change, it can only reflect it. Yet my cultural journey has proved otherwise. The lessons I’ve learnt along the way leave me in no doubt. There is a glorious otherness to music that continues to open up a vast world of culture and connections like no other art form, and given the right circumstances, it can still effect change.
It certainly changed me!
Chris Green
USER GUIDE
All playlists feature-
1. Comprehensive essays and notes.
2. Original artwork and record covers.
3. Track lists detailing the release date and format of each song.
4. A Spotify or Soundcloud Button.
You can email me at greenincmail@yahoo.com. Thanks for visiting.
AND FINALLY
This is all for Richard Paul Green (25174818 Forever & Always). ‘It’s not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years’.
Green Inc is curated, archived, engineered and administered by Dan Green
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