A LIFE OF PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
02 March 2010
‘We’re not over the hill really, are we?’ girlfriend asked, and so I asked what she meant. ‘Well, everyone we meet, we rabbit on about how middle- aged we’ve suddenly become and how we can’t relate to modern culture. I dunno, it’s becoming this self-fulfilling prophecy - it freaks younger folk out - all this talking about being forty, I mean who made this hill we’re supposed to be over?’ This was said as we, quite literally, drove over a hill after six weeks on countryside retreat. We were heading back to Glasgow, a city that was once branded ‘City of Culture’; and it was culture that we feared facing after such a long time in the midst of the still, silent, breathing, living nothingness of nature. Our ‘Advanced Capitalist’ culture: the ongoing parade of the now and the hip are things we’ve suddenly started feeling excluded from. We get this sense of deja-vu, of having seen and done it before – Who’s this months new indie rebel? This weeks groundbreaking hit? We’ve lived through twenty years of hip and have grown tired of the lie behind it all: the mindless repetition of newness for it’s own sake -‘A revolution in under-arm deodorant’. The ride home was melancholy. We had not updated the car or the car stereo; which takes tapes. And in that same car with the kids, weeks before, in conversation about iPods, I recall explaining to them - after my son complained that he couldn’t plug his iPod into the ‘stereo’ - the principles of planned obsolescence. ‘When they first invented the CD,’ I ranted, ‘they were supposed to be indestructible. In fact, I remember a Breakfast TV show, maybe ‘93, in which someone spread jam over a CD then bit it, then it was washed off and they stuck it in a CD player and it still worked. You see,’ I went on, increasingly conscious of how fuddy-duddy I sounded – ‘I saw an advert last week for Blu-ray and they said ‘unscratch-able’, but really we’ve heard this all before. They had to make CD’s disposable because they knew they’d go out of business if they didn’t.’ ‘Tim’s dad can plug his iPod into his stereo!’ My son protested. So I stuck on an old The Smiths tape and we were all silenced by the gloom of a now-aged Morrissey singing of things that no longer had relevance in an embarrassingly obsolete format. Girlfriend and I arrived back in Glasgow, parked the car and unpacked our things. The aged five year old CD player was the first thing we plugged back in, and I picked Neil Young. The gloom descended again, worse than before. I opened the newspaper and scanned through the feared culture section. The things that were in last year were out and being denounced as old-hat. But then old-hat was back with a new spin: Punk, The new Romantics and Pam Hogg. Everything was being re-manufactured as new-hip again which in a few months time would be rendered scratched, old, disposable. The Neil Young CD got stuck hallways through ‘Helpless’. Neil singing ‘helpless helpless helpless.’ ‘Maybe it’s time to buy an iPod.’ I said and girlfriend held me tight. I looked out, over her shoulder through the window at the city tenements and longed for the view we’d had of the hills, where one day soon we would have to go to finally accept our planned obsolescence.
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