Nostalgia? No thanks

One of the few benefits of growing up in Northern Ireland is a total absence of any sense of nostalgia. I don’t (and never will) love the '70s, '80s and early part of the '90s.

Really.
No, really.
I came to a realisation about the acronyms that used to be scrawled on the walls around Belfast early on in life: these things weren’t just a  way of dictating where your allegiances should lie; deciphering their meanings (FTP/FTQ/KAT/KAH), worked too as a neat time-killer on the walk home from school.
Fuck who? Up what?  
Every once in a while a new formulation appeared (a splinter group, a fresh hate figure, something impenetrable pertaining to joyriders) that would defy easy decryption.
And one of those read SLF.
SLF? WTF?
I must have had it explained to me at some point that it meant Stiff. Little. Fingers. And maybe someone even told me they were an ‘old’ band from the punk days.
But that information, and those collection of words were all I needed: this was different from the other stuff. They were on the same walls as those other slogans, but it was almost like they’d been daubed on with special paint.
As it turned out, it would be years until I actually listened to them, when a live album No Sleep ‘til Belfast was passed around our class like a bottle of cider.
I’d love to say it blew my mind, changed my life – but by then it was almost a decade and a half since their hey-day, and Madchester was fun, and the Pixies were thrilling, and Tanya Donnelly was still in Throwing Muses –  my affections lay mainly elsewhere.  
But even so, there was an instant sense of recognition. An acknowledgment that somewhere down the line, I’d have to give over a lot of my time to these guys. You probably can be insular if you listen to and love music from Seattle, Boston, Glasgow, Reykjavik, Dublin, Atlanta and London – but I’d imagine it kicks up some psychic dissonance and makes the job harder.
Because (and apologies for the over-simplification) if you love music from Seattle, Boston, Glasgow, Reykjavik, Dublin, Atlanta and London, have you not already made a subliminal assumption that you aren’t fundamentally different from people in Seattle, Boston, Glasgow, Reykjavik, Dublin, Atlanta and London? Pop music allows for that kind of  promiscuous empathy. The good stuff, actually, seems to demand it.
Think of Rudi – soaking up Bowie, Bolan and Eddie Cochrane, and The Undertones, with their Nuggets obsessions and eventual soul-boy side-steps. SLF loved reggae, Ash blended Black Sabbath with The Ronettes, The Divine Comedy seemed to run a party with Noel Coward, Scott Walker and Michael Nyman on the guest-list. Cashier No. 9 dug Pavement and Mercury Rev, and Ballet School made themselves very much at home in Berlin. As for David Holmes – well, where would you even begin?
Those walls, those acronyms – if you put them all together, whatever the politics – they’d often spell out the same phrase: Know Your Place.
But look back at the music that’s come – and continues to come – from here. It’s  all over the place, frankly. All over the place.
The word  ‘culture’ has a long history of being policed and weaponised. Culture in these parts can be about closing down perspectives and making the world smaller. Which, of course, is flat out crazy when you consider some of the figures who have held (and continue to hold) the opposing view.
Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon, McGuckian, Carson, Friel, Deane, Devlin, Longley (Michael and Edna), McLiam Wilson, Madden, Patterson, Seawright, Doherty, McCafferty, Caldwell  etc etc etc – if you want nuance, shade and revelation – it’s all there for you. If you want to be bolstered for the long war against the divisive and reductive mind-set, then the work and (in places) example of these people will help dismantle the edifice.
But dismantling an edifice can take time. It can be a grind. Sometimes you just want to drag a key across its paint-work. And, on those occasions, nothing – nothing – beats popular music. Pop music’s power is a blunt power. A grand sentiment that more often than not folds under intense questioning. But sometimes it is exactly what is needed.
Remember what the song says: “Grab it, take it, it’s yours.”
And remember too what it says later on: “Alter your native land.”