The Song Remains the Same No2: I Still Believe

Ok, this isn't a song I've been remembering fondly, in fact it's pretty recent... and it might be one of the single worst songs I've ever heard. But it is something of a time-capsule in the way that it just sounds so defiantly... Evening Session-ish. It's like something Steve Lamacq fever-dreamed into being. Rock n roll is going to save us? From corporate soullessness? Fuck off mate, do you even know what's happening around you right now?

Possibly he doesn't - according to Wikipedia he attended Eton alongside Prince William and his father is a city investment banker. But I didn't know that when I first heard the song ant that didn't stop me gesticulating at the radio in mute rage.

It really gets you from the first moments this, that 'Hear Ye, Hear Ye'. Just there you've already got most of the ingredients that make 'I Still Believe' so diabolical. The words, which say "hey I'm just a rock n roll troubadour" - he even sings about "folk songs of the modern age" a little later on - the strident guitar strumming(which in Frank Turner's mind = truth), the lack of any melodic guile whatsoever (again, it's the simplicity of the message that counts) the strained and just slightly nasal (traces of commercial US punk mixed with early 90s shit-indie) vocals. And that's before the music-hall piano and skiffle beat kick in (thanks the Libertines!) and you listen in sick amazement (TM CC) to lines like "we're not just saving lives, we're saving souls, we're having fun."

But this isn't simple at all. Even trying to unpick what this song actually means now, in this place and time, about late capitalism; rock music; authenticity; rebellion and belief makes my brain cry. The idea of community it celebrates is as noxiously vaporous as the notion of the Big Society. The disconnection between what this song is saying and SELLING, and what's actually happening around us is so great that, to quote John Berger does in 'Ways Of Seeing', one can only say that "this culture is mad. Reality itself becomes unrecognisable."