occupied Territory
This page was created (not dynamically – it takes a very long time dynamically) by a small PHP program I wrote called Occupied Territory. It runs through a string of input text, splits it apart into all its constituent words, checks each word to see if it’s a registered .com and if so spits it out as a link -not linking (obviously) to things that don’t exist. Named thus because of a favorite song/7inch by one of my favorite bands, Desperate Bicycles – that’s what the text is on about. How much is left and what is it?
"Shambolic", "amateurism"; these are words we come back to again and again. A whole musical generation has been polarized by concepts like these. The Desperate Bicycles never sought to promote such values actively, at least not the way I see it now, but neither were they going to feel stigmatized or guilty about having such labels attached to them and their records. The means justified the ends; the promotion of a liberating and alternative way of doing music, bypassing the music business establishment justified their not sounding like Cheap Trick or even the MC5. Theirs was surely an act of leading by example; "it was easy, it was cheap - go and do it!" they yelled out at both the end of "Smokescreen" and at the end of each verse of "The medium was tedium," a call to arms, an attempt at galvanizing some kind of collective change of attitude, provoking a wave (a new wave?) of D.I.Y. music and records. When Johnny Rotten said he wanted there to be more groups like his, he was just playing pop stars. When the Desperate Bicycles sang "no more time for spectating", they meant it, maaaaaaaan.