Julian Cope on BOC

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 05:40:10PM -0400, Albert Bouchard typed out:
> Is that THE Julian Cope? Boy, he sure is on Pearlman's dick. I wonder
> where he got all his "facts" from. He has some footnotes that make it
> seem all scholarly but much of the history is garbled. He criticizes
> the band for not knowing what the songs mean and then gets the meaning
> of many of them all wrong himself. Pearlman would always refuse to
> explain his lyrics to the band or anyone else, feeling that whatever
> interpretation someone could come up with was likely to be as good or
> better than the one he intended. I think Mr. Cope has just illustrated
> his point.

        I'm always puzzled by Julian Cope's reviews. It's nice to see
someone at least write even longer reviews than me, it means I could be
worse, but I do wonder quite how much of his spilling-over rock Knowledge
comes from the psychedelic glow of certain enlightenment rather than any
actual research. He spouts so much trivia that's just wrong that it makes
you worry for what you don't know to contradict. And the other thing is
that he always takes everything as such a serious statement of intent,
it's as if he has no time at all for the idea that someone could do
something just because it was silly or funny, it'd have to be either a
deep quest for revelation or else a deliberate toying with the absurd in a
Zen-like search for truth. There's no scope for just having a laugh in
his critical palette.

        And both these things are weird, because his archaeological work
is *cryingly* well-researched, and some of his stuff is really very silly
(most of _Navigator_ for example), without any apparent mission to be
otherwise. I think he must write his reviews only when really really
stoned. They're still a good read, but they don't really tell me half as
much about the band as they do about how much Cope has to say about almost
anything. Yours,
                 Jon

--
        Jonathan Jarrett                Birkbeck College, London
                 jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
        --------------------------------------------------------
  "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away." (Tom Waits)