Conversations With Ben #3: Plato's Cave

Ben: The new Teenage Fanclub song "I'm more inclined" stole the intro from Girl on the Phone by The Jam and the chorus from Don't Fear The Reaper (except no cowbell). (God, I hate that joke.)

The verses sound like every Travelling Wilburys song.

Rol: Sounds like a classic. I added it to a playlist but it hasn't come up yet (while I've been awake).

It's pretty good but very cut and paste.

I know you'll hate it (but then, that adds to its appeal), but I'm digging the new Weezer album. They've been listening to lots of ELO... and Jellyfish.

Weezer are like a 3.5/5 Weezer cover band.

They're the musical embodiment of Plato's cave.

Not everything has to be deep. I appreciate the shallows too. It's warmer and more comforting to swim there. Especially these days.

They're just MOR is what I mean.

Some of my favourite artists are MOR. It's glorious to give yourself to MOR, rather than constantly trying to live your life on the edge.

Besides, what did Plato know? He never even had sex.

Next you'll be telling me to listen to Foo Fighters.

No, they are bland.

The difference between Weezer and Foo Fighters is in the lyrics. Rivers Cuomo writes fun, smart and slightly geeky lyrics. Dave Grohl trots out rock clichés second only to Noel Gallagher. Occasionally he throws in a killer riff that elevates the odd Foo Fighters song to car tape level, but a lyric insert is never needed in a FF album.

Ben responds by linking to the lyrics of Beverly Hills...

Look at all those movie stars

They're all so beautiful and clean

When the housemaids scrub the floors

They get the spaces in between

Yeah, but in that they were knowingly going for the MTV crowd. 

...and No One Else...

She's not allowed to feel good in herself unless it's for me!

Do you not GET irony?

The fetishization of Asian women as objects throughout Pinkerton is also irony?

This from the man who made me listen to Hot Action Cop on loop last week.

I never said anything in Hot Action Cop was good, just catchy. 

I do believe Rivers has matured as a lyricist.

He might have got better but it's still just Weezer lite.

How can it be Weezer lite if they were never any good in the first place?

I quite like Weezer, not sure why I'm being so standoffish over this.

But here we are.

I'd argue Thank God For Girls and Wind In Our Sail are lyrically better than anything Barenaked Ladies ever wrote.

Now you're pushing it.

All that said, there is another track on the new album that sounds like 5ive, so I'm not completely deaf to your standoffishness.

Again, don't mind Weezer.  If you were trying to tell me the new Green Day album was any good, that'd be a different story.

Also, I just realised that one of the tracks steals its intro from Everybody Loves You Now by Billy Joel... so that's me sold.

I only started this conversation as a distraction from the tedious process of fitting Velux skylight blinds. And maybe get a blog post out of it.

In both those,  you have served your purpose admirably.

Ugh. That sounds like a nightmare. 

You still trying to get blog material out of our dull conversations?

If I'm just left to write my own posts these days, they all sound like Marvin The Paranoid Android.

Need a little Zaphod Beeblebrox in it?

Say what you want about Solipsism, but at least it's an ethos...

Well as a steadfast materialist, I'd say there's plenty wrong with it

Of course. But how do I know your opinion  even exists?

Basic answer. As Descartes concluded, though you may not know, the reality you are presented with is the one that you must experience so must accept my opinion as a part of your own constructed reality.

Of course, if you want to eschew Cartesian Dualism, you can always lean heavily into Hegel.

But then as Feurbach shows, the line of thinking that the individual idea of man is the true spirit inherently leads to the reification of a god in its very act of eschewing it.

I guest teach the lecture on "idealism to materialism: an ontological and epistemological split" in the 4th year module on social scientific theories.

You could always just read Wittgenstein's tracto-logicus philosophus. It gives a good argument that solipsistic ideas really have no bearing and are misinformed perceptions of the external world.

Is this good blog material?

Don't bother asking for an extension on the essay, then.

There is a link back to Weezer in all this though - their album is called OK Human, a play on the Radiohead album OK Computer which featured the track Paranoid Android. Gives us as a nice circular structure to this piece...

As for that new Teenage Fanclub song, most of its tune is nicked from Who'll Stop The Rain? by Creedence.