Moranifesto Read online

  I’m listening to “Get Lucky” right now. Don’t be scared. It’s totally safe. I am absolutely capable of both working and listening to “Get Lucky” without any impairment to my faculties. This is because, for the last three weeks, I’ve been doing everything while listening to “Get Lucky”—working, parenting, cooking, being drunk. My iTunes informs me I’ve listened to it 113 times. It’s taken over my life. I’d call for help, but it’s the happiest I’ve been since Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” came out in 2006. Eventually, I listened to that 427 times. To be sure.

  Here is my “Get Lucky” addiction diary. They said I would need to write a full confessional before I went to rehab. Apparently it helps, with the “problem.”

  Day 1 of “Get Lucky”

  19 April. My husband comes into the kitchen, looking a little bit shocked, and says, “The new Daft Punk single’s been uploaded to YouTube. It sounds like it might be . . . utterly perfect.”

  As he’s a rock critic, I’m used to him coming in and making dramatic pronouncements like this over things I subsequently find to be absolute and utter balls. He once said this about a song called “I’m Considering a Move to Memphis” by the Colorblind James Experience, which was so awful, I took it out of the CD player and threw it out of the window. We both watched as a street cleaner then ran it over.

  “I’m not sorry about that,” I said, just to make things clear. “I am not sorry about that at all.”

  Anyway, he plays me “Get Lucky” to, initially, a reception of absolute indifference. By the end, however, even I could see it was quite good.

  “That’s a good rip-off of disco legends Chic,” I say.

  “That’s because Nile Rodgers from disco legends Chic is playing guitar on it,” he replies.

  And that was the first time I listened to “Get Lucky.”

  Day 2 of “Get Lucky”

  I see some friends discussing “Get Lucky” on Twitter. “I can’t stop playing it,” one says.

  “I think it might be perfect,” the other replies.

  Prompted by this second, intriguing reference to its “perfection,” I go on Spotify, press “Play,” and—THE WHOLE WORLD EXPLODES.

  Within seconds, it becomes apparent that the initial listen to “Get Lucky” acts by way of a massive decoy. Because that’s when they get you. While you’re busily, self-importantly going, “Meh meh meh, it sounds like Chic!” with your stupid music-expert face on, Daft Punk reduce down to the size of nanobots, fly as vapor up your nose, access your nervous system, and lay six thousand tiny invisible disco mines right up your spine.

  Subsequently, the second—and, indeed, the following million—times you listen to “Get Lucky,” the disco mines all trigger, one after another, in a whiteout chain of hooks, offbeat misfootings, and melody. You’ve got adrenaline and oxytocin and Nile Rodgers going off all over the shop. It’s like the Fourth of July. You have never felt this warm inside.

  And the minute it ends, you suddenly feel cold and shaky—like you need to put it back on again right away. Or else you’ll just shiver and freeze to death, right here, in the kitchen.

  Of course, at that point I don’t know how many times I will need to listen to it again, in order to regain my normal body temperature. I thought it might be one of those “five times in a row and then you’re done” jobs. Like “Milkshake” by Kelis.

  Seventeen times later—that is one hour and eight minutes of solidly listening to “Get Lucky”—I realize I am in trouble. I take to Twitter to voice my concern for me.

  “I wonder at what point I’ll get ‘Get Lucky’ poisoning, and die?” I ask, morosely, while still—of course—chair-dancing to the song at the same time.

  Terrifyingly, my timeline instantly turns into some kind of makeshift emergency help line—full of wide-eyed, sweaty people admitting to being similarly, utterly disabled by their obsession with “Get Lucky.”

  My friend Robin has a particularly bad case of “Get Lucky”: “For the first three days after it came out, I sat around in my pants doing amyl to it, over and over,” he admitted. In common with all people discussing their profound powerlessness in the face of “Get Lucky,” he also sounds deliriously happy about this fact.

  Day 13 of “Get Lucky”

  So far, I’ve only heard “Get Lucky” playing on the tiny speakers of a laptop or a taxi. Tonight, however, I go to the after-show party for the Star Trek premiere, where the DJ “drops” it, just after midnight.

  In my life I have, of course, seen rooms “go off.” I was, after all, of a generation to be a terrified onlooker in the corner of Acid House, murmuring, “This is all a bit sweaty. Can’t we sit down and have a nice chat, instead?”

  Unlike those days, however, this is not a room full of scallies boxed off their minky on wobbly eggs. Instead, it’s filled with incredibly famous people, in very expensive outfits, who’ve just had two drinks. And they go nuts when the song comes on—they absolutely lose it. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen people properly cheer a song. Shouting “HURRAH!”—literally the word “HURRAH!”—and dancing in a manner so joyous, it recalls Snoopy capering on the roof of his kennel. Everyone is dancing at each other—everyone is as happy as they’ve ever been in their lives. This is an Olympic level of communal bonding. I’m watching Captain Kirk dancing to “Get Lucky.” I am the legend of the phoenix! I’m going to have nine more drinks! I’m up ALL NIGHT TO GET LUCKY!

  Day 14 of “Get Lucky”

  Terrifying hangover. Hot sweats. Play “Get Lucky” in lieu of codeine. Start to wonder what would happen if you could actually eat “Get Lucky.” Surely, you would poo out sleek, gleaming disco panthers. Disco panthers wearing glitterballs as earrings. That is the “legend” the phoenix was talking about. The pooing out of the disco panthers.

  As I float the idea of disco panthers on Twitter, people keep asking me if I’ve seen the Alan Partridge/Peter Serafinowicz tributes to “Get Lucky.” I watch them. My hangover instantly deepens—into vicious fear. Yes, these are very funny videos. These are very funny indeed. But when people have to make their own films to cope with how obsessed they are with a song, the general impression is of mankind being gradually overwhelmed by a force it cannot control. I begin to wonder, darkly, if society will ever recover from “Get Lucky.”

  Day 21 of “Get Lucky”

  My husband finds me on the Internet, researching musicology blogs that rigorously, nerdishly analyze the composition of “Get Lucky” in order to work out why it’s so catchy. I am, of course, listening to “Get Lucky” as I do this.

  “Pete,” I say. “Do you know why you feel like you have to keep listening to ‘Get Lucky’? Apparently it’s because it’s in a minor key—thus giving the feeling of dissatisfaction and irresolution—and it uses alternating syncopation of bass, guitar, lyric, and melody to provide a hook every 3.75 seconds! We could never have resisted those kinds of stats. NEVER! ‘Get Lucky’ was always going to win!”

  Pete looks at me. I’m very pale. I’m twitching as I listen to “Get Lucky.” During my speech to him I’ve had to break off a couple of times in order to mouth along to key lyrics—“Up all night till the sun,” “Up all night for good fun,” and the falsetto bit on “So let’s raise the bar / And our cups / To the stars.”

  “Cate,” he says. “This is like ‘Back to Black’ again. You need to get out of the house. I’m taking you to the park.”

  He puts me in the car and we drive towards Regent’s Park. He puts on a song that is not “Get Lucky”—“No, no, love—it’s not called ‘Not Get Lucky.’ This is Pentangle.”

  Slowly, I start to adjust to life outside of “Get Lucky.” The sun is out. This song is rather wonderful. I have listened to “Get Lucky” 113 times in three weeks. That is probably enough, now. I should probably stop.

  As we drive down Kentish Town Road, I start to feel the warm afterglow of the song finally leaving my system. Like some brief, incredibly sexually intense affair, me and “Get L
ucky” have now burned out, leaving me, yes, changed forever—but also filled with good memories. I will now move on. I wish “Get Lucky” nothing but good luck.

  As we approach the crossing by Royal College Street, I see, on the right, a girl and her boyfriend waiting to cross the road. She’s dancing on the spot and singing “Get Lucky” at him. I can tell this, even from a hundred yards away.

  Scrambling across Pete with all the urgency of an asphyxia victim, I wind down his window.

  “I’M UP ALL NIGHT TO GET LUCKY!” I scream at her.

  “I’M UP ALL NIGHT TO GET LUCKY!” she screams back at me. We beam at each other, in pure joy. She keeps dancing.

  We are as one. We’ve come too far to give up who we are. We’re up all night to get lucky.

  In Defense of Hipsters

  And all that oppression I was talking about at the beginning? All the minorities who are looked down upon, and belittled? Well, I will come to the defense of all of them. Even the hipsters.

  There was a report last week which I looked at for a bit and went, “Yeah, yeah—that definitely wins the ‘Most 2013’ report of 2013.”

  NBCnews.com ran a story about how animal sanctuaries, from California to New York, are being “overrun” by pet chickens—“dumped” when their urban hipster owners “can’t cope” with them anymore.

  “They’re put on Craigslist all the time when they don’t lay anymore,” said Farm Sanctuary national shelter director Susie Coston. Who was, to be clear, talking about the chickens—not the hipsters.

  Mary Britton Clouse, who runs the Chicken Run Rescue in Minneapolis, concurred: “It’s the stupid foodies,” she said, presumably surrounded by sad-looking chickens. “We’re just sick to death of it.”

  Now it may be that while you, as a Times reader, know perfectly well what “a chicken” is, you may not be totally clear as to what “a hipster” is. You may be too busy running an international conglomerate, finessing government policy, or writing an angry letter how Kim Kardashian’s bum-shots are corrupting a nation.

  Allow me to thumbnail for you. Hipsters are, currently, one of the most reviled subspecies in the Western world. Have you seen one? In all probability, yes. For instance, if you have, recently, seen a young gentleman walking around with a beard that looks like a badger stapled to his chin, wearing a pair of deck shoes in an “ironic” manner, and playing Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” on a tiny ukulele with an expression on his face that says, “Yes! I’m playing Robin Thicke on a ukulele! Can you handle this level of archness?”—then that was not, as you thought, an attention-seeking lunatic who’d recently seen all his proper clothes and shaving gear burned to the ground, in a fire, and was in the throes of a nervous breakdown, but a hipster, instead.

  This “Festival Missed Connections” advert—on hipster music online Pitchfork—gives an even more poignantly accurate insight into the working modes of hipsters: “During Waxahatchee on the Blue Stage you were eating vegan Vietnamese food out of a little container. I was the girl in the overalls with the rainbow bikini top, French braid and braces. Hope to hear from you.”

  Perhaps, after reading this, you feel that you, too, are now the kind of person who would—along with the creators of the “I Hate Hipsters” Tumblr—happily spend half an hour imagining the best way to kill the hipster who has just moved their sit-up-and-beg bicycle and soon-to-be-abandoned chicken into your apartment block (maybe dying under a landslide of ironic vintage T-shirts in Beyond Retro—the ultimate ironic death).

  But! Actually! No! For I would like to speak out on behalf of the hipster! I wish to defend them in the cultural kangaroo court they find themselves dragged into. I will answer all charges thus:

  “This wearing of secondhand ironic clothing, particularly the T-shirts—this is annoying. A childless mustachioed twenty-six-year-old media studies graduate drinking cocktails out of a jam jar in a pop-up Peruvian diner in Shoreditch while wearing a ‘Super Dad’ T-shirt? NO! STOP!” But come on—no one else is going to wear that T-shirt. No one else has use for it. This is the First World equivalent of you and your favela scavenging for used batteries and bottle tops off a teetering city dump. Ironic hipster T-shirts are the bottom-line reality of the necessity of recycling. Without them we would drown in “Hurrah for Benjamin’s Bar Mitzvah!” T-shirts, which we would be compelled to wear in all seriousness. The system is better this way.

  “They keep hens in one-bedroom flats in Hackney. This is both impractical, and done for effect.” But Lord Byron kept a bear and an eagle at Cambridge and we think he’s a total legend. We’ve got to have a consistent viewpoint on young, drug-addled people keeping pets in unsuitable locations. Otherwise it’s just not fair.

  “Hipsters ruin all music by claiming that they were into it before you.” You know what—they probably were. And thank God. After all, someone has to go out there and forage for new bands, in horrible clubs, in the middle of nowhere, at one a.m., and subsequently make them famous enough for me to simply listen to them on Magic FM in a minicab, instead. I’m perfectly happy for hipsters to put in all that vexatious spadework, in exchange for a bit of ZERO FINANCIAL GAIN smugness afterwards. This is the cultural ecosystem. Hipsters aerate the rock Earth. They pollinate Pitchfork. They do . . . whatever it is that wasps do. Let them carry on. It is Mother Nature’s plan.

  “I’m sorry, I still want to kill them with a suitably old-fashioned retro agricultural implement—such as they will have reverently yet ironically put on the wall of their local coffee shop. Maybe a thresher, hay baler, or scythe.” Oh, come now! This makes us sound, frankly, spoiled. How jaded have we become that we cannot enjoy the sight of a young man with a handlebar mustache wearing a Second World War flying helmet and riding a penny-farthing to the Apple Store with a very self-conscious expression? How can we—P. G. Wodehouse fans—love Bertie Wooster but not a hipster? Let’s face it—having a go at hipsters is just basically picking on well-meaning young people trying to be different—as all young people are wont to do. “Ah,” you reply. “But I don’t really hate them. I don’t actually want them to die. I’m just being a bit snarky and ironic about it, because, to be honest, I’m a bit bored.” Well, if that is the case, my friend, I must inform you that “being a bit snarky and ironic because you’re bored” is a classic hipster trope, and suggests you are desperately trying to crush the tiny unicycle-riding hipster inside you.

  I Am Hungover Again

  The thing is, if you hang out with hipsters, drinking ironic cocktails—“Death of a Cucumber Salesman”—from jam jars, you will, eventually, get a hangover.

  Once you have realized that you will never be a reasoned and disciplined drinker, it all gets easier, really.

  It’s the years where you keep thinking it might be possible to go out, have two glasses of wine over dinner, and be safely in bed by eleven p.m.—flossed and serene—that are the hardest. The constant collapse of intentions confuses you. You are discombobulated by the regularity of the chaos. You don’t know why it’s happening again.

  Last time you spoke to yourself in the restaurant it was 9:38 p.m., and you were in the toilets, going, “Hey, dude! There we are, in the mirror. I will be honest with us—I feel pretty sober, tbh. The wine seems unexpectedly . . . thin tonight. I think we might need to have a third glass—just to see this thing off properly. Maximize the potential. Promote the healthful sleep, etc. Still totally on for that ten thirty p.m. bus, though, amigo! This isn’t one of those nights! We remember it’s Tuesday! Or Wednesday! Whichever day it is! It is that day!”

  Five hours later, and you’re standing in the alleyway behind a Spanish bar, smoking a brand of cigarettes you’ve never seen before, which seem very dry, and which you bought off a passing tramp for a pound. (“Kind sir! Let us come to some manner of agreement of equal benefit to us both!”)

  The last ten minutes have consisted of a rant about Marxism, which jolted—with the jump-cut high-flying magic that alcohol brings—into an equally passionate displa
y of how you can boost the volume levels of the speakers on the iPhone by putting it in your mouth.

  You are now triumphantly pointing at your face, issuing muffled cries of “See! See! LOUD!,” while your head transmits a pounding version of “Now That We Found Love” by Heavy D and the Boyz.

  Your schedule has been far too busy—two bottles of red wine, three gins, a shot of vodka, and whatever the hell this is in this glass right now: Fernet-Branca? Aquavit?—to really check in with yourself again, but you do remember seeing yourself, dimly, in the dark window glass, halfway up the stairs, coming back from the toilet.

  You only looked yourself in the eye for a moment, mouthing the words, “Tuesday. It is Tuesday,” to which you replied, “I am going to kill tomorrow for tonight. I will make the beautiful sacrifice.” And then you passed again, and you saw yourself no more.

  After, in the morning—in the terrible morning—years ago, you would have panicked. In your twenties, or early thirties, you were shocked fresh that you were always crashing in this same car.

  “When will I stop doing this?” you asked yourself, under the shower—washing your hair clean in the way you wish you could wash your lungs.

  And you would spend the day berating yourself—making the panicky, sweating promise that last night was, obviously, by way of a wake for drinking. Last night was the night you toasted the toasts—raised the glass for the last time—as you are now, surely, too old to do this anymore.

  Certainly, when you look at your hands—veins raised, and everything of a mauvish hue—they appear to belong to a two-hundred-year-old.