“The future’s under fire / The past is gaining ground / A continuous cold war between / My home and my hometown” Which begs the question, was it ever, really? It rather lies in a fact that resonates, I think, with people of a similar age and background: that most rock music just isn’t revolutionary, or rather, participatory for me anymore. It’s not that I now simply dislike guitar-based music. Regardless of this characterization and identification, my swollen predilection for drum and wire has - crises of identity aside - waned with age, and for a reason. Like all teenagers, I wanted to be different. That is, the supposed agent of an ancient gyration, whose taste and sensibilities exist outside the ordered rigor and craftsmanship of a monolithic “real music.” And so I, disgusted at the stereotype and its applicability or lack thereof, sought refuge in a mastery of an alternate history. I used to be a rockist.Īll this complicated by the fact that I am a biracial African American. That is, a navel-gazing Baby-Boomer retrospective, a hopeless sensibility passed on through the most accessible sources and arbiters of popular music culture, Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All-Time,” etc. So by the dawn of my adolescence - a time when one is better embroidering a self-concept with all its appropriated and internalized peripherals - I came to imbibe and live through what was readily available outside the nuclear unit: mostly what came in the mail. Beyond the trappings of A/C radio, it was an ocean. Likewise, Chas de Wally, from Sounds, claimed that although "people were trying to tell me that this was a lousy album and The Jam were all washed up, This is the Modern World is one of the best albums I've ever heard in a long time".Growing up, my family didn’t keep up with music much. Here Weller is making an obvious attempt at creating a Jam sound. Despite some contemporary reviewers feeling the record was rushed to capitalize on the success of In the City, the Record Mirror's Barry Cain wrote that "This Is The Modern World reflects a definite progression, a definite identity mould. This Is the Modern World is the second studio album by The Jam, released in November 1977, less than seven months after their debut.
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