There are two types of people in this world; those who embrace the natural order of things, and those who instinctively, actively, and wilfully resist it.
Luckily, I was exposed to AC/DC at a very young age and have been suspicious of the mainstream ever since.
As a young boy, if I was helping my dad do jobs in the garden he’d stick an AC/DC record on, shove the speakers across to an open window, and treat the whole street to a blast of the Aussie rockers.
In the beginning
Back in nineteen fifty five
Man didn’t know ’bout a rock ‘n’ roll show
And all that jive
The white man had the schmaltz
The black man had the blues
No one knew what they was gonna do
But Tschaikovsky had the news
He said let there be sound
There was sound
Let there be light
There was light
Let there be drums
There was drums
Let there be guitar
There was guitar
Let there be rock
To a ten year old boy, that seemed pretty rebellious – I learnt that listening to AC/DC was a decision a person could make.
My school friends would sit and listen to the Top 40 on the radio of a Sunday Evening and I thought that was pitiful. Early AC/DC wasn’t clever music – it was bare chested Australians sweating on a stage and hot-wiring kids into not giving a fuck – but it changed my life.
Here in 2017 the mythical Google algorithm wants to decide where the mainstream is, and make all my decisions for me.
It thinks it knows what I like, and what I want to buy, and who I want to communicate with. So I resist. Because if I didn’t, I’d be validating Google and their algorithm. We give them our data, for free, with barely a thought. We let them track our tastes, and we click on the adverts that they shove under our noses.
I’m not saying Google are evil, I’m just wondering why we give them permission to organise and disseminate the stuff of the world in a way of their choosing?
By happily going along with it we’re telling Google that this is the way we want things to be. We haven’t got the imagination to consider the alternatives, so we carry on listening to the Sunday evening Top 40 when we could be raiding our dad’s stack of 70’s vinyl and duck-walking across the stage in our school uniforms.
And now we’ve got Donald Trump and Nigel Farage trying to confuse matters and redefine things; telling us that they are the very essence of ‘anti-mainstream’; that they are fighting back against the status quo in defence of the man on the street; that they are the ones to trust, in the face of a mainstream media run by a liberal conspiracy; that they, in their spare time, listen to early AC/DC on vinyl.
Come on chaps, I’m not buying that.
There’s no way you could quote the lyrics to ‘Let There Be Rock.’
And I bet the Google algorithm’s got you all sussed out too.
(Image: Pixabay.com)
