Allegro wrote:.Julian Cope | These Things I Know
Thanks, gnosticheresy_2, for the Cope vid you posted on the previous page.
For my reference.
2008 article wrt Cope.
Interesting article
Then there’s a homily in the CD booklet which justifies why he lets pagan deities off the hook while aiming both barrels at “Jehovah, Allah and the Christian God”, because, as I understand it, we’re Northern Europeans and those are Middle Eastern “Divine Phenomena”. It’s a tidy argument, and one familiar to long-term Cope obsessives, but one which ignores the fact that the idea of an indigenous faith is at best irrelevant, and at worst offensive, to a modern, mobile, multi-cultural community. Cope gets pretty close to suggesting that if you live in Britain and feel the need to worship a God, then you should worship a pagan, Northern European one – surely exactly the kind of dogmatism and intolerance which he purports, as a "Black Sheep" outsider, to despise?
Great tunes, problematic ideas I think
I only really know Julian Cope's music through the two (amazing) albums he did in the early 90s, Peggy Suicide and Jehovahkill (plus Rite I suppose, though that's not really a proper "album"). I drifted away as he returned to making more staright up "rock" music but I've seen him live relatively recently and he was pretty good. I've got his The Modern Antiquarian book as well, he's absolutely obsessed with the idea of the (rock) artist-as-shaman, and this "shamanic" link to some idea of "Albion" before the Romans came with its worship of the female-mother-goddess archetype, its people being tightly bound to the ebb and flow of the seasons, deep (dream?) time before the coming of the male gods. However the author's assertion that:
It’s a tidy argument, and one familiar to long-term Cope obsessives, but one which ignores the fact that the idea of an indigenous faith is at best irrelevant, and at worst offensive, to a modern, mobile, multi-cultural community
or
Cope gets pretty close to suggesting that if you live in Britain and feel the need to worship a God, then you should worship a pagan, Northern European one
..is pushing it quite a bit I think. Obviously I'd have to withhold judgement on until I'd read it myself, but I've certainly never got that impression, seen him live a few times, read interviews etc and he always comes across as basically just wanting to go back in time and be a caveman.
Badges? Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!
Sissyfied, you're civilized, I want to be a savage
I see Cope (at least in the period I know him from) as being charged with some of the same current as Alan Moore, the KLF and Grant Morrison. Mystic Britain, mystic Bree-tain, he's still pissed at the Romans basically
.)
Sometimes the obvious classics are the best.... 
