Confessions

I got it back recently. By "it" I mean my past. By "recently" I mean in the last few years.

I've never thought average guys were compelled to ape the ruling class, I don't believe romance is inevitably corrupted, and the collapse of European culture is long overdue. In short, what Bryan Ferry has to say has never spoken very loud to this listener no matter how you break it down.

That's Robert Christgau from  his review of an early greatest hits collection from Roxy Music. That band was a secret pleasure of mine in the late 1970s. In high school I'd heard "Love is the Drug" on the radio and loved it. I never would have admitted to anyone that I liked them. I bought Bryan Ferry's solo records In Your Mind and Let's Stick Together and somehow ended up in possession of another one called Another Time, Another Place that I hope I didn't steal.

I listened to those records only when there was no one else home. I wouldn't have dared to admit to anyone that I liked them. Even to myself, I affected a slight irony about liking them, always holding something back. Like a lot of boys raised by women, I had come to feel, as Robert Glover aptly put it, that it was "not safe or acceptable for a man or boy to be just who he is." Bryan Ferry provided me (and, I suspect, others) a romantic escape where we could experiment with figuring that out.

During the lowest period of my life, I listened to Flesh + Blood and Avalon obsessively.

Christgau is wrong. The Bryan Ferry thing is not that average guys are compelled to ape the ruling class but that we're allowed to if we want. That may seem to contradict the previous point but I don't think it does.