Plain Speakin'
|
| SHABBA: | Where've you been? Down the pub drinking and playing darts, I suppose.
You promised you'd be here at one o'clock! We're supposed to be laying
down tracks for this new single and we're running out of studio time! |
| GREEN: | Yes, but you must realise that to me language is essetially
meaningless, a defunct code of signification... |
| SHABBA: | You mean you ca't be trusted to do what you say you're going to ?
Well, that's clear enough. Well, how did your darts go? Did you get any
bullseyes? |
| GREEN: | I prefer not to think of the "centre" as such, that's so
prepostmodern -- I'm more interested in the peripheries, margins... |
| SHABBA: | You mean, you were so wide of the mark you nearly hit the scoreboard. |
| GREEN: | Got it in one. |
| SHABBA: | So this single, how are we gonna approach it? The way I see it, I
should rap and you sing and play guitar. |
| GREEN: | Yes, but it's so much more complex than that. We're dealing in a
semiotic vacuum...when you talk of "playing" the guitar are
you referring to Roland Barthes' concept of jouissance as opposed to
plaisir? That's a very important distinction... |
| SHABBA: | Look, I don't give a toss what Roland Barthes or Bart Simpson thinks,
it would give me a lot of plaisir if you'd actually sit down and play
some bloody music and stop putting it off! We're running out of time! |
| GREEN: | Yes, but you must remeber -- and this is something that we have only
come to realise since the work of the French structuralists in the
Sixties -- music per se "says" nothing... |
| SHABBA (exasperatedly): | I KNOW that! It's a bloody GUITAR! It's not supposed to say anything!
It doesn't have a bloody mouth! I do! Therefore, I'll do all the saying
in my rap! You just strum along in the background! Jesus wept! Now, then
-- you said you had some lyrics. |
| GREEN: | Yes, I was going to write some...then it occurred to me what Jacques
Derrida once said to me...that words had become poisoned, over-burdened
by signification and that all he could hope to aspire to was a state of
"musicality"... |
| SHABBA (now shouting): | "Musicality"! Well in that case perhaps Jacques bloody
Derrida could come down and play the bloody guitar! So let's get this
straight. You haven't written any new lyrics. Have you written any new,
self-penned material? |
| GREEN: | Er -- no. Largely because I have come to feel that the pre-eminence
traditionally ascribed to the auteur has been rendered obsolete... |
| SHABBA: | Or rater, because you couldn't be bloody bothered! So what are we
gonna do? |
| GREEN: | Oh I thought we could just do a cover of this old Beatles song. |
| SHABBA: | The Beatles. Great. That's bloody original. And a new musical
direction? |
| GREEN: | Sod that. We'll just do what we did on "Cupid Ad Psyche". No point in chaging a winning formula. Bums on seats mate. Anyway, now that's settled, fancy a pint?. |