kontextmaschine:

The Welfare State They Were In

Huh, that’s a point, while American “alternative” was significantly a shift to music by college graduates for suburbanites, Belle and Sebastian came out of the Scottish welfare state.

You will remember Trainspotting was a movie about a bunch of petty criminal heroin addicts who always have somewhere to sleep, even if there is a dead baby hallucination on the ceiling. Thatcher cut back but she left the “dole” as a buffer for the surplus population, even as gestures were made towards a future of new leisure careers.

On the other hand I don’t think it’s possible to write a better dismissive summary of that whole milieu than “Micah Uetricht attempts to hitch the welfare state to fondness for Belle and Sebastian”. Maybe if it had run in n+1.