As 2010 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.
There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Currie: I know it’s smug and over-designed, and I know it is essentially a soap opera for the televisually aspirational, but the one thing I can’t resist in Mad Men is when Don Draper does his inspirational pitches. And he’s only selling consumer shit! This scene, which is the real climax of season one is a perfect example of one of the show’s main tricks which is to have characters speak of one thing when the audience knows they subconsciously mean something else. What is so moving here is that Don, who has erased his past, is caught in the act of inventing a new one by using his own (recent) family’s photographs to sell All-American sentiment to his clients via their revolving slide projector. He’s actually moved by his own bullshit and hypocrisy. Rather like all of us. When the ads make you cry, you know they’ve got you cornered.
Watch it here.
