“Well, it's 1969, okay
All across the USA
It's another year for me and you
Another year with nothing to do
Now, last year, I was 21
I didn't have a lot of fun
And now, I'm gonna be 22
Well I say, "Oh, my" and a "Boo-hoo" (1969, The Stooges)
My mother-in-law was always highly judgemental of anyone who said they were bored. As a matron at a prep school she claimed she’d seen a sea change from boys who would happily “create their own fun” by going off to play in the woods or whatnot to her final years when they asked to be told what to do. But those were children who’d been barred from having phones or very limited access, at any rate.
Does anyone get bored any more? It would be quite a feat, assuming you have access to technology. People will complain about children on screens, sure, but for those of us who can remember life before the internet, there were in fact days when it was possible to run out of things to do. When I was a lad in the long school holidays, I’d sometimes play patience, sometimes bowl a ball against the garage wall. Go round to a friend’s house and play the only one of his seven albums I liked. Then play it again. Five days of test match cricket was a godsend.
There is, I think, something to be said for boredom though. It is where punk rock came from – the bored suburbs. Two of the early tracks on this pod convey that feeling of nothing happening – Bored Teenagers and Boredom. It’s no surprise that the angriest music often emanates from the most boring pockets of the kingdom. The Jesus and Mary Chain in their bedroom in the new town of East Kilbride. The “Bromley Contingent” that followed the Sex Pistols around early on and eventually turned into Siouxsie and the Banshees.
We can certainly be critical of some of Morrissey’s pronouncements, but he nailed that profound sense of ennui with “Everyday Is like Sunday”:-
Hide on the promenade, etch a postcard
"How I dearly wish I was not here"
In the seaside town
That they forgot to bomb
Come, come, come, nuclear bomb
Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey
So, here’s to boredom. I’ve taken a fairly flexible approach to the subject and included boredom-adjacent tracks. Deal with it!
Tracklist:-
Kitchen, Codeine
Bored teenagers, The Adverts
Boredom, Buzzcocks
Flaming Hot Cheetos, Clairo
Repetition, Spread Joy
No fun, Vitalic
Mount Wrocliai (Idle days), Beirut
Why bother? Public Interest
Terminal boredom, Crime
Snowman, Blonde Redhead
Not everybody gets to go to space, English Teacher
New job, Dry Cleaning
Box Elder, Pavement
Burst Noel, Malcolm Middleton
Fear of a blank planet, Porcupine Tree
Heaven, Talking Heads