#erasure band

[erasure-picnic]

Here's Part 1 of my post covering the relationship/rivalry between Pet Shop Boys and Erasure! The accompanying text is in this post :)

[erasure-smh]

Andy Bell strutting his stuff during the ABBA numbers in the Phantasmagorical Tour, 1992. From The Tank, The Swan and the Balloon.

(source)

[heartbeatkitty]

A legendary pop culture moment. “Take a Chance on Me”, Erasure, 1992.

[queer-reader-07]

i love my dad he's great, but he is also the most straight white man a person can get. so imagine my utter shock when in the course of one conversation i find out that he reads a webcomic featuring a main plot line about a lesbian couple and his first ever concert was an Erasure concert in the 80s where the crowd consisted of at least 50% gay people in leathers

[my-name-is-siduri]

the adventures are expanding. it is time for more bands. it is time for vinc and ndy

bonus: just ersur

[martinsharmony]

Vince Clarke from Erasure lost his wife to cancer. This is so sad

[emeritus-fuckers]

For everyone upset about Repugnant suddenly disappearing from Spotify (and YouTube Music, sadly), I've found as much as I could on Youtube for you.

Feel free to add whatever you find. - Jez

[beanghostprincess]

Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, Hayley Williams, Avril Lavigne

[erasure-picnic]

We’ve arrived at the final post in the Pet Shop Boys/Erasure “rivalry” series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride!

So, was there a “rivalry” at all? The two groups disagreed on a lot of things and made their fair share of snippy comments about each other, goaded on by journalists and fans’ comparisons. But they also talked about enjoying each other’s music and didn’t go out of their way to avoid one another. For instance, they appeared at the same London Pride festival in 1997, performing within an hour of each other.

By the 2000s, they’d stopped the trash-talking. In interviews around this time, both groups said they didn’t consider themselves rivals, and acknowledged the role of the public in creating this mistaken impression. However, when asked about each other, they were hesitant to approach the topic–which suggests that, while they weren’t enemies, they weren’t friends either.

For the most part, both groups have continued to reiterate that they weren’t and aren’t rivals. They hardly ever met in person–both have said that their paths rarely crossed–and when they did meet, they were able to be civil. And that’s still true to this day. In a 2019 interview, Andy Bell said that he’d met Chris Lowe a couple years ago at a Marc Almond show, and Chris had cracked a gentle joke, even calling Andy “love” as he did. It seems there are no hard feelings between the two bands.

My thoughts? The rivalry was mostly created and sustained by journalists and fans, and the bands themselves played a fairly small role in it. While they weren’t friends, there wasn’t any real hate between them. They may have even found it fun to make all those petty comments.

[erasure-smh]

Despite Clarke's heterosexuality, Erasure will always be known as a gay band.

"We're gay sometimes," Clarke jokes.

Sometimes?

Bell jumps to answer that one: "When we've had a few drinks and Vince starts grabbing my crotch."

— Boston Phoenix, November 1995

[heartbeatkitty]

Happiest Vince Clarke of all time 🥺

(source)

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

[ubiq80]

Erasure. 1987

[osbornenthusiast]

FUCK

[waugh-bao]