On 11th January – this week – in 1985, Sam Newton Battenberg Faulkner was born in that most average of Surrey towns, Reigate. So the seeds were sown that some 20 years later would grow into the dreariest of character-void music produced by British artists in years.

Listening to Faulkner’s music is a bit like taking public transport; it can only ever be average or bad, never an actively enjoyable experience. You hear him in shops and, if you have any self-respect, you feel ashamed at yourself for buying your clothes in there. Everything about him, from his ginger beard and white-boy dreads to his faux-lumberjack style and inoffensive, Caleb-Followill-lite voice, screams beige pop – he makes the kind of songs your mum likes but whose names she can never remember. He’s the cleanest dirty musician the industry could ever hope for. The musical equivalent of Buzzfeed.

Perhaps this is a little harsh; I have nothing against Mr Faulkner personally. Rather, what he represents is the beginning of a generation of mass-produced, ‘safe’ artists who dominate the radio waves but aren’t even especially fun to listen to. It was people like Newton Faulkner who brought about the decline in guitar playing and clever songwriting that has seen guitar music and indie bands left in the dust behind hip-hop, house and grime as the music of choice of the nation’s youth. This is not to say being popular is a bad thing – on the contrary – but the Faulkners and Sheerans of this world don’t have anything to justify their existence, let alone their legions of fans. You might hate Kanye with a passion, but at least you have an opinion. Just a few years earlier, Pete and Carl and the Libertines were clawing rock’n’roll out of its grave and making it dance manically round like the emaciated corpse of punk music long assumed dead. Fast forward to 2007, and Newton is Nice with a capital ‘N’.

Something somewhere went horribly wrong. Music should be weird, and exhilarating, and the promulgation of safe-for-work artists over the last few years is neither. Incidentally, on little Newton’s 13th birthday, another entered this world, destined for sacrifice on the high altar of forgettable drudge music, X Factor. Her name? You guessed it. Louisa Johnson. God help those of us who want to be challenged.

An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …”

Hysteria, T.S. Eliot

If you want a moment to indulge on how miserably repetitive and suppressive society can be, T. S. Eliot is definitely the go-to man. In this excerpt from the short prose-poem Hysteria, drudgery is easily slid to the fore. An elderly waiter goes through the aged rigmarole of laying a checked cloth over a table, desperately trying to cover the table’s rusty ugly surface. In Hysteria being only a tableau of a few seconds, this elderly waiter is eternalised. He stands, trembling, spreading the table cloth forever. “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden” spills off his tongue over and over again, as he directs said lady and gentleman to their seats, to drink tea in white ceramic tea cups, and shower scone crumbs upon their napkinned laps.

In the full prose poem, this waiter exists only in the background of the narrator‘s mind, his peripheral actions executed by a peripheral him. The narrator’s mind tunes into the waiter as he attempts to distract his thoughts from the heaving of a woman’s breasts, as she raucously laughs. His mind must not be distracted, must harmonise with his predictable and monotonous surroundings.

We must not feel, this tableau narrates. The narrator cannot be alarmed by the movement of a woman’s body, in a moment of uncontrolled laughter. The waiter must lay the table before the lady and gentlemen attempt to sit at it. But only unspokenly, as if all just fell into place by chance.

Here in Cherwell‘s Art and Books section, we are engaged in a pioneering mission to understand just what exactly constitutes the very nature of art in our ever ambitious society. I myself would like to put forward the suggestion that the latest artefact to have emerged from the Kardashian Empire, Khloé Kardashian’s Stronger Looks Better Naked, could indeed be recognised as the stuff of art. Could this book, I wonder, feature among the nominations for the Turner Prize this year? More importantly, should we, as appreciators and consumers of art, consider its position and influence in the increasingly multifarious artistic landscape?

The tome is divided into three distinct sections: Body, Mind, and Heart. This triptych is sandwiched between two substantial collections of photographs of many a Kardashian. Thus, for the visual purists in the world of art, the work still has much to offer. We, the reader, are encouraged to use the photographs as a source of motivation to change our lifestyle from one consisting of hours spent lying prone, head turned towards the white light of Netflix, to one in which we rise before the break of dawn to seek the spiritual guidance of our personal trainer and sustain our enriching, sociable activities on a diet of steel-cut oatmeal and flax. Khloé’s language is unerringly, enthusiastically assertive. In this way, Stronger Looks Better Naked is a response to the modern search for inspiration. It is an encapsulation of the oft searched-for term #goalz.

Indeed, we live in a virtual world in which we are continually forced to better ourselves both physically and mentally, and to compare our own selfies, diets, friends, possessions, achievements, and sexual feats to those of our fellow humans in a perpetual vortex of ‘online sharing.’ Khloé’s book, I would argue, stands apart from this ostentatious maelstrom of ideas and advice. It is the definitive lifestyle guide of our age. The book is, of course, written by a member of a family whose every activity from their runway shows to their leg hair removal is documented, publicised, and absorbed by an enormous section of humanity. This is a family in which every member has it all: money, status, beauty, popularity, adoration, fulfilment, and an ability to live a life whose every aspect is unashamedly free from the chains of modesty. Thus, Khloé’s work provides us, the readers, with quasi-scriptural guidelines for attaining and maintaining the pinnacle of lifestyles: the Kardashian lifestyle.

Thus, if art is a human creation intended to evoke an emotional response or to make a statement about the human condition, then it is my firm belief that Khloé’s book is art. It outlines a clear set of rules that, if followed correctly, enable the reader to realise the Kardashian lifestyle for themselves. The Kardashian lifestyle and, by extension, Khloé’s book, is itself a representation of our society’s obsession with the self. We struggle under the yoke of a relentlessly self-obsessed culture of self-improvement, self-knowledge, self-awareness, and the selfie. Our struggle is intensified by the desperately competitive environment of comparison in which we are all forced to play an active role, no matter how poor our selfie-game nor how strong our dislike of physical activity. Stronger Looks Better Naked is thus an important artistic response to this post-millennial struggle in our society. I for one would be most excited to see this work among the nominations for this year’s Turner Prize or perhaps to see it on display in the Tate Modern to inspire the many thousands of visitors to ‘turn their lives around.’

Please note: The author personally found the book to be extremely helpful during their own quest for motivation in the dark days of January that proceeded a lengthy festive period of Bacchanalian excess and consumption. The author is an avid follower of each Kardashian on every available social media outlet and hopes to move to LA upon graduation.

You’re not alone if you’ve been left a little dispirited by contemporary art exhibitions, thinking you had missed the wow factor of a virtuosic skill showcase or thought too often to yourself, ‘A five-year-old could have done that!’ Nowadays there is less emphasis put on the importance of craftsmanship within art and this is especially evident if one frequents art school degree shows. Craftsmanship is not discouraged, but aesthetic beauty is now seen to sit alongside a variety of other offerings art can make: conceptual intrigue, provocative activism and humorous satire, for example. If, however, you’re feeling a bit cynical about this shift, I’m going to advise you to search for the (probably numerous) screens in the gallery. Craftsmanship is making a major resurgence in Fine Art but it’s happening where you might not think to look.

Emerging from UK art schools right now are some astonishing digital skills. Jasmine Johnson (recently graduated from Goldsmiths) has appeared in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries as ‘one to watch’ and the work showcased certainly is. The video ‘Thieves and Swindlers are not allowed in Paradise’ is predominantly constructed from computer-generated imagery; a fictional 3D environment is painstakingly rendered to simulate the shimmery silk of an Apple Mac computer and the shiny reflectiveness of well-polished oak floorboards. Overlooking the conceptual merits for now, this work is aesthetically and technically rich.

Rebecca Merrill, who graduated from the Slade in 2015 offered an Oculus Rift experience at her degree show. Technically it was incomparably superior to the Oculus Rift offering made by the incredibly well established artist, Carston Höller, at the Hayward Gallery during the same summer. Merrill works predominantly with video as a medium but has branched into video games, a prism also masterfully deployed for artistic means by home-grown talent Laurien Ash. Laurien graduated from the Ruskin in 2015 and was immediately offered a slot in Modern Art Oxford’s project space as part of the Platform Award. Her ideas manifest themselves through interactive game environments, which Laurien amazingly builds by herself – not something professional game designers do! An artwork well executed, displaying technical nous and labour hours is appealing, and it makes a generous offer to its audience, providing multiple layers of intrigue and enjoyment.

At a basic level it can be aesthetically admired, and then one can delve deeper into the ideas and process behind the work. Video and digital artists emerging into the art world often demonstrate technical proficiency equivalent to the virtuosic painting we already know and love. Now, let’s give the screens some time.

Luke Wright’s poetry is raw with emotions, uncovering experiences often forgotten in the flurry of an Oxford term. Listening to his poetry online, I feel tired of the unfaltering short-sightedness of the drive for perfection rampant in the Oxford academic system. We are trained within an inch of our lives to analyse everything – every emotion, motivation and economic structure – with cold reason. Yet in this there is something the unfalteringly driven tutors and grasping BNOCs of Oxford lose: empathy skills. This is something Luke Wright’s poetry brings back in tender detail. It is not always about who is right or wrong, who has the power to win the argument: it is about where people are and what they experience.

I have the thrilling experience to interview him before his upcoming show. His dulcet Essex tones invoke an involuntary homesickness, which is odd because this is the vac, and I am at home. We start off with some Essex nostalgia. He actually went to Colchester Sixth Form, the same school as my brother. I meant to ask him about his poem ‘Essex Lion.’ The original news story was hilarious, his poem perhaps better. I also meant to ask about the hair. He co-wrote a book with Joel Stickley called Who Writes This Crap?, which looks simply brilliant (even if I haven’t actually read any further than the title page). But in the stress of a first ever interview and the caffeine of that overly strong coffee I just drank, I forgot. So I move on to the more important questions.

Essex or Suffolk? East Anglia (correct answer.) We talk about the North/ South divide and how it is really the fringes such as the East which you should watch out for. We are of course a wondrous region of our own, which will eventually take over the world with Olly Murs and Maggie Smith. I am glad he agrees.

So then moving away from the great geographical debate to the actual reason for the interview, why poetry? He describes how he saw some poets when he was 17 and fell in love with the art. They were passionate, exciting, funny and inspired him to start writing his own stuff. I asked who he would describe as his biggest inspiration. He mentions Martin Newell, John Cooper Clarke and Philip Larkin, and the list goes on. He also doesn’t hesitate to add that friends and people around him can often be the biggest influence and in his uncannily realistic character portrayals in some of his poems, you can understand how. He revels in the joy of spoken poetry, as he claims you can write something in the morning and be performing it by the afternoon. Wright per formed this year at Edinburgh Fringe, winning a Fringe First award for new writing, a load of four and five star reviews, and The Stage Award For Acting Excellence. I try to ascertain where is his favourite place to perform. I notice he is performing in Diss. I don’t know how much the Cherwell general readership knows about Diss, but for me it has always just been a train station. I am quickly put right. Diss is actually quite pretty, despite the row upon row of gravestones you pass as you enter the train station. Apparently there is a quite good gravestone shop, not just loads of dead people. Wright plays a number of venues; from the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall to the Colchester Arts centre, so trying to choose just one favourite was hard and, I guess, a fairly stupid question.

Having noticed the politics of some of his work, I ask about Corbyn. He says he considers him a principled man, who has been on the right side of history multiple times and that he is astute, a rare thing in modern politics. However he despondently questions whether Corbyn will ever be able to win an election because of the self-destructive infighting in the party and the wrestle for soul of Labour. His message for the current Labour Party? “Shut up and leave him (Corbyn) alone. He needs a fucking good team around to win an election.”

I ask him what concerns him most about our generation (this provoked the inevitable debate as to whether we really were part of the same generation. He’s now 34, so perhaps not.) His answer was blunt. Life’s tough. Unemployment. Really the same issues which span across the whole board of society. He worries how, with the welfare state being hacked away at, people in the most vulnerable positions are being hit. Looking to the future, he wonders at the power of technology in influencing future politics and doubts whether the public sector can survive.

Moving onto the more serious questions: cats or dogs? Cats (dogs are a lot of work!) He quickly puts me right in stating that cats and dogs are not really comparable. Dogs or children would be a more apt question because of the apparent degree of loving attachment. So I ask that. He says children. I realise how desperately I need to get better at this interviewing malarkey.

I ask him to summarise the show in five words. He replies – political, intense, funny, sounds good.

I then ask what message he would give to the average, exams-stressed, time-pressed Oxford student. Come watch the show! It will hopefully feel really relevant at the moment. It’s about the Labour party, being a student, finding something to believe in and the intense relationships you build at University. He highlights as a lasting point the formative power of our time at university. I cannot but agree.

Luke Wright’s multi award-winning political drama ‘What I Learned from Johnny Bevan’ comes to The North Wall, Oxford on Friday the 29th January 2016. Tickets here.

David Bowie passed away on the 10th January, after having fought against cancer for 18-months. This article was written a day before his death.

Not only did he celebrate his 69th birthday last Saturday, David Bowie also released his new album intriguingly named ‘★’, or Blackstar. Just two years after The Next Day, this new creation comes with its own themes and indeed its individual creature to add to the artist’s collection, quickly giving Bowie yet another reason to celebrate: it has only taken the album two days to reach the top of Amazon’s UK best-selling list, in front of Adele, with the vinyl equally in the top 10.

But this is as far as the festive mood goes. The album has more in common with the haunting sounds of Outside (1995) than with the hopeful messages of tracks such as ‘Dancing Out in Space’ from The Next Day.

David Bowie’s extremely versatile voice is backed up by drums beating irregular but ominously present rhythms and disharmonious strings, giving birth to an atmosphere that makes the expression “angsty” seem hollow altogether. ‘Girl loves me’, the fifth of this slightlyshorter-than-usual seven track album, is particularly obscure both in terms of musical choices and the lyrics themselves, and goes to show how electronic sounds can be used to complement acoustic instruments in a subtle balance. Most of the lyrics of this song, like “Party up moodge, nanti vellocet round on Tuesday”, are based on a mix of slang and made-up languages, using Bowie’s voice as a separate instrument in itself as he continues experimenting with combinations of echoes, dissonance and phrases with surprisingly high-pitched cry-like ends. Mostly made up of three distinct parts like ‘Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)’ – which evolves from a rocky intro with a bit of a funk tang into dark jazz featuring long solos of the artist’s favourite instrument, the saxophone, progressing towards a more expansive style at the end – this album’s songs play with the absence of sound as much as its presence. Liberated of any pretence of commercial interest, the artist is able to write slightly longer tracks and therefore give more importance to every sound and switch of tone that might strike the listener as out of place.

Easily recognisable as part of David Bowie’s long discography, Blackstar remains nonetheless a symbolic step further into experimentation, both musically and aesthetically, with the rather disturbing music videos for ‘Lazarus’ and ‘Blackstar’ directed by Swedish film director Bo Johan Renck and the cryptic design of the album cover.

Even in its closing stages, 2015 wasn’t without surprises. As Lemmy Kilmister, legendary bassist and frontman of Motörhead passed away, rumours emerged that the original Guns N’ Roses line-up was to reform for Coachella 2016 after decades of bad blood between Slash and Axl Rose.

Justifiably, the world of music drenched social networks with tributes for Lemmy. The band followed suit, with drummer Mikkey Dee announcing “Motörhead is over, of course” to Swedish newspaper Expressen. Sadly, Motörhead join the likes of Led Zeppelin in having their artistic contributions to the world cut short after the tragic death of a member and friend. But Dee’s “of course” is less apt than one might think, given that the death of a member does not always spell the death of a band.

Queen make for a particularly egregious example. No words need to be added to the tributes surrounding Freddie Mercury, whose death prompted bassist John Deacon to retire out of a wish to preserve Mercury’s memory and the band’s artistic integrity. Yet Brian May and Roger Taylor regularly wheel out the hits while editing and releasing Mercury’s old vocal takes – divisive moves critically, emotionally but, tellingly, not fi nancially.

Like Queen, Metallica and AC/DC suffered hard-hitting tragedies, but they occurred in their youth, before fame, with Metallica suffering a tour bus crash which robbed us of original bassist Cliff Burton. Believing that Burton would have wanted them to continue, they found a replacement in Jason Newsted (in turn replaced by Robert Trujillo 15 years later.) AC/DC’s story is somewhat similar, with Geordie Brian Johnson stepping in for Bon Scott after the latter’s untimely death – the first album on which Johnson featured was Back in Black, the second biggest-selling album worldwide.

Slipknot’s .5: The Gray Chapter is a full-on elegy to bassist Paul Gray who passed away in 2010. Here dedications to Gray are plentiful, but thinly-veiled shots at former drummer Joey Jordison, unceremoniously sacked in 2013, also feature.

Perhaps, though, the vicious break-up has been perfected as an art form by Blink-182. Original drummer Scott Raynor was sacked due to alcoholism, and was publicly dismantled in 2000’s scathing single ‘Man Overboard’. Indeed, +44, formed after Tom DeLonge left Blink-182 for the fi rst time (he left once more in January 2015) became an outlet for indirect rants for jilted bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker.

Blink-182 are currently in the studio with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba replacing Delonge. Their comeback album will be joined in 2016 by Bloc Party’s Hymns, after the band parted ways with two of their original four members over the last few years. If the past proves anything to us, losing a member (or two) is always a transformative time, often imbued with catharsis and soul-searching – two factors which almost always lead to a band’s best work. Examples of triumphant comeback albums are plentiful (Manic Street Preachers after the disappearance of Richey Edwards; New Order after the demise of Ian Curtis and Joy Division) so they’ll certainly be hoping that this sentiment rings true. Never has the pressure to perform been greater.