Songs in the Key of X

Green Day, ‘Basket Case’

Paranoia - in the colloquial rather than the clinical sense - preoccupied songwriters in the 1990s. So I decided early on that paranoia would be a theme in my book on alternative rock, and that I would try to be as paranoid as possible while writing it. I would approach my history book the way agent Mulder in the X-Files would tackle a murder mystery. For Mulder, nothing is ever simple – every piece of information is a sign that something else is being hidden, the news that the case is closed is virtually proof that he has come close to uncovering a sinister government plot. So it would be with me.

(Garbage, ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’)

My own investigations began with the letter ‘X’. In the 90s, ‘X’ stood for an invisible generation (‘Generation X’), a storehouse of government secrets (‘X-Files’) a hipster clothing label owned by Adam Yauch (‘X-large’), and its sister imprint, presided over by Kim Gordon (‘X-Girl’). Slowly more ‘X’s revealed themselves to me. The decade began with Sonic Youth’s ‘Goo’, whose sleeve is sealed with a kiss (which in typographic terms is an ‘x’) and ended with ‘XTRMNTR’, by Primal Scream – whose 1997 album ‘Vanishing Point’ could also be seen to describe an ‘X’.

I watched an MTV interview with Beck, in which he declared that “the past is a cancelled check.” Ah-ha! I thought. Cancellation is indicated by an ‘X’! I listened to Bikini Kill singing “in her kiss I taste the revolution”. Another ‘x’! I watched the 1990 film of ‘Naked Lunch’ and heard Peter Weller as William Burroughs say that he would ‘Exterminate all rational thought’. Then I bought a copy of an album called ‘Songs in The Key of X’ for 50p in a charity shop in Southampton, which featured Burroughs reading the lyrics of a song by REM. “There must be a connection!” I thought.

I had become paranoid, but did Burroughs himself not declare, in 1970, that “the paranoid is a man who knows a little of what is going on”? Did Primal Scream not remind their fans that "paranoia is total awareness" on the run-off groove of ‘Vanishing Point’?

(Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’)

I began to construct an enormous wall chart so as to lay out the timeline of the book...

...and everytime I identified an ‘x’, I connected it to its closest neighbour with a piece of red cotton.

I quickly moved beyond 'x's to connect other things that resembled one another - words, pictures, motifs from songs and videos. Over time, these red lines built up to the point where they criss-crossed each other. One day, I stood back and realised that each one of these cross-points was itself a ‘Vanishing Point’, and also an ‘X’.

It seemed as though a great secret had been revealed to me, but that no-one else could see it. This made me feel lonely and misunderstood, which actually felt surprisingly good.

What the cards mean