Question for you: is it just me, or is everything shit?

Sick to the core -- review by Charlotte Raven
Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? The encyclopedia of modern life by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur

Is it me or is everything shit? I've been asking myself this for the past five years. Before that, I believed the decadence and banality of our society was a simple fact - irrefutable except by those with a financial incentive to maintain the global monoculture of "cool". Then a therapist told me that the shitness I perceived as "out there" was actually a projection of the internal shit, the stuff about myself I didn't dare admit to, let alone embrace. I believed her because, in a way, it was better to think I owned it - at least then there was the possibility of ameliorating its effects with love. If, on the other hand, you think it's society, there's nothing you can do except contemplate suicide or revolution.

Even more reassuring is the thought that you might just be getting old. If I was young, my husband says, I wouldn't be sitting there moaning, I'd be out inventing new musical genres and banding together in knots of underground consciousness. For evidence, he points to the "Camden Canal Collective", a loose grouping of goths and cyberpunks housed in a derelict building down the road. As far as I can see, their countercultural activity is limited to burning "Taste the Difference" signs they've nicked from the Sainsbury's car park. They're not even proper punks, not like I remember them. But then I would say that, wouldn't I? People in their thirties always think things were better when they were young.

My husband says that when you have children, you no longer have the time or inclination to ferret out the stuff that's produced on the margins, so assume, mistakenly, that this whole area of cultural activity has been commodified, or absorbed by the mainstream. What we think of as culture - TV, magazines, books you hear about, music you get off iTunes - is mass culture, which is just as crap as, or certainly no crapper than it was when I was a teenage mod. I'm always caricatured in this argument, as if I'm mistaking Pop Idol for "the culture". I want to contest this, but can't substantiate the feeling I have that something terrible and disturbing has happened since Tony Blair took office. It comes out in bits in conversations - "Did you see . . . ?", "Can you believe . . . ?" It's not Sharon Osbourne, but Toyah Willcox with a facelift describing herself as a feminist; songs with only choruses; the iPod and U2 synergy; people mocking the former home secretary because he's blind and possibly crap in bed; the death of satire; Kaiser Chiefs predicting a riot.

These observations never seem substantial enough to stand on their own. When I had a column, I used to try and dress them up, thinking this would make them more plausible. I never realised they'd be far more hard-hitting in their unadulterated form. Some will no doubt think Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur infantile for calling Blair a "laser-eyed pixie weirdo" or Prince Charles a "loony feudal shithead parasite bastard". To me, the invective looks like a weapon of last resort. In stooping before taking aim, the authors clearly hope that some of their mud might stick.

None of which is to imply that Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? is in any way slight. Having seen it in the humour section of our local bookshop, I was worried that it might be a stocking filler-type production, a Grumpy Old Men -style faux rant about mobile phones and flat-pack furniture. Now that I've read it, I want to go back and put it where its potential audience is more likely to see past the packaging and recognise that the book's pointed wit is in fact quite the opposite of "humour". While the latter takes aim at speed bumps, service-station food and other inconveniences, Lowe and McArthur's targets are the things that are commonly regarded as fun. They attack shopping from every angle - most enjoyably for me, as a former Brighton resident, the fun/funky little emporia that offer shoppers simulacra of "individuality". Every kitsch/tat shop sells the same stuff - "George Bush fridge magnets, a Monkey tape measure, numerous cards featuring the same picture of a Fifties housewife and a rude slogan, something like 'On Sundays, Doreen enjoyed nothing more than a good spit roast!'" - and yet people come away from them feeling they've got something a bit "different".

Lowe and McArthur are maddened, not just annoyed but literally maddened, by the effluvia of consumer society. The sardonic tone of the entries reflects a sense that this stuff is not just irritating but degrading to our humanity. We're talking bad shit here, dredged from a place beyond the reach of satire. Richard Curtis's G8 film The Girl in the Cafe perfectly epitomises the kind of shit that will poison the spirit if you allow yourself to be fooled into thinking, as the authors put it, "that all it took to change the world was just one kooky Scottish girl to bump into a gangly cabinet adviser and for her to click her fingers in front of all the world's financial houses and emote about the world's poor and them to stop behaving like a global version of the loan sharks who advertise on daytime telly".

I wish they'd put Geldof on the cover, Bono, Ben Elton or any of the other sell-outs - anything but a road sign leading to McDonald's and an International Business Park, an image that woefully undersells the wit and range of this "encylopedia of modern life". There are many surprising entries, but the book reaches its critical pinnacle when attacking "Quality", that category of cultural output which aspires to depth and profundity. This is important, because the widespread belief that all is well is founded on the illusion that "art" still has the potential to redeem us from the trash. It's not frivolous to describe Sofia Coppola as "a supercilious rich-kid auteur who does pseudo-profound confections that people initially twat themselves over but which, on second viewing, are the cinematic equivalent of unflavoured rice cake". The authors are forcing us to confront our false belief that this kind of fare is more sustaining than some Hollywood movie McNugget. At least we know those are bad for us. Lost in Translation evokes profundity in the manner, the authors say, of "Wim Wenders directing a crap U2 video in 1993". I fell for it initially, too, then experienced the same rush of irritation as, yet again, significance dissolved into spectacle.

The book is like that disillusioning second viewing, an appraisal of the culture by people who are no longer susceptible to the myths that stop us from seeing things as they really are. They know that cool is a chimera, and disbelieve the scale of value on which success is currently judged. Amazingly for modern commentators, they seem to lack vanity. In spite of the quote that says they want the book to sell millions, you know they aren't going to take a table at Hell's Kitchen or try to chat up Richard Madeley's daughter at the "Hearts of Gold" awards. I used to think authorial intention was bunk, but now I really care about an artist's motivation. If something has been got up, it's shit, even if it's good. Most upsetting is that category of got-up integrity, like Zadie Smith's much-publicised refusal to appear on magazine covers. These lines in the sand are drawn in full view of the cameras. I wouldn't care, but in an apolitical age you are defined by the things you say no to, since there's nothing to say yes to yet.

Like Lowe and McArthur, I am almost always in a bait. It's impossible not to be when you're thinking and writing about this craziest period in the development of consumer capitalism. So much of it looks so obviously mad, you expect others to see it. From the looks on their faces, you can tell they think you're the mad one. The ebbing away of political consciousness has left writers such as Lowe and McArthur looking like olde worlde eccentrics for disapproving of private schools, the pursuit of wealth and people's willing submission to the insane work patterns that are now the norm. "We work stupid hours and relieve the stress by hammering our bodies with toxins and - unlike a Victorian chimney sweep whacked out on gin - we think this equates to radical high living rather than just alternating between droney worker or droney consumer."

As difficult as it is to be the person who doesn't know any better, it is equally hard to be the person who does. Awareness leads not to happiness but to paralysis, when you've realised that it's your life you've revealed as a sham, and accepted the fact that from now on you are doomed to sound like a fatuous twat. This knowledge is terrifying. How do you comfort yourself when you can't have a drink in a pub playing mellow dance grooves (pure tepid beats for yuppie mongs), go on a minibreak to a hip hotel or kid yourself that Gordon Brown will promote a return to old Labour values? For me, reasserting my opposition to "everything" is still a scary business, even though I can take solace from the thought that I now know who I'd like to have round the table when the time comes to plan the revolution.

(Charlotte Raven is a former editor of the Modern Review.)