Today, I found myself listening to Blur's Parklife on David Schmader's itunes (Schmader, though he wouldn't brag about it, has the best mp3 library in the Stranger offices, although it limits to five listeners a day, so you have to be early). It's the first time I've listened to the album in a bit, and it got me thinking about the grim economic (although politically hopeful) times we face and what that might mean for music. There is, of course, a popular notion that bad times—politically, economically, or otherwise—are necessary for great music, or at least that more great music comes out of such times. But I think that's bullshit, hindsight casting a nostalgic glow on the Reagan years because of punk rock and the like.

The '90s were, by most acounts, a great time to be American or British—dot coms and economic prosperity and rising tides blurring (urg) the disparity between haves and have nots, making even slacker jobs—say, civil service—relatively comfortable and attractive and bohemian; everyone could enjoy the bank holiday together. The guy who turned me on to Blur along with a host of other bands in the '90s, something of a mentor, seemed to perfectly exemplify this type: He worked a slacker job, had a great apartment on Capitol Hill, sported an Artists for a Work-Free America t-shirt and meant it, and just generally seemed like a man of leisure. And men of leisure need leisure rock like Blur. But it's hard to maintain a life of leisure in a great depression, and while we might get a lot of blistering punk rock in the coming years (or, shit, fingers crossed some green public works really will solve employment and environmental problems in one fell swoop), what will happen to the leisure rock of the world? Sure, the actually privileged leisure class may continue to make the stuff, but so what if us proles can't actually enjoy it? And what then to make of all this Blur reunion talk?