Blog Will Eat Itself

T'other day, I read a diatribe by Giles Coren in The Times, calling for dogs to be simply eliminated from amidst human society, for reasons of safety and hygiene, much as we don't permit firearms for fear that they be possessed by those harbouring ill intent. I experienced a vicarious bout of nodding first at the sentiment (I've always not only found dogs aesthetically unappealing but emotively tragic in that people's response to their geneticaly engineered loyalty and 'friendship' depresses me no end about my fellow man much as other psychological crutches like religions do). Then at the writer's doubtlessly delirious sense of anticipation, mid-rant, at how many knees he was jerking.
I found myself, amidst reaching for the keyboard to add my 'hear-hear', having David Quantick's expression from a review in the NME 20-odd years ago bounce around from ear to ear. Writing about the painfully awful Carter, the Unstoppable Sex Machine in their embryonic form (who some call godfathers of grebo, as if that were mitigating evidence), Quantick posited the idea that 'pop will eat itself' - successive waves of pop music only feed on the tastiest morsels of what came before, and so generation by generation the sound pool is diminished, the same elements recycled and little added.
Thankfully Quantick proved at the very least to be jumping the gun badly, like the oil crisis doommongers in the '70s, considering that only a few years later rave changed the whole landscape and then Massive Attack thundered in. Pop Will Eat Itself, meanwhile, was gleefully appropriated as a band name by a bunch of greboes, who did fairly well out of it.
But the idea remains inviolate. I'm not sure that the proliferation of mashups is in itself symptomatic of entropy and the end result is to be a universal musical grey mulch, but I'm pretty sure writers of any kind should guard against feeding off other writers, particularly in the closed system of the blogosphere. That way autocannibalism lies.
Anyway, since here I got to eat my cake of kicking dogs, I'm not hungry any more.