From an old interview with Andrew Eldritch:

Also, you've been quoted as saying in a February 1996 interview with the Dutch publication Hardrock and Heavy Metal Magazine (I read an English translation of this), "the young people of today just don't have the ability to review a text with any level of intelligence", hence they don't understand the "the ironic subtone" or "images and symbols" in your lyrics? Do you still find this?

It varies from place to place, culture to culture, and generation to generation. I don't remember whether the Dutch interview was referring particularly to Britain, America, heavy metal fans in Holland or the child prostitutes of Bombay. Overall, things certainly seem harder than they were twenty years ago, when Dylan, Cohen and the rest could unselfconsciously refer to things which are no longer familiar to people, thereby speaking a language with a larger vocabulary, without the need to spell everything out.

David Bowie was telling me recently how great Damien Hirst is, and how Damien was very excited when told about the minotaur myth. I was shocked that Damien didn't already know it. Sorry David, but how can Hirst be such a great artist if he lacks a basic knowledge of history/myth/symbolism, if he lacks the vocabulary, the ability to insert visual shorthand like a hypertext link? And how much less rich an experience is it for the viewer who lacks the ability to recognise and follow such links?

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone. If Damien's at all clever, it's because he's recognised that modern art has disappeared up its own backside, and drawn the only logical conclusion about his place in the scheme of things. There's a boy that's going places, even if he smells funny.

Anyway, back to business... Leonard Cohen tells me he would no longer bother to write a song about Isaac, because people wouldn't know what he was on about. That doesn't only diminish the vocabulary of songs, it has wider implications. If the reference points for our whole belief system are forgotten, we find it that much harder to understand a shared belief system, or even to disagree coherently with a shared belief system. We end up in a vicious circle of incoherent, half-baked individual utlitarianism where nobody has any belief system at all and we lose the ability to communicate with each other. I think that's one reason why football is so popular again - it's a game which the citizen can focus on, where the rules are defined. Unlike his life. The citizen is becoming a pawn in a game where nobody knows the rules, where everybody consequently doubts that there are rules at all, and where the vocabulary has been diminished to such an extent that nobody is even sure what the game is all about. Hence the concomitant rise of fads like astrology, spiritualism, and generic "I want to believe"-ism. I'm a humanist. I believe people should be able to sort themselves out, as does the Judeo-Christian tradition, obviously, but for rather different reasons. Even for Western-European humanists, it's helpful to know about Isaac and Abraham for any discussion of belief/hope/obligation, especially if we wish to join a discussion which has been developed over two thousand years. It's a bit tedious to have to start the discussion from scratch every time by mulling over yesterday's soap-opera with the few people who actually watched it.