Elbow won this year’s Mercury Music prize for their record The Seldom Seen Kid. I’ve been trying to work out why I don’t like it, and what this might tell me (or anyone) about how to live.

What’s not to like? The record is tuneful, and there are some clever lyrics - although “baby I love you” is about as clever and meaningful as meeting Shakespeare in an alley (more on that another time). The songs are often freighted with sadness and that bittersweet acceptance of life’s hardships you can buy in good branches of M & S (“this isn’t just acceptance: it’s bittersweet acceptance, marinated in tragedy with a sprinkling of joy and the sun behind the clouds coming out when you least expect it”). It’s the sound of kind Northern men who can play their instruments and who have problems with their lovers, with drinking and with middle age. With finitude, even.

And this is, I think, the problem - not just with Elbow, but more generally: when bands sound as you imagine they are in real life, I get antsy.  Let’s imagine a band of middle class, university-educated, intellectually-minded, left wing people coming of age musically in the late 80s/early 90s (just before Britpop, when eclecticism was at a premium and you could mix electronics with guitars). Oh, yes! Look! It’s Radiohead! I’m asleep already. Educated at Public School, the British rock canon and at a music school in Brighton?  Run for your lives/grab your AK47s (delete as appropriate), it’s the abomination known as the Kooks! And so on.

In contrast, there are bands who are aiming at something different, who are aiming to be something different: the locus classicus of this is the Beatles, those four “imaginary Americans” and the whole 60s British blues scene. Surrey, though verdant, just isn’t the Mississippi delta. But it’s true all over. Spaceman 3, a band that always make my (adolescent) heart beat faster were, basically, two dope-smoking lads from provincial Rugby, but they wanted to be, or at least to sound like, revolutionary Californian garage space-war hippy punks from the year 2525. The Go! Team (we love you! by the way) want to be weird techno-soul rappers flung back in a time machine to jam with the 60s Velvet Underground and the 80s Public Enemy. Simultaneously. Johnny Cash never killed a man in Reno. When we say (usually in a daze after three hours or so of improvised guitar noise) “The Mars Volta is the future!” we mean: they sound as if they come from the future. So what’s going on here? What’s making the music good? It is a projection to elsewhere or elsewhen.

Projection is also why bands go off the boil.  Oasis began as no-marks desperately  wanting to be Rock and Roll Stars. That first record – though it has aged badly – is full of yearning and wild, unfocused ambition, and for this reason it is beautiful. When they achieved their aim, having no ‘projection’ left, they became flabby and tired, notwithstanding Noel’s obvious wit and enthusiasm.  When the Spice Girls were puppets pretending to be mega-stars (they really, really wanted it), they had a charm and an energy: when they were all over crisp packets and newspapers, they lost just this charm in a barrage of money and success.  Reality caught up with the future, with the projection. (A cynical voice might say: well, ‘projecting’ yourself to be a rock star as opposed to, as above, ‘revolutionary Californian garage etc’, is not a really big ask. Anyone can fit in some practise.)

Conversely, bands or artists who have no idea who they want to be (are we a dance band? Or a New Wave band? Bugger me, we’re New Order!), or better, too many ideas about who they want to be (Hot Chip! Hot Chip!), or who go out of their way to avoid this (Aphex Twin) stay alive.

Projection goes against, of course, one of the great rock myths: the myth of authenticity (more on that, too, another time). Instead of ‘being true to yourself’ projection is all about being true to someone, something or somewhen else.  And, as bands and artists are in a big way ciphers for ourselves (we want to shag them or be them or – confusingly - both at once), this is true for us, too.

So what do we learn about how to live from not liking the Mercury Prize winner? We learn that pop is true when it isn’t true, that authenticity is really authentic when it’s not. The real ‘now’ we want is always involved with somewhere else.  This isn’t the NME wisdom that pop is fake and fake is good (I can be a fake being authentic in my fakery), but that, somehow, the thing lives in the ‘to come’ - in the projection (let’s call it - a good word to steal from Derrida – telepoesis: the ‘far away creating’). This is what we need to embrace. And everything we like in pop – its politics, its sexiness, its joy - comes from this.