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A Bullshitters Guide to Freshers Week

We're going to teach you how to bullshit about the only thing that's more important to be able to bullshit about than sex.

Freshers Week, if you're lucky, is a bacchanalian fuckfest. A Vaseline and bin-bag orgy stuffed to the gills with free booze and cheap drugs; a fortnight of unparalleled debauchery that signals an unforgettable entry into adulthood.

The lucky few that enjoy Freshers will end up making friends for life; the rest of us will spend the next three years avoiding people in Iceland. Whatever happens the main thing to remember is, even if you're in a half-baked conversation, you can always get through by blagging and bullshitting. So, with that in mind, we're going to teach you how to bullshit about the only thing that's more important to be able to bullshit about than sex: music.

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Everyone likes music and the great thing about it is that it makes up for a lack of personality. You can assign yourself to a social circle just by looking over a third year’s shoulder in the library and seeing what mix they’re listening to on Soundcloud. You can go to a shit gig and talk to no one and hate it but still feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself. You can probably use your music taste to impress the opposite sex.

The following tips will come in handy at house parties, be invaluable in long afternoons in the pub, and will stand you in good stead when you’re swaying on your feet trying to maintain eye contact with Jane/John from your postcolonial literature seminar. Let’s do this. Let’s get you into music without the hassle of having to listen to the shit.

ABANDON ALL NEW BANDS

Let’s start with a biggie here. Real talk: all new bands are terrible. Freshers is the only chance you get in life to reinvent yourself in totality and who wants to squander that by being known as the bloke down the hall who’s really, really into Twin Atlantic? I’ve never listened to them but I bet they sound like something your SU newspaper would breathlessly describe as “an oceanic roar of pure sound and emotion” or something. New bands are for people who were in bands at sixth form and want to be in new bands; a horrific ouroboros of landfill indie. No one wants to hear you talking about the merits of Royal Blood because they're shit.

BUY RECORDS

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Check your bank balance. Blink. Check again. Yep, you’ve got money in there. Four figures of cold hard cash. You will never see this again. Sure you can burn through a term’s worth of tenners down American Apparel in an afternoon or happily spend that month’s food money on the latest Palace garms, but come on, those clothes will get creased and stink because you don't have an iron or know how a washing machine works. Why not splurge on something practical, like expensive, heavy records that look good but sound shit unless daddy paid for your £3000 turntable. In truth, the sound quality doesn’t matter. What matters is how much you’ll impress your peers and wow the opposite sex by clumsily slapping on the latest Livity Sound 12” on an Argos platter and scratching the fuck out of it due to clumsiness. Get enough of them and you can pester a local pub to let you do a “DJ set” one night. Easy.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM

Obliterate irony and start enjoying things you enjoy. Obviously if what you enjoy is Mumford and Sons then maybe begin a lengthy course of intensive self-flagellation but otherwise pick something that sounds cool – could be a genre, could be a record label – and pretend to be more into it than you are. Just make sure that you make this look non-committal; just call everything ‘sick’ in a monotone voice. Talk about preferring the early stuff as you laxly light a Marlboro while cradling a coffee. Never ever look or sound like you genuinely like it. Enthusiasm is for fucking spods and you’re the big man who left the provinces to smash the city – city smashers don’t talk with exclamation marks.

FUCK FANDOM

Simple one this: never become someone associated acutely with a particular act. You’ll look like a 14 year old weirdo and everyone in your block will tell everyone in the other block about how you slunk out sniffling when everyone started talking about sexual experiences over their Cactus Jacks’ in the kitchen earlier that week. Jeff Buckley’s fucking shocking anyway.

IRONY IS THE ENEMY

At some point in the next fortnight you’re going to find yourself stood on the SU dancefloor, cherry stains on your boxfresh Janoskis, being corralled by people you’ll never speak to ever again to sing along to a song by 5ive. You won’t want to do this. You’ll hate doing it. But you’ll do it because everyone else is. As a heads up, peer pressure never goes away and is always as powerful as it was when you were 14. Sorry. Anyway, irony is a pox, the festering remains of the failure of postmodernism. Every time you do a disco hand-roll to "Getting Jiggy With It" you’re contributing to your own eventual head-first dip into the depths of depression.

KNOW YOUR SHIT

There are students for whom the idea of an afternoon spent in the library is about as tolerable as being stuck in a lift with an ebola ridden Brian Blessed. Don’t become one of those people. If you’re lucky, your university library will be one of the greatest gifts you ever receive, an endless fount of knowledge that never stops surprising. Most libraries will have a decent section of books that you can smash in an afternoon and will let you talk to older students with an air of authority. The following are indispensible: Last Night a DJ Saved my Life by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Culture by Tim Lawrence, Words and Music by Paul Morley, Lost in Music by Giles Smith.

MAKE MATES WITH DJS

This is an essential, even though most self-identitifed DJs are tossers. It doesn’t matter if you hate the music they play because you still get to look really cool when you go home and tell your mates from the old world about that “fucking wicked club night” you go to every Wednesday that your pal runs. They’ll be incredibly impressed and you wont have to tell them how you spend every night stood in the corner methodically drinking the £2.50 plastic bottles of Stella, looking at your phone, praying for the sweet release of the night bus home.

OBSCURITY: A FRESHER’S GUIDE

While it’s great to be into Ethiopian jazz and Vietnamese garage, there’s a fine line between looking like someone who knows their shit and is probably worth being mates with, and coming across as the kind of elitist record collector who smells a bit like hay and has had even less sex than you have. Which is none. Obscurity is good in small does but in the long run it’ll leave you traipsing around the dirty floors of internet message boards trying to suck the marrow out of a blues 78 for sustenance. Feel free, however, to play a fun game which involves making up record labels/DJs/bands and seeing how many people you can fool into believing their existence before you realise what a hollow life you’re going to have. The more obscure the better.

SNEER AT THE SU

SU bars are soulless puts that reek of the sweaty desperation of foam-doused rugby lads; grubby palaces of imagined sin that echo with the whoops of men too old to be working with nubile 18 year olds. They’re not as cheap as a Wetherspoons and the clientele of daytime drinkers is even bleaker. Going in the evening is an even worse idea. I’m sure there are exceptions, but most SU ents managers are more into Now That’s What I Call Music than Nu Groove so expect long desultory nights full of foam-doused rugby boys pretending to bum each other on the dancefloor to "Barbie Girl". Set your stall out early by bailing on the SU on that first night and going to a UK Bass club instead.

TREAD CARFEULLY WITH DRUG ADDLED CHOICES

Now, talking about drugs is the most boring thing imaginable so we won’t go into too much detail but please remember that choices you make this fortnight will have a huge impact on the entirety of your social life forever. Drugs make you do funny things so tread carefully. Don’t be the person who puts Exodus on whole smoking a ‘peace pipe’. Don’t foam at the mouth squawking out a "YES MATE THIS IS FUCKING WICKED MATE FUCKING LOVE IT" at every track you hear. Don’t you fucking dare try and rap along to anything. Just check ResidentAdvisor and Pitchfork the day before you arrive, memorise two song titles you saw on there and suggest them. Job done. You’ll spend the next week wanting to kill yourself but Chloe who studies Psychotherapy was really impressed when you put on that DJ Haus mix.

Follow Josh on Twitter: @Bain3z