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Errata and Addenda to Last Month's Edition
(a) It's been pointed out that the day of my birth - and, by association,
that of the bass player from Blink 182 - wasn't previously best-known for
being the date that an American radio station played "Puppy Love" non-stop
for six hours, but for being the date that appears in the very first frame
of Theatre of Blood (a movie in which Vincent Price plays a mad actor who
kills theatre critics in the style of the plays of Shakespeare, most memorable
for the scene where Robert Morley eats his own dogs). Do any other readers
have dates of birth immortalised in film? We should particularly envy those
children born on the 9th of September, 1999, the day when the moon was
ostensibly ripped out of Earth's orbit and began its mysterious journey into
deep space.
(b) The curious dying line of the Scissor Sisters record is 'this'll be
the last time I ever do your hair', not 'I'll never let you touch my hair
again'. But surely, no inconvenience could have been caused by this mistake?
Unless you were taking part in a really pedantic pop quiz.
UK Top Forty Singles, 40. "Chocolate", Kylie Minogue
Perhaps the first video to be notable purely for its exotic film-stock: the grainy,
slightly blurred texture of the video seems to suggest the 1970s, but in combination with the title the first
thing that springs to mind is Love Thy Neighbour. What's remarkable about
the history of Kylie Minogue is that when "Spinning Around" re-invented her
from the bottom up, people actually seemed to believe her arse was a new
discovery. Whereas anybody who remembers her performing on Going Live in a
purple skin-tight catsuit c. 1991 will remember the cameraman's rear-angle
shots with affection. Much like Dorian Grey, an unspecified supernatural
bargain has ensured that her backside never grows old even as her face
starts to fall apart from middle-age and cow hormones.
38. "F*U*R*B", Frankee
The music industry has, as we've seen, finally worked out the truth: the
best way to make money out of adolescents is to get them to fight each
other. When we're kids, we're taught that it's boys-against-girls all the
way. Pop music has now become the battlefield. From hereon in, every record
sold to girls will feature girls insisting that they're strong, independent
and don't need no shit off no man. Every record sold to boys will feature
boys being as hostile to girls as possible without risking a radio ban by
using the word "bitch". What this effectively means is that great pop music is
almost impossible. Great pop music requires vulnerability, and
vulnerability is unthinkable. No teenager would risk showing any sign of
weakness. No boy can ever admit to being hurt, and no girl can ever admit to
feeling as if she depends on someone else. Dusty Springfield would get her
legs broken, in this world. And Roy Orbison would just have his glasses
stepped on.
36. "Fuck It", Eamon.
Which leads us to one more conclusion. Pop music is deliberately
promoting aggression between boys and girls. Ergo, between men and women.
It's stupid to pretend that it won't have an impact, in the same way that
it's stupid to think you can feed your kids a McDonald's diet and not fuck
up their body-chemistries (another great cause of violent behaviour). And
when it comes to Gender-Hate Pop, this is the big one; the record that marks
the start of a whole new era, the record that's become an anthem for boys
who like to tell other boys what complete slags their ex-girlfriends are,
the record that raises the aggression-levels of the under-25s faster than
anything other than a bad refereeing decision. In the end, it's safe to say
that in the long-term… somebody will die of Eamon. Probably quite a
few people. Why can't pop stars just encourage children to take heroin, and make
things simple?
34. "Flawless", George Michael
Video (briefly) features a big fat woman in lingerie. The aren't enough
big fat women in lingerie in pop music.
31. "Bubblin'", Blue
Not doing very well, for such a carefully-assembled boy-band. And
is that surprising? The video does everything it can to look like a modern
hip-hop piece, putting the boys next to a swimming pool and surrounding them
with as many multi-ethnic women as the agency can get hold of. This works
with rap, because it's mostly bought by boys, who look at rap stars covering
themselves in Hot Central Casting Booty and think "yeah, that's for me".
But Blue are a boy-band. A band pitched at thirteen-year-old girls.
Thirteen-year-old girls who get really, really pissed off if they see their
idols being smothered in somebody else's fleshy parts. The real crippler here
is the "middle eight" of this song, a rap section performed by a guest
female artiste with a big cleavage. As the camera gives us a nice, long, low
shot of her to make her bosomy implants look as well-defined as possible,
you have to wonder whether Blue's management seriously thinks this is
going to make teenage boys buy their records. So it's an unusual, but
fascinating, sight: a group so macho that they're prepared to sabotage their
careers, just to show the world how many women they've touched up.
29. "Looking for a Place", Mania
Of the same Morlock species as Jentina (see the last edition), though with a much better tune to
whistle through their slovenly troglodyte lips. It had to be catchy; it was
designed as a ringtone. A record that obeys most of the Rules of New
Girl-Pop (compare with number 38, above), with at least one of the she-singers
insisting that 'I live by my own rules' as if it's an anarchist manifesto.
22. "The Show", Girls Aloud
The most remarkable, peculiar and (perhaps annoyingly, if you believe
that no manufactured pop band should be allowed to have more than one decent
song) interesting record in the top forty. A snapping, shuddering thing
made out of electricity and oscilloscope synth-noise, the lyrics are
striking enough on their own - 'should have known, should have cared, should
have hung around the kitchen in my underwear' leads straight on to 'should
have jumped a little high, should have fluttered my mascara like a
butterfly', and it seems perfectly natural - but the song's structure is
more bewildering still. Most conventional pop songs have three of four
parts, verse, chorus, middle-eight and / or instrumental section. "The Show"
has six. If the typical song-shape is A B A B C A B (verse chorus verse
chorus middle-eight verse chorus… a hold-over from the days when songs were
a story-telling medium, hence the similarities to fairy-tale
story-structures in which the hero has to try to complete his task three
times before finally managing it, the "middle eight" being the moment of
revelation that lets him figure out what he's doing wrong), then the shape
of "The Show" is A B C D E C D F A. Then there's the video.
On first sight
it looks appalling, a shrieking bastard child of Cutting It in which all the
girls work at a beauty salon and have comedy alter egos a la
"Say You'll Be There". But after a while it becomes clear that although
the content of the video is horrible to behold, the way it's made is
extraordinary. This is a spiky, angular record, and the video turns the
members of the band themselves into harsh, mechanical angles,
brightly-coloured patches of movement in lycra pants and high-heels. Nicola,
formerly the Funny-Looking One Out of Girls Aloud, steals "The Show"; even
her facial twitches look as if they've been generated electronically, and
the final shot of her throwing the towel over her shoulder (an odd quirk
in itself) makes her look like some kind of mechanical sculpture. Even
the meaning of the song is a puzzle. The video obeys the Rules of New
Girl-Pop, by having the band-members abuse, uglify, humiliate and strip-wax
their male customers. The lyrics tell a different story, though.
Or do they? Is 'should have hung around the kitchen in my underwear, acting
like a lady… it would have saved me' meant to be taken seriously, or is it
bitter irony? Hard to tell, when your singers all come across as walking,
dancing Gigapets. What is the "Show" of the title? Is it, as the chorus
suggests, a euphemism for the vagina? Is the song addressed to an ex-lover,
a lover who's absent, or… what? (As a bonus, the record also supplies the
best misheard line of the week: 'Ever since you went away, the other
Russians feel so wrong.')
15. "Satellite of Love", Ostensibly Lou Reed
Offensive. I am, of course, all in favour of heresy; no-one cheered more
loudly than I when Madonna got on the tits of people who insist on taking
"American Pie" seriously, and I still maintain that "Smells Like Teen
Spirit" would sound best performed by Morris dancers (just think about it).
But if you're going to do a dance remix of a sort-of-underground classic,
then for God's sake, isn't it a good idea to actually include the song
rather than just looping the run-out and slapping a piss-poor brassy rhythm
track under it? (The cutesy cartoon video is also dreadful, but raises one
question. At the end of the video, we see the over-literal Satellite of Love
carve the word "LOVE" into the face of the Earth with a special
laser-beam-of-niceness. When we see the beam hit the Earth at ground level,
we realise that it's actually causing flowers to sprout from the ground,
great swathes of foliage wide enough to be seen from space. Except that from
a distance, the word "LOVE" is written across the oceans as well as the
land-masses. How's this done? Does the beam promote the growth of coloured
algae? Does it dye dolphins? It's one of those things I can't help
wondering about.)
14. "Never Felt Like This Before", Shaznay Lewis
Key member of the best girl-group of the 1990s finally returns to the Hit
Parade, only to find that the Sugababes have made her presence unnecessary.
This record's main problem: it's a song in which a woman tells a man how
much she wants to have sex with him. Though this is a pleasant change from
the usual Rules of New Girl-Pop - actually, it even verges on being
romantic, in its own way - it's just liable to make men in the audience feel
insecure. Because nobody ever talks to them that way.
13. "Bye Bye Boy", Jennifer Ellison
The Rules of New Girl-Pop made flesh. But it sends confused signals, or
at least, it makes the hypocrisy much too obvious. Jennifer Ellison don't
take no shit off no man, and yet the video consists of nothing but her and
her (all-girl) backing band stripping off and presenting their backsides
like cheerleaders. Jennifer also has the problem - once common among girl
vocalists, though we haven't seen any examples of it in a while now - that
she's clearly much less attractive than any of her dancers.
12. "I Don't Wanna Know", Mario Winans
Last month's edition was very rude about this. With hindsight, my problem
may simply be that I don't like men very much. In accord with the Rules of
New Boy-and-Girl-Pop, two versions of this track are currently in
circulation, one featuring Mario Winans and one with a female vocal. You get
a choice, here: it's either about a boy with a slag for a girlfriend or a
girl with a slag for a boyfriend. Make no mistake, this is how all teen-pop will eventually work, although at least this time there's a pleading
quality to it rather than a sense of someone sending a death-threat. And the
female version seems… somehow more acceptable. Even good, in some ways,
since - as the Fugees discovered - you can't go completely wrong if you
slap a beat over someone humming in Gaelic. But then, that just underlines
the main problem with this record, in either version. You don't remember the
tune as much as you remember the Enya sample. Which means that two minutes
after the track's finished, you'll find yourself singing "Ready or Not"
instead. ("Ready or Not", incidentally, now sounds far better than it did in
1997. Why? Because all other music has got so much worse? Or because we've
had so much time to forgive the Fugees for their version of "Killing Me
Softly"? It's not in any way an original observation, but it's always funny
and it's always worth remembering: "Ready or Not" was the record which made
those startling allegations about Nina Simone shitting on the recording
equipment.)
11. "Mova Ya Body", Nina Sky
Puzzling. Nina Sky seems to be two women, similar enough to be sisters
but one obviously more attractive than the other. Since the video takes
place in a typical nightclub setting, it's possible that Nina is the fit one
and that she's brought her slightly-less-fit mate along with her to make
herself look good. As is the way.
10. "See It in a Boy's Eyes", Jamelia
A rarity, an R&B record which borders on being "quite good". It'll be
best-remembered, though, for its video: a sweaty, big-budget re-make of GI Jane, which casts Jamelia as the lone skinny black girl in a company of
young, butch marines and probably says something terribly profound about the
psyche of the Western World. What's notable, though, is that… nobody really
likes GI Jane much. Movie parodies are obviously a standard of pop
video, but isn't it more usual to use movies that are actually popular and
well-remembered? Perhaps this is a way of giving a second chance to any film
that fails; even The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might work, if it
starred Busted and was reduced to four minutes. Oh, God, I wish I hadn't
thought of that.
6. "Tipsy", J-Kwon
Seventeen-year-old American rap artist, given everything he wants much,
much too early in life and thus guaranteed never to become an interesting
person (although the world can occasionally surprise you; there's always
been something very zen about an older, less fashionable Vanilla Ice owning a bicycle
shop). Not many seventeen-year-olds have much to say that's very
interesting, unless their sisters were freebasing whores and their parents
forced them to lick t'Ghetto clean with their tongues, but from the video
J-Kwon seems terribly middle-class and suburban. This may be why his version
of rap seems strangely mumbled, as if he doesn't want anyone to hear
that he hasn't got much to rage about.
The title alone is a give-away. "Tipsy"? Surely,
it's the place of pop stars to make records called things like "Fucking
Rat-Arsed and Driving on Speed at the Same Time"?
5. "Some Girls", Rachel Stevens
Most extreme use of the Rules of New Girl-Pop in the charts. The video
sees Rachel Stevens lead an army of bolshy, self-confident women through
the streets, which is fairly typical. But Rachel doesn't rally these women
by leading them out of their kitchens and offices. Oh, no; instead they're
all shown to live underground, in dank, dark sewer-tunnels beneath the
city, and it's Rachel who has the Moses-like task of leading them into the
light of day. This is painfully, unpleasantly wrong in so many ways. In the
first place, it's made fairly clear that the women would never have thought
about climbing out of the sewers before the coming of Rachel Stevens, as
if her bargain-basement electro-pop has invented feminism. Things get
worse when we see the faces of the local men, actual reaction shots of
surprised (male) members of the public, witnessing the revolution as these
troglodyte-women of the Jentina-Mania tribe take to the streets. They look
delighted, obviously relishing the chance to letch up this many birds at
once. The twelve-year-olds of today will, of course, grow up believing that
this is what being an "independent woman" really means. Rachel herself
returns to the sewers at the end of the video, curiously implying that she
isn't entirely human. Perhaps she was flushed down there as an embryo,
raised on all the filth and lost cannabis, and knows no other kind of life.
Perhaps she's a CHUD.
4. "How Come?", D-12
Band named after the best method of determining the damage done by a
Beholder to a fourth-level cleric in chainmail armour. (This sounds
unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Those who were conscious in the
early 1990s may remember that geek-rap band The Dream Warriors recorded a
track called "Roll the Twelve-Sided Dice", and began their stage act by
forcibly cross-breeding Spinal Tap and Gary Gygax, stepping out of a
gigantic transparent dodecahedron as if it were a spaceship or a cryo-pod.) Eminem is now incapable of writing
about anything but his life as a pop star, which to me suggests the
"disintegration" phase. Best thing that anybody I know has said about pop
music this year: 'I haven't heard any records by Eminem, except for that one
about shandy.'
3. "Lola's Theme", Shapeshifters
Best band name in the Top Forty, but even more sci-fi-geek-friendly than
D-12.
2. "Dry Your Eyes", The Streets
The Bernard Cribbins of the twenty-first century. The existence of The
Streets is unquestionably a good thing, for one single reason: heritage. The
last couple of generations have been told, in all seriousness, that pop
music started in America in the 1930s (documentaries on the subject, even
British ones, have insisted on it). But my granddad's family worked in
music-hall at the turn of the twentieth century, and The Streets have got a
damn sight more in common with Wee Jock McGregor than with Gershwin. You
find yourself listening to Streets records just in the hope that you're
going to hear him say something like 'oh, moi old mahn said follow the
vahn… 'cos it's full of crack'.
1. "Thunderbirds" (Busted)
Surprisingly, not a record about triggering global disasters so that you
can look up Lady Penelope's skirt. But that's what I use death-rays on
experimental power complexes for.
Number One in the Album Chart This Week: Red Hot Chilli Peppers, "Live in
Hyde Park". It's important that you punctuate this properly, because
otherwise it just looks as if the Red Hot Chilli Peppers live in Hyde Park.
Like upmarket Wombles.
Funniest Thing of the Month (Unintentional): the new video by Anastacia.
Before the music kicks in, the video opens with film footage of an actress
at an audition, a blonde conventionally-attractive American woman who looks
into the camera and introduces herself to us and the casting directors. What she actually says - as far as I
can make out - is: 'Hi, I'm Donna Stone.' What it sounds like she's saying
is: 'Hi, I'm Don Estelle.'
Best Sentence Spoken by a Working-Class Teenage Girl and Overheard on the
Bus: 'She can canter, but she can't trot. That's well stupid.'
Best Teletext News Headline of the Month: "Girl with Bionic Ear is Top
Pupil."
- LM.
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