|
Errata and Addenda to the Last Edition
Following last month's ruminations on the history of
UK Top Forty Singles, This Week's Big New Release:
There are two things I greatly dislike about the internet. The first of
them is Simpsons porn. Though obviously I have to respect the right of the
individual to look at inept drawings of Bart Simpson engaging in homosexual
fellatio with other - less easily-identifiable - bright yellow people, the
pop-ups of this genre are so ugly that even after you've clicked the "close"
button you find yourself looking for "double-close", "extra-special-double-close" and "scrub the inside of the screen with Dettol" buttons just to be
on the safe side. The second problem with the internet is, of course,
right-wing Americans. There's no escaping the buggers. If they kept
themselves quarantined in sites where they'd only bother other right-wing
Americans, then it wouldn't be an issue, but they insist on gut-barging
their way into every forum known to civilised humanity. You don't even have
to touch on politics to set them off. If someone on-line casually mentions
Sophie Guillemin (N.B. she's a French actress), then it's likely that at
least one Young Republican with the genetic make-up of cooking-fat will be
ready to write a page-long diatribe about the fact that everyone French is a
coward for not wanting to do the manly, heroic thing of bombing civilians by
remote-control. (This is an especially sore point for me, for a very
personal reason. There's one particular right-wing American site that takes
its name from… how can I put this without sounding self-involved?… from a
book I wrote. The idea that the kind of in-bred possum-filth who run these
sites have even read a book, let alone one by me, seems curious in itself.
The book in question was in part about the sale of torture equipment and
weapons of mass destruction by the West, and I suppose it's asking to much
to assume that these people would spot the irony.)
All of this comes to mind
when thinking of Avril Lavigne, thanks to a recent post on a certain website
I could mention in which one Yank-Nazi responded to the mention of Ms
Lavigne by asking how long the Jews thought they could fool people by
marketing "their kind" as normal pop stars. Because apparently, "Lavigne" is
a thinly-disguised version of her real name, "Levene". The question is: can
there possibly be a nugget of truth in this? Avril Lavigne certainly doesn't
seem Jewish, or at least, if she is then she surely can't be orthodox. If
it turns out to be in any way accurate, then it'll be the most successful
deception since Rebecca Didostein dropped four syllables from her name and
convinced the world that she was a nice C of E girl.
39. "How to Be Dead", Snow Patrol
Erased develop the perfect Erased title. On the other hand…
38. "Predictable", Good Charlotte
…this is one of those great self-destructive titles, much like "Dumb" by
The 411 or Shoot the Writers on ITV. "Nah-nah-nah-NAAAH-NAH-NAH-nah…"
34. "Love Machine", Girls Aloud
Watching the video for "The Show" again, I can't help noticing the
ever-so-subtle way that Nadine strokes Kimberley's thigh halfway through
proceedings, barely noticeable on the first eighty-eight viewings but
suggestive in the context of a video which shows them mocking and
humiliating all the rugged men who drop in on their beauty salon. It
should be noted that no two members of any boy-band are ever permitted to
touch each other (in much the same way that it seems perfectly natural for
witches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to use magic as a metaphor for Sapphic
fiddling-about, but spells performed by male characters never involve ritual
fisting). And see the endnotes for more implied lesbianism in the ranks of
Britain's second-most-mediocre girl-group.
31. "Free", Estelle
Not as good as her brother Don. Let me come out and say this: I greatly
dislike Christians, in exactly the same way that I greatly dislike pop-ups
headed "Ned Flanders Anal Penetration". Nothing theological, you understand.
They're just the rudest human beings on Earth, and it's hard to respect
people who get a kick out of parading their ignorance about Absolutely
Everything on the Planet in front of you as if it's a virtue. The rise of
Christianity in this country is, therefore, more of a concern to me than the
threat of evil burka-wearing germs in the water supply; at least Islamic
terrorists don't insult your bloody intelligence. Our Prime Minister's now
toying with the idea of bringing creationism back into schools, presumably
in an attempt to stop people pointing out that his close acquaintance George
W. Bush has the same face as Sal the Monkey from Muppets Tonight. Estelle's
last single was "1980", as far as I know the first God-bothering Brit-rap
record to pierce the side of the Top Forty, with its irritating
street-corner-preacher chant of '1980, the year God made me'. (Interesting
thought, isn't it? Does she accept that her mum and dad had anything to do
with it? I imagine God looking at her foetal DNA and saying: 'Nah, that's
shit. Here, let me have a go.') The video to this one sees Estelle
standing behind a podium as if she's an electoral candidate, preaching to
the crowd next to a poster that says "Estelle Says Change is Coming". We've
already got an Anglican for a leader and it's killing us, so what more does
she want?
What's particularly galling here is that a lot of the imagery
seems to draw on the American civil rights movement, except with Natasha
Bedingfield putting in a cameo appearance instead of Malcolm X. Even the
word "free" seems to be used in the American sense of "oh, whatever you
like". Doubly ironic since the record occasionally touches on gospel, i.e.
the Official Music of Slavery. You may remember Mary Mary's (relatively)
recent pop-gospel hit "Shackles", which had perhaps the most disturbing
chorus of any record ever made: 'Take these shackles off my feet so I can
dance… I just want to praise you.' Strangely, nobody found this
objectionable at the time. See number 3 for more faith over reason.
28. "What You're Made Of", Lucie Silvas
The thing I've found most entertaining about the freeview digital
channels - apart from seeing a hack who once gave me a spectacularly bad
review make a complete git of himself on FTN's 3001: A Sex Oddity - is the
sense of desperation. Anyone who's bothered watching The Hits (freeview
channel 18) around tea-time will know that they've now started copying TMF's
Matchmaker idea with a two-hour programme called Stardate. Here,
pubescent viewers are invited to text in their names and the names of
celebrities they want to rub their barely-developed bodies against, and are
given a percentage score for their compatibility. This score scrolls along
the bottom of the screen while videos play in the background, along with a
comment that usually boils down to "this isn't a great match, go out and
meet some real people instead". Thus we're treated to the sight of
thirteen-year-old girls asking how good a match they are for Eminem and
young gay men wondering about their chances with Gareth Gates. So the only
thing I know about Lucie Silvas, apart from the fact that she looks like a
slightly melted waxwork of Sarah Michelle Gellar, is that she's 8%
compatible with Nathan. (What's notable is that pop stars generally aren't
given surnames in this programme, and are referred to by the name of their
band instead. "Cheryl Girls Aloud" is reasonable, but "Harry McFly" sounds
like a '60s East End gangster.)
After the first week of Stardate, The Hits
added the on-screen disclaimer STARDATE SCORES R JUST 4 FUN!, presumably to
clear themselves of a charge of Incitement to Stalk… but the real problem
is that the comments are generic and randomly-generated, when for this sort
of thing to work they really need to be tailored to the pop star in
question. So when one young lady asked for her compatibility factor with
Eric Prydz - and while Prydz's soft-core video was playing in the
background, as well - the result was an indifferent "this isn't a great
match, Polly" when it should obviously have read "for fuck's sake, girl,
have you seen the competition?". But the programme revealed itself in all
its absurdity on its very first day, when one misguided girl texted in her
own name and that of George Michael. The random number generator gave her a
middling score of around 50%, then provided the unintentionally great
comment: "This could go either way."
24. "Kinda Love", Darius
The usual rule applies: if you live in a culture where people are
rewarded for being shit, then you can't act surprised when that culture
produces nothing but shit. This is, as I've said over and over and over
and probably over, the dark side of post-modernism. All very well being arch
and knowing about Low Culture, but if you're happy to swallow any old
excressence then nobody's got any reason to feed you anything else. And
don't pretend I'm alone in thinking that we're entering a New Cultural Dark
Age, either. Who do I blame for this? People we thought it was "ironic" to
pretend to like S Club Seven, people who watch Big Brother and seriously believe
that because they've got a qualification in cultural theory they're on a
higher plane and less Chav-like than all the commoners who watch Big Brother, and people who go to see every piece of Hollywood filth-fodder that
reaches the cinemas but claim to do it in a more "analytical" way than the
peasants. My solution is quite simple: we need a new sense of snobbery. We
need to stop listening to the kind of monkey-twats who say 'ohh, come onnnn,
lighten uuuuuup', and start treating tasteless people with more contempt.
Together, we can build a world where those who insist on quoting
catchphrases from American sit-coms are segregated like the lepers they so
clearly are; where anybody who casts a 'phone vote in any variation of Pop Idol is automatically flagged by a central computer, and forbidden to vote
in a real election ever again; where needles can legitimately be shoved
through Eamon's face without criminal charges being brought. It may sound
zealous, but if in ten years time we don't find ourselves living in a
world where White Chicks: The TV Series is considered the height of sophistication and
every work of culture is vetted by News International, then you'll be glad I
suggested it.
22. "The Love of Richard Nixon", The Manic Street Preachers
Standards change greatly over time, of course. When Winston Churchill
made his famous Lord Mayor's Banquet speech after the battle of El Alamein -
'this is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, but it is,
perhaps, the end of the beginning' - he received a standing ovation, and not
one of those present said 'sorry, are you pissed?'. So perhaps "The Love of
Richard Nixon", which comes across as a sort of anger-free protest song, is
the Manic Street Preachers' way of getting their point across in a world
that isn't really bothered; a way of making the whole thing sound
nonchalant, as if they're saying 'well, we know something interesting about
politics… no, never mind, you wouldn't be interested' in order to lead
people on. On the other hand, perhaps it's all just abstract as far as
they're concerned (bear in mind that one of their previous albums featured a
song about the Hillsborough crush called "South Yorkshire Mass Murder",
which by the band's own admission wasn't inspired by any great sympathy for
the bereaved but by that episode of Cracker where Robert Carlyle stabs the
new Doctor Who). The song features the line 'Richard the Third in the
Whitehouse', possibly in an attempt to draw a parallel between Nixon and the
current meat-puppet-in-office, but if so then it's an unfair slander on one
of our greatest monarchs.
21. "Do You Know (I Go Crazy)", Angel City
Yet more recycling of old material, and this one doesn't even follow the
"I'd leave it eleven years if I were you, mate" rule, being based on a
record that was hanging around the Top Forty only half a decade ago. It's
just Robert Miles' "Children" with singing on it, and that's cheating.
20. "More More More", Rachel "This CHUD's for You" Stevens
The chic, CGI-airbrushed video dresses her up in Darilea-cheese-triangle
silver (the old kind of Darilea cheese triangle, the proper kind, not one
of the new ones) and surrounds her with dancers in stylish future-wear. The
big push here, not for the first time, seems to be to turn her into the new
Kylie Minogue. Which is a strange ambition, when you remember that Kylie
Minogue becomes the new Kylie Minogue every eighteen months or so. This is
the problem with pop stars who insist on "re-inventing" themselves: in the
long-term, no-one really likes them. Nobody's actually a fan of Kylie
Minogue (although I'm reliably informed that gay men often pretend to be),
any more than anybody's a fan of Cher or the later work of David Bowie.
Apart from leading rampaging bands of sewer-women on daring raids into the
city, precisely what does Rachel Stevens stand for? And doing songs that
Banarama have already covered just isn't going to help.
17. "Radio", Robbie Williams
Is he still alive? God.
15. "Enjoy the Silence 04", Depeche Mode
So, what we've learned: we're on the brink of a new dark age, Britain is
now virtually irrecoverable, America is set to push the world past the point
of no return (Osama bin Laden apparently gets the deciding vote if the
election's too close to call, a little-known rule of the US constitution
which has never been invoked until now), all western culture has been
compromised to the point of stupidity,
free thought is caught in a pincer-movement between Christianity and David
Blunkett, and pop music - like most other art-forms - is essentially
finished. And just in case you should reach the conclusion that things can't
possibly get any worse, it turns out that John Peel can go and die on you at
any minute. So here's another (admittedly very personal and very, very
small) portent of the End of Days. "Enjoy the Silence" is so superior to
everything else in the Top Forty that it almost hurts to listen to it, but
it's just a remix of something fourteen years old, which logically means
that I should object to it as much as I object to all the other cannibalism
in this Countdown. At a time when comedy novelty bands like the Thrills and
the White Stripes are taken seriously as "alternative rock", though, this
still sounds oddly… new. And it really is so very hard to care about
anything else. I'd dearly love to believe it's just a result of me getting
older and not understanding what The Kids like, but if anything the problem
is that I can understand it. Instead of frightening and confusing me,
today's Hit Parade increasingly reminds me of Seaside Special from the
'70s. (Now I come to think of it… modern British pop
music revolves around the Pop Idol model; Pop Idol was pioneered by Nigel
Lythgoe; and Nigel Lythgoe used to be on Seaside Special with his troupe of
skinny dancers. Coincidence?)
|
|---|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
The text of Lawrence Miles' Top Forty Countdown is copyright © of the author, 2005. Any opinions expressed within
the confines of the Beasthouse.fsnet website are purely those of the author, and in no way reflect the opinions of any
other group or individual connected with the site's content. To go home, click here.