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Errata and Addenda to the Last Edition
(a) Occasionally an English phrase will get garbled inside your head and
it'll stick, so from that point on you'll always find yourself defaulting to
the "wrong" version; this is, for example, why you hear so many adults using
the word "skellington". Following the comments on the Manic Street
Preachers' "The Love of Richard Nixon" in the last edition, I've repeatedly
found myself singing the tune in quiet moments, except that it's somehow
become "The Love of Richard Widmark". This is actually quite an easy song to
improvise, as it rhymes with "skidmark". It's also been pointed out to me
that the song is supposed to be a defence of Richard Nixon (or at least, a
criticism of his critics), so the reference in the lyrics to the
much-underrated Richard III may be more meaningful than expected. This begs
an obvious question, though: why in the name of arse would anybody write a
song defending Richard Nixon? Especially at a time like this, when there are
so many real things to complain about in the world. It's a bit like one of
those episodes of South Park where the programme briefly acknowledges all
the terror, genocide and corruption on the planet, but then spends twenty
minutes taking the piss out of American liberals for using long words.
(b) You may recall that in the last edition, I mentioned my attempt to
avoid the title of the next Star Wars movie until the day of its release.
This month I made a similar effort to avoid finding out the result of the US
Presidential Election, but this proved less successful. I am, however,
currently trying to find out how long I can go without seeing George W.
Bush's face. This is actually turning out to be quite rewarding.
(c) There are more and more gay matches on The Hits' Stardate,
specifically boys asking for their compatibility scores with male
celebrities. As The Hits is aimed at fourteen-year-olds, and as I have
difficulty imagining many fourteen-year-olds who are that comfortable with
their sexuality, I have to conclude that boys are texting in the names of
other boys they know just for a laugh. But since Stardate doesn't give
surnames, it's hard to imagine who these hoax-texters think they're
humiliating by making the words DARREN AND LESLIE GRANTHAM appear for
fifteen seconds on a minor digital channel. The real tell-tale moment came
when the programme gave Michael a 2% chance with Brad Pitt, but then
immediately afterwards gave him a 99% chance with George Clooney.
(d) I spelt "Dairylea" wrong. It's not a mistake I intend to make
twice...
UK Top Forty Singles, This Week's Big New Release:
The video sees Nadia and her dance troupe striking their poses in what
looks like a stately home, in front of an enormous antique painting of a
military nobleman on the back of a huge, powerfully-built charger. Except
that the nobleman's facing away from the "camera" and looking into the
background of the picture, which means the video makes an unbreakable
connection between Nadia and a fat horse's arse. Technically I should be in
favour of more chunky women in the Hit Parade, but my finely-honed instincts
tell me that she's packing implants, which is cheating. Plus, she's got a
nose like a tranny.
40. "Nobody's Home", Avril Lavigne
Following last month's mention of the right-wing American who claimed
that "Avril Levene" is actually a no-good dirty Jew-girl disguising her big
black beard and little round hat behind a façade of mall-hanging
all-American WASPishness, it's been pointed out to me that she's actually
Canadian, so "Lavigne" implies French roots rather than Jewish. Somehow I'm
not convinced that this knowledge would make the right-wing American feel
any more well-disposed towards her. This is, incidentally, the third Avril
Lavigne video I've seen that establishes her credentials as one of The Kids
by having her thrown out of a shop or shopping mall by an authority-figure.
I'd prefer it if she just pissed in a fountain.
37. "Jolene", The White Stripes
Wait a minute. Implants… nose like a tranny… no, couldn't be. Sorry,
nothing to do with the White Stripes. I was just thinking aloud.
26. "My Prerogative", Britney Spears
It's funny, in a way. By the 1990s, those of us who'd gone through
wanklet adolescence with Britain's Favourite Radio 1 felt as if we were
surrounded by old things all the time. Simon Bates would play a solid hour
of oldies every morning, and the station would have a fixed fall-back list
of pre-'80s records (and "Jump" by Van Halen, for some reason) that'd turn
up again and again and again and again, as if the Top Forty were free to
produce whatever monstrous noises it liked as long as "Big Yellow Taxi"
occasionally came along to tie us down to our parents' generation. Even
Janet Street Porter, one of the three most appalling women on Earth, pointed
out that nobody should be listening to "Hotel California" twenty years on.
So when Radio 1 went through its make-life-so-miserable-for-old-DJs-that-Dave-Lee-Travis-has-to-quit phase, we actually felt as if we'd won
something. One year the Official Best Record Ever Made, voted for by the
listeners, was "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen. The next year it was
"Unfinished Sympathy" by Massive Attack. Result. Or so we thought.
Now,
though… are we reaping the consequences of making "newness" the standard?
It's not just Radio 1, of course. Circa 2004, nobody under the age of twenty
listens to stations that play anything older than "Baby One More Time". This
means that teenagers don't actually know Wings existed, and if you don't
know about it then how can you hate it properly? More importantly: if nobody
who's buying records knows the slightest thing about pop history, then
what's to stop record producers re-recording things the target audience has
never heard, and passing them off as new? When it gets to the point where
Britney Spears is repackaging fifteen-year-old songs to sell to
fifteen-year-olds, and where Those of the Gene-Stock of Cat Deeley can
comfortably describe "My Prerogative" as 'the Bobby Brown classic, "My
Prerogative"' (younger readers should be informed that not many people liked
it at the time, and that nothing much has been said about it since), you
know something's gone violently wrong. And like Bobby Brown in 1989, Britney
can't even pronounce "prerogative" properly. The opening line, 'they
say I'm crazy', seems to beg the immediate response 'no, they say you're
just a bit shit'; the second line, 'they say I'm nasty', is accurate but not
in the way she means; the rest ('getting boys is how I live', 'see nothing
wrong with spreading myself around', and best of all 'I don't need
permission, make my own decisions') is simply untrue. Most memorable thing
about this is that for its UK release, a warning's been added to the start
of the video explaining that it includes flashing lights which may be
distressing to those with photosensitive epilepsy. And the narrator who
delivers this warning is Paul Darrow from Blake's 7.
19. "DJ" / "Stop", Jamelia
Other things I've tried this month: speed-dating. Anyone who knows me
personally may have difficulty imagining this, although I'd point out that I
wasn't (as the advertising copy of the speed-dating company might suggest)
searching for a long-term partner and unable to find time in today's busy,
professional world. If anything, my reasons for speed-dating were that it
seemed to be a very personal kind of challenge. Given that I have difficulty
dealing with other human beings face-to-face, a situation in which I'm
actually forced to charm twenty women in a row - or die of embarrassment
trying - seemed like a kind of Rite of Passage. Besides, it struck me that
any crippling discomfort I might experience during any of the three-minute
dates would be lost in the overall morass of having to go through twenty of
the buggers.
Now, I'd prepared myself for the horror of discovering that all
twenty women might be unremittingly hostile and quite possibly repelled by
my presence. I thought, as the speed-dating appointment drew closer, that
I'd considered the Worst That Could Possibly Happen. Two days beforehand,
however, I checked the company's website and saw that later in the same week
they were having a special dating party at the premiere of the Bridget Jones
movie. This was when the true terror of it struck me. The problem with the
kind of people you might meet at speed-dating events isn't that they're
over-judgmental, over-demanding or particularly evil, it's that… they're the
kind of people who like Bridget Jones. You may be aware that in any romantic
comedy or modern sit-com, the single woman lead character will always
experience a montage of failed blind dates before she meets the man who
looks like Colin Firth, Colin Farrell or one of our nation's other
attractive Colins; a montage in which various obviously-unattractive or
emotionally-disturbed men will be shown sitting opposite her in a selection of
restaurants, all of them alienating her in some way. My role at the
speed-dating event was, quite clearly, that of the character who's listed in
the end credits as "Freaky Date Guy #3". (And "Freaky Date Guy #3" is the
optimistic version. Some romantic comedies list the failed dates with
adjectives rather than numbers, so I have to wonder whether I was listed as
"Hairy Date Guy" or "Manic Date Guy" or "Badly-Dressed Date Guy" instead.)
Since "Stop" is one of the six-hundred records on music television to be
taken from the soundtrack of either of the Bridget Joneses, it's now one of
the six-hundred videos that give me a nervous twitch and bring back memories
of trying to justify my existence twenty times over. On the plus side, at
one point I found myself involved in a discussion as to whether The Godfather
or Goodfellas is the best film ever made. But did she tick my
"yes" box? Did she my gangster-loving arse.
17. "Call on Me", Eric Prydz
Apparently, the adolescent population isn't quite "spent" yet. We
might reasonably expect a delay before Eric comes up with That Difficult
Second Video.
15. "Car Wash", Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliot
Another team-up effort from one of the hag-brood who brought you the
Moulin Rouge version of "Lady Marmalade", mathematical proof that as you add
more awful people to a project it gets worse exponentially. But just the
individual parts of this are bad enough. Christina Aguilera: the owner of
the worst speaking-voice in the western world (only Catherine Zeta-Jones'
American-Welsh even comes close), a woman who - like Jordan, and possibly
Avril Lavigne when she's in heavy slap - is technically pretty but so
offensive that you wouldn't want to touch her without the kind of gloves one
might typically use when handling kestrels. Missy Elliot: the least talented
woman on the planet, one of the few pop stars to be entirely, 100% useless
on every conceivable level, here given the all-important job of making
'uh-huh, yeah' noises. This record: the spoor from the movie Shark Tale, one
of those relentlessly ugly Pixar-style films that make you wish Alan Turing
had never bothered. The video is so leprously unattractive that when Missy
Elliot's "fish" alter ego turns up - a CGI animation specifically designed
for maximum cuteness, with big eyes and a slinky Afro-American bone
structure - you actually find yourself going "fwoar" at the sight of a
pilchard who is, relatively speaking, far more appealing then anything or
anybody else in the production. I'm not joking.
13. "Vertigo", U2
Oh, fuck off.
11. "Confessions Part II" / "My Boo", Usher
Yeah, I'm quite sure about it now. Pop music would be much better if all
the men got taken out of it. Especially the excessively ugly, hairy or
tedious ones. Usher still has a morbid fear of being buried alive, remember.
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