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Errata and Addenda to the Last Edition
Last month I mentioned that in 2001 I temporarily gave up on pop music,
in part to get away from the noise made by Destiny's Child. It's now been
pointed out to me that shortly after this, Destiny's Child split
up, and only re-formed once I'd come back. Now I feel as if Beyonce's
sitting behind me at the back of the classroom, flicking things at my neck
and then looking away whenever I turn round. (Incidentally, I've recently
learned that Destiny's Child is the favourite "current" band of Prince
Charles. To me, this is vastly more offensive than his coke-damaged
offspring forgetting which side won the War. Which is, let's be honest, a
far more likely explanation than the "fancy dress" one.)
Before the main countdown this month, a special feature…
Post-Eric Prydz Wanklet Round-Up
(31/01/05)
We knew, as soon as "Call On Me" got to number one through sheer strength
of female crotch-sweat, that we were going to see no end of this sort of
thing: videos based on close-ups of women with sexually-suggestive pastimes,
possibly with a "joke" thrown in to suggest irony, but - as in Eric's case -
usually not. Examples of the Wanklet-Vid genre have been piling up over the
last few weeks, so here's the round-up so far, with points awarded for style
and artistic interpretation…
"My Neck, My Back", Khia
First out of the trap in Prydz's wake, like a greyhound after a stinking
gymnastic rabbit. This was dealt with in the 31/10/04 edition, so a brief
reminder: unattractive women in sunglasses wash a car, then get sprayed by
firemen. Lacking all the stickiness and implied body-hair of Prydz's
original effort, this is soft-core wankletting at its most airbrushed and
ineffectual, tying with "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" by the Girls of FHM as the
most contrived piece of pop pornography never to be remotely arousing. It
did manage a respectable chart position, though, mainly by being the only
one of this new genre to match the cod-porno video with cod-porno lyrics.
('My neck, my back, my… uuuh.' Again, this is very much something for
drunken urban peasant-girls to sing when attempting to navigate complicated
pavements in high-heels.) But overall, this has to be considered a poor
start for this new art-form. Wanklet Rating: 2/10.
"Out of Touch", Uniting Nations
The plot, in a nutshell… the "hero" of the video plays strip poker with
half a dozen reasonably tarty-looking women, all of whom remove articles of
clothing, get drunk and dance on the table. Put like that, it sounds
workable. After all, wanklet videos are like Lynx adverts: they work best
when they deal in genuine male fantasies, and "winning against a group of
women at strip poker" is one of the big ones. (This is why the Lynx advert
about the geeky dancer attracting two women at a time and the Lynx advert
about spontaneously having sex with the girl in the supermarket both worked,
but the one about teaching cave-girls to fight a two-headed monster and the
one about being abducted by mermaids didn't. Actually some psychologists
have seriously suggested that the mermaid is a deep-rooted symbol of the
male desire for oral sex, but that's a conversation for another time.) The
trouble is that this video, despite being the one which most accurately
follows Prydz's format, is as close to the original as Wigan is to Las
Vegas. This looks like the cheap, shoddy, daytime-TV version, a feeling
that's underlined by the fact that the male lead looks like a young Alan
Partridge. And unlike Prydz, he insists on looking at the camera, making
eye-contact with the viewer and trying to pull amusing faces. A fatal
mistake, of course. No adolescent boy wants to be reminded that he isn't the
one inside the picture. The video ends with the girls turning the tables and
stripping the man, which may be a last-minute attempt to make the story look
post-feminist but actually makes it look like a '70s sex comedy starring
Robin Asquith. But who knows? That may have been the point of the whole
exercise. Wanklet Rating: 3/10.
"Satisfaction", Ministry of Sound
It immediately gets marks for its central conceit; this time the
sweating, barely-dressed women are all using power-tools. In slow-motion.
While technical specifications for the tools flash up on the screen next to
them. The only video of this genre so far to have managed to be funny and
hormone-expanding, the sight of various body-parts vibrating in time to
pneumatic drills and electric saws is appealing on just about every level -
from a hetero-male point of view, it's certainly true that semi-naked women
and industrial machinery have a close relationship going back generations -
yet this seems to have failed to touch the public imagination. It's
possible, though a worrying thought, that the teenage-boy target consumer
doesn't like entertainment value with his groin-fodder. Wanklet Rating:
8/10.
"Strings of Life", Soul Central ft. Kathy Brown
A once-rare but now increasingly-common breed, the two-faced wanklet. The
plot revolves around a man who's tied to a chair by the quartet of vengeful
women he's been four-timing, then exposed to a sexy and marginally sadistic
dance which involves all of them bending over in front of the camera at some
point. The ploy of using a strong-independent-women-get-their-own-back
scenario as the pretext for an arse-fest is by no means new, and it's a
strategy that's been successfully employed several times over the past few
years, but in this format it seems ill-judged. Let's not forget, the genius
of Prydz's production was its complete lack of irony, apology or basic human
shame. "Strings of Life" immediately thwarts itself with this attempt to
appeal to the Other Half of the audience, although there are at least a few
half-decent bun-shots. Wanklet Rating: 4/10.
"Just Can't Wait", 100% ft. Jennifer John
Simple and effective. The vocalist - we have to assume it's really
Jennifer John in the video, for reasons we'll come to later - stands in the
foreground, performing in front of a pouting, thrusting all-girl band who
obviously aren't really playing any of their instruments and have the knack
of making the use of a wah-wah pedal look like a sexually-charged act. Many
close-ups follow. Several of the girls here are quite attractive, but
clearly stealing the show is the drummer, who's got a low-cut vest-top and
(I'm sorry, but '70s vernacular really does seem to be the order of the day
here) big knockers. They wubble endearingly as she performs her drumming
duties, though cleverly the camera never lingers on her for more than a
second at a time. This means that the knockers in question immediately snare
the attention of the all-important boy viewer, yet never give him a proper
eyeful, compelling him to watch until the end. Nicely done. The one flaw
here is Jennifer John herself, who's a "proper" vocalist and therefore under
no contract to be a sex object. Indeed, she actually looks quite masculine,
although this may be because we're all subconsciously expecting to see
Robert Palmer standing in her place at the front of the band. All very
noble, the video-makers have decided to use the actual singer instead of
another model, but it still makes you wonder if this is a proper wanklet or
some kind of wanklet / performance hybrid. Still, they are very nice
knockers. Wanklet Rating: 7/10.
Now we've cleared that up…
UK Top Forty Singles, 40. "One Night" / "I Got Stung", Elvis Presley
Given that I'm the one who believes in compulsory electronic tagging and
semi-optional sterilisation for people who cast 'phone votes during any
programme on ITV… my conscience would like me to admit that this month, I
saw half an hour of American Idol. This caused me to question, for the first
time, whether the Idol format is a wholly evil and destructive thing;
there's an argument that the programme's fine, as long as it's exported to
places that deserve trouble. In this country, the sight of Simon Cowell
insulting Council girls who look as if they're descended from the
hippo-women in Fantasia is meaningless. In America - where rudeness is
generally followed by retribution in the form of either a drive-by or a
lawsuit, and where protocol is so rigid that if a teenager calls a man "sir"
then it's considered to be old-fashioned good manners rather than the result
of Tourette's syndrome - there's a certain purpose in it. Cowell himself may
be as dull as ever, yet there's the same sense of
satisfaction here that you might get from watching John Prescott punch a
yokel. This is particularly true when it comes to those many, many
contestants who think it's a good idea to audition by singing either "The
Stars and Stripes" or The Other One (the one that nobody in Britain knows
the words to, but that we usually get to hear coming out of the mouths of
drunken US servicemen, and that therefore seems to begin with the remarkably
homoerotic line 'oh beautiful far-spacious guys'). Try to imagine a UK
contestant attempting to impress the judges with "God Save the Queen", and
the Atlantic seems a much wider place.
But then, even the title hints at
America's own peculiar brand of self-obsession. American Idol, as opposed
to… what? They already run most of the world, so why do they feel the need
to stitch the name of their country into everything they own, like we used
to do with wellies at school? Or do they run the world because they stitch
their name into everything, thus ensuring that they can never lose it? It's
hard to believe they were ever worried about someone nicking American Gladiators
during P.E. The other thing I learned from American Idol is that
in America, everyone with a hat believes him- or herself to be a qualified
Elvis impersonator… but then I realised that I was starting to believe in
the immortal soul, just so I could imagine it being eaten away, and switched
off. (For more of this sort of thing, see numbers 31 and 27.)
32. "Serious", Pop!
I know nothing about this band, I haven't been told anything about their
origins, and I certainly haven't listened to their record. I've just watched
the video with the "mute" button on, and seen four airbrushed,
impossible-to-remember front-persons (two male, two female) doing their best
to pretend to be Abba, under a group-name that wants to suggest "look, this
is straightforward pop music and we're not ashamed of it" but actually says
"look, we haven't got a fucking clue what we're doing". So I'm going to make
a guess. Pete Waterman?
31. "Live Twice", Darius
It's fast becoming obvious that as a nation, our greatest blessing has
turned into our curse. Up to a point, British culture was better than most
people's because we knew we were inadequate, and weirdly this made us more
than adequate; British sit-coms used to be funnier than anybody else's
because we understood that failure, disappointment and ugliness are
intrinsically great, and that there's something desperately funny about
being parochial, about a wannabe intellectual being stuck in East Cheam or a
failed revolutionary living in Tooting. In America, politicians can stand up
in the Senate and talk about "the Great State of Ohio" with a perfectly
straight face, but if anyone in this country tried to make a speech about
"the Glorious City of Wolverhampton" - or indeed, just about anywhere except
London, and even naming specific parts of London would be a mistake - then
you can guarantee that there'd be sniggering from the back. (This is why
Americans can cope with The Office, but have no Alan Partridge. A sense of
personal failure and frustration is just about conceivable. A sense of
complete national, cultural failure and frustration is beyond conception.
Likewise, consider Bill Bailey's recent reminiscence about one of Marilyn
Manson's appearances in Britain, during which Manson started dramatically
chanting the name of the city in order to hype up the crowd. The city was
Milton Keynes, and how on Earth could you to explain to anyone from
outside the UK why this is amusing?)
The problem is that since the 1980s,
this corner-shop, home-grown view of culture has been chronically
unfashionable, and we've been asked to believe that only sleek, shiny,
professional things are any good; we're still parochial, but we no longer
think there's anything great about it. Hardly surprising, then, that this
current generation has grown up believing that Americans are better at
everything and that anything made from Penzance to That Specky Little Island
at the Top of the Orkneys must be rubbish by its very nature. If the cast
had all been English, then Friends would have been considered unwatchable
even by Radio Times columnists. Remake The Blair Witch Project shot-for-shot, but
with Liverpudlian accents, and it just looks like a bunch of
live-role-players with a camera. The memory of Brit-Pop is now generally reviled
by the media, but if nothing else then it was the last time we were supposed
to listen to things that seemed close-to-home with joy rather than derision.
All of that ended once the idea got hijacked by Oasis, once Liam Gallagher
convinced the press that "rock 'n' roll" was about illiteracy, Neanderthal
grunting and being photographed in sunglasses outside nightclubs, so for the
last ten years pop people have been "celebrities" rather than "icons" and
you can get laughed out of journalism for suggesting that it might possibly
be preferable if they tried to be "artists" (or even just "makers of
records"). It's been a long time now since we were supposed to care what any
of these mongrels have to say, which means that the bloody Yanks win by
default, by virtue of (a) having headlamp-reflective teeth and (b) just
being Yanks.
So. In addition to everything I've already said about Darius, about
him being the product of a culture which has ironied itself almost to death…
the idea that someone gets to be a pop star because they've proved
themselves spectacularly bad at being a pop star, and that it's okay to
treat him as a minor celeb because he's not expected to be as important as
George Clooney, is basically an admission that in this country we're
expected to be crap at everything we do. Crap in the serious way, that is,
not in the sit-com funny way. This would've been unthinkable just a decade
ago, and it's unimaginable in any other field of human experience. Nobody
hires a particular plumber just because they've seen him make a hilarious
toilet-based plumbing error on You've Been Framed. Nobody goes to see a film
starring a particular Hollywood actor just because they've seen him make an
embarrassing speech at the Oscars. I'm tempted to say that nobody would vote
for a particular politician just because they've seen him make an arse of
himself in an amusing way, although I suspect that if the Conservatives had
kept Boris Johnson on their side then he might have done quite well for
himself at the next election. "Harmless entertainment", my foot. This is a
bigger danger to the country than Arson in Her Majesty's Dockyards.
30. "If There's Any Justice", Lemar
The video sees Lemar brooding pensively in a room full of identical
copies of himself. That's sooo last autumn. (See, especially, the 03/10/04
edition.)
27. "Against All Odds", Steve Brookstein
This is going to be the third Pop-Idol-related entry this month, and we
haven't even got to the Top Twenty yet. We might reasonably hope that X-Factor will prove to be the end of this madness and that things are going
to be looking up from now on, but in terms of television, this year has not
begun well; ITV kicked off its January schedule by trying to get Kym Mazelle
to lose weight, and on the same night BBC3 decided that it was high time to
begin a repeat run of Little Britain (q.v. the last edition). They followed
this with a documentary about the making of Little Britain and an out-takes
show largely consisting of sketches from Little Britain, these three
programmes being interspersed by announcements about when the next episode
of Little Britain could be seen on BBC2. (No, wait… let's dwell on the
slopes of Kym Mazelle a while longer. Back in the days when Smash Hits
magazine was prone to fits of strangeness instead of just being the
battlefield for Busted and McFly, it ran an interview with Kym Mazelle in
which it provided her with a list of things that rhymed with her name, and
asked her to compare herself to them. When she asked for confirmation
that a "gazelle" was one of those animals that jump elegantly across the
plains of Africa, Smash Hits replied: 'Yes… do you jump elegantly at all,
Kym?' Anyone who's seen Ms Mazelle in recent years, particularly on Celebrity
Fit Club, will immediately understand why this concept is funnier
than it was in 1990. By the same token, viewers of FTN will know that it's
hard to watch the opening sequence of Jane Goldman Investigates without
joining in with "boing, boing, boing" noises. There are a lot of breasts in
the Countdown this month, so spring must be on its way.) But the TV
highlight of 2005 so far has to be the moment in the documentary series Drugland
when a semi-coherent teenage crackhead, who insisted that he
didn't have a problem, described how he ended up where he is today: 'The
first time I ever had one, I had to have another one straight away. Because
they're just so moreish.' It's official, then: crack isn't "addictive", like
heroin. It's "moreish", like Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes.
26. "Object of My Desire", Dana Rayne
I worry about the fact that I hate Ringtone Culture so much. I worry that
since I'm basically objecting to the idea of Chavs becoming techno-literate
(see the 27/06/04 edition, if you're prepared to go that far back into the archives),
I'm basically turning into the Duke of Wellington, the man who
objected to the industrial revolution on the grounds that steam-trains would
just encourage working-class people to move about more. It's still
irritating, though, that the ringtone business is now big enough - that
there's a sufficient number of under-25s in the country who are smart enough
to use technology, but not smart enough to realise how anything really
works - for Jamster to be able to spray its sodding adverts all over
daytime television. (Those of you who have either day-jobs or the clinical
tendency to go outside should note that Jamster makes its profits by
charging people for ringtones which essentially seem to consist of Jamster
employees doing funny voices into a microphone. Last month the oeuvre
reached its apparent nadir with a ringtone entitled "Annoying Ringtone".
This month the company's doing a roaring trade in ringtones based on
catchphrases from Little Britain.) Dana Rayne herself appears to be a
computer-generated cartoon, a sort of modern, urban,
feel-me-up-in-the-alley-behind-Quicksave version of Betty Boop, primarily designed to
look good on wallpaper. That's the modern kind of "wallpaper", obviously,
the kind you get on mobile 'phone screens rather than the kind we had when
we were kids that had characters from Hanna Barbera cartoons on it. In
fairness, the Dana Rayne video is better than most of its kind, possibly
because I like the idea of a big-eyed cartoon strumpet scooping up male
sex-slaves with a multi-legged War of the Worlds-style walking machine.
Which is what it's about.
25. "Tumble and Fall", Feeder
A "feeder", if I remember my Channel 4 documentaries about sexual
deviations correctly, is a man so infatuated with overweight women that he
force-feeds his girlfriend until she can't leave the house and starts to
grow fungus on her thighs. The band's live appearances must be quite
memorable, and there must be more than the usual amount of strain on the
roadies. 'Roll out the dancing girls, lads, and let's get this party
started!'
24. "Filthy / Gorgeous", Scissor Sisters
If there's one thing worse than a band that thinks it's wacky, it's a
band that thinks it's alternative. The video here is a rite-of-passage story
about a would-be drag queen's first night in a "degenerate" nightclub full
of freaks and transvestites, like "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood but
without the fat bloke pissing on everybody. The flaw with all this is the
obvious, predictable one: the majority of the people in the club are either
attractive or clearly from Central Casting. The vamp-girls all have big
wubblers, the crowds dressed in outsider fetish-wear look as if they'd be
just as happy doing Baywatch Nights, the obligatory fat drag act is obviously a
long-term professional Club Tranny, and even the girl midget is quite a sexy
girl midget. The only apparent concession to the not-conventionally-
appealing is the token old woman, and she's probably not too bad if you
like that sort of thing. The usual logic applies here, i.e. that
anybody's welcome to the counter-culture as long as they look right, the
same kind of reasoning that leads goths to believe they're at the cutting edge of
individualism even though you're persona non grata if you look shit in
eyeliner. (You may detect some personal bitterness here. Quite right. Last
year I made the mistake of going to a goth club without a peer group to back
me up, and my flawed-but-well-meaning attempts to socialise resulted in me
being told to fuck off on three occasions. Interestingly the two individuals
I did get on with were both foreign, and there's got to be something wrong
with the country if the friendliest people in it are from Germany and Ohio.)
In fact the least pleasant-looking "extras" in this video are those members
of the band who usually stand at the back, and you can tell that nobody
really wants them there. At least "Relax" had the repellently ugly man in
the schoolboy outfit to bring us all down to earth.
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