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Before the main countdown this month, a special feature…
Whore Foods
It's a well-known and well-established fact that the most effective way
of reading the social trends and sexual anxieties of any society is to study
how that society consumes; the truth of this can be found in any
contemporary analysis of commercial culture, but particularly blatant
examples might be the drastic rise in sales of pornography during the
AIDS-aware era of the late 1980s, or the fact that chocolate companies tend
to experience a significant boost to profits whenever a country stands at
the brink of an international crisis and suffers the effects of war-anxiety.
It's unclear, however, what it means for a society when its media seems
determined to prove that some of its best-selling food and drink products
are in fact prostitutes.
Advertisers have, naturally, always attempted to establish a connection
between edible produce and sex. Yet this has traditionally been achieved
through the suggestion that if an individual buys a certain item then
members of the opposite sex will find that individual attractive, whereas
the last two decades have seen a subtle shift in expectations, so that
increasingly the products are - in themselves - shown to be whores.
Here are some of the key moments in the development of the "comestible of
easy virtue".
- Fresh Cream Cakes: "Naughty, but Nice" (Late '70s)
A slogan famously devised by Salman Rushdie during his time as an
advertising copywriter, though executives originally had reservations about
the advert, as they felt it suggested that cream cakes might actually be
bad for you. In fact, what the advert told us - in its own subtle, and
very English, way - was simply that the cakes were up for a bit of slap and
tickle. This was merely the whores d'oeuvre in the prostitution of
foodstuffs, the tactfully-worded ad in the newsagent's window, a long way
from the no-holds-barred sexual revolution which was to follow. Nonetheless,
Rushdie must be remembered as the godfather-pimp of all whore foods.
- Apple Tango: "You Want Me" (Mid-'90s)
During an important boardroom meeting, an executive receives a telephone
call from a "feminine" can of Apple Tango (seen reclining by the side of a
pool, seductively coated in condensation) who begins by telling him that
'you want me' before proceeding to talk dirty to him in a low and husky
voice, the crux of the conversation being that he's powerless to resist her
coquettish apple-flavoured charms. The executive attempts to retain some
sense of self-control, but eventually screams 'you little minx!' - the first
comestible orgasm - in front of his bewildered colleagues. In the
mid-1990s, just after the golden age of non-tactile sex but before the
internet-pornography boom, this was proof that food and drink were capable
of consensual sexual practices even if they weren't yet on the game
full-time.
- Kinder Bueno: "I'll Be Whatever You Want Me to Be" (2002)
A man goes into a newsagent's (naturally) and witnesses / hallucinates a
packet of Kinder Bueno levitating from "her" shelf, while leading him on
with various role-play-like promises (the packet insists that she can be
biscuit or chocolate or nut-flavoured). Driven by his lust - and here
this is both overt and intentional, not simply a Freudian reading of the
script - the man rips open the packet without even paying for her services
and begins to devour her, a rare moment in that for once we see the actual
act of eating with all its sexual / cannibalistic overtones. Clearly, this
is an age in which we're not only comfortable allowing
prostitute-comestibles to speak openly, but in which we're also comfortable watching
the tragic, inevitable end-result of their lifestyle choices. At a time when
most food-prostitution was portrayed in the media as a contemporary
fairy-tale a la Pretty Woman, this was notable for being the advertising
equivalent of Ken Russell's Whore.
- Birds Eye Potato Waffles: "They'll Go with Anything" (2002)
This time it's a poster campaign, in which the possibilities of potato
waffles are portrayed as if they were tabloid sex scandals ("waffle had a
thing for older cheeses, says mature cheddar"). As with the Kinder
advertisement, this is clearly the product of an era in which the sexual
context can be wholly overt; the development here is that the waffle seems
to be taking the male, rent-boy, role. But in an age when television
presenters were frequently linked with prostitution in the popular press,
this was very much a "coming out" for whore foods. These are celebrity
waffles, and yet everyone stands a chance with them. Even this, however,
pales in comparison with what must be considered the most explicit whoring
of a foodstuff yet seen…
- Pot Noodle: "The Slag of All Snacks" (Early 2000s)
Whether the slogan was withdrawn after complaints from the public, or
purely because the Pot Noodle producers themselves felt they'd gone a little
too far, is something which will only be known to readers of Campaign
magazine. But even after the change of tag-line - to "the fwoar of all
snacks", and later "it's dirty and you want it" - the imagery remains, the
implication this time being that Pot Noodle is comparable with either
under-the-counter pornography or an extreme fetishistic sexual practice.
Actual, profound shame has been brought into the snacking process. (A
later instalment in the campaign, set in Mexico, plays on the obvious
subconscious connection between "the foreign" and "the obscene" with its
suggestion of supposedly happily-married men "crossing the border" in order
to find sexual satisfaction.) Comestible prostitution has reached its
Channel 5 stage, in which the adverts are as cheap and as casual as
late-night documentaries about the adult leisure industry. Foods are now
such blatant whores that they no longer even require innuendo. It's barely
conceivable that things could be any more blatant than this.
- Monster Munch: "It Swallows" (2005)
Coming soon.
Now that's out of the way…
UK Top Forty Singles,
40. "Do Somethin'", Britney Spears
After the glory of "Toxic" she's obviously back in her "dormant" phase,
which will see her spitting out dreadful records like seed-pods for another
five years until her career seems on the verge of wilting, at which point
she'll make another token half-decent single and begin the cycle again. But
at this juncture, I have to question the wisdom of what I said in the 2005
Annual. My point, if you remember, was that Britney's call for Americans to
be 'faithful' to their President wasn't an indication that she's actually a
Republican (or, indeed, that she has any concept of politics at all) but a
demonstration of the American mind-set that sees any President as God's
representatives in His Own Country. I'm no longer sure about this. You may
be aware that the US has recently seen the rise of the anti-SUV movement,
which objects to the hazard, pollution and general nuisance of the things
that are politely referred to as Sports Utility Vehicles in order to get
around laws on emissions. You may be aware that the American automobile
industry is doing everything it can to discredit this movement. And now
here's Britney's new video, the first verse of which has her explaining how
much she loves her SUV and how she wouldn't have any friends without it,
accompanied by images which show the vehicle in question literally flying
through Heaven. I'm suspicious. Certainly, Britney's the ideal icon for the
American corporate right: a devout Christian and advocate of family values,
who's nonetheless prepared to countenance soft-core porn, Satanism and
general lezzing-up as long as it's done in a professional context. You have
to wonder whether Madonna - as a supposed long-term left-winger, even if
she's now more interested in meeting God through qabbalistic speed-dating -
considered this before she engaged Britney in the second-most contrived
piece of lesbianism in the history of popular culture. (The most contrived
was the video for "The World is Not Enough" by Garbage, in which Shirley
Manson became the first woman on film to snog herself to death.) It's like
Arnold Schwarzenegger doing a fisting movie with Michael Moore, yet the
politics of pop music have become so well-disguised that we don't really
find it odd at all.
38. "Turn the Lights Out When You Leave", Elton John
Regular readers of this Countdown won't be surprised to learn that I'm
prone to fits of paranoia. This is one of my natural and loveable
character-traits, but ever since sending secret messages to al-Qaeda and
making clearly actionable statements about minor celebrities in the last
edition, this paranoia has found a focus (although it's fair to say that if
I actually start expecting the anti-terrorist squad to launch a dawn raid on
a flat full of Lego and Doctor Who videos then I really will have entered
my Marilyn Manson "fooled-myself-into-thinking-I'm-dangerous" phase). I only
realised the extent of this a few weeks ago, when my computer crashed and I
was forced to use the PC in the flat downstairs, which belongs to a couple
who'd gone away for the week and left me with the key. I sensed that
something was wrong as soon as I sat down at the keyboard, but I was
focusing on the screen and it wasn't until an hour or so later that I
realised what had been bothering me. To wit… the picture on the
computer's mouse-mat was a photo of two naked toddlers in a bath. Genitals
above the water-line, bubble-bath disguising nothing. Now, this came as a
slight shock, but there was a reasonable explanation: the couple who own the
flat are old and sentimental, and this was clearly a photograph of their
grandchildren. It probably never even occurred to them that there was
anything weird about putting child-nuts on a mouse-mat. Yet nevertheless, I
had to ask myself… suppose the hypothetical anti-terrorist squad did burst
in here now, having tracked me to my secret secondary lair in the flat
downstairs, and found me stroking my mouse across a picture of children's
private parts while writing an e-mail column that features phrases like
"sucks the excrement out of toddlers with a Smarties tube" and "come over my
crib"? How would that look? Needless to say, on leaving the flat I made
sure that the mouse was demurely covering all the visible wiggly bits.
However, this talk of underage genitals quite clearly has nothing to do with
Elton John at all.
36. "Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder", Yeti
That is, I think, exactly the kind of thing a Yeti should say to you.
34. "Back to Basics", The Shapeshifters
Can anybody think of any other Top Forty records named after
badly-conceived policies of the Conservative Party? I don't remember any
early-'90s New Age Traveller / Rave Culture records called "Community
Charge", even if it felt as if they were all called that at the time. And "Controlled
Immigration" just sounds like something by Kraftwerk.
32. "Go Gone", Estelle
Another pulpit-ho, but this one trying to look and sound like an American
soul artist from an era that ended thirty years ago. On a scale of one to
ten, how much do you think I like this record? At which point, it's time to
start yet another round of disciple-baiting. Following my comments on
whinging, Leviticus-quoting zealots in the last edition, some of you may have
seen Channel 4's "Banned in the UK" season, and been much-enlightened by the
modern definition of blasphemy. One Christian campaigner - the kind of
person who's proud to be interviewed in front of a wall covered in
crosses, a level of religious fetishism which personally reminds me of
Patrick Troughton in The Omen and makes me hope for high winds - was
thoroughly disgusted by Jerry Springer: The Opera, and expressed the opinion
that it was obscene to portray Jesus as an 'obese non-entity'. Interesting
point of view, isn't it? It's blasphemous to depict the Messiah as a fat
bloke in a nappy, not because it makes him look like a sexual pervert but
because it's a crime to suggest that the Son of God might have been
overweight. It's official, then: fat people are evil. And this in the same
month that Channel 4 decided to let the Bishop of Durham make an hour-long
programme explaining how everything bad in the world is really Satan's
fault, which just makes you remember the old saying about the banality of
programmes about evil. On a related subject…
31. "Oh My Gosh", Basement Jaxx
Presumably a version of the Kaiser Chiefs' "Oh My God", re-worked
following complaints from Mediawatch UK. (It's clever, isn't it? "Mediawatch
UK" makes the organisation sound almost legitimate, as if it's conducting a
proper survey of British viewing-habits rather than being a bunch of
emotional retards and moral bullies who seriously think that Jesus looked
like Robert Powell. It's a bit like the Flat Earth Society renaming itself
the Pre-Renaissance Geological Survey. At least in the '70s, you knew you
couldn't trust a group that called itself the Legion of Light; the very name
had that smack of "Salvation Army, License-Payers' Branch" about it. I know
that makes three easy attacks on Christians within six paragraphs, but it's
not my fault if records that remind me of them keep clogging up the spaces
between 31 and 40 every month.) All I can say about "Oh My Gosh" is that
it's the record which caused my mother to say to me, 'there were two fat
women on Top of the Pops'.
30. "Laika", Arcade Fire
There should be more records in the Top Forty about dead dogs in space.
28. "Chicken Payback", Bees
I get the listing for the week's Top Forty from Ceefax, in case you were
wondering. Sometimes it goes wrong, and random letters turn up in the middle
of words. Has it now started coming up with entire random sentences, as
well? There can't really be anything called "Chicken Payback Bees" in the
world, can there? It isn't even amusing eccentricity, it's just Tourette's.
25. "Get Right", Jennifer Lopez
Get bent, Jennifer Lopez.
24. "California", Phantom Planet
There's been a lot of talk this month about whether British television
ever really had a golden age, or whether the belief in a time of Quality
Programming is just pure nostalgia, which seems to miss the fairly obvious
point: it's not that there was ever a golden age, it's that we're now living
through a dark one. This year's Huw Weldon lecture addressed the question,
but it was delivered by the Head of Sky Networks, which is like asking
Harold Shipman to present a documentary on the future of medicine or getting
Americans to talk about democracy. Obviously I couldn't bear to watch this
horrible spectacle, but I'm guessing that her answer to the "was there a
golden age?" question was "no", because on the whole it'd be too
embarrassing for her to stand up in front of an audience of her peers and
say "yes, television used to be better, because stinking, excrescential
vermin like myself and my employers weren't running it and now I'm going to
slit my own worthless throat for your entertainment as the first faltering
step towards making amends". (Although this is slightly hypocritical of me.
One Sky channel is at last showing a programme that I want to watch, in that Sky
Travel is repeating the fly-on-the-monkey-house-wall series The Zoo. From this I've learned
that there are few sounds as satisfying as that of someone affectionately
slapping the flanks of a sea-lion.) I could be wrong, but it's been
indicated to me that "California" is in some way connected to a series
called The OC, a programme being shown on Channel 4 which is full of
American teenagers, has inspired one of the digital channels to show a
programme called The Real OC and has resulted in US listeners to Radio 1
sending e-mails to DJs which say things like "hey, I'm in a place that's
just like The OC!". All of this presupposes that everyone knows what an
OC is, so I'm assuming all the Young People do. How come they're so
knowledgeable about these things, but at the same time are happy to believe
a jeans ad which claims that the man-with-a-donkey's-head scenes in A
Midsummer Night's Dream are genuinely about people's arses?
23. "He Wasn't", Avril Lavigne
Of course, when people like me say "all torture is inexcusable", we just
mean torture against political prisoners.
25. "Get Right", Jennifer Lopez
No, wait, I've changed my mind. Can we do this one again? Now I come to
look at it, the words "Get Right Jennifer Lopez" just make me think of a
conversation between middle-aged northern women, possibly scripted by Alan
Bennett. 'Can I tempt you with another sponge finger, Mrs Hopkins?' 'Ooh,
nooo, I get right Jennifer Lopez if I have more than two before supper.'
22. "No Sleep Tonight", The Faders
The most contrived band in the history of anything, ever. My favourite is
Molly, because as a middle-class college-educated non-conformist I'm
supposed to be attracted to aggressive-looking women with dyed red hair. I
see they've made the Token Dusky One sit at the back and do the drumming,
again.
20. "Negotiate with Love", Rachel Stevens
This month, I learned that Rachel Stevens has webbed feet. This is
apparently quite true, and chimes remarkably well with what this Countdown
has been saying about her since its early days. As you may recall, the video
for "Some Girls" saw her living in the depths of the sewers and only
occasionally going up onto the surface to teach feminist principles to human
women, suggesting that she's some form of Cannibalistic Humanoid
Undercity-Dweller. The webbed feet may be the final clue; there's always
been the implication that she was flushed away as an embryo, and if her
species' life-cycle is slightly faster than that of human beings then she
may even have been raised by the many, many pet turtles who went down the
pipes after the end of the Teenage Mutant Ninja / Hero Turtle craze of 1990.
I imagine them bringing her up as one of their own, teaching her to hunt by
dragging tramps through manholes. Anything to make her more interesting.
25. "Get Right", Jennifer Lopez
And another thing… wasn't Jennifer Lopez the one I singled out to be the
token victim of a pretend al-Qaselza ricin attack, in the last edition? As
usual, I was ahead of all the big trends. This week the war against Islamic
terrorism continued with the UK conviction (for murder and, almost
charmingly, "nuisance") of Kamel Bourgass, surely the ultimate Evil
Chemical-Wielding Arab as his name contains both the word "camel" and
the word "gas". If you haven't already seen the video footage of Bourgass'
home-made weapons factory, then it really is wonderful; among the
evil-looking chemicals and concoctions on his workbench, we can clearly see
a bottle of Alberto Balsam shampoo and a packet of Nivea for Men. Such
well-groomed terrorists they have in Algeria. But is he a terrorist,
exactly? Newscasters have been quick to call him an "al-Qaeda suspect" (i.e.
there's nothing to link him to al-Qaeda but he's a murdering Muslim), yet
it's curious that he doesn't seem to have worked out how to use his lethal
shampoo-and-ricin cocktails, despite some vague and peculiar talk of a plot
to poison the "streets" of Britain. It's just as curious that he went mental
with a carving-knife when confronted by the police, which doesn't make him
look like the world's most well-drilled sleeper agent. Might I tentatively
suggest that far from being a pawn of an organised international
terror-network, he was / is actually just the Muslim version of one of those
people who stockpile large numbers of guns for fetishistic reasons, but
don't know what to do with them until they go over the edge and start
shooting at toddlers? Or, to put it another way: 61-B-24-B-89-89-E. I slam,
you slam, we all slam Islam.
19. "They", Jem
The "They" of the title refers to the unseen and unknown people who make
up all the rules of society without ever explaining their reasons: 'who are
they / where are they / how can they possibly know all this?', Jem would
like to know. Given the song's '60s-style "baa-daaaah-daa" choral lines, the
video should quite clearly be a cartoon in the style of an animated title
sequence from a Peter Sellers movie, with a big-eyed cartoon Jem being
followed around by large black shadows in wide-brimmed hats and trenchcoats
who melt into the background whenever she turns round to see who's behind
her. But no, instead she becomes the third pop-tartlet to make a video
that re-stages the zero-gravity lap-dance from Barbarella. The last time we
saw this was when Kylie Minogue did it in 1994; her version was pink and
furry, whereas Jem's spaceship is all slinky silver-and-black surfaces, and
in the final moments her space-nipples are covered up by ultra-modern CGI
effects. In other words, Kylie's version was deliberate '60s retro, whereas
Jem's is like the 2005 "everything-looks-like-The-Matrix" Hollywood remake.
Except with a singer who comes from Wales, since Welsh People in Space are
"in" this month. And oh look, here comes the ancestor.
16. "Giving You Up", Kylie Minogue
The video sees a fifteen-foot-tall Kylie slinking around a city and doing
sexy dances for men who suddenly find themselves eye-to-eye with her crotch.
Very well, I'll ask. Why? Many, many videos have featured giant women before
now, but they're usually "giant" in the sense of "rubbing themselves off
against skyscrapers". Fifteen feet somehow seems a half-arsed version of the
idea - not that I'm sure I should be using the term "half-arsed" in a
paragraph about an engorged Kylie Minogue, although mathematically-minded
readers might like to try to work out the mass of each cheek if she's now
three times her usual height - and besides, there isn't even a pay-off. She
doesn't grow to giant size to revenge herself on her former lover, as in
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. She doesn't plant an enormous comedy
lipstick-mark on her male prey, as in "Tell Me" by Nick Kamen (you've
probably forgotten it, but it had Madonna on backing vocals and a year later
they recycled the tune to make "Like a Prayer"). She just lounges around the
place in her enormous lycra pants, annoyingly blocking the traffic and
taking up two spaces in the pub. What's the point of that?
14. "I See Girls", Studio B
The worst Post-Eric-Prydz Wanklet yet, the video is a reconstruction of
that sketch from The Meaning of Life about a convicted criminal being chased
off a cliff by topless women, except without the topless women (we get lots
of close-ups of wubblers bouncing inside vest-tops by way of compensation)
and without the man actually going off a cliff. Anybody can see that this is
a non-starter. And right from the very first edition of this Top Forty
countdown, I've been concerned about the inability of people to die in pop
videos. Pop stars who commit suicide or fall off skyscrapers always wake up
and find it was all a dream, often with great big stupid grins on their
faces, while supposed murder victims have the power to return to life for
the final scene. Even the best of the bunch are unprepared to snuff it
on-screen. In a recent interview on digital TV, the Sugababes revealed that
one director submitted a video treatment for "Caught in a Moment" in which
all three of the girls would be seen trying to off themselves in different
ways: Heidi by slashing her wrists with a razor, Keisha by hanging herself,
Mutya by jumping off a tall building (presumably a council block). Heidi's
comment was something to the effect of, 'that's just wrong'. Let's think
about this for a moment, though. True, it seems unlikely that any girl-group
would ever agree to this kind of production. But… how much time did the
director spend, working it all out? Because I'm guessing that he must have
put a lot of thought into this, making sure that each girl got exactly the
right kind of death. Heidi jumping off a building seems somehow
ill-fitting; Keisha slashing her wrists seems somehow hard to imagine; Mutya
stringing herself up seems somehow out of character. He successfully
envisaged the way that each Sugababe would commit suicide, should she wish
to, but without spotting the fairly sizeable problem that none of them would
ever consider filming such a thing. People who come up with stupid ideas
don't get enough credit for working out the details, that's what I say.
12. "I Bruise Easily", Natasha Bedingfield
Promise?
11. "Rich Girl", Gwen Stefani ft. Eve
Oh, and now Gwen Stefani's singing Topol. I'm going to wake up in a
minute, aren't I?
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