Music Banter

How I loathe the Kings of Leon. Apparently, they’re good, because they sing in their own accents and they’re the sons of preacher men. Yeah, they’s good ole’ Southern Boys Who done gone and made them some purdy rock music. Whatever.

Even if this irritating, clichéd schtick isn’t put on, the resultant sound made by lead singer Old Pappy Wilkinson Haystacks the Third and his merry band of Uncle-brothers is one of the most irritating and pointless excuses for music to achieve success in recent years. His voice. My god, his awful, awful voice. You know how people listen to, I don’t know, Xiu Xiu, or Bjork or something and just say it’s weird noises with no musicality? That’s exactly how I react to this man’s voice. It’s almost indescribably terrible and I just cannot understand how otherwise intelligent people who can do things like remember to get dressed in the morning would like this band’s music.

I have traced the original inspiration for it, however. Just look at this Jack Dee video from the mid-nineties, and listen from about 3.26:

He’s talking about an old teacher of his, but I think you’ll agree that the sounds he’s making are scarily close.

Anyway, I hate them. They’re shit and if you like them you simply don’t understand and there is something wrong with your ears.

The world, however, seems to have a LOT wrong collectively with their ears, and the Kings of Leon are bafflingly successful.

Luckily, it seems the pigeons of the world have seen fit to redress the balance, subjecting them to the physical equivalent of what they’ve been shovelling our way, musically, for ages, by crapping on them from a great height until they stopped playing.

Brilliant, just brilliant. Of course, I’m not saying that rock and roll venues should be full of pigeons crapping on bands, but this petulant behaviour from a bunch of supposedly rough tough country boys just makes me laugh. Let’s not forget, too, that not one but TWO support bands had already made it through their sets. Kings of Leon- bunch of wusses.

Still, it could have been worse. Kings of Leon could have actually played a full set.

This has understandably garnered rather a lot of coverage, but my particular favourite is The Guardian’s Mark Beaumont turning over their Singles review page to the pigeons in question.

Of course, the whole debacle could have been avoided if they had simply worn this hat:

Lady Gaga’s been mildly amusing every now and then. I think there was a point in time when I quite liked her, though I was suspicious of the way her early releases and videos seemed to be rather deliberate syntheses of whatever was popular. I wasn’t convinced, though, and as time went on I found her more and more irritating. I noticed people started to talk a hell of a lot of absolute god-damn nonsense about her. I particularly liked the website that claimed she was an Illuminati Sex Puppet, but then this malaise started to infest my friends.

‘Oh, but she’s amazing,’ friends of mine would say. ‘She’s like a modern-day David Bowie, she’s just using whatever’s out there, like a cultural magpie.’

Oh, piss off and die, I would say. She’s not the modern David Bowie, she’s the modern Madonna- a cynical, ruthlessly ambitious pop star making chicken salad out of chicken shit and dressing it up so she can sell it to us. She knows that the best way to get attention and commercial success if you’re not actually that good musically is to find a way to appear shocking, say a few provocative things that you know the press will repeate Ad Nauseum, and then let idiots buy into the buzz.

‘Oh, but it’s like performance art,’ my friends (who had all finished Art History degrees) said. ‘It’s not really about the music, it’s about the aesthetic.’

Fine, I said, I’ll watch her videos with the sound turned down.

And that’s what I did for Alejandro. I heard about thirty seconds of the actual song, and it sounds ‘la isla bonita’ re-written by a group of concussed nine year-olds if you ask me. Still, I imagine it’ll sound good if you’re in a coma. The video is horrendous, too. I was going to go through it and dissect it but then I read This article in the Guardian which does it perfectly, so I thought no, let’s not be cynical, let’s be constructive. Let’s find a way to improve things.

If you’re like me and you want to appreciate the Lady Gaga ‘phenomenon’ without having to listen to excruciating mid-90s Europop, then here’s what you can do.

Here’s the video:

Switch that on. Turn the sound off. Oh, and fast-forward through the first thirty seconds that look like a couple of fetish models hanging out on the set of Pan’s Labyrinth to when stuff actually starts happening.

Now load up this video.

Play the two together. Of course, you may need to restart the second a few times, because it’s only twenty-seven seconds long, but I promise you the results will be a lot better than actually listening to her music.

Remember those moments in the school playground where word got round that there was going to be a fight, and everyone would gather at some illicit location to watch two people who didn’t like each other got at it for a little while, whilst the rest of you stood around in a circle watching, feeling oh so rebellious and wondering how long it would be before the teachers came to break things up?

Ah, happy days. I remember my own big moment in the world of FIGHT! when I decided that Jamie Hughes from my class had made one kilt joke too many (Scottish boy in an English school, toughens you up a bit) and that I needed to show people I wasn’t there to be picked on. Oh, the glory, oh the attention. Oh, the week-long detention afterwards.

Of course, these days we do things differently. We have the internet. We have Twitter, Facebook, blogs, text alerts and a thousand ways to communicate.

But some things are still the same. The recent Hole Album, which I liked seems to have stirred up some rage in erstwhile Smashing Pumpkins frontman and professional asshole Billy Corgan, who has launched an astonishing rant on Twitter about Courtney Love.

Here’s a highlight:

Thought number three’s a bit harsh, I have to say.

Love’s fired back, of course, accusing him of paedophilia, then going on a talk show and claiming to be a changed woman, who’s above all that immature bitching, and anyway, he started it.

It’s a shame, really. They’ve both made some amazing music at various times, and now they’re sniping at each other for all the world to see. It’s not very dignified, but it is very them.

If I can offer a solution, then here it is; LET’S TAKE THIS TO THE RING!

Another week, another pop culture moment that makes you feel old. This week, it’s been the sad news that Malcolm Mclaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, has lost his fight with cancer at the age of 64. My god, Malcolm Mclaren was 64? My first thought on reading that was surely that can’t be right?

But it was. The Silver Jubilee was a long, long time ago, kids. There’s teenagers alive to whom Punk Rock means Fall Out Boy, or the Offspring, or something. Strange indeed.

Let’s just take a moment, then, to remember that back in the seventies, Britain was screwed, both musically and culturally. Bin bags piled up in the streets, no-one had anything, rock music had disappeared up its own arse and was staring at the Dark Side of the Moon or Journeying to the Centre of the Earth. It was something done by rich people, or aliens. Society was stagnant and things were terrible.

And then came the Sex Pistols. A glorious, ranting, enraged mess of noise, filth, profanity and bodily fluids who hated everything around them, hated themselves, hated the establishment, hated their own audience. Where they went, anger, noise, barbarism, energy, change, anarchy, rebellion, shock and outrage followed in their wake.

They signed their record deal in front of Buckingham Palace and openly expressed their contempt for the monarch. And behind them (usually at a safe distance), Malcolm Mclaren stood smirking.

Just look at this picture of that signing:

Notice who’s standing there, staring at the camera like he knows this picture is going to be on the front of every paper in the country the next day? Yup. He knew what he was doing, did McLaren. He looks like one of the band in that picture, and it’s clear that they were, in a lot of ways, his carefully selected weapon of choice. I’m not wanting to take anything away from John Lydon and the rest (I suspect if I did, Lydon would find me as I slept, rip off my head and gob down my throat, kick my sorry corpse till it stopped twitching, using my head as a kind of twisted glove puppet to make me apologise for my disrespect), but I think that everyone knows that McLaren’s flair for publicity was a vital part of the Sex Pistol’s success.

As England lay Dreaming, languished in the depths of suburban misery, McLaren gave the Sex Pistols a chance to wake it up, and reminded us that Rock and Roll could still be truly shocking. That means Punk Rock, if not his idea, is at least partly his fault.

For that, I for one salute the grumpy old cunt.

Moving on from the shameless soul-flogging of the other day, here’s another strangely-dimensioned frontman known for unusual stage behaviour, outrageous lyrics and a few great moments of rock and roll rebellion (Brits 96. Earth Song. Take that, Jackson!), but unlike Iggy Pop, Jarvis Cocker, formerly of Pulp, still has a few brain cells left.

He’s still recording and performing interesting material (his album ‘further complications’ was a musical highlight of last year, as wry, self-reflective and witty as ever). He’s also recently begun presenting his own radio show on the BBC’s Six Music.

In this, he’s following in the footsteps of Guy Garvey of Elbow, Lauren Laverne (some of us still remember the genius of Kenickie, Lauren!) and Mark Riley, once of the Fall. He’s nailing it, too- the opening sequence, a sort of Barry White pastiche where he talks about dentures, is quintessentially Jarvis- sexy, and self-mocking. Somehow, it works, and I suspect that the ladies love it.

You see, Jarvis’ show works because he’s a willing talker, articulate and intelligent. He’s the kind of presenter, like Mark Radcliffe or Terry Wogan, whose personality makes him the kind of presence you don’t mind inviting in to your home on a regular basis. Of course, with Jarvis, he’s probably hiding in the cupboard and spying on your sister as she undresses, but somehow that’s ok. It’s only Jarvis, and your sister probably likes it anyway.

He’s also quite a knowledgeable student of music- each broadcast so far, I’ve been very impressed with the standard of music played. It’s quite high on the sweeping grandeur, and sultry crooners, which is fair enough, and quite reflective of the tastes of the man himself. Jarvis is also pretty good at sprinkling interesting titbits of musical information about odd instruments, strange quirky facts about rock and roll, life, the universe, and everything.

An interesting show. I’m looking forward to seeing how it grows.

Not the most original of headlines, I admit, but I’ve recently been shown further proof. Want to see?

I don’t think you should, you know. Really, it’s not a good idea.

Oh, ok then, you young rock and roll rebels. Here it is;

You think I’m selling time? I’m not, I’m selling my dignity.

Yes, that’s right, Iggy Pop, the leather-skinned elastic monster of rock and roll abandon, Mr Lust for Life himself, has whored himself out on a car insurance ad. What kind of world are we in where this is allowed? I mean, really. Surely they can’t be paying him that much money, can they?

The whole sorry thing continues- here’s the more recent ad, wherein a stupid gyrating puppet controlled by unseen forces drives a car about and sells insurance whilst a slightly more stupid gyrating puppet hams it up in the passenger seat next to him; it’s called Iggy and ‘Little Iggy’.

Little Iggy? LITTLE FUCKING IGGY? Time was when someone mentioned Iggy Pop and ‘Little Iggy’ being seen together it would mean he was driving around Los Angeles, high on crack with his cock out. THAT’s the only ‘little Iggy’ I want to see, in a purely heterosexual rock and roller way, of course.

The whole thing is just one of those moments that life throws up from time to time to make us all feel like we’re getting old. Well I never, Iggy Pop doing Car Insurance, who’d have thought it. I remember back in the day he was challenging people to do a shit on stage and eating it, now, well, he’s just lost that edge, hasn’t he?

I guess it’s inevitable, though- eventually, you need to put some money by, you need to compromise to pay the bills, to sell out. They’ve all done it- John Lydon’s got his property portfolio, Moby his vegan Cafe, and Pink Floyd have a neon pink diamond mine on the Moon. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about people cashing in on their fame as their careers start to wind down. Still, there’s selling out and selling out. The thing that really bugs me about this is that Swiftcover don’t cover musicians.

That’s right, kids, advertising is a lie! Shocking, I know. Apart from the fact that no insurance company in their right mind would offer Iggy Pop any kind of insurance whatsoever, Swiftcover wouldn’t offer insurance to Sir Cliff. Musicians are a high-risk category, see.

Bunch of arse. Next time Iggy Pop does an ad, I want it to be for something appropriate and connected to his life, like the pharmaceuticals testing industry, not this Swiftcover Car insurance bollocks.

Car insurance. Bunch of Old arse.

And they didn’t even get a play of ‘Passenger’ in either. Twats.

I love Shoegaze. I said so a while back, remember? I love everything about the genre. I love the massive walls of feedback, the whispered vocals which are often kind of about sex, or what taking drugs might feel like. Of course no shoegazer, apart from Jason Pearce of Spiritualized, was ever actually brave enough to take drugs, but they listen to shoegaze, so they don’t have to. You can realise this is true if you just consider the fact that to get drugs, a Shoegazer would have actually had to interact with someone. Can you imagine Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine stepping outside his front door and actually talking to a dealer? Thought not. No, it’s physically impossible. Shoegaze was all about introspection, which makes me, as a nerd with a laptop, wedded to the indoors, the prime audience for such a music. And the audience is expanding, too.

In this modern twitter-age, the internet and social media have created a whole generation of facile Emily Dickinsons sitting at their computers typing drivel to each other, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never really have to interact with anyone, not ever. Millions upon millions of shy flowers, endlessly reading Pitchfork and deciding whether or not to put Slowdive onto their playlist on Last.Fm. I blame the Cathode Ray babysitter- it’s clearly all television’s fault.

Still, I think it’s a good thing. We’ve got a generation of people, socially crippled and unable to deal with the outside world, but at least we’ve got a willing audience for music like School of Seven Bells who are kind of like a shoegaze band grown in a lab from the dead skin cells swept up from the studio floor during the making of Loveless, only nice, and not manky like that sounds. They’re on Sonic Cathedral Records, one of them was in Secret Machines, and their singer is a lucid dreamer, which is a VERY shoegaze thing, and unusually for a shoegaze (or Newgaze, which is apparently what you’re supposed to call it these days) band, they write their lyrics first. Remarkable. You can even hear the words, which is something that purists will frown at a bit, but I can forgive them this. I listen to them obsessively, and I think you should too.

There was a point on Saturday when I actually thought it wasn’t going to happen. I thought that a million grannies were going to buy a copy of that X-factor song for each of their grandchildren, and that everyone who downloaded seven copies of Killing in the Name Of was going to be disqualified and count for nothing.

I started to do that little backpedal in my own head of ‘even if it doesn’t win, they’ll have made their point,’ but I knew this was just lying to myself. I said so on here- it was going to be gutting if they lost, pure and simple.

But they didn’t. Oh, simple joy of simple joys, they didn’t. And now Simon Cowell looks like an idiot, and all that money that Sony spent on pushing the musical equivalent of raw tripe down the throats of the music-buying public has been entirely wasted.

That’s the interesting thing- this is the first Download-only Christmas number one. But it won’t be the last. In some strange way, you can see this as another part of the death throes of the old order. In the same way that a band like, say, the Arctic Monkeys, masterminded their meteoric rise through as crude a tool as Myspace, this is the sign that record companies just can’t BUY success any more, that unpredictable things crop up and succeed, and that the old tried and tested techniques for manufacturing success aren’t enough.

The media is dispersed enough that no-one is in control. Not really. That means good news for musicians, good news for fans, maybe not quite so good news for the people who are accustomed to making huge amounts of money from these two groups. That’s fine by me, honest it is.

You see, there’s always been music. There hasn’t always been a music industry.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Oh, there’ll always be infrastructure, and investment, and networking and promotion, of course there will. It’s just in the hands of the people now, which is what Tracy and Jon Morter realised.

There’s a lot of opportunity out there. If you’re a musician, you don’t need to do what they tell ya. You can just do it yourself.

I don’t buy much music these days. I listen to things online, I use Last.fm. and spotify, I listen to the radio and I swap mix-tapes with my mates, sometimes of music we’ve made ourselves. I don’t think I’m that unusual, either, amongst music fans. It’s just not necessary to buy music, any more. Maybe it’s just aging- I’m just the other side of thirty, and therefore on the slippery helter-skelter road to oblivion and irrelevance. Soon I’ll be at the final destination, sitting around amongst my CD collection and muttering about how pop music is just noise, and insisting that no-one knows how to write proper tunes since GodSpeed You Black Emperor! broke up. I can feel it starting to happen, too, that slow slide into the aged certainty that

I did buy some music this week. I hope you did too.

You see, this week, people decided that they were going to do something rebellious, something a little bit childish, and very funny indeed. They were motivated by a number of reasons, mainly a dissatisfaction at the seemingly endless string of bland karaoke nonsense that the TV show, ‘The X Factor’, was foisting on the British record-buying public at the Christmas number one.

It’s been one of those David versus Goliath stories- one one side is a husband-and-wife team with no resources whatsoever, who merely started a group on Facebook, suggesting that everyone buy Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ in the week of the 11th to the 19th of December, thus getting the 1992 hit to Christmas number one. The refrain from the end of the song, in case you didn’t know, is the repeated ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ which makes it the perfect rebel anthem.

No-one put any money into the marketting of this campaign, no-one put out huge ads everywhere, it just spread through word of mouth. It’s a totally do-it-yourself effort.

On the other side, is Joe McElderry, the winner of a TV show which ran on prime time TV for several months, and whose face has been plastered across billboards, advertising displays, and websites at great expense by Sony.

At the time of writing, I don’t know who won. What I DO know is that last night when I bought the song from Amazon, different versions of it were number one, number three AND number twenty on the list.

If it doesn’t get to number one, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll feel a bit like Simon Cowell, a man who I view as something roughly equivalent to Satan Himself in musical terms, has won.

What I do know, however, is that this has been something of an embarrassing week for Simon Cowell and the people he represents. If you spend all that money and get a serious challenge from a bunch of people who hate your music, is it really worth it in the end?

For Simon Cowell, and Sony music, the answer is probably yes. At the end of the day, they’re in business. If they make money, it’s a good thing for them.

That said, it’s nice to know that people can still really annoy the powers that be. It’s nice to think that rock and roll hasn’t lost its ability to be annoying, teenage, truculent and disobedient.

Fingers crossed.

For a long time now, an evil force has held sway over the music of the nation. A sneering, cynical enemy of all that is right and good, all that is original and heartfelt. You know who I mean. I mean X Factor. Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, all those other fetid shitbags who are responsible for churning out one god-awful, forgettable chart hit after another, all in the name of making themselves more and more obscenely rich. They’re manipulative, they’re unpleasant, they play on the desperate and pathetic desire that people have for fame, and a regular basis they churn out awful, awful music. Bland elevator-worthy nonsense which would stand no chance of success, and rightly so, unless it was allied to what is in effect the world’s biggest pop marketing campaign.

Theirs is a world where mediocrity, consensus and the safe option of what has worked before is all that matters, where individuals are disposable cogs, made to compete with each other, to humiliate themselves onstage and be subjected to withering criticisms and increasingly desperate acts in search of their brief, pointless moment of success, climbing over the bodies of their friends and fellow musicians to reach the top. Their time there will be fleeting, a brief flicker of success which will gain them next to nothing, but which will have already made obscene amounts of money for their watching overlords. They don’t care about sustained success for these people- one hit and that’s it. Suck them dry and on to the next one.

All the while, those who have masterminded these poor individuals’ brief rise sit in judgement, and grow ever wealthier. Their smugness is impossible to conceal. And to be honest, they SHOULD be smug, considering their achievement; they’ve somehow managed to turn their sordid trawling through the nation’s musical mediocrities into entertainment. Before this was done behind closed doors, and the cost of finding the next young sacrificial virgin to go on their altar of disposable mediocrity was born by these grimacing svengalis themselves. Then, at some point, they managed a wonderful trick; they got TV to pay for it. More than that, they got paid themselves just for being there. Genius! The moment when they came up with this idea, and said, ‘hey, let’s turn the one thing which we actually have to DO and pay for into entertainment’ must have been a bit like those moments in films where the villain reveals his master plan and cackles diabolically for hours.

It was the moment when manufactured, mediocre pop turned from a giant beast squatting upon the struggling, desperate coma victim that is the music industry, and extended their tendrils into television, creating the world’s biggest marketing con. Evil genius. Inexorable. Unstoppable.

NO MORE.

FUCK YOU, SIMON COWELL. I WON’T BUY WHAT YOU SELL ME.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE.