A Different Beat
October 18, 2009
———
“So what was with the Boyzone this morning?”
“What?” I said, looking up.
“The Boyzone, in church. Was it a greatest hits thing?”
“I wasn’t playing Boyzone. I was playing the Bee Gees.”
She smiled, awkwardly.
“Yeah, but…”
“Oh God. Tell me people didn’t think I was playing Boyzone.”
“I think they probably did. I mean *I* did.”
“It wasn’t Boyzone! It was the Bee Gees! ‘Words’!”
“Which Boyzone covered.”
“It’s a different version. I was playing a different version. Structurally they’re worlds apart.”
“No one would have been able to tell the difference. And people will think it’s a Stephen Gateley tribute.”
“Oh, they didn’t think that, did they? I mean, it’s a horrible thing to have happened, and I have tremendous sympathy for his family, but I’d never be so crass as to put it in a bloody church service.”
“I’d put money on people thinking you did exactly that.”
“God almighty,” I said. “Really?”
“I thought you were playing a little Boyzone medley when I came in.”
“It wasn’t a Boyzone medley! It was a Bee Gees medley!” I said, instantly regretting that, because it sounded equally silly.
“You may have to put people straight, then. Why were you playing it, anyway?”
“I don’t know, it just popped into my head. Now I wish I’d ignored it.”
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 41
October 19, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Scissor Sisters – Ta-Dah
Sigur Ros – Ágætis Byrjun
Simply Red – Stars
Scissor Sisters – Scissor Sisters
Simon & Garfunkel – Bookends
Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
Sigur Ros – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
Simon & Garfunkel – The Definitive Simon & Garfunkel
Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska
Paul Simon – You’re The One
Sigur Ros – Taak
Cheddars Plays Pop
October 20, 2009
———
One Saturday afternoon, about three and a half years ago, we were approaching the city limits of High Wycombe, listening to Chris Evans on Radio 2. Just before four o’clock, he played “the cheese record” – what I presume was a regular feature, dragging out songs from the archive that you loved but that just made you cringe. His offering this particular afternoon was Bucks Fizz’s excruciating ‘Land of Make Believe’, which I hadn’t heard in years and which brought back vivid memories from my childhood of dancing to it in the living room, pulling off a barely coherent mime (much to the delight of my parents and grandparents).
I suspect that most of you are familiar with ‘Land of Make Believe’, but it deserves a recap, chiefly because it’s one of those songs that’s even worse than the audible memory stamp that’s playing in your head. The lyrics are truly dire: “Run for the sun, little one / You’re an outlaw once again / Time to change, Superman / He’ll be with us while he can / in the land of make believe”. Yes, I know it’s a lament for lost youth and I know it’s fun in a corny, eighties synth-driven kind of way (one of the best types of corn) but I still have an internal struggle with this record. My inner child thinks it’s utterly fabulous, purely for the sake of nostalgia (one of the things about eighties trash, at least for my generation, is that dancing to it is in itself a recognition of how much our tastes change – it’s almost as if we realise that we were stupid to think that Kylie’s version of ‘The Locomotion’ was an improvement on Little Eva’s, but that we don’t want to appear too smug and self-righteous about it). The musician in me, on the other hand, thinks that ‘The Land of Make Believe’ should have been drowned at birth.
This set me thinking about how an error of judgement only becomes an error of judgement when it’s too late – we don’t realise how bad these songs are until we’ve loved them for years, which means we’re caught in the trap of admitting that we once loved the song, which means endless trips to the dance floor at School Disco club nights. It’s difficult to truly hate something that you loved as a child, even if, in later years, you recognise it as a musical shambles. (On the other hand, hating something for your whole life can actually be quite fun once you get old enough to work out exactly why you hate it, as opposed to the standard childhood response of “It’s rubbish”.) So it’s no wonder that nostalgia records sell by the bucketload, irrespective of quality.
All this was running through my head during those final choruses, and as the record began to fade Evans began to talk about putting together a compilation CD himself – it’s apparent that he’d been having similar thoughts to the ones that I’d been experiencing. His co-presenter / producer / lackey (delete as applicable) suggested a two-CD set, with one record containing the cheese and one containing the good stuff – what they referred to as ‘class’. Evans promptly dubbed this the best idea they’d ever had, and I can assume that they spent the rest of the afternoon making copious notes during the other songs, as well as taking your emails and texts.
It was then that I had an idea for my own two-disc collection: disc one containing the sappy, excruciatingly embarrassing songs we all loved as children / teenagers, and the other the preachy, “vulnerable”, self-important drudgery that seems to dominate today’s chart. I don’t know what’s worse, to be honest: the insipidly bland manufactured pop that reaches number one for a week at a time and then disappears, never to be seen again; or the tortuously dull internal monologues of singer-songwriters who think that it’s a good idea to complain a lot about being rich and successful and on top of their game. It’s Joni Mitchell’s fault: she opened her heart on Blue, with fantastic results, and thirty-five years later everyone is doing it. Unfortunately, everyone is not as talented as Joni was in her prime (very few people are, in fact), so what we’re left with is hours of self-indulgent pomposity by the likes of Robbie Williams: “Oh, I’m really rich and successful and I’ve got loads of birds, but I’m actually a really lonely person, and I love me mam”. (Listen, Robbie, I couldn’t care less. You’ve got more money than I could ever dream of. Live with it!)
Anyway: this two-CD set that I’m concocting will be called Cheese and Whine. Actually picking records that are properly cheesy (as opposed to just irritating) is trickier than you might think: see for example Minnie Ripperton’s ‘Lovin’ You is Easy ‘Cause You’re Beautiful’, which grates on the ears but couldn’t really be called cheesy, or ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’, which is just plain diabolical. I have nonetheless come up with a few that I think deserve inclusion. The Whine list was even trickier – there’s no shortage of emotionally overwrought garbage to plough through, but I tend to try and block it out of my head, so I can never remember the songs I want to include. (What a lot of musicians don’t seem to understand is that while we do like a bit of emotional angst in a song, we don’t necessarily want to hear about their emotional angst.)
The Whine list, however, was also the more interesting, so while I’ve done nothing more than merely name and shame the songs in the Cheese component, I have chosen to subject the Whine records to a little deconstruction. It’s easy enough to see how and why a record could be described as cheesy, and I would have hoped that most of my choices would have been relatively self-explanatory. The same cannot necessarily be said for their emotionally overwrought counterparts – and if I appear to be justifying myself a little bit, I probably am.
Here they are, then, in no particular order. And it’s by no means an exhaustive list.
Part 1: Cheese
Bucks Fizz – ‘Land of Make Believe’ (Evans was right; there probably is no cheesier record)
Andrew Gold – ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’
Dean Friedman and Denise Marsa – ‘Lucky Stars’
The Proclaimers – ‘Let’s Get Married’
Aerosmith – ‘Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ (except another airing of this wretched slush)
Michael Jackson – ‘Gone Too Soon’ (oh, if only we knew)
Bobby Goldsboro – ‘Honey’ (the subject of a future entry, so watch this space)
John Miles – ‘Music’ (but if it’s good enough for Jarvis Cocker, it’s good enough for me)
Paul and Paula – ‘Hey Paula’ (as beautifully performed on Ally McBeal)
Barry Manilow – ‘One Voice’ (don’t get me started)
—–
Part 2: Whine
Robbie Williams – ‘Strong’ / ‘Come Undone’
Either, or possibly both: I can’t decide which one I hate more. Robbie’s always more interesting when he’s being an egotistical arsehole: he’s insufferable then, but at least he’s fun to watch. To see him wear his heart on his sleeve is uncomfortable, and not in a Joni Mitchell but-at-least-it’s-art kind of way. Because the truth is that the songwriting talents of Robbie Williams have over the years been inflated beyond all comprehension. In ‘Strong’, Robbie and long-term writing partner Guy Chambers insist that first thing in the morning the favourite son of Stoke resembles “Kiss, but without the makeup”. This is fine, but straightaway they add “and that’s a good line to take it to the bridge”, which is presumably a dummy lyric that they forgot to remove in the mixing session – either that, or Robbie got hit by a car and was magically transported back to 1991.
‘Come Undone’ is even worse: a laundry list of contradictions (“such a saint but such a whore”) meant to emphasise Robbie’s dual personality and enslavement to the Gods of Corporate Rock. Having sounded off about his inner demons, he confesses that he’s “contemplating thinking about thinking”, which I know is meant to be a clear sign of procrastination, but to be honest it comes across like bad Oasis (and that’s no mean feat). By the end of the chorus, Robbie is weeping over his caviar and Clos du Mesnil: “I’m scum, and I’m your son / I’ve come undone”, and then off he goes to buy another yacht (even admitting as much in the middle eight). Both songs are cut through with the sort of overstated pleading that is supposed to show these swaggering, wipe-your-arse-with-fifty-pound-notes rock legends for the vulnerable and insecure people they are, but it’s very hard to feel sympathy for anyone with even more capital than Robert Mugabe, and who got there by being only mildly less irritating. “My life’s a mess / And it’s starting to show, so before I’m old, I’ll confess / You think that I’m strong / You’re wrong / You’re wrong”, sings Robbie. No, we don’t think you’re strong, we just think you’re an ungrateful twerp. It’s no wonder that Rudebox didn’t sell.
James Blunt – ‘You’re Beautiful’
I have a lot of time for James Blunt. I remember being one of his staunchest defenders in an online debate, documented here in a previous entry. But I have to admit that even I am getting a little tired of ‘You’re Beautiful’. It’s never been clear exactly how autobiographical Blunt’s masterclass in misery actually is, and to be frank I don’t really care. True or not, it’s the whingy, overstated tone of the whole piece which is grating: the initial sighting on the subway, in which a stoned-beyond-redemption Blunt encounters an apparently friendly ex-girlfriend who was presumably only smiling at the sight of him falling about the train carriage – “she could see from my face I was fucking high”, he wails. Presumably said ex is thinking “thank Christ I’m out of that one”. Blunt then maintains “I’ve got a plan”, before conceding at the end of the chorus that “I don’t know what to do / ‘cause I’ll never be with you”. Online dating might be a good start.
George Harrison – ‘Only a Northern Song’
Memo to Harrison: songs about writing songs never work. (Someone should actually have said the same thing to the Manics, the subject of the entry below, after they’d written the abominable ‘S.Y.M.M.’, but that’s for another day.) Similarly, novels about writing novels are bad. Films about making films are occasionally quite fun – witness Bowfinger, Singin’ In The Rain and Ed Wood – but generally speaking, anyone who explores the basics of their craft through the craft itself is treading in dangerous waters. At best it’s pretentious, at worst it’s downright irritating. Hence the former Beatle’s sarcastic anguish about the less-than-wonderful financial situation into which he’d been cast, which saw his profits from Northern Songs marginalised in favour of those of Lennon & McCartney. The Beatles had sang about being ripped off before, and would do so again in the beautifully constructed ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, but ‘Only A Northern Song’ is everything that ‘Taxman’ isn’t: plodding, tedious and bereft of even the slightest wisp of humour. Towards the end, Harrison laments that “It doesn’t really matter what chords I play / what words I say or time of day it is”. No, George – with rubbish like that, it really doesn’t matter at all.
Manic Street Preachers – ‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’
There was a time when the Manics’ sense of self-importance and aggrandized angst actually appealed to me. In the summer of 1996, when Everything Must Go was in the window display of every HMV in the country, I had ‘A Design For Life’ welded to my CD player, nodding sagely as James Dean Bradfield lamented that “we don’t talk about love / we only want to get drunk / and we are not allowed to spend / and we are told that this is the end”. As a dazzling exposé of the nightlife culture it didn’t get much better than this, and we lapped it up. But then came their 1998 follow-up, when the radio stations were awash with the sound of ‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’, from the equally long-winded This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. As the band went mainstream, Bradfield and co ranted about the Spanish Civil War, and the Manics’ songwriting techniques proved their undoing: lyrics that barely scanned their ill-fitting melody, making the song sound like they’d been working on words and music in separate rooms before recklessly combining their results (which, of course, is exactly what they were doing). This time, Bradfield is talking about “holes in your head today, but I’m a pacifist / I’ve walked La Ramblas but not with real intent” which sounds like bad beat poetry. It’s all very worthy but thoroughly tedious, much like most of the Manics’ output on that album and ever since. They just haven’t been the same since The Holy Bible.
Britney Spears – ‘Lucky’
Seriously, does anyone really believe that this is actually about a movie star? Are we really supposed to assume that the sad and lonely tale of this lovely Hollywood girl is anything but allegory? It didn’t help that Britney chose to portray both herself and the unfortunate starlet in Dave Meyers’ video: she may have traded the MTV awards for the Oscars, but it was quite obvious that this was supposed to be a telling insight into the life of an obviously desperately lonely girl, for whom money and fame and a glamorous showbiz lifestyle simply weren’t enough to stop her weeping into her luxurious satin pillows at night. Never mind being an international sex symbol (although only just, at least in a legal sense) and having more money than you can ever dream of; apparently this glamorous jet-setting lifestyle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She was more fun when she had her head shaved.
John Lennon – ‘Working Class Hero’
There are few sights quite as hypocritical in 1970s pop as the image of Liverpool’s favourite son, seated behind a sumptuous white grand piano in a lavish New York dwelling, warbling “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can…”. Well, to be honest, John, the expensive-looking necklace being sported by your wife is making it a little difficult. But let’s move on from that, and talk about your rant against the institution – an institution that will apparently “hate you if you’re clever”, and “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV”. All salient points, but then we reach the chorus, in we’re told that “A working class hero is something to be / If you want to be a hero, well just follow me”.
Hang on a tic, John, you’ve lost me. Where are we going? Are you going to lead us down the fire escape to an old abandoned warehouse that’s been turned into a top secret crime-fighting laboratory, where a wizened Japanese sensei will teach us all to be heroes? Or were you just heading over to the other wing of the house, where you presumably have the ‘hero’ formula written down in a notebook you keep locked in your safe, along with the original Beatles lyrics and Yoko’s sense of humour? Or were you actually insinuating that you yourself were the answer, and that we should all become your disciples, like the pinball-obsessed youngsters in Tommy? Maybe there’s an irony in this song that I’ve simply never appreciated, but to be fair, I was a bit thrown by your liberal and frankly gratuitous use of the word ‘fucking’ (I don’t know, John, it just felt like you were trying to be all grown-up and cross). I hope that under the circumstances you will excuse me for having missed the point, but I’m still trying to reconcile the image of the multi-millionaire living the high life in the Big Apple pleading with the masses to avoid his fate, and to stay down with the paupers where they’re more likely to be true to themselves. Billy Bragg may be guilty of double standards, but at least he doesn’t pretend to be something that he’s not. What’s up, are you more popular than Jesus now?
Charlene – ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’
For this particular summary, I defer to Tom Reynolds, who gives a great account in Touch Me, I’m Sick:
“The pseudo-disillusioned Narcissist: a person who brags by bitching. Hollywood’s full of them, pumping themselves up with tales of woe. They mention their private chalet in Aspen while complaining about a delayed plane flight. They name-drop Reese Witherspoon when describing an unpleasant dining experience. They work Matt Damon into their tirade about the service at a Mercedes dealership. What’s worse, they do it intentionally so they can feel superior to you….While there are other songs as insipid as ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’, few are as narcissistic. That’s not the fault of Charlene, as she didn’t write it (though her treacly performance makes it worse). What makes the song so insufferable is how we’re expected to feel sorry for people like the celebrity in the song. This sort of hubris is very symptomatic of the last 30 years, when artists and songwriters started pretending to be ‘disillusioned’ with their chosen professions while continuing to work in them. Think of all the name actors who whine about crappy Hollywood movies yet eagerly appear in them because the money’s so good…Personally I’m all for artists getting rich and being successful. Just don’t bitch about it.”
And on that note…
The Verve – ‘Bittersweet Symphony’
There’s only one person for whom I have less time than Liam Gallagher, and that’s Richard Ashcroft. Labelled a ‘genius’ by Oasis in their liner notes to What’s the Story?, Ashcroft was no stranger to hyperbole over the years: when introducing him at Live 8, Chris Martin announced that “the best singer in the world” was going to perform “probably the greatest song ever written”. Imagine our dumbstruck horror when, instead of Freddie Mercury / Elvis Presley / Frank Sinatra (yes, I know they’re all dead, but I’m making a point) singing ‘Stardust’ or ‘Every Breath You Take’, we were greeted with the sight of Ashcroft blundering across the stage to perform his overblown magnum opus about the futility and meaninglessness of existence, and without a pipe or a black polo neck in sight. What’s particularly irritating about this song is that it probably could have been a really good one if it wasn’t so world-weary: Ashcroft may have lifted the strings from ‘The Last Time’ (to the extent that Jagger and Richards got songwriting credits), but they form a powerful and almost intoxicating groove when Peter Salisbury’s drums are cushioned underneath. It sounds like it was written for a Match of the Day goal montage, but it works beautifully, until Ashcroft starts to sing, at which point the song rapidly goes downhill: “Oh, it’s all so hopeless and you’re all a bunch of slaves to the system, and I’m crying out in the darkness and I don’t really know who I am, and I’m loaded but really miserable with it”. I’m paraphrasing, but only just.
Phil Collins – ‘Another Day In Paradise’
All right, it’s not strictly whiny as such but it’s just so pompous. Former Genesis drummer turned frontman turned M.O.R. veteran, Uncle Phil struck gold with this lament about the unwanted homeless girl who is ignored by the clearly embarrassed passer-by. It’s like ‘Streets of London’, but worse: a finger-pointing rant against apathy that falls at the first hurdle simply because it’s just not very good. The archaic drum loop and unfashionable synths date the song, but it’s Collins’ torturous, nasal vocal that really finishes it off: “Oh lord,” he wails, “is there nothing more anybody can do?”. Actually, there is: how about keeping the money you’d have spent on this dross and using it to buy a Big Issue instead?
A far better song about the homeless was the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘The Theatre’ (Very, 1993), which manages to deal with the problem without moralising any more than is strictly necessary, by actually adopting the point of view of the ignored vagrant, rather than trying to empathise: “Pavarotti in the park / Then you walked back up the Strand / Did you catch my eye / And then pretend not to notice all the years we’ve been here / with the bums you step over as you leave the theatre”. Cutting, and not in the least bit preachy. And that’s probably a good place to stop, before my raging and completely unjustified sense of bitterness that all these people have more money than I do finally takes hold, and throws me completely over the edge.
“…but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
October 23, 2009
———
The days drift on in a dull melting pot of brown. One is barely distinguishable from the other. I am now at the stage where I want to see this thing through rather than reap the benefits. I no longer find the hat fun. I’ve saturated myself in music this year – playing it, writing it, writing about it, thinking about it, living it – and this feels like burnout. I have lost the motivation I had when I started writing this blog. I am sedated. I am bored.
I suspect that a part of this has to do with Bono. If I’ve calculated things correctly this will be the last week of 2009 where our listening choices are severely limited – even ‘Z’ has a surprising array of artists on offer. Sadly, the ‘U’ section of our CD library consists of a Ukulele Orchestra collection, Hand on the Torch (the first album by Us3), the admittedly glorious soundtrack to U-Turn and almost every record by Ireland’s finest. And this week, I don’t want to listen to any of it.
I can’t remember the point at which I went off U2. Perhaps it was when I realised that I had no inclination whatsoever to buy their last album. Although I don’t know if that simply marks the point of confirmation, rather than the point at which I actually lost interest. The jumping-the-shark metaphor is apt here: the Happy Days team did not run out of ideas overnight, and then decide to go to Los Angeles to have Henry Winkler perform water sports. Things don’t just drop off the edge, they go downhill. It was a low point – but if the bottom of the barrel needs to be scraped, there must have been a lot of substandard produce to go through first.
Similarly, I think I’d been fed up with Bono for some time before the release of No Line on the Horizon. Looking back, it may have been Live8 that finished things off: Bono’s bombastic performance was the epitome of grandiose smugness; it wasn’t quite Rattle and Hum but you really got the feeling that this was a singer who had, at last, begun to believe his own hype (particularly if the backstage arguments with McCartney were to be believed). U2 were far more interesting when they were reinventing themselves – Achtung Baby remains, in many respects, their finest work, because it marks the point at which the band ceased to be self-important and became ironic. It was a trend that continued throughout the nineties, as U2 resorted to ever-more elaborate sets and a multitude of costume changes and stage personas for their stadium tours, as Bono would shift, chameleon-like, from MacPhisto to Mirror Ball man to the Human Fly and then back again.
Ironically, it was during this period that I stopped listening to their music, as I considered that they’d lost their way: only some four years later, with the release of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, did I welcome them back. I was, at that point in my life, desperate for some sincerity, and I felt that I’d found it here: the grungy euphoria of ‘Elevation’, the grandiose finality of ‘Walk On’ (with lyrics lifted straight from Roger Waters’ ‘Eclipse’), the lighter-waving tenderness of ‘Kite’, or the emotional angst of ‘Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ (once more demonstrating that rock singers know fuck-all about prepositions). Forget the drum machines of ‘Discotheque’ – this was the U2 I loved, the band I cherished, the grandeur and sweat and the fever and the flourishes. I was home; I was happy.
I’d be lying if I said I was bored all of it. Certainly the Boston Elevation Tour is the best gig I’ve ever seen on DVD, in terms of sheer energy. There are many highlights: Bono lying on stage and singing ‘With Or Without You’ to a female fan he’s plucked from the audience; the bizarre theatrical duel with The Edge at the climax to ‘Until The End of the World’ (Bono does interpretative dance; who’d have thought?); or the rant against then-up-for-parole Mark Chapman that finished off ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’. But it’s the fusion of ‘Bad’ and ‘40’ that raises the Boston show to new heights of brilliance: as the song draws to a close, Bono leads the crowd in a chant of ‘How long to sing this song?’, before leaving them to it: the band stop, and then, after a few seconds of a capella singing, a familiar chord progression bubbles underneath. The crowd roars its approval, as Bono asks “What can I give back to God for the blessings he’s poured out on me?”. The Edge begins his guitar riff, Clayton underpins him and then finally Larry rolls into the driving beat of ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’. Bono jumps up and is away, running round the circular walkway like a man possessed. It’s a moment of incredible energy and raw emotional power, and I have yet to see its like, in a U2 show or anything else.
Sadly, the Boston gig has become a bubble of excellence in a pond of irritation. Because it’s the only time, as far as I can see, where U2 have taken that euphoria and surrendered their ego to the extent that what they were doing became, in essence, an act of worship. Before we go on I should mention that I’m not opposed to the idea of performance, and of a band doing what it does best and getting applauded for it, and revelling in that appreciation. It’s just everything else. Everything else is infuriating: the iPod / Blackberry campaigns, the ridiculous finger-snapping exercise (on television and, apocryphally, in concert – according to urban legend, Bono said “Every time I do this, a child dies”, which leads to the obligatory “Stop fucking doing it, then!”), the pomp and circumstance and swagger and the patronising, holier-than-thou outlook, masked by a veneer of social conscience. We get the feeling that we’re not the people we could be and that Bono is the light to show us the way, which I find laughable.
I don’t own a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Make Bono History’ (although I, like many others, think this is a good idea), and I bear him no grudge over his status as a tax exile. I simply object to the ego. Because it seems these days as though the ego has become the band, or the band has become the ego: that Bono’s over-earnest and misguided quest to put an end to poverty has got in the way of the music. And I’m tired of the drama of it all, and the songs are no longer as meaningful as they used to be, and they echo mindlessly and inanely, saying little of any real substance and leaving me lost and confused and generally fed up.
So perhaps it’s U2 in general, or perhaps it’s the monotony brought about by the letter ‘U’ – one of the first times this year where the restriction has been suffocating rather than enlightening. Perhaps I’m just generally gloomy. Or perhaps it’s the growing realisation that the hat hasn’t changed my outlook as much as I hoped it would. I’d like to say that it has. I dearly would. Earlier in the year I was awash with fresh hopes about how this would help me see music in a new light. Now, I am everything I was this time last year. I should be embracing the contradictions: instead, I’m just looking ahead to January so that I can listen to the new material I’ve obtained for this year’s used letters, unable to listen to it now, afraid that breaking my own rules will risk bad karma. Is this the sum total of the year’s experiment? This tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 42
October 26, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
U2 – The Joshua Tree
U2 – The Unforgettable Fire
U2 – Achtung Baby
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – Precious Little
U2 – Zooropa
Soundtrack – U-Turn
Intermezzo
October 26, 2009
———
“It’s funny, really,” Jessica was saying. “How different people ask you to do things.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, let’s say I get an email from Stephen, and he says ‘Would you like to do this’, which generally means ‘I would like you to do this’. But then as a contrast, I’ll get an email from Paul saying ‘Can we also do this?’, which again means ‘I would like you do this’.”
“I know what you mean. It’s the power of suggestion. It’s like when the song says ‘Would you like to swing on a star?’. Is that a genuine question, or a veiled command?”
“Exactly,” said Jessica.
“Actually,” I went on, “the chorus of that song always bugged me. It goes ‘Would you like to swing on a star’, which would be downright dangerous even if it were scientifically plausible. Then ‘Carry moonbeams home in a jar’, which is again impossible. Or you can have more money, or would you rather be a pig? I mean, it’s pretty much a given, isn’t it?”
“Makes you think, though.”
“What? That some people really shouldn’t be writing lyrics?”
“Or that they just need a rhyming dictionary.”
Bone of Contention
October 27, 2009
———
“I’m thinking about buying a didgeridoo.”
The Engineering team is a sea of interested glances. Then Emma says “Didgeridon’t”.
“Did you mean that?” I ask. “Or was it just for the sake of making a pun?”
“I’m serious. Because unless you’re actually musical and planning to play the thing seriously, and unless you have a large lockable cupboard, it will just be used as a weapon by your children.”
The didgeridoo fantasy is one that I drag out periodically. Emily and I hadn’t been going out long when we spent a weekend in Stratford-upon-Avon, and I found a box full of them in the market. It’s been a recurring joke ever since, fuelled in no small part by our mutual love of Rolf Harris. I’ve seen them on sale at Greenbelt: large, painted tubes that cry out to be lifted from their baskets and played. But I never do. I suspect I’m too embarrassed, because I’ve had a history with wind instruments, and would like to think that I’d be able to adapt to the Aborigines’ accompaniment of choice with relatively little difficulty. Intuition tells me that this will almost certainly not be the case, and it is for this reason that my occasional desire to obtain a didgeridoo is something to be routinely entertained and then dismissed as foolish, at least until the next time I feel the urge to expand into world music. If you will excuse the obvious wordplay, it’s nothing more than a pipe dream.
A conversation with Emily the other evening more or less confirmed my suspicions. “Just because you play the trombone, it doesn’t follow that the didgeridoo is going to be easy. It’s nothing to do with puff – it’s a completely different technique.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. It’s circular breathing.”
I remember circular breathing from my trombone lessons, but it’s something that I never really mastered – much like, I suppose, the trombone. It was an instrument that I began to play not long after I started secondary school, after some encouragement from the music teachers who wanted me to learn an instrument but didn’t have the resources to teach the piano, which was my first choice. My mother tells me that at this point I declared “I quite fancy the trombone”. I deny ever having said this, but am willing not to contest the point now. We’ve had too many arguments about it.
The instrument-formerly-known-as-sackbut wasn’t my first foray into the world of peripatetic tuition: some four years earlier, at the tender age of seven, I’d taken up the violin, along with several other primary classmates (including a girl who was to remain the object of my affection for the next ten years, on and off). A few months in, they were advising me to stop. This had nothing to do with the screechy wails that came from the front room whenever I practiced, the ones which convinced our neighbours that the cat was trapped inside the waste disposal. There were plenty of those. Instead, I was told, it was a matter of physical proportions. I was an awkward child, and while I was able to master the rudiments of notation, I simply couldn’t hold the violin.
I suspect that if I’d started school as little as ten years later, I’d have been labelled dyspraxic. I’m actually convinced that this isn’t true: instead, it’s more likely that I was just clumsy. I was hopeless at games, not so much picked last as left on the sidelines while everyone else played. I tend to fall over my own feet quite a lot. I will probably never be a dancer. But I can hear a tune and play it back at you, or at least give a reasonable approximation. My failure to pick up the violin was perversely literal – I actually couldn’t pick it up, choosing as it were to hold it in a not dissimilar manner to the way in which my eldest son holds a pencil: awkwardly, with his fist.
I ditched the violin and took up the keyboard at the age of ten, bashing out show tunes on a microscopic Yamaha (keyboards were, at that time, polarised in the same way that video consoles and home computers were. You liked Atari or Commodore. Sega or Nintendo. Casio or Yamaha. Never both). Saturday mornings were lessons in a nearby comprehensive – not the one I would ultimately attend, which was a shame because the head of music was fantastic. We learned songs by Status Quo and the Mindbenders, as well as the themes from Flashdance and Neighbours (even now, over twenty years later, I can still pick out the bass line). We would sit in rows and bash out in a clumpy, haphazard attempt at unison, the room humming with fifteen tinny approximations of electric pianos. Those sessions are a hazy fog of watery squash in plastic cups, oversized headphones and the smell of chalk, but the tunes linger.
Not long after this, I started at secondary school, and scored highly on an aural test they gave the entire first year, picking out notes and chords from a gramophone recording. I’d also impressed my class, and my mother and father, with two melodies I’d composed. All of the above marked me out as ‘gifted’ (a label I utterly dispute, even today), and it was suggested that I take up an instrument. Before the trombone turned up I was still favouring the keyboard, having upgraded now from my tinny PSS-170 to the considerably more impressive PSR-37, with chord styling, intros and endings and some really quite convincing sound effects. The keyboard was purchased along with another selection of Roger Evans tuition books, and I’d stand in the lounge for hours, trying to work out the chords and polyphony in the admittedly impressive demo – one that I’d never be able to replicate manually, due to technical constraints, although that didn’t stop me trying. Frequently my mother would finish watching Coronation Street, pour another Red Label (tea, not whisky) and say “Play those tunes you made up,” and of course, I’d once more oblige.
Here’s something I never told my parents: I didn’t make them up. I stole them from a video game. It was owned by a sometime friend who’d recently taken to bullying me. I justify my actions by saying that I was going through a hard time and didn’t know how to deal with Aaron Northway or Stephen Taylor (and it would be another six months before they sent me for counselling), but having worked in publishing for eight years I’ve learned that nothing really justifies plagiarism – particularly when it was so blatant. I didn’t even rework the melodies or substitute the chords: I just ripped them off, and hoped that no one would notice. Jason certainly did, although to his credit he never dropped me in it, and neither did my other friends, although one asked me, after the second and last instalment, whether I’d be pinching the Afterburner theme next time. (I never did; there’s no real hook to it.)
The strange thing was that this incident was almost certainly one of the catalysts that helped my musical development during secondary school, and without it I really can’t be sure that things would have unfolded as they did. Sometimes the worst things happen for the right reasons. Despite an inbuilt sense of guilt that is almost Catholic in its immensity, I’ve more or less stopped beating myself up about this (I was eleven years old, and all kids do stupid things when they’re eleven years old) but I suspect that the fact that music became such a central part of my life as a result is probably worth a year or two of living in fear. And it really was living in fear: every shopping trip became a paranoid nightmare as I’d wander the department stores with my parents, convinced that we’d find Alex Kidd in Miracle World playing on some display system – as indeed we did a couple of times, more so after it became the built-in default on the new Master System II. Thankfully the sound was usually off – although it wasn’t off on the day we walked into Argos and I found The Enchanted Castle, which uses the same theme, playing on a Megadrive on the other side of the store. I spent twenty minutes finding excuses to keep them away from that particular display. They never noticed, or if they did they never said anything. The passage of time devalues the gravity of this particular sin; I may tell them about it one day, perhaps in December 2012 when the last comet is about to destroy the Earth.
I took up the trombone, with some difficulty (have you ever had to hold one?) and mastered the basics of tuning, finding the correct slide positions – one of the first questions anyone asks you is “How do you remember which note is where?” – and emptying the water valve. This last one was, in particular, great fun: there can’t be many social situations where effectively spitting on the floor is not only tolerated but actually encouraged. The sight of a dozen eleven-year-olds spilling out their valve contents on the grubby tiles of the school hall was not exactly a highlight of our thrice-yearly concerts (or if it was it was for all the wrong reasons), but it was essential if you were going to avoid that unpleasant clicking sound caused by a build-up of fluid in the slide. You just had to learn to always carry a cloth. Also fun was the gradual transition over those first few weeks from vague, unintelligible noises that sounded like a Holstein having a shit, through to wobbly, uneven tones and then, eventually, actual notes. It’s far easier to play low notes on a trombone than it is to play higher ones – like smiling and frowning, it’s all to do with the number of facial muscles you use and how relaxed your embouchure is, which means that everyone who takes it up will automatically start with the low, rumbling approximations of notes that eventually become Bb in first position, followed by C way out in sixth (why did they do that? Why? Why?), and so on and so on. Bob Brookmeyer I was not, but after a month or so I could at least manage to get through ‘When I First Came To This Land’ without the neighbours having to ring the RSPCA to report an escaped elephant.
The trombone won me early exits from lessons, a place in the much-derided school orchestra, a few solo spots in the aforementioned concerts – oh, and a date. It happened when I was seventeen and asked to take part in the sixth form Blind Date, which we were doing in conjunction with a school on the other side of town which had no obvious connection with ours. For reasons that I have yet to fathom almost fourteen years later, I was asked to be one of the three male contestants endeavouring to win the affections of Davida, who was sitting on the other side of the partition. On the advice of friends I turned up to the common room wearing a jacket and tie, listened to the drama teacher tell a few dodgy jokes that earned him the wrath of the headmaster the following morning, and then – as a punchline to my third answer – I played ‘Only You’ (the Platters, as opposed to Yazoo).
Inexplicably, Davida picked me: she met with the runners up (a football-playing, beer-swilling Oasis fan, and a sensitive, aesthetically dazzling German exchange student), and then when I came out her first response was “Can I have the other one?”. She was pretty, but made a point of avoiding me for the rest of the night. Things were no better at the close of the evening’s disco – as soon as resident DJ Will struck up with Mariah Carey’s abominable cover of ‘Without You’, announcing that he wanted to see “all the couples on the floor”, a reluctant Davida was jostled into the centre by her friends, whereupon she stood opposite me, avoiding all eye contact, before launching into a frenzied version of Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever routine, complete with gyrating arms. It was like watching Pulp Fiction in a country where the soundtrack has been removed for copyright reasons, and you’re having to make do with the local radio. When she finally fell into an awkward slow dance, largely prompted by the chorus of boos from her peers, she admitted to me that she was already partnered up, and had only done the show as a favour to the friend who’d originally been asked and who didn’t want to take part. The whole thing was ritually humiliating, but everyone sided with me, and even though Doggy Davida – her nickname around campus, as I later found out – refused to enter into the spirit of things, I did at least find out who my real friends were that night (and perversely, they never call me).
I got quite good at the trombone, in the end. I had three teachers, who were shuffled around periodically depending on current budget needs. The third and best was Mike Sallis (“No relation to Peter”), a jovial, bespectacled man from Cheltenham who taught me to step beyond the notes on the page. It all sounds rather Mr Holland’s Opus, and I suppose that in a way it was. Unfortunately I wasn’t the world’s best student: I concentrated fully in lessons, for the most part, but refused to practice in between – hoping that he wouldn’t notice, as invariably he did. “The bottom line, James,” he would say, “is that when all is said and done you’re just not a trombonist. You play it very well, when you want to, and you could be even better, but I simply don’t think your heart’s in it.”
He was right, sadly. It’s relatively easy to learn to do something, but if you’re not prepared to put a little something of yourself into the process then you will never truly master it. Conversely, your abilities at something else may be nothing more than mediocre, but just the right amount of sincerity can improve a performance so that it becomes something more than the sum of its parts. This doesn’t always work – I’ve seen plenty of embarrassing solos from people who meant well but simply couldn’t sing / play, but sometimes tackling something with a little soul can make all the difference. Certainly I found that the more of myself I put into my piano playing, the more I enjoyed it. There were times when it was just you and the instrument, and you could feel every note, and time seemed to hang suspended between chords, and there were shivers down my spine: when you think of some embellishment to add in the middle of a performance, some way of improving the song that you’d missed the last time you ran through it, or when the arpeggiated flourish that you never quite mastered in practice suddenly comes off perfectly when you’re playing it for real, and you think to yourself, I am a musician, and I do this because I love it.
I never got that sort of euphoria from the trombone, no matter how hard I tried. Maybe it’s because there’s less scope for trombone soloing unless you want to go down the jazz route, and I was never really good enough for that: I had the confidence, but lacked the technical expertise. Or perhaps it’s because my heart has always really belonged to the piano – an instrument I would have taken up if we’d been able to afford a piano when I first wanted one, and if they’d had in-school tuition. I can remember endless lunchtimes sitting in the music block, trying to work out the progressions to Beatles records or master the changes to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (a feat that I wouldn’t manage for another ten years). I can remember walking in on Ewan, who was playing one of the themes from Outrun (and who was then annoyed at how quickly I picked it up; it was like a scene from Amadeus). I can remember trying to master the pedal, with limited success. I can remember the talent competition when I sang ‘Saltwater’ (which really is a dreadful record, but I was fourteen and angst-ridden), and how the microphone failed halfway through: it later transpired that our sound engineer, a year 11 electronics whizz and erstwhile friend, had found it in the back of a skip. He was also a fellow contestant. I should have seen that one coming a mile off.
I wrote my first song at the age of thirteen. About nine months later, I wrote one that was actually quite good, even though it adhered to every cliché in the book. I’d like to say that songwriting was a good way of picking up girls, but it never worked for me. That may be because I had an annoying tendency to fall in love with the wrong people: impossibly beautiful, notoriously popular and faintly amused cheerleader types who thought it was cute that I’d written a song for them, but who were a little less comfortable with my shout-it-from-the-rooftops approach to young love. My ability to play by ear (which has always been a curiosity; most people use their hands) did at least make our GCSE lessons a little more interesting: we were supposed to be working on compositions, but would instead retreat to the tuition room and play Diana Ross ballads, where the girls (of which there were plenty; it was a predominantly female group) would improvise harmonies on top of my clunky rendition of ‘When You Tell Me That You Love Me’. Cheesier than your average episode of Barney, but at least it passed the time.
My trombone, conversely, was a first instrument on a technical level, but not on an emotional one. It’s hard to get too attached to a lump of metal when you have to lug it across town on the bus (two buses, actually) every Friday evening because you failed your driving test. It’s easier to love something when you’re doing it out of sheer enjoyment, rather than because you need to master this piece to get the Performance credit for your A-Level. And, of course, you never have to carry a piano: one is always provided, and more often than not it’s been tuned. I feel very guilty about this: my parents spent £300 on that trombone, and I only ever played it when I had to, as my mother would frequently point out in the car. Our family Escort was her favourite place to pick bones, because I had no escape route, unless I’d brought my headphones – and when she wasn’t lecturing me about the fact that I didn’t seem to be in any hurry to re-book my test, she’d be complaining about the fact that she hadn’t heard me practicing in a month (“Yeah, but Mum, I do it when you’re out…”). You could always tell when my mother was angry; she’d start speeding. Given the way that our relationship deteriorated during the second year of my A-levels, it’s a miracle she managed to keep her license.
Some years later, my parents got me a guitar, but that’s another instrument I never managed to grasp. This is chiefly because by the time I got round to starting, I was already set in my ways with the piano, and my fingers were pianists’ fingers, not guitarists’ fingers. I had a real concern that learning the guitar, and subjecting myself to the calluses and bleeding that accompany those first few strums, before your fingers thicken up, would have a knock-on effect on my piano-playing. That’s what I tell people, anyway. The truth puts me in a rather less positive light: I was simply impatient, and anxious to be as proficient on the guitar as I was on the piano. When it was clear that this would require some hard graft, I found myself unable and willing to commit. Not exactly a crowning achievement from a man in his thirties who claims that music has been his whole life.
Until a few years ago, my trombone had become rather like a Christmas decoration that you fetch down from the loft every December, dust off, and then use for a few weeks before putting it back into storage. It would come out of its case for carol concerts, where I’d join the other instrumentalists in rough-and-ready renditions of ‘The First Noel’ and Johnny Mathis’ excremental ‘When A Child Is Born’. After the service we’d blow out the candles, pick the lumps of wax from the pews, try not to think about how many fire regulations we’d broken and then retire to the church hall for coffee and mince pies. It was when I discovered I’d lost my edge, finding myself unable to play notes I used to be able to reach, that I realised that even this was no longer any fun. If I’d had the motivation, I probably could have dusted it down and started playing again, properly, but motivation always was my problem.
These days the trombone resides in Cambridge, being played by the son of one of our best friends (and Joshua’s godmother), and I am pleased that it’s getting more use now than it ever got with me. Sometimes I even miss it – I enjoy the piano immensely, but there was something very satisfying about blasting a column of air down a long pipe and getting a pure, long and satisfyingly musical tone from the other end. There was something fun about playing in a wind band, when we were playing properly, and that’s a feeling I’ve never quite been able to emulate in any other musical experience I’ve encountered since. The trombone wasn’t my first love, but it sufficed for as long as it had to, and it was often enjoyable, and despite the bus journeys and cleaning sessions and my apparent inability to practice, we had some good times. Still, I’m in no hurry to purchase that didgeridoo.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 43
November 2, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Original Cast – Godspell: 2000 Off Broadway Cast
Groove Armada – Vertigo
Goldfrapp – Supernature
Gorillaz – Demon Days
Genesis – Live – The Way We Walk, Volume 1: The Shorts
Genesis – A Trick of the Tail
Guns ‘N’ Roses – Use Your Illusion I
Guns ‘N’ Roses – Use Your Illusion II
Genesis – We Can’t Dance
Soundtrack – Good Will Hunting
Goldfrapp – Felt Mountain
Soundtrack – The General’s Daughter
David Gray – Life In Slow Motion
Peter Gabriel – Hit (Disc One)
Goldfrapp – Seventh Tree
Bloodlust for Life
November 2, 2009
———
The Sun reports a non-violent altercation at Asda Rochdale, where a mother of three was reportedly refused service by an Asian checkout assistant because she was wearing a Help For Heroes band, which, the assistant maintained, meant that she “supported the war in Iraq”. When 40-year-old Beth Hoyle complained to a supervisor, she was told that it was his right to refuse service. Angry, she went straight to the press. Asda, when confronted, said that they were appalled at the claim, but that they could find no evidence whatsoever that it actually happened, and that they’d be happy to discuss it with the woman concerned if she wanted to take it further.
The sheer ridiculousness of the story – as well as the scant detail – should be a clear indication that it’s almost certainly made up, as most of these stories are. There’s a clear pattern at work: lower / middle-class white adult experiences racism from ethnic minority, thereby deflating the myth that only white people are capable of discrimination. White person is treated in a wildly implausible and thoroughly unprofessional manner, and is left dejected and humiliated. Cue shock and awe from a dumbstruck public – sorry, that should be a dumb public – who maintain that this is “a clear infringement of our right to support our boys”, or, worse, “political correctness gone mad”. We had an influx of them over the summer, but as October shifts into November, it’s now time for the Christmas myths: numerous tales of local authorities pandering to the needs of Muslims by abolishing Christmas in favour of the Winter Festival, which would be ridiculous if it were actually happening, but with one or two crackpot exceptions it simply isn’t.
No, the truth is that we just love a good scandal, particularly when it involves a heartless corporate giant (Wal-Mart, in this case) stomping all over the feelings of the common man (woman, in this case), eroding our British traditions and customs in order to pander to the whims of the influx of workshy towel-headed immigrants and their left-wing Labour-supporting loony liberal sycophantic sympathisers. As the country goes to hell in a handcart, we’re all told to down tools and march for justice and the welfare of our rights and way of life, before we’re all forced to adopt Sharia law and face Mecca five times a day. And so we ignore the outrageousness of Mrs Hoyle’s claim. No Asda checkout assistant in their right mind would have behaved in this manner, nor would their supervisor – although when you point this out, we’re told that “that’s just what they want you to think”. The store may have voiced scepticism that the event actually occurred, but they’ve been quick to invite Mrs Hoyle back in to talk to them, which is not the calling card of a chain that supports this sort of behaviour – nor of one that allegedly doesn’t support the Help for Heroes campaign, as some have maintained.
The problem is that there have been one or two documented cases of ridiculous behaviour of this type, but that is hardly representative of the pandemic that the press would have us believe is rife amongst our high streets and local authorities. A couple of years back, either the Independent or the Guardian (and I wish I could remember which) ran a piece documenting several utterly fake stories that the tabloids had printed about the derogatory impact of Islamic values on our society, including the decision of one Muslim bus driver to stop on his route to pray, thereby holding up his passengers. It was completely false and the newspaper did eventually apologise (in a half-hearted, three inches on page nineteen sort of manner), but the damage was done: you give these people an inch, and they’ll take a marathon, and before you know it the papers are full of stories about the removal of The Three Little Pigs from school libraries, and branches of Dominos only serving Halal meat. (Actually, that one was true, but given that the franchise’s client base was ninety five per cent Muslim you can perhaps understand their need to change their buying practices.) Meanwhile, the rumour mill grinds into ugly motion, and makes an annoying clanking sound.
It’s tempting to lay the blame for this likely misunderstanding at this squarely at the foot of the Sun, but to be fair to them, they’ve only brought the story to a national audience: the source, as it turns out, was an article in the Rochdale Observer. Nonetheless, the thread on the Sun’s discussion forum was arguably the place where the real trouble was brewing, rife as it was with vicious comments, most of which ran along the lines of “I am boycotting Asda for the rest of my days, and I hope that these people are fired and that their children’s puppies get stomped to death”. I am only exaggerating slightly. There have been a selection of voices of reason who have pointed out that the story is almost certainly false, but they’ve been shot down in flames. I am staying well out of this one. I know my limits.
Perhaps it’s appropriate that my music of choice this morning was Kaiser Chiefs’ Yours Truly, Angry Mob, which seems to defy the ‘difficult second album’ cliché. It’s an absolute stormer, from ‘Highroyds’ lament for teenage ebullience (“I remember nights out when we were young / They weren’t very good, they were rubbish”) to the jubilant singalong chorus of ‘Ruby’ – an album of defiant, rollicking good tunes. Kaiser Chiefs get a lot of flak for producing ‘jukebox hits’, but there’s nothing jukebox about the (partial) title track – as Ricky Wilson boasts that he “can prove anything / The way that it’s read again and again”, he discusses street violence, twenty-four hour drinking, and even gets in a nod to Jim’ll Fix It. But it’s the song’s two-minute coda that provide the album’s high spot, as the band proclaim that “We are the angry mob / We read the papers every day / We like who we like, we hate who we hate / But we’re also easily swayed”, amidst rumbling, grungy guitar chords and rolling drums. It goes on for ages, but you don’t want it to stop.
Seriously, has there ever been a more damning indictment of the Facebook generation than this? You know the people I mean. Armchair politicians. The ones who think they care about the state of the country – actually, the ones who think they’re the only people who care about the state of the country – but are really just trying to satisfy an intrinsic need to see someone get the shit kicked out of them. The ones who sign e-petitions. The ones who suggest that “if we were to bring back the death penalty, I’d be first to pull the trigger”. The Islamophobes. The ones who maintain that the system is irrevocably corrupt and that the BNP are the only way forward. The ones who advocate that “charity begins at home”, used largely as an excuse to slam the door in the faces of Christian Aid collectors.
I was going to include a disparaging addendum to that list about thinking that it doesn’t get any better than a six pack of Stella and a kebab after last orders – but that’s unfair, because some of these people don’t drink. The angry mob mentality transcends age and class barriers (although it’s fair to say that I don’t know many aristocrats with ASBOs). You don’t need to have a particularly high or low level of education: you just need to think that you know better than everyone else. You also need to have unfailing faith in the press, broadsheet and tabloid alike. You need to have an opinion, and you need to make sure that your opinion is heard, because anyone who says that your opinion is wrong is a fascist and part of the corrupt government state who wants to flood this place with immigrants until our systems are at breaking point.
These people have a vote, and they have a right to be heard, and we have the responsibility to listen, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I stand ardently by Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s assertion that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, but by Christ it’s hard when you have to listen to some of the crap that’s spouted by the rabble that frequent forums – forums that I visit, before you ask, because while I’m a misguided man with lofty and pretentious ideals, I’m trying to help people to think, and because even Jesus himself said that doctors don’t visit healthy people. Perhaps most dismaying of all the traits displayed by the angry mob is the tendency to believe everything that’s written in the papers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’re being manipulated by a gutter press who tell them what they’re supposed to think and how they’re supposed to feel – a mass media who destroy lives by reporting an incomplete truth, or a heavily distorted truth, or even articles that are blatantly false. It’s inconceivable that anyone could have read the Rochdale Asda story and not immediately suspected it, given Asda’s denial and the fact that details are scant and witnesses missing – but, of course, it tells us exactly what we want to hear, which is that Muslims are out to destroy this country and Our Boys overseas. Another excuse to run out and bang on the roofs of police vans outside the courts in between signing on and watching that morning’s instalment of Jeremy Kyle.
The frightening thing is that Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘The Angry Mob’ is a couple of years old now, and I suspect that there’s a contingent of people out there who have adopted it as their official anthem for National Change. It’s the sort of chorus they’d chant en route to the court of appeal where the trial of a notorious paedophile is taking place. Now, I think that all convicted sex offenders should be locked up for a very long time, and kept away from children permanently (Al Murray was correct – being a parent does make you more right wing) but I also believe in rehabilitation and redemption, albeit behind padlocked doors. I don’t believe that executing them because “it costs the taxpayer too much to keep them alive” is really the answer, and the day we go down that particular road is the day that society is doomed. Because if the welfare of violent criminals is a waste of public funds, then why not also get rid of the geriatrics who can’t feed themselves and who are enduring a miserable existence anyway? And if the geriatrics, then why not the chronically unemployable? Why not the disabled? Why not the retarded? Why not the gays? Why not the Muslims?
But all this is a moot point to the angry mob, whose inability to see the world in anything other than black and white has them convinced that if you’re not in direct support of the death penalty, you’re a paedophile sympathiser and quite possibly a kiddie fiddler yourself. Ergo they will continue on their march, even though they’ve exchanged pitchforks for placards. They display a shocking lack of understanding when it comes to the criminal justice system, which is not a terrible thing, but suggesting that you yourself can do better than the judges – and telling them so – is another matter entirely. The web has empowered humanity and given everyone a voice (unless you happen to live in China, anyway) but the upshot of this is that we’re more inclined to jump in feet first, without verifying our sources, researching our facts or spellchecking our emails. I’m inclined to believe that my own views on what goes on in and outside of a courtroom are overwhelmingly insignificant, because whatever I may think I know, my only real certainty is that of ignorance.
In this, I’m reminded of 24’s Noah Daniels, the Vice President who reflects to an advisor that “It’s easy to think you’ve got all the answers when none of the ultimate responsibility lies with you. But sitting in this chair…until you sit in this chair, you don’t know anything.” It’s a telling line that was heard by many but, I fear, understood by few. As teenagers, we laughed at the antisocial Kevin on Harry Enfield and Chums, not realising that he was based on us. Some eleven or twelve years later, Catherine Tate pulled off exactly the same stunt. Objects of scorn very rarely see themselves in those who scoff at them.
So the prospect of anyone taking ‘The Angry Mob’ seriously would be mildly frightening, but old news. In Things The Grandchildren Should Know, Eels’ Mark Everett discusses growing up in Virginia alongside teenagers who would sing along to Randy Newman’s ‘Rednecks’ and completely miss the satire, taking the unpleasant sentiment contained therein at face value. Jarvis Cocker says he was accosted backstage by a burly Scot who said that “Common People is me. I’m that song, man”, again missing the irony – as Jarvis puts it – that “It’s the ultimate insult, really, calling people common”. The Reagan administration adopted ‘Born In the USA’ for an election campaign, either oblivious to or simply wilfully ignoring the fact that the song was a damning indictment on Republican values and the very foreign policy that Reagan himself embodied. And Phil Collins has revealed that at least one unscrupulous televangelist has expressed public support for ‘Jesus He Knows Me’, unaware that he himself was the target for the Genesis frontman’s abuse. Presumably he never saw the video.
And me? Well, I’m a hypocrite, because – as I’ve admitted on more than one occasion, although never in here – if someone were to touch any of my children, I’d probably want to see them dead as well. But I don’t think I’d be able to do it. My bloodlust is purely testosterone fantasy – the part of you that wants to leap in front of your children to take the bullets that would have otherwise hit them, preferably in slow motion, or run from a burning building with one son under each arm and the baby in a sling, again in slow motion. The part of you that thinks you can genuinely outrun a fireball, even though this is scientifically implausible. But I’m aware of it, and it is therefore safe, and I can temper it and shut that part of me away when I need to. I don’t want to go too us-and-them – even the dull and ignorant have their story – but I suspect that this is a faculty not possessed by the bulk of the angry mob.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 44
November 9, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Kaiser Chiefs – Yours Truly, Angry Mob
Soundtrack – Kill Bill Vol. 1
Kaiser Chiefs – Employment
Keane – Hopes and Fears
Kraftwerk – Autobahn
The Killers – Hot Fuss
Carole King – Love Scenes
Soundtrack – Kill Bill Vol. 2
KLF – Chill Out
What’s in your head, zombie?
November 9, 2009
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Friday morning, the week before last, and the dishes are shedding dirt in the sink. On the windowsill transistor, Jeremy Vine informs us that he will be discussing hothousing on his show that day, and “is there anyone who is not just doing it secretly or passively and who’s quite ashamed of it, but who’s actively engaging in hothousing and is proud of that fact?”.
I didn’t listen to the show, largely because I can’t stand Jeremy Vine or, indeed, many of his guests. But it struck a chord, because I instantly wondered whether it applied to me. This sense of paranoia is connected with my guilt complex, as discussed in last week’s entry. When my manager would have intense discussions with a feared colleague in the Editorial department, I’d become convinced that I was the object of their discussion. If my mother is not in the best of moods, I’m convinced that something we’ve said or done has riled her. Most frequently, I’ll attribute Emily’s mood swings to the jobs that I’ve not done, or done badly, or to things I’ve said. A typical conversation might go as follows:
“What’s up? Why are you sad?”
“I just feel fed up. This place is a mess, and I’m tired.”
“Oh dear,” I’ll say. “I feel dreadful. I should have cleared up that lounge by now. I just felt too tired, but that’s not really an excuse. Is there anything I can do?”
“For fuck’s sake, give it a rest! It’s not about you. Not everything in the world is about you.”
“I know, I just – ”
“You just think it always has to be your fault, or that you have to fix it. I can never just be miserable because I just am, rather than because of something you’ve done.”
“I’m not being egocentric, darling, I’m just anxious to help you.”
Lesson learned: sometimes you can’t. In truth, these conversations are becoming increasingly rare, because I do seem to be grasping the concept of not always taking responsibility for all the world’s problems. It’s a work in progress.
That said, something about Mr Vine’s topic of choice on this particular Friday struck a chord, because I wonder if I’m doing it. It’s no secret that I’ve tried to encourage my children in their musical pursuits, to a point. I’m not about to push them into piano lessons, unless they clearly want to have them. Thomas has a pleasant, tuneful singing voice for someone his age, but I’m not signing him up for stage school (largely because I’ve seen what happens when you send your children there: you end up with Bonnie Langford). Joshua is having swimming lessons, paid for by his grandmother, but he loves them, and as soon as he stops loving them the swimming lessons will cease, or at least be re-evaluated.
Still. There are the YouTube sessions. There’s our insistence that other music is played in the car, and not just the collection of pirate songs which has been in one CD player or another on an almost daily basis since I bought it in June (for them. Honestly for them). I don’t sing them lullabies; I sing Cole Porter, Aztec Camera and Elton John. There are the Saturday morning breakfast sessions, where we’ll listen to the pensionable Brian Matthew doing Sounds of the Sixties. Leaving aside music, there’s the delving into media history. Josh asks me about the sounds a lightsaber makes, and how they work. I show him the battle between Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader in the second act of A New Hope, being sure to bring the streamed video to an abrupt halt just before Kenobi becomes one with the Force. He’ll point out that he knows that Darth Vader is the villain, “because he’s got a red lightsaber”. I will mention the word cliffhanger; Josh will ask me what it means and the next thing I know we’re watching reruns of Batman. “They may be drinkers, Robin, but they’re also human beings”.
There are the science lessons. He’ll ask me about polar bears and penguins; I’ll use a grapefruit to demonstrate the Earth’s globe shape. We’ll talk about thunder and lightning. I try to make it simple and fun and right throughout I tell myself I’m doing this because he enjoys it. I’m watching Dire Straits videos with Thomas because he likes the gorilla in ‘Walk of Life’, or we’re watching The Lion King because there is no other animated film that sums up the father-son relationship quite so beautifully, and there’s a part of me that wants them to know how much I love them. I want them to know things, but I want them to want to know things – create fountains of knowledge, rather than reservoirs.
But part of me wonders whether I’m doing this simply because I want my children to be different. Perhaps I’m trying to elevate them above the ones whose cultural awareness begins with Tommy Zoom and ends with The X-Factor. Perhaps I show them Sesame Street videos not because “it’s a slower, gentler sort of programme” but because I want them to know stuff. Perhaps I’ve seen too many of my own generation whose idea of a good evening’s television is the Big Brother omnibus – the sort who genuinely believe that Eastenders counts as quality drama.
I can remember a scene in Mr Holland’s Opus where Richard Dreyfuss and Glenn Headly awake early one morning to find the sound of loud music coming from the lounge downstairs, and find their profoundly deaf son playing blues records at full volume, in order to hear the vibrations through the floor. Dreyfuss approaches the smiling teenager and picks up one of the records, and as the camera pans out through the window of the house he begins to talk to him about it. It’s the first moment in the film where the two have really bonded, and I suppose I wanted something similar: boys with shared interests, to whom I could talk about the music I loved growing up – not robots who automatically listen to the same things that I did but who do at least see the merits of the Beatles and Pink Floyd and Jacques Loussier, and who could perhaps teach their father a thing or two about what’s currently at the summit of the hit parade.
But what’s the purpose of all this? Am I training them to be independent thinkers, or am I training them to be brilliant in pub quizzes? More to the point, should I be training them at all – is all this cultural education occurring at the expense of good old honest play? Should I be encouraging Josh to think for himself, rather than simply respond to me? I like to hope that I let him and his brother lead the way when it comes to play activities, allowing them to choose what we do and when we do it, but how much of this is true? I don’t spend time forcing them to watch things and listen to things when they’d rather be building towers – heaven forbid – but am I dictatorial in other ways? Am I helping, or just stunting?
I mentioned all this to Emily, the following Sunday, barrelling along the A49.
“You know,” she said, “just for a change, you could worry about something that’s actually important.”
“It is important, isn’t it? I mean, this is the future of our children we’re talking about.”
“Yes, but think about it. Do they enjoy it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You do what you do. Do they enjoy it?”
“I think so.”
“So what else matters? You were watching videos with Thomas the other day. What did you watch?”
“’Sledgehammer’. And he loved it. Then we watched ‘Steam’, and he loved that as well.”
“So there you go. In the end, if you’re opening their eyes to culture and they enjoy it, there’s no harm done.”
Perhaps I think too much.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 45
November 16, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Mike Oldfield – Earth Moving
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells
Oasis – Definitely Maybe
Mike Oldfield – Elements: The Best of Mike Oldfield
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