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September
2006: The Side-Splitting Reign of the Mortified
Whatever happened to funny, anyway? There was a time when
funny just meant, well, funny. As in something would come on the telly and you’d
laugh at it, because there’d be jokes and stuff like that. The classic
example here is Friends, which is (for better or worse) one of those
epoch-defining comedies, except it’s not because it’s repeated every single
day and lingers on in our culture like a clearly rotten courgette no-one
quite has the courage to take out of the fridge, but anyway; it was the
classic sitcom. Setup, joke. Setup, joke. The jokes were then in every
sentence. Tight as a drum. Perfect sitcom-writing. The end.
Or not. Thing is that the first couple of series of
Friends were actually looser, and had less jokes in them, and when someone
made a joke they took time to cut to someone else and show them laughing. It
was about naturalistic interaction, and it worked. I liked Friends. In fact,
I loved Friends. It’s not fashionable to say it any more, but fuck it; it was
my favourite sitcom. I even liked the Ross and Rachel subplot. But the
“tighter” it got the less natural it seemed, until all the characters became
cartoon versions of themselves and Jennifer Aniston was nowhere near as hot
as she used to be. Point being that early Friends wasn’t good because of the
jokes, it was because it actually had something to say; that lounging around
with your mates was a fulfilling way of spending your life, that piddling
around between jobs was normal and healthy, that being single was fun and
that women could also have one-night stands and not be slappers (Friends was
initially billed, in America, as six losers hanging around in a coffee-house).
It defined a pattern of behaviour that no-one had defined before.
Anyway, it wasn’t long before people realised that – since
Friends wasn’t about the jokes, really – it would be possible to make sitcoms
without them. So we got Peep Show, and The Office. Sitcoms are now at their
best when they’re scary. You’re meant to watch the whole thing in a permanent
cringe of embarrassment. And because of it they’ve become all deep, and
socially relevant, and concerned with chronicling the corners of life that
no-one chronicled before. They’re about tracking people who live their lives
in banality and finding the innate humour in their existence, the black
comedy that underscores the human condition, the…
Well, you know how it goes. It’s a good thing, mostly.
But… well, is it? Or is it just more navel-gazing bollocks? As it happened, I
liked comedies with jokes in them. Fawlty Towers had embarrassment and
jokes. Anyway, this issue has decided to have a look at our New Grotty Comedy
and seriously analyse where we… oh, okay, I’m just reviewing more comedies
than usual. Get on with it.
Corrections to the Last Issue:
-
I forgot to mention it, but the bit in the Guinness
advert where the penguin pats itself looking for a wallet is really funny.
Penguins are just funny, aren’t they? God knows why they had to have a film
about them marching somewhere for some people to start shouting about this as
proof of the existence of God. Because if you’re that way inclined, then… look
at them. You think something like that just evolved by chance? There is
a God, and he’s got a sense of humour. Good for him.
-
Speaking of Rachel Fromfrenze, she of Friends and the
Break-Up (just in case people aren’t following the conceit… think about it… there
you go) – how come she’s only starring in films now, rather than ten years
ago when she was actually attractive? It’s a bit like having a massive
superweapon and sealing it inside a comet for a few centuries before using
it. Let’s face it, Rachel Fromfrenze isn’t the greatest acting talent in the
world, so if you’re going to put her in films for her ornamental qualities
you might as well do it when she’s pretty. And while I’m on the topic, could
someone start putting Winona Ryder back in films please? You know, now? Her
career’s not going well and she’s probably desperate, so strike while the
iron’s hot… I don’t want to wait until she’s fifty before I get a topless
scene, thanks.
-
OK, maybe the very-dark-grey-on-black thing was going
a bit far with the concrete imagery but fuck it, it was a mourning
issue. I’ve actually lightened the
grey a bit, since the pain of Doctor Who Being Shit has passed a little bit.
And besides, Torchwood’s on now. Let’s look to the future.
Thanks to Slaar for his
contribution to this month’s issue (well actually I got it ages ago, but hey
I’m busy at the moment and I don’t get paid for this lark you know). It’s
pretty easy to spot which one isn’t written by me, by the way.
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television
Extras
For those of you who, you know, don’t actually own a
television (something I generally look on as a reason to be pitied, but over the
summer I’ve come to see the logic behind such a move), Extras is a comedy by
Ricky Gervais – he who came up with The Office, and if you haven’t heard of
that you don’t actually live in a house. Or a city, town, or village. Or the
surface of the globe. In which case you won’t be reading this website, so you
don’t count. Anyway, the premise of Extras is simple and clever; Gervais
plays Andy Millman, who in the first series was an extra in a number of
productions which starred famous people, and in this series is the star of a
not-very-good not-very-popular sitcom which – yet again – brings him into
contact with various famous people, who all show up and play outrageous
versions of themselves.
First up, it’s not as good as The Office. But as The
Office was one of the five greatest sitcoms of all time, that’s all right.
Second, it’s one of those programmes that people talk a
load of old rubbish about. Critical response usually goes along the lines of
“well we like it but there’s something a bit wrong with it even though we
don’t know what it is”, before coming up with various reasons which are all
nonsense. It’s a not-as-good version of The Office; Andy Millman is a
not-as-funny, smarter version of David Brent; it’s The Office with
celebrities in it.
Right. Extras is nothing like The Office, and Andy Millman
is nothing like David Brent. It’s a comedy of embarrassment in much the same
way that The Office was – no jokes, just people squirming and the viewer
cringing while they laugh – and also relies on people being crass about
minorities and the sort of issues people call “politically correct” (a sort
of shorthand for not calling black people niggers and refraining from doing
impressions of people with cerebral palsy). But just because Ricky Gervais
has a style, it doesn’t mean he’s made the same programme. If anything,
Extras is an inversion of The Office – a world of deluded,
self-important, self-styled beautiful people in which the main character sees
how ridiculous it all is. Whereas David Brent was a study of self-deception,
someone who had no idea how he was really perceived, Andy Millman knows
exactly what he is and is completely aware of all his limitations, his
foibles, the things that make him the friendless grump he is. You could
argue that Ricky Gervais is playing a character from The Office; but it’s not
Brent, it’s Tim.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have problems. It doesn’t
feel the full experience somehow, and the world it creates is too contrived
to be completely satisfying. Part of The Office’s genius was how you never
watched it and thought that they’d just sack David Brent, but you frequently
look at Extras and wonder why he doesn’t just sack his slimy, obnoxious,
downright incompetent agent. And, while the nasty cringe-inducing
I-can’t-believe-he-said-that slurs in The Office arose organically from the
plot, in Extras they seem to parachute in and hence the laughs are cheaper.
Finally, the celebs-for-the-sake-of-it isn’t entirely without foundation –
Extras is nowhere near as biting or as satirical as it thinks it is, and the
fact is that getting a celebrity to play a version of themselves isn’t
difficult – even Orloomdo Bland can do it, so it’s not that much of a
stretch.
But; what makes it work is what lay at the core of The
Office – Gervais, for all his smart-arsery, has a real empathy with ordinary
people. The Tim-and-Dawn angle from The Office is the most obvious example,
but in its entirety it was a programme that never really mocked its
characters; it treated them with respect, and when David Brent begged his
bosses not to be made redundant it was a genuinely heartrending moment. In
Extras, the world of celebrity and glamour which everyone is so obsessed with
these days is portrayed, not just as hollow and vapid, but as incredibly
boring – and you end up siding with the dropouts, the extras, the ordinary
people who go about their day and go home to an empty flat, who say stupid
things, who aren’t amazingly funny or brilliant or outrageous or attractive,
but are just half-decent people. All of which has to be a good thing.
All of which makes Extras, actually, a rather lovely show.
The Office was a dark, dark piece of work, but Extras has an amiability at
its core that makes it actually quite sweet. It’s not perfect, but it’s the
best thing on telly when it airs.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Amusingly, a newspaper described this lately as “the show
that Extras wants to be, but isn’t.” It might be true that Gervais is heavily
influenced by Larry David, but it’s still a ridiculous statement; Extras is a
version of Curb Your Enthusiasm that’s actually engaging, likeable and funny,
as opposed to complete arse from beginning to end.
Thing is, Larry David made Seinfeld, and Seinfeld is the
pinnacle of American sitcoms. However, what people neglect to mention is that
David co-wrote Seinfeld – Jerry Seinfeld was also involved – and while
it’s obvious that Seinfeld (the show) was largely a Larry David creation (in
which Jerry is the least funny character), it’s worth wondering whether he’s
now suffering from the lack of a co-writer with an actual idea of what you
might call “commercial entertainment”. Actually, just “entertainment” would
be nearer the mark.
Here’s an example of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s brand of
humour – Larry David meets one of his indescribably dull friends, the little
fat one, and they’re waiting for a woman who’ll be joining them shortly.
Larry announces he’s going to the bathroom. “Well wait, she’ll be here in a
minute.” “But I want to go to the bathroom.” “But she’ll be here in a
minute.” “So she’ll be here in a minute, I still want to go to the bathroom.”
“Well what do I tell her if she arrives when you’re in the bathroom?” “Tell
her I’m in the bathroom.” “But she’ll be here in a minute.” “So tell her I’m
in the bathroom. What, you want me to wait for her and then tell her I’m
going to the bathroom, is that it?” “What’s the matter with you?” “What’s the
matter with me? What’s the matter with you?” “What’s the matter with you?”
“Hey.” “Well what’s the matter with you?” “I want to go to the bathroom is what’s
the matter with me.” And so it goes. On and on. For five minutes at least.
Then it moves on to another scenario which is – in narrative terms –
completely unrelated; you know the way Family Guy is just a string of
sketches that don’t even attempt to construct a storyline? Well in comparison
to Curb Your Enthusiasm, Family Guy is a taut, tense, white-knuckle ride to
the very core of no-nonsense storytelling.
To be fair all these bits are completely the same, so you could argue that there’s a stunning
thematic consistency to the whole thing. Perhaps this is what all those silly
middle class journalists and critics think when they run off and start
writing about how it’s a biting satire on contemporary life and Larry’s
outbursts are just so outrageous and oh it’s a work of genius it’s sooooooo
funny.
Well; no, it bloody well isn’t. It’s worthless drivel.
It’s awful in a way that people have been conning themselves into thinking is
artistic and insightful. Here’s the thing; it doesn’t have jokes, it doesn’t
have a laughter track, it’s all observational and stuff, it’s got celebrities
playing versions of themselves… and all this stuff is now considered to be
intrinsically clever. There’ve been all too many formulaic comedies where the
dialogue consists of setup-joke, setup-joke, setup-joke, all to the sound of
recorded laughter, and now when something doesn’t do the big dumbo sitcom
thing it’s automatically considered smart. Which is why, whenever you say
Curb Your Enthusiasm is rubbish, you’ll get someone saying “oh you just don’t
get it, you’d probably rather watch Friends or something.”
Well actually I would rather watch Friends, but
that’s just because Friends is actually funny sometimes, and I “get” Curb
Your Enthusiasm perfectly-well-thank-you and I can still tell it’s rubbish.
The dialogue’s improvised, and you can tell, because it rambles on and on to
no purpose at all. The main character is not a biting-outrageous-crazy-angry
man, he’s a moany dullard who thinks having a hair stuck in his throat is as
important and troubling as a brain tumour, and grumbles about kids who run
too fast on the street and not having enough shrimp in his Chinese takeaway.
The society in which he lives is one of those television versions of real
life, in which people actually get uptight about table manners and everyone
talks about eating a sandwich as if it’s the most crucial exercise in
humanity ever, but here’s the thing; this simply does not exist in the real
world. People become friends because they like each other. They go to the
bathroom whenever the hell they want, and what’s more they call it the
toilet. They get drunk and then laugh about it afterwards. They shag each
other. They spend evenings watching videos at each other’s houses. OK, so
It’s just possible that in some tucked-away corner of LA there is a
society like this, but I couldn’t give two shakes of a fetid buffalo-penis
about anyone in it. Nobody’s likeable. Nobody’s even interesting. And if all
that’s not enough it’s all shot on video, which makes it look like a
screamingly ugly home movie. And please don’t say “Oh well that’s the point.”
Anyone who actually thinks Curb Your Enthusiasm is biting
and hilarious must lead an incredibly boring life. This is what the flipside
of jokeless observational comedy can lead to, and what’s frightening is that
no-one ever bothers pointing out that it’s bollocks (except me, obviously).
This is an unqualified load of arse, stop watching it immediately.
That Mitchell and Webb Look
Ah, David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Or, as they’re known
to everyone, Those Two Blokes From Peep Show (or TTBFPS for short). Peep Show
was an extraordinarily good example of comedy that scares the pants off you,
and makes you embarrassed and horrified, and turned out to be unmissable and
biting and affecting and brilliant in the way that Curb Your Enthusiasm
wasn’t. So then the BBC gave them a radio show and that was successful, so
now the radio show has been transplanted onto television.
First up, here’s the thing with sketch shows. A while back
there was a programme called The Fast Show – remember that? It revolved
around setting up overtly formulaic and off-kilter set of sketches with
transparent catchphrases, which were then subtly varied every week in a way
that became about stereotyping and caricaturing. It was deceptively clever,
and it was much-loved. Unfortunately a whole bunch of less literate sketch
shows misinterpreted this as meaning that you can just repeat the same sketch
over and over again and it’ll still be funny. Which means that, once you’ve
seen one episode of Little Britain, you’ve seen them all. The most successful
variant was probably The League of Gentlemen, which was effectively a sketch
show in disguise, but by stitching them around a narrative – however tenuous
– it got away with the elements of repetition.
That Mitchell and Webb Look has long sketches, which hark
back to the length of the Monty Python sketches. However, the Monty Python
sketches had things like “development” and “pacing” and what’s more, they
were incredibly funny. Whereas That Mitchell and Webb Look has sketches that
are – at best – sporadically amusing, but nowhere near good enough to justify
their length. They go on. And on. And on. And then you watch the next episode
if you’re stupid enough to do so, and you see that the same bloody sketches
are just repeated, with exactly the same jokes, and exactly the same
characters, and exactly the same hamminess and ridiculous costumes and
shouting the same punchlines in exactly the
same way.
So if Peep Show was another good example of making comedy
out of embarrassment, That Mitchell and Webb Look is just an embarrassing
attempt at comedy. TTBFPS are obviously talented boys, but it’s equally
obvious that they’re operating without a producer or editor who’s prepared to
say sorry lads, this ain’t funny. Some of the sketches are transplanted radio
comedy that rely far too much on repetition, and translate badly to
television. Some are vaguely amusing conceits that end up being so laboured
that they lose any impact they might once have had. Some of them are clever,
but not funny, and therefore not as clever as they think they are. And some
are just plain rubbish and that’s all there is to it.
So how come there’s all this “funniest men in Britain” rubbish
being thrown around? The two have huge ability, that much is obvious, and
David Mitchell’s appearance on panel games has shown him to be a witty bloke.
In other words everyone wants to like them, and the show itself
tallies with everyone’s idea of what a sketch show is supposed to be. Yer
average critic will look at it and think oh yeah, they’re funny and sardonic
and clever and a bit like me, and the jokes are the sort of thing I think of
when I go down the pub, so therefore I’m funny, and I can see all the jokes
coming which means I’m also really clever… and so on until they build a small
cottage with Dolby Surround Sound in the further reaches of their rectal
cavity, muttering “That’s Numberwang” to themselves with smug self-satisfied
grins.
Thing is, Mitchell and Webb are funny blokes. Peep Show
was a wonderful programme – one which they didn’t actually write, but clearly
had a large creative part in – and we’re talking about two talented comedic
actor-writers. But here they’re being lazy, and everyone’s glibly letting
them and – worse – applauding them for it. The result will be that this will
get recommissioned for a second series, then everyone will realise it’s
rubbish because it’s not new any more and say it’s lost its freshness (and
thereby ignore the fact that it never had any), it’ll get cancelled, TTBFPS
will vanish for a few years, and then hopefully re-emerge a bit older and a
bit better. Or maybe vanish without trace. That really will be a pity.
Respectable
But unfunny as That Mitchell and Webb Look is, it’s
nowhere near as unfunny as Respectable – a new comedy set in a brothel that’s
airing on Channel 5 in Britland and Paramount Comedy over here. This is the
kind of thing that The Office also has to answer for, and it’s got some
serious explaining to do. The Office put about the notion that you could show
people being embarrassed and not actually bother putting jokes in the air –
fair enough, you might think – but in the process, the notion of the safe,
traditional sitcom has sort of fallen by the wayside. That might sound like a
good thing, but if this or The Smoking Room is the alternative, we’re really
in trouble.
The basis of Respectable is this; there’s a brothel in a
respectable part of suburbia. One of the clients is a middle-aged man who
falls for a pretty-but-dim prosititute. And… that’s it. There is no
more depth or intrigue to this, beyond a cast of characters who are so
two-dimensional you might as well be watching an animation. Even if you
ignore the fact that the entire series is basically stealing a running joke
that took up about quarter of an episode of Green Wing, This makes The
Cassidys seem like Withnail and I.
Nothing happens in any of it. The show is based on two
basic tenets: 1, brothels are inherently funny and hilarious and shocking; 2,
middle-aged polite people in brothels are even more hilarious and shocking.
Obviously, neither of these are true. People go to brothels and I don’t care.
If you like prostitution then hey, go ahead and enjoy yourself. But as you
watch the middle-aged bloke stumbling and mumbling his way through the
oh-how-hilarious brothel situations, you mind will start drifting to the
comparatively fascinating wallpaper on the wall behind him.
If you’re going to make us all laugh at people making tits
out of themselves, then you have to actually make the situations believable
and the characters rounded. There’s nothing of the kind here, it’s
essentially My Family with no one-liners and a whorehouse in it. Lots of
women’s charities got very uptight about it giving an unrealistic view of
prostitution, but bluntly I couldn’t care less; make the damn thing funny and
it can be as offensive as it likes. Having said that, there is
something rather offensive about setting something in a brothel and then not
having any nudity involved, especially when it starts That Hot Girl Wot Used
To Be In Hollyoaks. And actually, in anything really pisses me off, it’s that
I would like very much to watch That Hot Girl Wot Used To Be In Hollyoaks
playing a prostitute in just about anything, and they’ve only gone and put
her in an absolutely unwatchable sitcom. Bastards.
South Park
Aaaaahhh. Now you’re talking.
It’s a bit scary to think that South Park is now ten years
old. Whereas The Simpsons is creaking and groaning its way to the point where
eventually it will be put out of its misery, like a
once-beautiful-and-elegant housecat that is eventually put down after
shitting in your favourite shoes (and I should clarify that I’d consider any
item of footwear worthy of being my favourite shoe provided it doesn’t
have cat-shit in it), South Park still feels fresh and new. You can probably
mark off as some sort of symbol of old age the point at which you start
discovering that a programme is ten years old but you can still remember the pilot;
it’s a bit like making groaning noises when you sit down or stand up, and
saying “even the original was rubbish” when you hear the latest cover version
by the latest girl-band ironically entitled Stepford. The fact that South
Park has done episodes about both boy-bands and senile cats gives a sort of
pleasing symmetry to this paragraph, I might add, and there you go.
Anyway, South Park is one of those things that’s now
become so thoroughly ingrained in our culture – or anyway, so firmly
ingrained in the culture of anyone I want to associate with, which is all
that counts – that reviewing it is a bit like commenting on water. It’s a
bunch of foul-mouthed 8 year-olds who have absurd adventures that frequently
have a satirical content along with the scatological humour, it’s riotously
funny, and the cardboard cut-out animation is primitive but has a strange
ability to genuinely shock (the Akira episode about Cartman’s Dawson’s Creek
trapper-keeper looks really, really disgusting and Mr Garrison’s sex change
is obvious duck and cover television). In short, one of the best adult
cartoons of all time.
The downside is that it’s sort of opened the door for a
huge amount of badly animated vulgar programmes, which is what happens when a
programme has some sort of a gimmick at its centre. There are many reasons
for South Park’s brilliance, but the main ones are: the makers have a real
insight into the weird mixture of innocence and cynicism that kids have; the
episodes are carefully structured and have a proper narrative progression;
the comedy is inventive and often cuts close to the bone; rather than
returning to the default setting, South Park characters actually alter and
progress from series to series; they have a talking pothead towel in it for
god’s sake; and oh yeah, it’s actually funny.
South Park’s heyday was probably around Series 4 and 5,
when it was consistently snot-dribblingly pants-wettingly funny, but that’s
not to say it doesn’t still have sublime episodes. However it is – by its
nature – an up-and-down show, and nowhere near as clever or political as some
people will tell you it is (usually the same people who think Bill Hicks was
more than just a damn funny stand-up, he was in fact the greatest fount of
ideological philosophy since Plato). In fact, it’s overtly anti-ideological –
the main criteria that it uses to judge political issues is which side is the
most annoying, it’s as likely to get annoyed with poncey actors using long
words as it is with real horror and nastiness, and the biggest crime anyone
can commit is to just be a bit of a dick. And this, of course, one of the
ragged-around-the-edges elements that make it so damn charming.
This season has been a bit up and down in the usual South
Park manner. The Return of Chef relies too much on people knowing the
behind-the-scenes story of Isaac Hayes pissing off with his scientologist
chums to really work, and the two-parter Cartoon Wars was a bit too bogged
down in its own moralising, in spite of some amusing digs at Family Guy. But
then there’s The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce which was fantastic, and the Al
Gore episode about ManBearPig that confirms one of the other attributes of
this show: it can be as sharp and satirical and witty and edgy and vulgar and
thoughtful and political as it likes, but it’s always been at its best when
it’s just being completely unfair.
One of the best American comedies of all time, then. It’s
on Paramount Comedy at some time or other at the moment but fuck it, just go
to YouTube. God bless the internet.
Legend
The lead character’s called Fridge. Eh? What? Who or why
or what or… how on earth is anyone called Fridge? How does this occur? A
bunch of happy chirpy Dublin types sit around for a bit, chatting, and then
someone says You Know Yer Man Reminds Me Of A Fridge. Presumably.
One thing that Legend is: set in Dublin. And how. In fact
it’s Dublin, it’s Dubberlin, where bleedin everybody bollix goes to the
bollix pub for an ould scoop y’know, and pronouncing the letter “t” is
punishable by a beating. Sorry, I mean a baytin’. It did settle down after
the first couple of episodes, but even so there are times when you simply
want to snap your fingers, morph through the television a bit like that girl
who vanishes into the comic book in the video to Take On Me, and just shout at
everyone present to STOP TALKING LIKE THAT! I KNOW YOU’RE ALL FROM
DUBLIN! YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THE ACCENT THING, I CAN TELL!
One thing that Legend isn’t, and nor is it supposed to be:
funny. It’s gritty, and then some. It opens with a funeral which is tautly
shot and well-conceived, after which we get to see out lovable hero Fridge –
no, I don’t know, you just sort of have to accept it – struggling with
bringing up his two kids as a dad who doesn’t actually know how the washing
machine works. So far so worthy, but then there’s the twist; a bunch of
workmen show up to install his new kitchen. I didn’t buy a new kitchen, he
says. Yeah you did, they reply. Turns out his wife bought it with cash that
she borrowed from the local cokehead money-lender. And he wants it back.
The result is… worthy, but not particularly good. There’s
a really fascinating idea at its core – the notion that someone’s secrets
only become apparent after their death, at a time when there can never be an
explanation for them – but the programme never really wrestles with this
enough to make it as good as it could be. Instead we’re into the world of
money-lenders and gangsters and people struggling to make ends meet (sorry, I
mean strugglin’ teh make ends mee) – which might work, but unlike Pure Mule
the writers don’t seem to be completely to grips with this world. The crime
bosses sit around the local pub talking in husky voices, the separated
husband and wife still have feelings for each other, the barlady has a heart
of gold, and it’s hard to shake the suspicion that a lot of this has been
written by some goys from Ballsbridge who read Paul Williams articles in the
Sunday World.
Which isn’t to say it’s bad as such; it’s, well, fine. But
here’s the thing; RTE have, in the last few years, made Pure Mule and Love is
the Drug. We know that they can actually produce properly good drama, and
therefore we should stop cutting them slack. Too many people were amazed
that, with a programme like The Clinic, RTE managed to produce a bog-standard
medical drama that wasn’t embarrassing when compared to other bog-standard
medical dramas. Well whoopee-sodding-doo. RTE can do better than that, and
they can do better than this. Legend is okay, but it’s neither as good as it
should be or as it thinks it is, and that’s not really good enough any more.
Try harder, guys.
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film
A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick could be pretty funny too. Anyone who’s read
a Philip K. Dick book will know a few things about the man; he was massively
paranoid, obsessed with the question of what constitutes reality, and had a
strangely slapstick sense of humour which had a weird, off-kilter feel when
balanced against the blank earnestness of his text. When you read a Philip K.
Dick book one of the more notable things is how you’re never sure whether
you’re supposed to be laughing or not.
He also wrote Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, which
became Blade Runner, which remains the greatest film adaptation of a novel
ever – simply because it’s nothing like the novel, but manages to get the
viewer to the same place emotionally (which is, of course, somewhere rather
unpleasant). In that respect Blade Runner is the exception that proves the
rule, because Philip K. Dick novels are not unfilmable but damn close –
they’re conceptual pieces that are heavy in the internal monologue, which
isn’t exactly the sort of thing that makes for cinematic joy (most films –
Minority Report being a good example – elect to jettison the subtleties and
turn them into action films instead). Latest to give adapting Mr Dick a bash
(and if Adapting Mr Dick doesn’t sound like a bad Ealing comedy I don’t know
what does) is Richard Linklater, and the results are… interesting.
The plot’s pretty simple. Keanu Reeves is an undercover
cop trying to find the dealers of a drug called Substance D, to which one
quarter of the population are addicted, but by infiltrating a group of
stoners he has become a borderline addict himself; worse, as the police
maintain anonymity even from each other, he’s under pressure to investigate
himself. His druggy buddies consist of Robert Downey Junior, Woody Harrelson,
and Winona Ryder. Some big names in the cast then. Reeves himself isn’t
exactly a majestic thespian, but there is a role he can do well – namely, the
simple bloke who’s permanently in a state of confusion and lost in a world he
doesn’t understand (that’s method acting for Keanu). He’s rather good. Winona
Ryder is good too, but I would say that as I Love Her. Ah, sweet sweet
Winona, whose career went down the tubes when she decided to take up
shoplifting, meaning that everyone forgot that she’s actually a
rather-good-actress-thank-you-very-much. The other two… hum… we’ll do them
later.
The main point of A Scanner Darkly is the visuals though;
it’s done by a weird version of rotoscoping, which makes everything look like
a cartoon, but the degree of rotoscope-ness seems to constantly change,
meaning sometimes characters look almost real, at others they’re highly
stylised. This is the sort of thing that can really piss me off – and I speak
as someone who absolutely hated Sin City – but this is a story of people who
can’t really distinguish what’s real and what isn’t, so the visuals are
highly appropriate and work very well. Watching this film is a warped
experience in which the viewer has to make an investment. If they do there’s
some fun to be had, even if the film is by no means perfect.
It’s actually the first three-quarters of an hour or so
that doesn’t really work. It’s an example of why Philip K. Dick’s humour
doesn’t translate to screen – what might have been inscrutably funny on the
page just comes across as annoying stoner comedy, much of which revolves
around the Bob-’n’-Woody team referred to above. Both are doing, you know,
that thing they do times ten – Woody Harrelson is a version of Woody from
Cheers who got addicted to drugs somehow, and Robert Downey Junior is playing
Robert Downey Junior and being fucking annoying while he’s at it. The plot
takes a long time to go anywhere too. But after a while the Cheech and Chong
Rotoscoping-Fest gives way to an interesting, bleak look at a world where
apathy and bureaucracy rule the day and those who go under do so without anyone
really noticing. Not a million miles from the truth, then.
The conclusion is at once triumphant and coldly
depressing, and the overriding feeling from the film is one of loss and
disconnection. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch – it’s got too much
joking about how many gears a bicycle has to qualify under that banner – but
as curate’s eggs goes, this is one of the better ones. Worth a look. If you
like that sort of thing.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Funny thing about comedies these days; they aren’t funny
enough. The funniest films of 2006 have been Aeon Flux and Stormbreaker, and
neither of those were comedies. Funniest films of the last 12 months or so
have been Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and A Cock And Bull Story, both of which were
damn funny to be fair – but it seems increasingly that comedies are becoming
confined to television (and A Cock And Bull Story was quite televisual
anyway). That’s unless you count Little Man, and since I’d rather not believe
that really happened, I don’t.
So most comedies these days – unless you count romantic
comedies, and at the risk of repeating myself, I don’t – seem to come from
the Frat Pack. That’ll be all those people like the Wilson brothers, Ben
Stiller, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughan, and all those other people who do
frat-boy (the American equivalent of laddish) comedies which all follow
exactly the same template.
One: Must have guys, you know, just being guys. You often
have Ben Stiller doing a ludicrously over-the-top performance of some kind or
other. You might have Will Ferrell shouting and yelling and waving his arms a
lot. They’re a bit like the equivalent of all those young British comedy
actors who make up the cast of Shaun of the Dead and Green Wing, except with
the wit replaced by shouting. And they can, on occasion, be amusing
(Zoolander, Dodgeball). Most of the time, though, they’re a bit rubbish.
There’s a few reasons for this; largely it’s that repeating the same joke
over and over again EXCEPT THIS TIME LOUDER becomes a bit wearing after a
while. Dodgeball worked because the central joke was all about people getting
hit in the face by things and that’s intrinsically amusing, but it shouldn’t
disguise the fact that something’s gone wrong. A while ago the default comedy
in America was set in a high school and usually tried to be clever by
reworking some Shakespeare plot or other, and while that was a bit annoying
it was at least nice that they were trying to be clever. Then you had
American Pie, which was gross-out comedy that concealed a rather sweet and
accurate portrayal of adolescence, and what’s more it was actually funny
(largely because the innocence factor makes it funnier; a teenager fucking an
apple pie out of curiosity is almost endearing, but an adult doing would be
more than a little disturbing).
But now all the out-and-out comedies have a sameness about
them, which extends beyond the cast. It’s not just that they’re all based
around the same premise, which is the aforementioned guys-being-guys that’s
neither as shocking nor as funny as the FratPack think it is: blokes sleep
with girls; they like pornography; they watch baseball, if they’re American
(which is actually rather more of a difficult concept to understand given how
terminally dull that game is, but it’s kind of axiomatic to the country); ho
hum. Most of the films revolve around a single, central joke which fits
neatly into the tagline, and that joke is then repeated at varying levels of
agitation. And if all that wasn’t enough, they don’t go far enough
with it and end up tacking morals onto the end of the films. Seriously guys,
you don’t have to do this; just be big and stupid all the way and it’s fine.
It’s bad enough that people have to pretend to find Will Ferrell funny, which
is part of that ongoing conspiracy that previously had everyone assuming the
same about Jim Carrey in shouty mode, but if you’re going to make sure we all
learn-something-kids at the end, well you’re adding insult to injury.
All of which are valid reasons for my not bothering to go
and see Talladega Nights. But I’ll bet it’s not that good.
Children of Men
Grim. Actually no, not grim; a bit grimmer that. Think of
the grimmest thing you can think of then multiply it by miserable, then raise
all that to the power of pessimistic and you’re getting the idea. The idea;
civilisation is collapsing everywhere you look. Britain is the only place
that has retained a semblance of society, and it’s being regularly devastated
by terrorist bombs. A whole bunch of non-Brits are having the sheer gall to
try and get into the country for which they’re being rounded up and shot,
nobody can have babies any more, and the crowd of savages who live outside
the city for some reason or another will go and kill good-looking
freedom-fighters without so much as a by-your-leave. In other words, this
world is so crap that even Clive Owen looks animated about it sometimes.
That’s the setup. The story itself is pretty simple; Clive
Owen has to get the world’s one and only pregnant woman to Bexhill, which
must be one of those anonymous crap-ish towns in England that nobody knows
anything about, like Grimsby or Rochdale or Doncaster. And that is pretty
much it, if you ignore the rather high level of
The-World-Is-Going-To-End-It’s-All-Pointless events that seem to happen on
the way.
There’s a few problems with Children of Men, most of which
relate to the first half of the film. Do you remember 28 Days Later? Well so
do the makers of this. It’s got similarities in structure (trek across a
ravaged English countryside), tone (post-apocalyptic and then some), and even
the film stock looks strangely similar. However it doesn’t quite have the
same pace or drive as 28 Days Later; at its best it’s an interestingly dark
variation on a road movie, at its worst it’s a rather directionless trek
through Danny Boyle’s out-takes. It’s also saddled with some no-holds-barred
infodumps (that’ll be a fancy word for bits when characters tell each other
stuff that they already know for no reason except that the plot demands it)
that flollop around in the plot and sort of puncture the illusion.
That’s not to say it isn’t impressive, and doesn’t have
some fantastic scenes. The only-child-will-soon-be-born is the sort of thing
that begs to be seen as religious allegory but the film manages not to make
this annoying – makers of Superman Returns, please take note – which does
give it a vaguely redemptive edge. Some of the scenes are magnificent, not
least when Clive and his charges take a rest in a derelict school – it’s a
segment that really brings home the horror of the premise, a world in which
no-one ever learns or discovers anything, nothing is new and there’s no
freshness or hope.
And then there’s the last segment of the film, when the
film actually reaches Bexhill. Only it’s not crap-English-town, it’s a place
where people are starving and no law exists; where wars between different
factions constantly rage; where people stagger around with severed limbs
screaming in pain, and well you get the picture. The film somehow managed to
be rated as a 15A, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a
look-from-between-your-fingers rollercoaster of nastiness. This, of course,
is the kind of nastiness that goes on just about everywhere except Western
Europe, but we happily tell ourselves is the exception rather than the rule.
Now a film has shown it to us in a place that we actually think of as
civilisation, rather than a funny landscape full of little brown people that
doesn’t actually count as a real society because Vodafone don’t have an
outlet there.
So obviously, this is automatically a good thing.
There are some wonderful moments in this film, actual
solid moments of hope. The conclusion leaves itself open to a number of
interpretations, some of which are clinically depressing, some of which are
incredibly optimistic. Ultimately, it’s about a world which is devoid of
hope; which means, automatically, it’s about the power of hope. It’s an
emotional piece of work that’s more flawed than 28 Days Later, but at the
same time more ambitious; and in the end, in spite of its problems, it’s one
of the films of the year.
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concerts
Madonna: Confessions Tour
(by Slaar. Obviously.)
There’s something wilfully perverse about reviewing a tour
that if I recall correctly didn’t actually come to Ireland, by an artist whom
the website’s editor-in-chief can't stand. And I'm all for wilful perversity.
Anyway, a few fumbling attempts to be positive about something might provide
a bit of comic relief, if only for their gross ineptitude.
“Confessions” seems appropriate; there are three things
I'm never quite sure whether to let slip during everyday discourse. One, that
I'm a Doctor Who fan. Two, that I likes lads. Three, that I'm keen on
Madonna. Not a damn thing wrong with any of those tendencies, of course (oh
no there’s not), and frequently I guess they come in a kind of Borders-style
3-for-2 package anyway, but I find that if you don't reveal them early,
though not too early, and at a ripe moment, conversational events will
incrementally overtake you and soon enough you'll find yourself very nearly
living a lie through simple inaction. Smile and nod politely when someone
mentions about how her Madonna looked like a scrawny old harridan – or
something of the sort – at Live 8, purse your lips noncommittally at ensuing
remarks about camel toes in leotards, and before you know it you’re hiding
copies of her albums from visitors, stashing them into the same nameless
vault as Claws of Axos DVDs and those bloody indie movies about rent boys
where somebody dies at the end. Not because you’re ashamed, but because
you've gradually let an inaccurate picture of yourself build up, and it’s too
much of a chore to then have to put that right.
So, I’ll come clean: back in April I spent the whole of
one morning alternately on the phone and the internet trying to get hold of
tickets for Madge’s then-upcoming tour, watching date after date get
announced and date after date get sold out two seconds later (all bought up,
I can only imagine, by a breed of Terminator-style ticket-purchasing cyborgs
who can emit a billion credit card numbers from their fingertips in a
nanosecond), a chore made harder by the fact that I refused to pay any price
higher than the cheapest on offer. Which, after all, was not that bloody
cheap. I’d like to say this fiscal reticence arose from my being at least
marginally sensible, but in fact it was purely because I'm completely skint.
And when I did, after having more or less completely given up hope, finally
get my hands on the requisite pair of tickets, I ran around the room jumping
up and down in an unabashedly gleeful manner which previously I’d associated
only with the under-eights. Then I went into work in a joyful mood which I of
course had to disguise under the watchful, potentially mocking glare of the
normals. Yes, chaps, I'm all excited about going to see a middle-aged woman
horsing around in a purple leotard.
Funny thing is – my goodness, this is starting to sound like
a sob story – even as a Madonna fan I don’t quite fit the mould. Most of the
women I know are fans of hers and pretty much every one of them considers the
dread eighties to be the golden age of the old girl’s music, with everything
after that a sort of pleasant optional extra. My own view is wholly the
reverse; she’d knocked out the odd good single every now and then but didn’t
start releasing good albums until around the mid-nineties, when she started
recruiting a bunch of top-notch dance producers. It very much helped that at
some time around this period studio knob-twiddlers discovered a remarkable
thing called the bassline and finally junked whatever unholy Tonka-type
device it was they used throughout the eighties to make every piece of pop
music sound so ear-bleedingly shrill.
At this juncture, though, I'd better extricate myself from
the too-easy snob’s refuge of suggesting that, oh no, it’'s the producers I
really like, not that dreadful nominal “artist”. It’s probably to some extent
true, but it’s too easy an excuse to make, and not the whole story. The
woman’s worked with three producers since 1998 – William Orbit, Mirwais
Ahmadzai and Stuart Price – and they’ve all come up with better – well, let’s
say more toe-tapping – tracks in collaboration with the semicentenarian
singer than they have when flying solo. Whether it’s through her own creative
input, or simply because she provides a muse – the idea of a Pop Star who
must be fed with Pop Hits – the combination proves fruitful. You know, if you
like that sort of fruit.
Ah, “if you like that sort of thing”. Now there’s a
stumbling block for a gig review; I have no idea how to write about music. I
don’t think its emotional effect can be analysed, and certainly I can’t
explain why Hung Up (the one with the Abba sample) makes me want to dance or
why Like a Prayer (the one that's the best pop song ever) always has me
singing along. Music journalism generally strikes me as more a sort of
free-associating poetry than a process of objective inquiry anyway, and I’m
sure no-one out there needs to hear my free associations. Suffice it to say,
I think pop music is basically escapist and Madonna’s pop music evokes my own
preferred escape world; all dancing, sex and striking a pose. Her lyrics can
often be clumsy, but often in a way that ultimately serves to makes them more
memorable (analogous to HP Lovecraft’s purple prose), and – crucially – never
in a way that I find, shall we say, philosophically irritating. They're
never, for example, “I’m just a girl” drivel like Britney's early hits, or
waffley “Ooh I love Jesus who apparently has nothing better to do than help
my career” stuff like you get from J-Lo and Beyonce types. That Kabbalah
thing might seem strange and silly, but at least it’s not bloody Christianity
again.
A couple of years back, Madonna released an album called
American Life. It was a very good low-key electro-bleepy ballad sort of album
somewhat mis-marketed as being some kind of big statement about, well,
American life, and had a couple of out-of-place singles stapled on at the
front. It didn’t sell so well as usual, so this time round she went back to
basics – pop songs about traditional pop subjects like love and loss and
shit, much like the kind of thing she’d have released at the beginning of her
career except, as I say, with much more appealing production. The nifty use
of that Abba sample summed up the ethos of the project – late seventies /
early eighties disco, or rather the idea of it, all polished up and
cybernised. Somewhat like the Pet Shop Boys except not so nasal and
depressing. She called it “Confessions on a Dancefloor”, just so as to be
clear. It’s a bit camp, a bit cartoony, and it’s fun. But then I’m a sucker
for that romanticised, eroticised pop idea of The Dancefloor which bears
little if any relation to the dancefloors of the real world.
The show is for the most part in that vein. It begins with
the woman herself descending from the rafters inside a giant mirrorball, but
of course, carrying on through a bit of equestrian S&M with near-naked
men (presumably for old time’s sake more than anything). Then there’s a bit
of ballad-singing on a mirrored crucifix; a surprising guitar-playing segment
with solos and everything; a bunch of older hits sonically beefed up to fit
in with the new ones; and dancing, lots and lots of hugely energetic dancing
so intricately choreographed and timed that a single foot wrong would likely
cause a row of ten annoyingly fit people to fall into a bruised and bloodied
heap. A culminatory string of dance hits climax with her current trademark
leotard and boombox routine, amidst ever more frenzied goings-on among the
dancers who’'ve started scaling the railings and leaping in a doubtless
carefully controlled way into the crowd.
Say what you like about her, I’m sure it’ll have been said
before anyway, but she knows a thing or two about showmanship. “Style without
substance” would be the grumpy way of looking at that, but to be honest you
don't need all that much substance to have fun jumping up and down and singing
along. There’s a reason they don’t do Spinoza readings at these kind of
affairs. The audience finds itself shifting awkwardly when that moment comes
where she sits down and says something vague about making the world a better
place (“Oh, she always does this!” someone rather amusingly complains
behind me, as if speaking about an unwanted party guest making a show of
herself), but it soon passes and we're back to yelling “Quicker than a ray of
li-ii-iii-ii-iii-iii-iiight!” again.
I like her for these clumsy, daft gestures. When she does
things like kissing Britney, or hopping up onto that aforementioned big
mirrored crucifix, we tend to tut and roll our eyes because such attempts at
brewing up controversy are old hat and we’ve seen her do the like so many
times before. But if you think about it, how many of the current crop of
bland play-it-safe-to-whitebread-America pop divas would even think of doing
these sorts of things? Would Beyonce or that Rihanna person (no, I don't know
either) exhort their audience mid-song to “go to Texas and suck George Bush's
dick”? Of course not. In the context of current pop music, Madge’s overtures
seem less like aimless controversy-seeking and more like the common touch.
Much of Madonna’s press these days hints at a grumbly
under-slash-overtone – “when's she going to start acting her age?”
I know it's a trivial thing all told but, oh, I do hate that. Acting her age
would entail what? Sitting back in a rocking chair, taking up embroidery,
growing a moustache and quietly awaiting the cold embrace of the grave? I
mean really, why do that when you can still be wearing hotpants and
faux-humping a boombox? I'm not joking either. Decay and death will come
quite quickly enough and they won’t go away once they get here. If you don't
like her music don’t buy it, but for fuck’s sake, don’t begrudge the woman
for enjoying having an active body and breath in her lungs while they last.
And if she’s making an obscene amount of money out of it, well, it’s one of
the more charmingly innocent ways of making an obscene amount of money. She’s
not an oil company or an arms dealer.
Not that her age wasn’t a factor in my wanting to get
along to one of this year’s concerts. I ain’t seen her in a live show before,
and figured that given her age this might well be the last tour she does.
Indeed, part of the pleasure of going to see a date on this particular tour
is the giddy sense of vertigo – how much longer can this woman possibly go
on? She’'s extended the kind of career that normally lasts about four years
if you're lucky to over two decades. She’s twenty years older me and can do
things with her body I wasn’t able to do with my own ten years ago.
Having stopped getting her tits out around a decade ago she’s now doing
videos where she bares half her arse, and by some physics-defying miracle it
looks brilliant. The big showstopper everyone’s waiting for is not some
greatest hit from twenty-odd years ago, but a song released within the last
few months. Oh, and her voice is stronger than you’d probably expect too. I
think subconsciously a lot of us are expecting her to suddenly dessicate from
the sheer strain of keeping it all up in the air, career and buttocks alike,
waiting for her to blow away like dandelion spores as she achieves some
hitherto undiscovered yogic position. It, like, adds an extra piquancy to the
performance.
It won't happen for another ten years though, on the
evidence of the evening. And by then her daughter Lourdes will be old enough
to take over the mantle; perhaps the name will be passed down and “Madonna”
will enjoy a two hundred year career via successive generations of the
Ciccone family. Indeed, when you and I are dead and buried people might still
be commenting on how good Madonna looks for a one hundred and forty-eight
year-old or complaining about the three thousand quid ticket price. I don't
want to worry you, but I shouldn't be a bit surprised.
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singles
Scissor Sisters : I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’
Me neither. Now fuck off.
The Killers: When You Were Young
I don’t actually mind The Killers. Not that I’d buy one of
their albums in a blue fit (whatever a blue fit is), but they do perk me up
whenever they come on the radio. It’s pretty obvious to see that their first
album consisted of not-too-appalling filler and four slices of pretty much
perfect pop-rock, and in Mr Brightside had a song that went beyond perfect
and joined the ranks of “oo-er, get a load of that then”. It’s worth saying
it again, really; it’s a song about a bloke watching his girlfriend cop off
with another bloke while he lies there being too shitfaced to do anything
about it. Not many pop songs dabble with subjects like this, but the world
would be a better place of more of them did.
The problem with playing “proper” instruments is that as
soon as you pick up a guitar you get cast out of the “harmless pop” bracket
and thrust into the “real band” genre, where a lot of these people don’t
belong. When everyone complained about the Stereophonics being bland and
conservative, they missed the point; of course they were, they were a
perfectly decent pop band, and if twelve year olds want to listen to that
crap then let them. It cuts both ways, since people who don’t like music
(i.e. 97% of the population) can fool themselves into thinking the
Stereophonics are a proper band and say “oooh Kelly Jones has a fantastic
voice”, which just makes you want to say no, he doesn’t and he’s got a girl’s
name; even so, that’s hardly the Stereophonics’ fault. It’s gone the same way
with The Killers. You had the usual rush of people saying they were
brilliant, on account of how they play guitar and all; then there was the
usual backrush of hipper-cooler-more-cynical people saying no, they’re
derivative; and all these people missed the point, which was a: they aren’t
terrible and b: they’re for kids.
For adults, their best quality and worst quality are
somehow the same, and it’s this; they sound like their record collection.
Their record collection is at least pretty good, and there’s a nice sort of
familiarity about a Killers record. At the same time though, it’s never going
to be anything more than a guilty pleasure. Music should have newness, and
innovation, and heart; the Killers don’t have any of those, and energy (of
which they’ve loads) only takes you so far.
So they’re fine for what they are. This particular song
amps up the nostalgia even more by having a title called “When You Were
Young”, which let’s face it is what every Killers song could be called. Unfortunately
it immediately puts you in mind of When We Were Young by Whipping Boy, and
it’s obviously not fit to eat that song’s week-old leftover curry. But sod
it, that “He doesn’t look a thing Like Jesus” line sounds good even if it is
completely meaningless, and – like almost everything they do – it’s hard to
dislike. “Fine” is probably the best thing you can say about it. And weirdly,
it’s also the worst. I’ll probably hate them next month, by the way.
Scissor Sisters : I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’
Actually, I’m not done here. Can I go back? Perversely,
these complete arseholes deserve more of my time.
Here’s the thing; generally, decent songs aren’t funny.
You’ve got the occasional novelty song which tickles the ribs for a minute or
so before you get sick of it (with the possible exception of Jumbo Breakfast
Roll), but generally it isn’t a hotbed of humour. Except Bob Dylan, he can be
funny. And Tom Waits. Morrissey: Very Funny. “I was looking for a job and
then I found a job and heaven knows I’m miserable now”; funniest thing in the
world. Which would suggest that it actually takes proper songwriters to be
funny, therefore the Scissors Sisters aren’t funny. Because they’re shite
songwriters. Actually, repeat that; they’re shite songwriters. Shite. They are
clearly an annoying novelty band in disguise as… um… a proper band pretending
to be an annoying novelty band (oh, the double-bluffery), but all sorts of
stupid people are saying oooh nooo, actually they’re really goooood, they
fuse so many different influences and it’s really good pop music, blah blah
blah.
First up: ABBA, the Bee Gees and early Madonna were
absolutely crap the first time round, so this “fusion of different
influences” involved is the musical equivalent of throwing a frog, a toad and
a herring in a liquidiser and flicking the switch. The result is about as
appealing as it sounds even before you get that streak of shallow spite added
(we’re talking about a band who produce lyrics such as “you’re filthy and I’m
gorgeous, you’re disgusting and you’re nasty”). At least when ABBA / Bee Gees
/ Madonna happened, they sounded like… themselves. It doesn’t excuse how
completely shit they were, but ABBA genuinely sounded new when they first
came along. Ditto Madonna, back when she first popped on the scene with her
pointy tits and sass, and Papa Don’t Preach does so bold and confident and
new (still shit, obviously, but you know what I mean). Whereas listening to a
Scissor Sisters song you can spot all the recognisable bits of old songs
among the sea of regurgitated rubbish, a bit like picking through someone’s
vomit and identifying chunks of tinned carrot.
Second: nor are they “just a bit of funnnnnn”, which is
the other line that’s always regurgitated when you start castigating people
for funding these fuckers. They aren’t fun, they’re boring. Instead they hide
under the veneer of camp, and flounce around in feather boas clothes like
they fell out of an Adam Ant video and are now angling for a part on Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy. Here’s the thing: I hate camp. I hate everything
about it. I hate Graham Norton and I hate Julian Clary and I hate that
irritating fuckwit with the glasses who presents the Friday Night Project,
grinning like a twat as he cracks yet another double-entendre (fucking hell,
the penis goes in the arse, I get it). I hate the way that it consists
entirely of vaguely clever people pretending to be stupid. I hate the
glorification of shallowness, the idea that if you speak in a vaguely
effeminate voice you can criticise people on the basis of them having a bad
haircut and everyone thinks it’s funny. I hate how dull it is, how the
outrageous ‘n’ shocking behaviour almost always consists of jokes about
penises and dildos in an endless string of dull fnur-fnur smut. I hate the
notion that all this then becomes defined as “gay”, thereby implying that if
you happen to fancy men you have to buy into all this unmitigated shit. I
hate the triumphalistic posing with the most vapid, most plastic elements of
popular culture and the fingers-in-ears-la-la-la-I’m-not-listening attitude
adapted to the rest of the world at large, because oh-don’t-you-know that
would only bring you down. I hate the idea that liking Big Brother is
different if you do it in a post-modern ironic way. I hate the arch irony that
underscores the entirety of camp. I hate the way that it consists of gay men
jumping directly into the box that homophobes would like them to fit into, in
the mistaken idea that this is daring and brave. I hate how everything is so
choreographed and so expected. I hate the raw, stinking, insidious conservativeness
of camp, way that something that makes great play of its newness and
playfulness can so quickly become revealed as so endlessly, killingly dull.
And I hate – I fucking hate – the Scissor Sisters.
I hate them, hate them, hate them.
Sandi Thom: What If I’m Right?
SHOCK HORROR: SENSE OF HUMOUR AMPUTATION ON LEADING FEMALE
SINGER-SONGWRITERS! MORE INSIDE! Yes folks, it seems that all the leading female
singer songwriters have had their senses of humour sneakily amputated shortly
before becoming famous, a bit like the operation that was carried out on
Steve Martin all those years ago. I mean, really. “There are nine million
bicycles in Beijing”… delivered completely straight like it’s a new
philosophy. “Because of you I never strayed too far from the sidewalk”, and
not a flicker of a smile. And now this. “You’ll be my sympathetic lover, and
you won’t steal the covers, but I’ve got my doubts, and what if I’m right?”
No, hang on, there’s better examples… [googles some song lyrics]… “you’ll
always tape the football and let me watch my shows”… no, wait… oh, here we
go. “You’ll say I’m thin and you’ll bring the washing in, but I got my doubts
and what if I’m right?” Erm… eh? What? Huh? Let me rephrase that…
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?
Thing is, to get an album made, lots of people have to
hear the songs, even if you did become famous thanks to MySpace (and, it now
seems, a very well-paid and efficient publicity firm). And this song is
actually a single, so even more people will have heard it. So how come no-one
at any stage coughed and said quietly, “Sandi, what in the name of arse is
this?” One of the more irritating things about that Prawn Cracker song is
how shockingly po-faced it is, but quite how anyone can sound all
angst-ridden and horrified while writing lyrics like “you’ll send your vinyl
records and go get us a loan”… hey, aren’t you supposed to be a musician?
Shouldn’t you be the one with the vinyl records? Is this what we’ve come down
to; music that extols the virtues of getting a mortgage? Are you, in fact,
the dullest woman on the planet?
And another thing; the video’s got lots of close-ups of
Sandi, and she isn’t even good-looking. I mean, she’s not as offensive as
Fergie (either version), but she’s clearly not good-looking at all. So what
is she for? Anyone with uses for a Sandi Thom, please e-mail me. And “target
practise” doesn’t count.
Fergie: London Bridge
Lead singer of the Black-Eyed Peas takes advantage of
having a nickname that puts people in mind of one-time ginger woman who got
married to some inbred German or other, and dubs herself (and her album) The
Duchess before coming up with a song that’s called London Bridge for no
apparent reason. The rest of the song consists of Fergie telling us all how
she doesn’t queue to get into clubs on account of how she’s so great, and
then she gets on the flo and dances like a ho (even if she is a lady), then
she gets pissed and then she fights with paparazzi and she’s just so great
and she doesn’t give a fuck (I’m quoting direct here, by the way). Well I’m
glad she doesn’t give a fuck, because it makes me feel better about saying
this; go and fuck yourself Fergie. You are a talentless obnoxious slapper
and, in comparison to your hideously ugly features and fucked-up eyebrows,
that manky royal ginge with whom you share your nickname is Winona bloody
Ryder. Every time you hear this song it just becomes clear that Fergie is the
single most horrendous organism on the planet except for maybe an advanced
form of the ebola virus that infects everyone out of spite. However it’s a
good song for people who hate women, and as there is (obviously) an enormous
number of women who hate women, this shit finds a market. And yes, of course
Western Civilisation is doomed. If this woman ever comes within a hundred
miles of me I’m going to take it as provocation and get a shotgun from
somewhere. You have been warned. You fucking harpy.
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albums
Missy Elliot: Respect M.E.
For what, exactly?
Some pop stars have must henceforth be commonly known as
the “wow” factor, now that “The X Factor” just invokes images of dreary mediocrity.
Then there are the others that invoke the “huh?” factor, and Ms Elliott fits
neatly in the latter camp (the unkind amongst us might speculate that it
might be the only thing she fits in, but I’ll try and lay off the abuse for a
paragraph or so). Why is it that when people refer to her they occasionally
say words like “diva”, or at the very least hush their tones a little to
imply a certain legendary quality? Oooh, Missy Elliot. You know her, Missy
Elliot. She’s great, she is. RNB genius. All that.
So here’s the challenge: name a single song by her. Just
one. I actually perform better than the average person here, since I can
actually remember her having a hit and I used to be able to hum it (but it
sounded a bit like I’m Slim Shady, which has obliterated the memory on
account of how it was, you know, good). More tellingly, a friend of mine
actually owns an album but was still unable to name a single song when
I pressed her on the matter. Admittedly, if you made a list of people whose
names have been preceded by the abbreviation “ft” then Missy would feature
damn high on the list, but… aren’t you supposed to be famous before
you start ft-ing? There’s also a theory that she’s a great producer, but
given that “producing” a rap song seems to involve asking a more talented
person if you can play a bit of one of their old songs on a loop, I can’t see
this as much of a recommendation. What are you good for, Missy? What’s the point
of you?
Answer: appear on other people’s songs, say some
unintelligible things and grunt a bit. Well good for you, you terminally
useless tart.
I can’t say I’m wild about dividing music up into genres,
but if you think of all the great black female singers of the last century or
so it’s hard to see them being impressed by this. Aretha Franklin, Nina
Simone, Billie Holliday and all those people, and now you have this; a warped
version of Mary Harney dancing like she all that, sweating 'n'grunting. The only
possible reason for her fame is that she somehow blagged skeleton keys to
every major recording studio and occasionally wanders into the sound booths,
grunting orgasmically as she eats four hot dogs at once. Or at least, I hope
she’s eating them. I just had an unpleasant thought.
The Roots: Game Theory
Course, you do have to remember that Franklin / Simone /
Holliday / Mayfield / oh fuck it Maxi Sodding Priest for all I care would
make about the state of black music as a whole. Actually even calling it
“black music” is a fairly stupid exercise in the
let’s-divide-everything-into-an-entirely-arbitrary-system-of-genres that
means you end up with people talking about
post-proto-shoegazer-alt-country-rock without being ironic, but given that
there’s such a thing as the Music Of Black Origin awards I can’t help but
think it’s fair game. Essentially it now seems to consist of rap (annoying
men boast about their hoes and bitches while wearing lots of incredibly girly
jewellery) and RNB (annoying women sing about having sex and pretend it’s a
badge of emancipation, or men sing about making sweet lurve to all the
laydeez and how attractive they are, but rather undermine their position by
all trying to sound like Sade).
In other words: it’s rubbish. Black MusicTM is in trouble,
in that it isn’t actually sound like music any more. To be fair this is a
trait of modern music, it’s just that it’s most evident here; we’re talking
about a genre where Fifty Fuckpiece Cent’s first video actually showed him
being manufactured (but hey, check out the six-pack), for crying out loud.
When people get all worried about rap corrupting the nation’s youth etc. they
miss the obvious problem with it, which is that it’s musically a bit rubbish.
Yay for 8 Mile and all, but it would be nice if the rappers involved could go
on from rhyming things as fast as possible and actually start the business of
playing instruments and stuff. Or at least hiring someone who can. And if
they could stop talking about themselves it would be nice.
Oh yeah, The Roots. The Roots are often spoke of as the
intelligent face of black music, which really just goes to show how stupid
the rest of it is. What’s really shocking is how surprising it is when a rap
group complain about the raft of sexual imagery that’s all around us, which
let’s face it isn’t the most insightful thing you’ll hear all year (that’ll
be Pussy Galore off Phrenology, that will). Their lead… um… well lead singer
isn’t technically accurate and lead rapper sounds wrong, but you know what I
mean… well anyway he’s called Deep Thought, which should already be a
punchable offence (Nobody references Hitch-Hikers and ge’s away with it, you
hear? Nobody. Level 42 are still on my hit list) but the thoughts aren’t that
deep anyway. But, but…
Well, The Roots are actually a bunch of musicians. They
have a drummer rather than a drum machine. This isn’t to get all snotty about
synthetic music, just to say that obviously you’ll understand things like
rhythm and tone and all that bollocks if you actually know how to play
instruments in the first place. Game Theory is their latest album, and here’s
the thing; it’s fantastic. It’s better than their previous biggies (Things Fall
Apart and Phrenology), and it’s been rather criminally underrated by the
world at large. It verges on instrumental at times; in fact, the rap bits are
probably the least interesting things on the album. But it actually sounds
like music, rather than someone trying to be a star; it sounds serious rather
than clunking, it sounds like… well… it’s good. Lyrically The Roots are sharp,
and manage to sound like double-bastard-hard-mofos without sounding like
right-wing imbeciles, which is a trick that hasn’t been pulled off for a
while.
At the end of the day it’s rap, and if you don’t like rap
then you won’t like this… but it’s still a cut above the norm. In fact,
that’s an understatement; this is a terrific album, give it a go at least.
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