Slagging Off Everyone’s Mum
After I’ve finished typing this, I’m going to listen to Human, by The Killers, all the way through for the first time, and I’m going to enjoy it even if the process actually does kill me.
Do you remember enjoying I Kissed a Girl by Kate Perry? The simple hook? The catchy refrain? The naive and quaint whisper of girl-on-girl action? Then everyone and his mum set it as their ringtone, and the bajillionth repetition of Kate’s bi-curious experimentation leads you to wonder if maybe she should have drawn her conclusions by now, and perhaps had them published in a respected lesbonic academic journal.
Or how about Bring Me To Life by Evanescence? I genuinely really liked this song when it first came out. Amy Lee is a stunningly talented vocalist, and if you haven’t rummaged around the grimy floor of the internet for any of their accoustic offerings yet, I strongly recommend you do. I found a lot of their first album to be a bit samey, but they were ultimately redeemed by this one awesome song. Then everyone and his mum played, sang, hummed and whistled it, for about two continuous months, whenever the slightest opportunity presented itself.
This song was literally too good for its own good. Eventually everyone (and his mum) got sick of it. Now people seem to be afraid to express any liking for it outside of an ironic context. It’s been sentenced to serve the same punishment as Barbie Girl and Ebeneezer Goode, both of which have their own merit, but neither of which you’d want as a cellmate.
Now I’ve come across this most recent Killers offering, which actually came out three months ago, but which has only filtered into my hermetically sealed music bubble over the past week, with everyone and his erstwhile mum (and more pertinently my girlfriend, who I may as well share a skull with) singing as much of the chorus as they remember.
This tends to be “are we human, or are we dancers”, repeated ad nauseum, which I’ve now learned isn’t even the actual lyric. I wasn’t aware the two were mutually exclusive, but I’m not one to let a bit of stray set theory ruin my enjoyment of a song. I quite like The Killers. I quite like sausages as well, but if I was forcefed Asda own-brand chipolatas for a week, they’d probably lose their appeal by Tuesday afternoon.
Unlike the other two examples, I haven’t had a chance to just enjoy this one. It’s already winding me up and I haven’t even listened to it. By rights, I should really like this song, and I’ll be mildly gutted if I can objectively assess it as being quite good, but also have an irrational dislike of it caused by half-arsed mass-exposure.
I’m not sure who to blame more: everyone, or his mum.
Masochism Centre Edition
I’m currently looking into building myself a media centre. Media centres aren’t a subject I know a great deal about, and whilst carrying out my research I’ve stumbled across LinuxMCE, a media centre environment which is conceptually awesome. If I set this up, I could (in theory) direct our cable service through it, have it manage suitably-interfaced services in our house (heating, lighting, security), carry out VoIP and video conferencing, and (the bit that I find most impressive) set up thin client terminals on all the other TVs in the house, so I can not only access my media from every room, but also have each simultaneous user’s media follow them wherever they go.
We’re talking proper automated house-of-the-future stuff here. I could phone or email my empty house and get it to turn the lighting and heating on and off, or have Star Trek-style conversations with friends or family anywhere in the world over wall-mounted TVs and monitors in every room in the house. I’d half expect Rosie the Robot Maid from The Jetsons to materialise and start sweeping the floor. Watching the video demo, I can’t help but be impressed and inspired.
But I’m not sure I trust it. I’m not a platform warrior. I’m a fairly competent linux user and employ it as part of my job on a daily basis, but my experience with open source software is that whilst you don’t pay a material value for it, you do end up paying for it in time and expertise. There may be plenty of developers prepared to donate their time to open source projects, but there are woefully few technical authors, or QA testers, or user interface designers, and it shows. The software may perform like a greased weasel on amphetamines, but it’s often as intuitive as a nine-sided brick, and when issues go beyond your own ability to self-support, you have to throw yourself on the mercy of “the community”. That’s not to say it’s bad, just that rather than getting what you pay for, you pay for what you get.
Still, I’m considering giving it a go. All I have to lose is my time, sanity and hair, all of which have long since started disappearing anyway.
Poor Production Values
Ever become obsessed with a song, to the point where it rattles around in your head both night and day, and unless you spend an embarassing amount of time constructing some sort of bastardised creation relating to it, it will continue to haunt you until the day you die?
Nah, me neither.
Savoury Success
I used to be quite fat. Think somewhere between Big Daddy and Winston Churchill, and you’ll have me circa 2004. By eating sensibly and getting more exercise, I’m now somewhere around Adrian Chiles from The One Show. Unfortunately, recent job changes have forced me into the lifestyle of regularly eating out of vending machines, and daily Yorkie Bar fixes have seen me slide back down into gravity’s warm, wobbly caress.
So I started making vaguely sensible packed lunches, and as a result I haven’t had a single Yorkie Bar in about a month. I’ve been having Muller Corners instead. Today I had a flavour called “Vanilla Choco Balls”, and if that doesn’t sound like an interracial gay porn title, I don’t know what does. Anyway, whilst munching away on this, contemplating ethnically diverse adult films for the discerning gentleman, a question occured to me.
Why do you not get savoury Muller Corners?
They’re a delicious culinary accident just waiting to happen. The first idea that sprang to mind was pork scratchings and dripping, which would probably be an experience not entirely unlike fellating a pig, but beyond this are ideas with a bit more mainstream appeal. Croutons and soup, for example. Turkey and gravy. Lemongrass and thai green paste. Crackers and caviar. Cream cheese and biscuits. Miniature sausages and smooth creamy mashed potato. Meaty faggots in a thick curry sauce. Actually, that last one might be a sequel for Vanilla Choco Balls.
The boundaries between sweet and savoury are in dire need of transgression. We have donuts filled with jam, custard and chocolate. Why not mushy peas, dusted with a light sprinkling of salt? Switch off your food format conventions! Turn the edible world on its self-assured and presumptuous head. Beef ice lollies. Fried tempura vegetable cookies. Peppered hash brown bars in a thick tomato coating.
Subverting your food has never been so enjoyable. Or sickening.
The Emperor’s New Tracksuit
It is a sad but unavoidable fact that I am slowly turning into my dad. I nearly watched a documentary on canals last weekend, which should give you some idea of just how far it’s progressed. Once I own a copy of Nat King Cole Sings the Blues, I’ll know the transformation is complete. Until then, I’ll just have to measure the decline by how annoyed I get at young people.
I’ll say that again: young people. I’m 26, have no functional recall of either Black Monday or the Lockerbie Bombing, and the earliest contemporary pop song I can remember hearing is Stevie Wonder’s Part-Time Lover. Young people are getting on my nerves.
Except it’s not young people. It’s a specific young person who was sat over the aisle from me on the train a couple of days ago. Tracksuited and sporting a no-back-and-sides haircut, he was playing a game on his phone with an annoyingly catchy and loud techno/dub soundtrack. I was sorely tempted to go to the woman sitting behind him, politely ask if I could open the window, then lean over the seat, snatch the phone away from him and hurl it to some obscure cranny of the West Midlands rail network.
I don’t just mean I was idly fantasising about doing this. I was seriously weighing up the pros and cons of going through with it. Stepping over the line and becoming a low-level vigilante, combating injustices too trivial for the law to handle. Even Batman had to start somewhere. Once I’d done it I could ad-lib something witty, and the rest of the people in the carriage would cheer and give me a round of applause. I Am Shallow Justice! Cower, antisocial wrongdoers, for your days are numbered.
In the end I decided against it, on the grounds that it would only be polite to ask him to turn it down first, and that would ruin the surprise. He might even actually turn it down once asked, thus smashing all my prejudices about young people in tracksuits. Bizarrely, the fact that he was asian didn’t actually register until I was recalling what happened after the fact.
It comes as no surprise to me that I’m probably considerably more biased against tracksuits and stupid haircuts than I am against young asian people. If you think about it, judging people based on how they dress is entirely defensible. If we willingly telegraph our allegiance to an abstract social grouping by wearing certain clothing, we have to take the rough with the smooth.
It might seem easy for me, someone who habitually dresses either smart-casual or like an off-hours Top Gear presenter, to defend making character judgments based on what people wear, but clean-cut mainstream attire carries its own concerns. I don’t bat an eyelid at someone with facial piercings and a Ramones t-shirt, but what do they think of me? I used to get quite paranoid about this. I wanted to meet their disapproving gazes and say something like “been in any good moshpits lately?” or “I used to have transgressively long hair, y’know”.
The problem I find with telegraphing information like musical tastes, social background or political allegiances through what we wear (or through any broadcast means for that matter) is that this information is no less superficial than any other immediate judgments you can form about people. There’s no uniform for not being an arsehole, and even if there were, we’d all wear it.
I’ll show you something…
The tail-end of November is always a depressing time of year. Shorter days; Christmas anxiety; the icy spectre of death nudging another wooden bead from left to right on the abacus of your mortal existence. It all adds up. As a result, this is the perfect time to talk about the Ralph McTell song Streets of London.
If you’re unfamiliar with it (presumably because you’ve had the good fortune not to be born on planet Earth in the past fifty years) you can find it here. I’m always stunned to discover people who don’t know this song. We sang it during assemblies at primary school, and I didn’t discover it was a commercially released pop track from the 1970s until my teens.
The basic concept behind the song is McTell challenging the listeners’ audacity in thinking their personal problems are of any consequence, what with all the homeless people and old sailors in the world. “How can you tell me that you’re lonely? You privileged bougeosie ponce, with your roof, and your bed, and your passing interaction with functional society. You make me sick!”
It might very well be a contender for the most miserable song ever written, but just to secure its title, I think it needs an extra verse:
Have you seen the kitten
With the terminal diseases
Missing both his back legs
Pulled along on rusty wheels
He’s ground up into dogfood
And then fed to starving orphans
Slaving in the sweatshops
Making clubs for killing seals
I think I’ll write to him and see if he’s interested in revising it.
Bloody Typical
No-nonsense misanthropic curmudgeons are all the rage these days, so it’s just my bloody luck I’m as cheerful and upbeat as I am, isn’t it?
It’s not easy to stay positive in the face of all these people telling you how rubbish the world is, or how much people suck. Or how awesome the world would be if people weren’t such stupid, greedy, careless bastards. Or how brilliant people are when they’re not subject to the choking whims of an uncaring, rubbish world. Make your sodding minds up.
It’s also a little too easy to complain; about the economy, for example, or the establishment, or decaying societal values. Illiteracy, obesity, poverty, injustice, inequality, bigotry of all stripes, the environment, GM food, religion, crime, healthcare, teenage pregnancy and immigration policy are all easy enough subjects for us to roll our eyes at, then shake our heads and mutter about how bloody typical it is. Unspeakable horrors systematically dismantling all we know and love? Tsk. Bloody typical.
It’s a wonder any of us can motivate ourselves to get out of bed in the morning, let alone produce, or even simply admire, works of undeniable merit that benefit the whole of mankind in subtle but profound ways. No, it’s far easier to just be miserable about the whole sorry state of our earthly existence. You should try adopting a more positive outlook on life.
You know, like mine.
