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Hard to look right

7 May 12 | Re: Chart confusion

Rapidly maturing ex-munchkin Justin Bieber is interesting to chart followers. No one can deny the size or fervour of his fan base —look at those Twitter trends— but the hordes of fainting Ashleys have yet to bring him a chart hit, single or album, of any great significance. His first top ten hit (as lead artist) didn’t turn up until recently, and even that dropped pretty quickly from its top three entry position. In its fourth week, it’s a bit below Jason Mraz.

In light of this, people have generally been pretty pleased to conclude that Bieber is followed by a new type of music fan who loves the artist, but “just doesn’t buy music”. They watch the videos on Youtube, they sigh over the posters, they buy hats and hoodies and necklaces and books and perfume and pencil cases and dolls and tour tickets and all that stuff, but they don’t see the need to own the music itself. So goes the coventional thinking. Which was pretty convincing until five weeks ago.

Five weeks ago, Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen crashed into the chart at number one and proceeded to sell a hundred thousand copies a week for a month. It must be knocking on half a million by now, and it’s still at number two, outsold only by World’s Sexiest Woman Tulisa Out Of N-Dubz.

Call Me Maybe, which has a delightful video by the way, came to public attention because of a video of Bieber and his demographic colleague Selena Gomez dancing to it. So a lot of the people who are fans of it must be Bieber fans, ie supposed non-music buyers; yet they have no problem paying for this track. Back to the drawing board, chart-watchers! Must try harder, Bieber.

One note on Call Me Maybe itself, which genuinely is a brilliant song. As great as the cute lyrics and Freemasons-type string riff and chorus tune and verse tune and breezy middle-eight are, the more I listen to it the more I become convinced that what takes it from good to great is all in the way she sings the four words “all the other boys”. Something in her voice on that line is at once coy and knowing and cute and pleased and archly modest: it’s a second of pop brilliance. Other aspiring singers ought to learn from that line – it’s details like that that make a classic.

Posted by RETSIM RETRAC at 22:12

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There goes another one

2 May 12 | Re: The five Rs???

Mere hours after I write about discovering a new R sound (thanks to Michael Rosen), I’ve just thought of a fifth R sound that Rosen seems to have overlooked!

This is one you hear around the Liverpool area. To say it, you put the tip of your tongue very low behind the bottom teeth at the front of your mouth, and sort of very briefly go “eurgh”. I promise you that when you hear it in context, it sounds like an R.

This sound is most often heard when people with quite a marked Liverpudlian accent speak quite slowly and emphatically, so who better to demonstrate than John Bishop. I’ve found a clip here for you to watch where he conveniently says the word fridge about fifty times; I don’t think he uses that special new R every single time, but listen out and you’ll hear it.

Well done, Liverpool, for going beyond even Michael Rosen’s knowledge of pronunciation!

Posted by SVIDRIGAILOV at 21:59

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PS Gonna tweet Michael Rosen about this, but I’ll put it on Sea of Conjecture first to avoid any collateral damage to this poor site.

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Discovery of the sunken consonant

2 May 12 | Re: Going beyond the three Rs

Still reading and enjoying Michael Rosen’s blog, for the most part. There’s been an interesting bit just lately about Roy Hodgson and how he says the letter R. I’m less interested in Hodgson than in something else Rosen points out: a way of saying R that I hadn’t noticed.

Rosen describes this as:

He’s quite right, and I’d never noticed. Thinking about it, I’d associate this R sound mostly with some Londoners whose speech seems to be predominantly at the front of their mouth. Other characteristics of that type of speech are the L sound at the ends of words that also sounds a bit like a W, the dropped H, the glottal stop used for a T, and for some reason a slight hoarseness or croakiness. Also the distinctive pronunciation of words like ‘talk’ that Bob Hoskins used when he was doing the BT ads. But this R sound, now I’ve had it pointed out, seems to tie that whole accent together for me.

Back to Hodgson, and while I agree with Rosen that there’s nothing wrong with the way he speaks, I do think the poet has missed an important point. People’s tendency to belittle the W-like R sound must have a lot to do with the fact that it’s associated with children: children often start off using it, and then switch to a more ‘standard’ R when they get older. Therefore, many people associate that R with childishness, and I think it’s largely the incongruity that arises when adults use it that causes it to be looked down on.

Posted by MARFA PETROVNA at 13:33

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Granulated beauty

1 May 12 | Re: Retro sweetening

When you put sugar into tea, just rest the spoon gently on the tea’s surface. You will see the tea slowly soak into the sugar, crystal by crystal. It’s like watching a sepia tide come in, computerised, on an old-fashioned low-res display.

These quiet moments of everyday beauty traditionally call for a haiku; so I have written one:

As if tea-making needed to be any more of a spiritual experience.

Posted by DMITRY PROKOFYTCH RAZUMIHIN at 13:24

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Cobblers, New York

3 Apr 12 | Re: Film I didn’t like

I watched that film Synecdoche, New York the other day, and the moral of it seems to be: Don’t give a supposed auteur too much independence or he will come out with a load of old cobblers. That moral applies to the protagonist of the film, and also to its writer/director Charlie Kaufman. Oh wow, another layer of mind-blowing self-referentiality. My goodness, that is clever. If only he had done it 400 years earlier, he could nearly have scooped Miguel de Cervantes.

Billed as a comedy, this film also contains a lot of sadness. Neither works. Kaufman doesn’t seem to realise that it isn’t enough to have a freaky idea with some comic potential – a house that’s permanently on fire, say. You then have to think how to package it right, to make it into an actual joke. All the unfunnier moments of Big Train, or Chris Morris’s stuff, had this problem: they have the idea – often a very original, good idea – but they just chuck it onto the screen without doing the rest of the work. So it doesn’t work.

As for the sadness, the problem is that it’s not properly earned by the narrative. Misery is rained down on the poor arty man’s balding head, but without an underlying logic to why or how, you don’t think, “Oh, that poor man.” You think, “Why are you, the filmmaker, doing this to this poor character of yours?” All the worst moments of the second series of I’m Alan Partridge have this same problem: the things that befall him stop being self-inflicted and start being colossally implausible, mediocrely plotted bad luck, with the result that the viewer’s most likely reaction is to feel sorry for him, and maybe slightly uncomfortable about intruding on his personal misery. You can only do sadness if you have a story good enough to draw the viewer in. Otherwise, much like the comedy, you’re just asking, “Wouldn’t it be sad if this happened?” Well, yeah, maybe, but why would it happen?

As for the clever stuff, it really isn’t that clever. All the stuff about creating a city within a city, and then another city within that, doesn’t actually give endless multiple levels and layers. Either a city’s real or it isn’t, so after layer two there isn’t much of a return on pursuing the concept further. It’s all quite sub-Borgesian, not that Borges himself was ever so much cop in my opinion (briefly, his concepts were often half-baked, his logic was often flawed, and even his good ideas would have been better in the hands of a writer with a bit of humanity to flesh them out with). And what about the rank and file actors who have to spend years inside the project? The film might have been more interesting if told from one of their points of view, with the director as an initially remote presence whose bizarre story is gradually revealed. At least then, when the project finally collapses in on itself in some kind of bloody revolution or catastrophe, we could have seen how that unfolded instead of looking at a glum old guy pottering around a cupboard, which is literally what is on the screen while the story’s most interesting event takes place.

The actors are all very good, but even so, I wouldn’t bother.

Posted by RASKOLNIKOV at 00:38

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When policies succeed

28 Mar 12 | Re: Beery daydream

The government decides to impose a minimum alcohol price of 40p per unit. Makers of cheap beer realise that the only way to continue competing on price is to cut the strength of their beers - otherwise they have to go for taste and quality. For the first time in recorded history, a lager ad dares to mention the taste of the product; this proves a mistake. Legions of drinkers around the country, after decades of making their drink decisions by weighing up the relative cheekiness of ad campaigns, turn a critical taste bud to their drinks for the first time. Result: a boom in sales of all other drinks.

Microbrewers all over Britain add extra capacity in order to meet demand for their tasty wares. Some prescient brewers had taken an early punt before the policy came in; they are richly rewarded, and over the next few years the House of Lords sees a steady intake representing the nation’s new fastest growing industrial sector. The red benches echo to cod-Shakespearean language and pronunciation-dependent jokes. New bills receive eccentric amendments. Sandal sales boom. Razor sales plummet.

Of course, lager sales don’t tail off completely and the big breweries are still left rubbing their hands in anticipation of the windfall in profits brought by the minimum price. Until, that is, they all realise that if even one competitor ploughs that money into marketing instead of shareholder dividends, all those who don’t will be left behind. Result: 99% of the windfall cash goes on marketing and brand one-upmanship, some notable ads giving young British directors their first experience of working with a Hollywood-sized budget. Twenty years later, this “beer generation” of UK filmmakers will be credited with catalysing a boom period of intelligent blockbusters; a few go back to Britain to work in a revitalised Pinewood studios. A nascent Wollywood industry starts in Devon and Cornwall, taking advantage of the superior light, abundant accommodation and exquisite cream teas.

Not all beer marketing goes on adverts, and the panicky spending also results in huge sums being poured into sponsorship of TV comedy and sports. Since most major sports already have their sponsors in place, the beer cos have to look further afield; money pours into British Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling, handball, kendo, triathlon and moguls skiing, among many, leading to Team GB dominance at the 2018 (winter) and 2020 (summer) Olympic Games. Northampton becomes an international centre of excellence for minority sports. Iranian wrestlers going over for winter training make such a good impression on the locals that public opinion demands that the planned nuclear devastation of Tehran be cancelled, which it duly is, just hours before the button was due to be pressed. An international era of wrestling-based harmony begins.

Meanwhile, those beer companies unable to compete on quality have been cutting the strength of their products. A young, Durham-based entrepreneur realises early that tramps and simpletons trying to get loaded off two per cent beer will result in a five-fold increase in demand for 500ml aluminium tins. He opens a factory, and thanks to a few canny innovations becomes the world’s number one manufacturer, regenerating industry across the north-east. Durham itself is nicknamed Tin City, and generous endowments given to the university bring it up to Oxbridge standard. All the people who didn’t get into Oxbridge are no longer so bothered, as there is plenty of room for them at Durham if they decide against a career in handball. Left to get on with it without being barracked by the media, all English universities reach standards never dreamt of before. Medical breakthroughs in a Trevelyan College lab bring hope to millions, and literature breakthroughs at Castle College bring a new understanding of the human condition that will gradually permeate all of Earth’s population and lead to a 50% reduction in global crime and unnecessary suffering over the next 40 years.

Carlsberg Special Brew finds itself at a crossroads. Deciding that its current customer base cannot be expected to pay £1.80 a can, the potent beverage’s manufacturers boldy overhaul their entire brand image, pitching a strong drink for strong people and playing up the Churchill connection. This works: the beer itself remains rough as anything, but it now appeals to a certain kind of pompous, boorish half-wit, of which there are more than enough in Britain to sustain a premium beer line. Churchill himself would be proud, and the sight of a Special Brew in hand makes a useful early warning sign for the rest of us. Frosty Jack and White Lightning industrocider fare less well, although they retain a niche nostalgic appeal to moneyed types with fond memories of park benches in their teens. Buckfast Tonic Wine somehow swings itself a medical exemption and is available in bulk to those with biddable GPs.

In homes across the nation, hardworking members of alarm clock Britain drinking themselves into stupours on their sofas realise that this pastime no longer provides value for money. At these prices, they say to each other, you may as well be in a pub. So they go out: slowly at first, then faster and faster, Britons become sociable people. The change of environment brings a change of entertainment. No longer is a typical evening spent swallowing down whatever the major channels serve up - instead, it is spent meeting people, talking, exchanging ideas. Growth in the market creates room for diversification, so even small towns might have a sports bar, a live music pub, and one focusing on the beer. People get to know their neighbours. Links are forged. Ideas are had. Most people are happier, more motivated, and more optimistic. Conditions improve.

A country of bustling, lively pubs cannot go unnoticed internationally, and Ye Olde Ireland is swiftly deposed as the global byword for good pub culture. Tourists flood into Britain in search of “that unique British pub atmostphere”, and find it. They even want to bring a piece of it home with them, so sales of British-brewed beer take off all over Europe and in all the major cosmopolitan cities and territories. Guinness becomes primarily a world record arbitration company, although it maintains a small brewing arm for complicated tax-related reasons.

Ten years hence, the architects of the 40p unit policy survey a land with rejuvenated industry, a happy, diligent, healthy populace, a reaffirmed position in the arts, and sporting success unimaginable at any other time since other countries learnt how to play the sports we invented. A land at peace with neighbours far and near. A commemorative 40p coin is minted in honour of the foresight and inspiration of these noble men and women. Bone-chilling “What If...” documentaries and dramas on television conceive of nightmarish parallel presents that might have come to be, had it not been for minimum pricing. But nobody much watches them. They are all in the pub, enjoying this golden age together.

Posted by ATKINSON at 19:18

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Versus battle

24 Mar 12 | Re: The proper way to give credit

I have no real problem with producers being credited as artists, much as David Guetta is messing up the next edition of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles. But what is all this “featuring” nonsense?

Commander: Kelly Rowland “featuring” David Guetta. Give Me Everything: Pitbull “featuring” Afrojack and some other people. Wrong, wrong, wrong. As any proper musical maven has known for twenty years (ie me), featuring denotes either a vocalist performing with a group or main-credit producer, or a singer doing the chorus in a rap song, or a rapper adding verses to a song by a singer or another rapper, or in the old days of jazz, a highlighted instrumentalist. Not a producer-type person responsible for the underlying beat of the song.

The proper way to credit a dance music guy beefing up somebody else’s track is versus. Current hit Elephant, for example, should be credited to Alexandra Burke versus Eric Morillo. Megahit We Found Love should definitely be Rihanna versus Calvin Harris. So now I’ve pointed this out, could people please get back to the right terminology? Thank you very much.

It also sounds much cooler.

Posted by BINNS AND BLOTWELL at 12:12

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Xenophilius-philius

17 Mar 12 | Re: A minor character

I had a letter in the TES last week. One Jane Bower had written a fairly objectionable piece finding fault with some unnamed children’s books (one had even won an award, she sniffs), so naturally I dashed off a rant against her fusty prescriptivism. And it got printed, so you can read it rightchere. I must say, it seems less clever to me now than when I wrote it, but maybe that’s a bit like hearing your own voice on tape.

Anyway, one of the things Bower said that got my goat was that some prepositional laxity or other of JK Rowling’s had infuriated her. Ridiculous, thought I, that anyone could read the excellent Potter books and focus more on a few silly quibbles than their obvious, blazing brilliance. But then I remembered that, weirdly, I had sort of done the same thing. A while back I posted my own few objections to the series (there are three). I meant to follow up with a balancing piece pointing out something I liked about the books, but I never did. Well, I am no hypocrite; so I need to set this right.

What I meant to talk about was minor characters in Harry Potter. One review I read of the last film alleged that in eight films, the series had only managed to create one character of any depth: Snape. OK, maybe you don’t get as much from the films as you do from the books, but that seemed to me an outrageous criticism, because one of the joys of the Harry Potter series is the rich cast of characters, dozens of whom do have their own complexities and layers and conflicts at the edge of the spotlight. There’s Neville Longbottom, and the Malfoys, and Sirius, and MacGonagall, and Firenze, and Krumm... I could go on, but I’m going to stop the Wheel of Blog on the main subject of this post, Xenophilius Lovegood.

Xeno seems like a character as worth examining as any, partly because of his emblematic name. Both forename and surname refer to one of the main themes of the series, love. (In a parallel universe, perhaps he could be called Euphilius Strangelove.) Now Xeno plays an important role moving on the action of the last book —when Harry and co go to see him things start to kick off— but he’s also a good example of why people who dismiss HP as being no more than whimsical thrillers are wrong. In a mediocre thriller, Xeno would just be a carboard signpost pointing the way down Plot Street; but Rowling is much more artful. Yes, he sells Potter out and progresses events, but let’s look deeper into why.

The reason he does what he does, of course, (SPOILERS) is that his daughter has been kidnapped. But the fact that that ploy works adds a lot to the drama. A lot of children’s fiction suffers from having villains who are constantly undercut: they are meant to be scary and evil, but they are always being defied, bungling their schemes, and tasting defeat; so why should they frighten anybody? Voldemort might have been at risk of suffering from this, since Harry and Ron and Hermione, and many other children as well as adults, are very ready to stand up to him. Rowling needs a counterweight to this, so she spends quite some time building up Xeno as a notably brave and independent man —remember that he keeps publishing the Quibbler and speaking out against the Death Eaters in the face of significant pressure from the Ministry— and then shows us how his will can be broken by Voldemort’s ruthlessness.

There’s also something particularly moving about the tragedy Xeno experiences, set as it is against earlier scenes where he’s acted as light relief. He’s something of a figure of fun in the wizarding world, wearing bright yellow robes, drinking foul tea, and going off looking for absurd animals (incidentally, Rowling is very deft at coming up with absurd beasts that are still obviously absurd to characters living in a world where, say, blast-ended skrewts are real). Then we see him at home and the laughs start to stick in our throat slightly, as the pictures of his late wife and other clues hint at how his and Luna’s first tragedy, along with a sense that neither quite fits in, might have pushed them deeper into their own world. Just as this private sadness dawns on us, we’re then hit with the revelation of Luna’s kidnapping, and the extra pain and shame Xeno must feel as he’s brutally confronted with the limits of his own courage, and the laughter seems a long way off. Here’s one man’s situation that to him, and to Harry and his friends (though I believe they leave it unspoken) must be almost unbearable; but to the Death Eaters it’s all in a day’s war-waging. Thus Rowling hits us deep down, making the difference between knockabout cartoon evil and real, almost tangible villainy.

Finally I will note that Xeno is one good example among many of Rowling’s knack for drawing family relationships. All through the series, Harry as a boy with no real family makes an unusually distanced observer of others’ family setups, and Rowling provides him with quite a selection. As well as the Weasleys’ archetypal happy home, there’s Neville and his grandmother, and Dean Thomas dealing with an inheritance from a dad he never knew, and the Lovegoods’ father–daughter bubble, and Sirius the black sheep, and the young Dumbledore with the family headship thrust upon him, and the meanly dysfunctional Gaunts, and the Malfoys regretting their patrician tough love, and even hints at Hermione’s slightly distant if well-meaning mum and dad, to name but a few. Independently of the story, these are all a delight to discover; but seen through Harry’s eyes they take on a poignancy, since it becomes clear that despite any flaws they may have, he’d happily have settled for any of them. And then of course there’s Voldemort, also an orphan, who’s gone the other way and decided to hate families and ties of every kind and declare war on everything except himself.

So, that’s just one minor character. He is by turns funny and moving and desperately sad; he has his key plot moment; and he ties in with the wider themes of the book and the major characters in complex and powerful ways. I could have chosen dozens of characters and written a similar piece. There really is a lot in these books — a lot more than a few maddening prepositions, Jane Bower.

Posted by TEMPLE at 19:34

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Of sofas, nuts and WMD

11 Mar 12 | Re: Statesman's explanation

I’ve just been thinking back to what Tony Blair said around the time he stopped being prime minister. He was widely reported as saying “I did what I thought was right.”

It’s only now struck me what a weapons-grade example this is of how shades of meaning can colour a phrase. “I did what I thought was right.” Well that’s great. You had sound principles, you are a moral man, you had everyone’s best interests at heart, you had the conviction to act on your strong sense of what ought to be done.

But there are other ways to express that concept. One is: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” If anyone can tell me exactly how “I did what I thought was right” and “It seemed like a good idea at the time” differ in the bald meaning of the words, I’d be quite interested; but I don’t think they really do. Yet I don’t suppose Mr Blair would be so keen to tell the Iraqis that he followed George Bush on his dictator-whackin’ jaunt through their country for the same reason that one might eat old peanuts out of the sofa.

Posted by SQUEALER at 14:36

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Party rock arm-y

29 Feb 12 | Re: Either astounding commitment or sheer bad luck

LMFAO may be “sorry for party rocking”, but I know someone who isn’t: the woman in the One Stop near me has a tattoo on her forearm that says PARTY ROCKER in nearly inch-high letters.

I didn’t chat about the tat to her, but I can see that one of two things is definitely going on here. What I would say is the less likely option is that she is a big LMFAO fan who wants to proclaim that fact to the world. Just like SkyBlu, she’s got tattoos cos she’s rock ’n’ roll. She’s talking about PARTY ROCKING firmly in the LMFAO sense, ie with about as much to do with actual rock as the Funky Giraffe baby product range has to do with actual funk. She’s Sexy And She Knows It (or, in a confidence-centric society, Not Sexy And She Doesn’t Know It, which is the next best thing). She shuffles about on one leg while flailing the other around wildly, all to the accompaniment of electronic squeaks and beguiling rhythms.

Now, she was standing behind the counter when she served me, the woman in One Stop, so I can’t say for sure that she wasn’t wearing “animal print pants on patrol”. Maybe she was, so she might indeed be an LMFAO fan. If she was, I suppose I can see two minor problems. One is that of all the genres that might sensibly inspire the lifetime commitment of a tattoo, novelty dance is perhaps some way down the list. One would look pretty silly these days if, say, one was saddled with a Gonfi Gon or Doop tattoo from the early 90s, as much as those acts might have seemed like The Future at the time. Secondly, the simple words PARTY ROCKER don’t, to me, really encapsulate the playfulness that gives Redfoo and his half-nephew all their charm. PARTY ROCKER and a picture of a zebra would have been better.

Those are just quibbles, though. If the woman in One Stop is indeed an LMFAOer, my general verdict is fair play and keep on party rockin’ like yo’ in Miami.

Back to reality now, and the far more likely possibility that this woman likes actual rock music and your standard, non-champagne shower-based parties and thought that PARTY ROCKER was the best tattoo she could get to sum up that enviable outlook on life. She probably got it before LMFAO even recorded the first Party Rock album. But imagine her dismay now that that innocent phrase PARTY ROCKER has been cruelly snatched away from the wide-eyed, Jäger drinking Mötorhead lovers and adopted by these bespectacled shuffle-clowns. Maybe no one has told her yet and that moment of horror is still to come!

There is hope, though. If the woman in One Stop had happened to have a non-LMFAO-intended tattoo that happened to show two people with big afros and empty glasses frames and leopard-skin trousers, she would be lumbered and there would be no way back. But words, mere words, can be changed. I suggest she gets a tattoo amendment; for example, she could get PROPER tattooed in front of PARTY ROCKER. Or if she’s into politics and a particular type of rock, she could have it changed to, say, TORY PARTY and HARD ROCKER (or if a fascist, NAZI PARTY and HARD ROCKER; you get the idea). Give a bit more info at the same time as distancing herself from the zany “Gettin’ Over You” hitmakers.

Or finally, the woman in One Stop could batten down the hatches and wait for the LMFAO storm to pass and everyone to forget that PARTY ROCKER ever referred to anything other than wearing leather and moshing putting up those devil horns. It can’t be long, can it? It’s already been, what, over a year?

Posted by KLIMENT at 12:54

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Pop round-up

22 Feb 12 | Re: Some little pop items

I haven’t blogged for a little bit, and since last time a few things have happened in the world of music. For what it’s worth (v little), here’s what I thought about them:

MIA flips her middle finger at the Superbowl: The gesture matched the line MIA was delivering as she flipped it. If the song was appropriate for the Superbowl, so was the gesture; the high-ups had approved the song. All objections are cant.

Madonna’s single only reaches number 37: Basing all your publicity around the Superbowl probably wasn’t the best way to ensure a smash hit in Britain. It’s also a nice bit of poetic justice that this song didn’t even do as well as the Nicola Roberts song that it sounds a bit like.

The BRIT Awards happen: This year more than any other, the awards seemed completely irrelevant to me as a music fan. Only one nominee excited me, and that was Olly Murs and Rizzle Kicks for best single; they didn’t win. If Nadia Oh had got some awards, now you would have been talking. (But if you’re a youngster who loves Ed Sheeran, bully for you.)

Rihanna to collaborate with Chris Brown: I’m generally in favour of forgiveness and second chances, but I hope that anyone unfortunate enough to be able to relate to Rihanna/Brown on a personal level thinks very carefully before using this reconciliation as a source of guidance for their own life.

Mick Jagger gets into the top 10: I wrote about this trend a little while ago, so I’m pleased to see it continue. In many ways, Will.I.Am (who chart guru James Masterton simply calls “William”) is the perfect collaborator for Sir Mick, each being the only one who can avoid being subsumed by the other’s unstoppable uncoolness. He should produce the next Stones album.

David Guetta keeps having hits: The only thing that’s new about the Guetta situation is that he gets credited as an artist as well as producer. Record labels must be worried that all the other dungeon-dwelling producers will rise up and demand credits too, and every video from here to the apocalypse will have to feature a grinning bloke shaking his hair about.

Posted by HAMFAST GAMGEE at 13:14

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Gagging order

10 Feb 12 | Re: The thing with Chris Moyles

Have you heard the shuffle game on the Chris Moyles Show? The premise is simple: they play five random songs from a member of the Chris Moyles Show team’s generic MP3 player, and then try to guess which team member’s tunes they were.

Now, the problem with this isn’t that it fills up hours of radio with a clique of friends playing tissue-thin games with each other and bantering. If that concept offends you, you won’t be listening in the first place. No, the problem, the big, beige elephant in the radio room, is three of the team members’ taste.

The other day, when I “caught” the end of the “feature”, the five songs picked by the Shuffle God were by Robbie Williams, Maroon 5, Snow Patrol feat. Martha Wainwright, U-flippin’-2, and some other gosh-awful jacket-wearing nonsense I can’t remember. First of all, this makes the game impossibly hard because those songs exactly fit the interchangeable musical taste of three members of the team, so the game element is dead in the water. Second and more importantly, featuring that selection on what is meant to be a music radio station for young people —and praising them as “quality” and “such a top tune”— is getting towards a travesty. There’s nothing by any act that came out in the last ten years. There’s nothing that wouldn’t be, that hasn’t been played on Radio 2 – or even Heart. These are the no-thought pop picks of people who are more interested in the MP3 player they play the music on than they are in the music. And of course, strongly featured are U2, the figurehead of everything that is baffling and wrong about Radio 1’s music policy. How do they and the Foos and RHCP and Take That still get on? You’re not telling me young people are into them. Young people can only be dimly aware of who they are.

This is the thing with Chris Moyles. At a time when Radio 1 is a bit worried about the age of some of its presenters, Moyles might be seen as vulnerable. In his favour, though, he has a style that still connects with young people, a great radio presence and manner, a format that people know and like, a preternatural ability to establish a rapport with young, relevant performers including Dappy, Tinie Tempah and Adele, and audience figures that attest to all of the above. Everything, in fact, is still very much on Moyles’s side, so long as he doesn’t talk about music. Music-wise, it seems like the only people he likes are U2, the Foo Fighters and his mate Gary’s band Take That. It’s OK for him to like them, but it’s not appropriate to be pushing them on Radio 1. They are clearly Radio 2 acts, and even I, now at the top end of Radio 1’s target age range, cringe like a fourteen-year-old when I hear them and start mentally composing angry letters to the playlist committee and the BBC Trust. So it seems obvious that the Moyles policy should be to keep him on the breakfast show for the foreseeable, but please, ditch the music talk, grandad.

(Incidentally, Ben Cooper does seem to be in an odd situation in the above-linked article. The BBC are concerned about Radio 1’s average audience age, so he’s kind of having to subtly repel older listeners. That’s ridiculous - if the BBC wants people to switch to Radio 2, it’s up to Radio 2 to get better and attract them, not Radio 1 to blast the poor souls with a dubstep-cannon every hour. Should be judged on the absolute number of target-age listeners, with older ones counting neither for nor against.)

Back to the shuffle game: what made it worse was that after revealing the owner of the five identi-tracks (newsreader and U2 brainwashee Dominic Byrne in this instance), they spent ten minutes barracking the sportsreader Tina for having a load of 90s RnB on hers. Honestly, whatever you think of R Kelly and Another Level, at least she’s got some individuality. At least she’s made the effort to actually be passionate about a particular type of music that means something to her, that isn’t right now acting as the background to every poor Q-reading dupe’s middle age. But sorry, on Planet Moyles R Kelly doesn’t count as “quality tunes” like Embrace and Shed Seven do, so it’s banter ahoy.

I don’t mind Moyles, but he should not be allowed to talk about music on Radio 1.

Posted by SEGISMUNDO BALLESTER at 18:20

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The sweet spot

28 Jan 12 | Re: Proceedings against a gaffer

Like all Spurs fans, here’s what I want out of the Harry Redknapp trial. Harry needs to come out of it with just enough mud sticking to him so that he can never manage the England team, but at the same time not actually have anything proven against him that would cause him to be barred from being in charge of a Premiership club. Just dodgy enough, please, Harry. That’s how we like it.

Posted by LORD DARLINGTON at 19:37

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We are Scylla. We are Charybdis.

24 Jan 12 | Re: Education policy syllabub

Good blog from Michael Rosen here. It is kind of counterintuitive that the government’s big idea to improve schools is to ‘free’ only some of them from government (well, local authority) ‘control’. We’ve been meddling with schools too much, they say, so we’ll set you free and leave you alone so that you can get on with running yourselves. Oh, except that we’re going to keep on meddling with most schools, the same as before. It’s a strange mix of doublethink, buck-passing to the LAs, resigned demoralisation and dogged bloody-mindedness.

I actually quite agree with some of the things they’re doing, but they certainly do need to work out whether they think things like the National Curriculum are helpful or not. If it is, shouldn’t it be applied to favoured as well as unfavoured schools? If not, why are these poor educationalists beavering away writing a new one? Or again, if the LAs are so useless, shouldn’t they be improved? Couldn’t they be improved? Or if not, why are they still running so many schools?

If academy status is so desirable, why do schools need to be given extra money to persuade them to convert to it? (This is the same wheeze that was pulled with specialist schools. Do you think it was the specialism itself that made specialist schools such a success, or the big bag of extra cash that came with it?)

The English Baccalaureate is another funny one. It’s designed, in part, to stop schools getting massive league table credit by pushing kids into doing dubious (easy) qualifications that are better value in the tables than they are in the real world. But as a group, the esteemed academies have been the arch-users of that particular fiddle; so shouldn’t they have had at least one year of newly unfixable league tables before deciding that the academies programme needed tenfold expansion?

Tricky questions to answer, these. What we need is Stephen Twigg. He’ll sort it all out. Especially if he has a nice, long talk with Michael Rosen first.

Posted by GONERIL at 22:05

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Rules, rules, rules

18 Jan 12 | Re: How to live

Some while ago, I posted a little piece about the Scout Law. I said that, except for one questionable point, they aren’t a bad set of rules to live by. So well done Baden Powell, and well done Baden Powell’s well-prepared followers.

It does seem helpful to have a set of rules like this. Nobody has time to work out what to do in every situation from first principles; we all need to simplify the process of living and saying and acting down to some general rules that will make sure we don’t go far wrong, while avoiding spending minutes in slack-jawed cogitation whenever a new circumstance is presented. People have realised this for thousands of years, too. Long before the scouting movement, Moses had come up with his famous Ten Commandments and Jesus had given us His two (love neighbours, love God). I’m sure there have been many more since.

However, while none are without value, some of the above-mentioned do seem a touch vague, or out of date, or incomplete from the modern-day perspective. Therefore, I have had a think and come up with my own set that I think fills in the gaps. I have reduced all that is required for modern living down to six rules, so not quite as many as RBP and significantly fewer than Moses, but three times as many as Jesus, twice Isaac Asimov and six times as many as Danny Wallace.

Are you ready, my disciples?

Of course you are. Without further ado, here is James’s Hexalogue:

1. Never say (or even think) “I can’t be bothered.”
2. If you say you’re going to do something, you have to do it, however daft or inconvenient.
3. Don’t spend loads of time and effort thinking about your own identity.
4. Always have an answer to the question “What are you reading at the moment?” (The vast majority of the time, this should be the name of a book.)
5. Never refuse to make a speech when asked.
6. When owning up to having eaten something, always say, “It was delicious.”

Much like Jesus and Baden Powell (though unlike Moses), I’m not necessarily putting these out there with the immediate intention of forming an organised movement. I’m just spreading my ideas here, and if other people agree and they want to go along with them, then so much the better. If those people then want to form groups, the better to observe my teachings and spread the message, then so much the better. If, in due course, they then want to start venerating me as some kind of prophet or god-like being, then that’s fine as well. But for the time being, all I’m saying is, don’t say you can’t be bothered (and five other things). Be bothered! Be bothered, and it will be the better for you.

Posted by SOPHIA PRIMROSE at 22:12

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Number of muscles??

14 Jan 12 | Re: Facial exertion

“It takes more muscles to frown than to smile, you know!!”

This, of course, is something that simpletons say when they encounter someone who isn’t grinning and skipping around doing jazz hands quite enthusiastically enough for their liking. Sometimes they say “Don’t worry, it may never happen” or “Worse things happen at sea” instead; but the inane frowning/grinning fact is a fave.

Now you probably already realise that this stuff is idiotic. On encountering a gloomy soul, the would-be bucker-up can’t possibly know the cause of his misery. They are essentially playing Russian roulette, tempting fate until someone with genuine, terrible cause to be upset splatters the furniture with their chirpy, upbeat brains. But I have known that for years – decades! – and so have you.

What is new to me, though, is something I have found out now that I have a young baby. From day one, babies are brilliant at frowning. They can’t lift their heads, they can’t name a single member of Atomic Kitten, but frowning is no trouble. Smiling, however, takes weeks or even months. So this number-of-muscles business doesn’t even work on its own facile terms. It is clear, scientific fact that frowning is far easier than smiling. Far easier and much more natural for human faces of all ages. The number of muscles doesn’t come into it. I don’t believe, on reflection, that number-of-muscles-required is, in fact, a thing in any meaningful sense.

So next time you get the chance, frown at a hearty. Put as many muscles into it as possible. You can add a few more by shaking your fist as you frown, if you like. Why not develop a full-body frown that exerts every single muscle in the fullest possible human expression of hatred, misery and disdain. Then ask them if worse things happen at sea.

Posted by RADAGAST THE BROWN at 21:17

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Keeping them at bay

11 Jan 12 | Re: Horrible-looking robots

I’ve put my finger on what it is I don’t like about the new Transformers films. It’s this: the transformer robots all look like freaky insects. When they’re not being cars or planes, you can see far too much of the intricate robot gubbins inside them, just like a blown-up picture of a cockroach where you can see all the folds and weird cavities where a normal person has a smooth outer skin with a proper, convex shape to it.

I don’t think the freakiness of insects can be underestimated, really. I don’t think that all insects should be eradicated instantly, but I think it’s best if they and us normal humans all keep ourselves to ourselves. I lived in Spain for a year and I coped all right, but I would certainly not want to live in a society devised and run by insects: I cannot even begin to imagine the bizarre nature of a real-life insectocracy, and I don’t think you can either. Nor do we want to. So these robots, with their scant pieces of bodywork and their fussy, in-and-out interior-exterior metalwork, stir something of the insectine in the human subconscious. Except that while insects have the politeness to remain suitably small, the Transformers are unduly large.

Urrrgh.

This is the main reason why I have no desire to watch three long films about these singularly unenticing talking alien Volkswagen-based life forms.

Duly having watched none of them, I only know two more things about them. One is that they are too loud. The other is that they all have a token chick in them who then wins the FHM 100 Sexiest Women vote in the year the film comes out. (I don’t read FHM, but I love lists and I always like to know which American actress is currently considered the World’s Best Looker.)

Incidentally, these poll results are very revealing about FHM’s readership. Time was when they would be won by the leading lady in some TV show aimed at twenty- and thirty-something adults, like The X Files or The Adventures of Superman. Now they are won by the eye candy in earth’s most brainless film franchise. If proof were needed that these risibly categorised “men’s magazines” are now read entirely by 13- to 15-year-old boys, there it is. FHM, it strikes me, would be a good place to advertise over-branded deodorant and massively multiplayer online role playing games with orcs in them. It would not be a good place to advertise, say, cars, unless to plant the seed of a brand identity in the nascent consciousnesses of those who might be buying new cars in fifteen years.

I wonder what magazines actual men actually read. Q, I suppose, which in its own way is no less depressing.

Posted by MR ROCHESTER at 13:02

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