Ladies and gentlemen, I have been inspired to musicianship. I have picked up a guitar and am fully dedicated to the cause of becoming an international rock star by this time next Thursday. Bear with me, though, it's not the idea of snorting suspicious powders off of fresh stripper breasts that has enticed me into the exotic world of axemanship, but the fact that everything in the charts is so rank awful that recreating it really didn't seem too difficult. I have a guitar - two, in fact - lying around the place, and almost limitless free time to faff about with them, so why not have a go at writing the next 'London Calling'?
Well, if you want the short answer, it's because you could pretty accurately recreate my entire repertoire by throwing a guitar at a wall.
The problem was that I was stumped by a real guitar in the same manner as I was stumped by Rock Band; try as I might, I simply cannot get fingers on both hands doing different things at the same time. It's like the pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-stomach trick, but with added twanging around and well-rehearsed failures at improvised cool. After the fourth time I went for what I thought would be an impressive new lick and dropped the thing on my foot, I went back to bed and had a lie down. Then I got up to have another go and found that the thing had somehow managed to detune itself by magic, and after that couldn't be bothered.
This rock star thing obviously requires more dedication than I had assumed.
This doesn't take away from the fact that the charts are getting worse. I'm fairly sure this isn't just me getting old, and that scientific theory could be employed to empirically prove how awful the bloody Ting Tings are. Almost everyone I know has spent as long as they can remember bemoaning the lack of guitars in popular music, and now they're back, nobody can wait for them to piss off again, as now 'rock' has become the domain of children with floppy haircuts and the wrong gender of jeans. Somehow, this makes it even worse. If popular culture was previously passing us by, it's now walking in unannounced, picking it's nose in the sitting room and wiping it's bogeys all over the furniture. Much as we maligned the fact that good music was seen by the masses as the domain of outcast old duffers, we were those duffers and that music was ours. The next thing I know I'm standing somewhere unpleasant and expensive listening to an 'ironic' rap cover of 'Peaches' by The Stranglers. For the entire first verse I thought the DJ was talking over the record.
I think the key difference is that, last time 'guitar music' was the in thing, you could sit back, listen and say "wow, this guy can play". You were impressed, taken in by the technical and artistic ability on show. Now it seems like things are decided more by the fullness and body of a singer's hair; every time I see a picture of the bloody Ting Tings that awful woman is leaning back just so she can see out from under it. That's not the stuff of rock and roll. Rock and roll should have singers who's hair is the result of being too busy being amazing to bother to go to the barber's. I like to pretend that Ozzy Osbourne only has his hair long simply because he is on such an alternate plane of rock that haircare simply doesn't exist. The idea of someone being paid to trim bits off your head would seem so ludicrous that he'd probably slap you in the mouth then and there. You might as well be asking him to butter a unicorn.
I think it's the crossing of two different eras that confuses everyone; The nineties were the nineties because everyone had talked it out and decided that the eighties were probably left alone and unmentioned, hidden behind the bog roll at the back of the generational cupboard. That's how things were supposed to be done. Then, once the Noughties rolled around desperately seeking an identity, it briefly flirted with punching out old ladies before it rooted around in the cupboard, pulled on it's gold lamé tights and went off 'ironically' dancing to Queen. Thus begins a fashion false dichotomy where on one side you have the old crusties that are taking it seriously, and the fashionistas are taking it seriously as well, but only on an 'ironic' level that, even though they don't actually like it, it's fashionable because it's fashionable - Frankie Goes To Hollywood haven't seen so many shirt sales since 1982, but then I don't think anyone really liked Frankie Goes to Hollywood then, either, so perhaps that's a bad example, but I saw a girl wandering around a nightclub the other day in a Frankie Says Relax shirt and gold lamé tights while Dizzee Rascal played in the background and it all but instantaneously gave me a headache.
Maybe I'm wrong. I am, after all, an idiot of some not inconsiderable renown. Maybe this is all very positive, and come 2010 will be spurring the nation into a repeat of the early 90's 'Greed is Good' boom, thus restoring us all to wealth and health via the medium of old Stone Roses records. Perhaps that's been the plan all along. Maybe in a few years we'll all be swept along on a current of new hope and renewed prosperity, sweeping all before us with grandiose gestures on top of an open-top bus of a new exciting era for Britain and British culture, led eloquently from the front by an ageing and erudite Liam Gallagher. I don't know. I couldn't tell you.
I just wish that awful woman would get her stupid hair out of my childhood.
Well, if you want the short answer, it's because you could pretty accurately recreate my entire repertoire by throwing a guitar at a wall.
The problem was that I was stumped by a real guitar in the same manner as I was stumped by Rock Band; try as I might, I simply cannot get fingers on both hands doing different things at the same time. It's like the pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-stomach trick, but with added twanging around and well-rehearsed failures at improvised cool. After the fourth time I went for what I thought would be an impressive new lick and dropped the thing on my foot, I went back to bed and had a lie down. Then I got up to have another go and found that the thing had somehow managed to detune itself by magic, and after that couldn't be bothered.
This rock star thing obviously requires more dedication than I had assumed.
This doesn't take away from the fact that the charts are getting worse. I'm fairly sure this isn't just me getting old, and that scientific theory could be employed to empirically prove how awful the bloody Ting Tings are. Almost everyone I know has spent as long as they can remember bemoaning the lack of guitars in popular music, and now they're back, nobody can wait for them to piss off again, as now 'rock' has become the domain of children with floppy haircuts and the wrong gender of jeans. Somehow, this makes it even worse. If popular culture was previously passing us by, it's now walking in unannounced, picking it's nose in the sitting room and wiping it's bogeys all over the furniture. Much as we maligned the fact that good music was seen by the masses as the domain of outcast old duffers, we were those duffers and that music was ours. The next thing I know I'm standing somewhere unpleasant and expensive listening to an 'ironic' rap cover of 'Peaches' by The Stranglers. For the entire first verse I thought the DJ was talking over the record.
I think the key difference is that, last time 'guitar music' was the in thing, you could sit back, listen and say "wow, this guy can play". You were impressed, taken in by the technical and artistic ability on show. Now it seems like things are decided more by the fullness and body of a singer's hair; every time I see a picture of the bloody Ting Tings that awful woman is leaning back just so she can see out from under it. That's not the stuff of rock and roll. Rock and roll should have singers who's hair is the result of being too busy being amazing to bother to go to the barber's. I like to pretend that Ozzy Osbourne only has his hair long simply because he is on such an alternate plane of rock that haircare simply doesn't exist. The idea of someone being paid to trim bits off your head would seem so ludicrous that he'd probably slap you in the mouth then and there. You might as well be asking him to butter a unicorn.
I think it's the crossing of two different eras that confuses everyone; The nineties were the nineties because everyone had talked it out and decided that the eighties were probably left alone and unmentioned, hidden behind the bog roll at the back of the generational cupboard. That's how things were supposed to be done. Then, once the Noughties rolled around desperately seeking an identity, it briefly flirted with punching out old ladies before it rooted around in the cupboard, pulled on it's gold lamé tights and went off 'ironically' dancing to Queen. Thus begins a fashion false dichotomy where on one side you have the old crusties that are taking it seriously, and the fashionistas are taking it seriously as well, but only on an 'ironic' level that, even though they don't actually like it, it's fashionable because it's fashionable - Frankie Goes To Hollywood haven't seen so many shirt sales since 1982, but then I don't think anyone really liked Frankie Goes to Hollywood then, either, so perhaps that's a bad example, but I saw a girl wandering around a nightclub the other day in a Frankie Says Relax shirt and gold lamé tights while Dizzee Rascal played in the background and it all but instantaneously gave me a headache.
Maybe I'm wrong. I am, after all, an idiot of some not inconsiderable renown. Maybe this is all very positive, and come 2010 will be spurring the nation into a repeat of the early 90's 'Greed is Good' boom, thus restoring us all to wealth and health via the medium of old Stone Roses records. Perhaps that's been the plan all along. Maybe in a few years we'll all be swept along on a current of new hope and renewed prosperity, sweeping all before us with grandiose gestures on top of an open-top bus of a new exciting era for Britain and British culture, led eloquently from the front by an ageing and erudite Liam Gallagher. I don't know. I couldn't tell you.
I just wish that awful woman would get her stupid hair out of my childhood.
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