Clubbing. (Or a survey of collective delusion).

Last night I was once again persuaded against my better judgement to engage in that most hallowed of university rituals, the ‘club night’. Now on paper clubbing sounds great; who wouldn’t enjoy getting monstrously drunk with their friends and rocking out to their favourite music? The thing is that the actual experience rarely lives up to those expectations. In my experience at least, the music is almost universally dire. Nights like the acclaimed ‘Fruity’ play to the lowest common denominator and whilst there are always a few good songs thrown in, the DJ seems determined to maintain a low average in quality overall. Despite their virulent protestations, I think everyone in reality feels the same about this. It seems odd to me that friends who are usually known for their taste in avant garde dark metal suddenly seem to know all the words to Justin Bieber’s latest shit on a plate. Or the right mouth shapes anyway. Stylus at Leeds University offers a unique opportunity to survey the behaviour of such doublethinking clubbers, as it has a balcony around the main dancefloor. I challenge you to count the number of people who look like they are genuinely having fun; that is not checking around them constantly to see if they’re being judged/judging others, or adopting a fixed grin whilst vibrating wordlessly to some dire dance track, or simply standing and drinking glumly. The only people who seem to me who actually enjoy themselves are those big same sex groups who are having an evening of ironic frolicking and therefore throwing themselves around with no regard to others, often being glared at by said others for being ‘saddos’ or whatever. I can appreciate that adopting the ‘irony’ approach might actually be pretty fun, but it’s not really a great advert for clubs if they can only be appreciated ironically. Or maybe it is. Maybe nobody actually really enjoys clubbing, except those who possess the insider’s knowledge that the whole phenomenon of clubbing is just one massive joke. Hundreds of thousands of people are nightly engaging in one massive self-parody, and by doing so perpetuating the myth to those not in the know that it’s a legitimate activity. Sometimes I think this can be the only viable explanation.

Even if one discards this theory, irony and self-delusion are nonetheless the predominant abstract nouns present at any given club, except perhaps drunkenness and unsatiated horniness. This is undeniably true. I shall give you a few examples. Last night we went to ‘Wendy House’, a night which advertises itself as ‘Alternative/Goth’ which to my mind suggests a playlist of screaming and blood curdling shredding but which apparently actually includes The Killers and The Human League. (As an addendum, it seems to me that club nights are a bit like political parties. They advertise themselves as being more radical than they actually are, to enthuse the party base and bring out the core vote, but then actually lurch inevitably to the centre in order to please the casual listener/voter. A recent example of this in my life includes a Rock/Indie night at the Faversham which turned out to actually be more Radio 1 dance music, with a token grunge or indie track thrown in every half hour. What I expected at that night was what we actually got at the ‘Goth’ night. Maybe in order to get music that actually appeals to people who only listen to vaguely alternative music you’d have to go to a night that advertised itself as Thrash Metal, or Grindcore. I digress.) To be honest, a night of Killers, HL and The Smashing Pumpkin sounds pretty appealing, so in terms of music it was a good night. Frankly I enjoyed myself. But so much of what I expect of clubs happened that a lot of time I had to stop myself from having a constant smirk on my face. For instance, the spectacle of groups of people spending half the evening taking photos of themselves at clubs is well remarked upon, and I shan’t go into all the hilarities of needing to prove to yourself and everyone else that you’re having a good time here. However, when a nearby acquaintance remarked to a friend of mine “I can’t wait to see these pictures on Facebook” I nearly punched her out of mirth. Why can’t you wait? Is it not enough to be living the experience right now? Are you blind to everyone’s amusing costumes in the here and now, only really realising what they looked like once those people who you actually know are digitised memories on a screen? Has Zuckerberg taken us all for such a ride that we now think our friends don’t actually exist until their image is legally in his ownership? Honestly. I’m surprised she didn’t implode in a scantily-clad mushroom cloud of irony as those few ill-informed words tumbled out of her dribbling drunken gob.

One final point. Something about clubbing seems to enforce the rules of social conformism even more rigidly than usual, which conceptually seems strange, considering the inhibitionless glee with which people down their drinks, and is especially twisted last night, given the philosophy of nonconformism behind much ‘Alternative’ music. Example. I observed several people at various points being berated by their friends for not knowing the words to the songs that everyone was bellowing along to. Such scoldings were generally accompanied by an air of self-annointed superiority; they knew they were in the exclusive club of cooldom and their lyrically deficient friends were not. Frankly this attitude is bullshit, especially when the song in question is Sum 41’s ‘Fat Lip’ whose lyrics include “I’ll never fall in line/become another victim of your conformity”. People are just having fun, if they wanna scream and shout along to a song they love, let them, even if they don’t know the words exactly. As the great Cat Stevens once said: "If you want to sing out, sing out". Who the fuck are you to judge? To be honest, if even that is considered a crime in the supposedly liberationist atmosphere of a clubnight then I don’t see what the point of them is at all.

/rant.

Against Poirot

I'm disgusted by the happy sentimentality of my last post, so I'm going to go back to good old-fashioned hatred.

Poirot is essentially a poor man's Sherlock Holmes. Not literally, of course, since he serves only that peculiar strain of the upper-middle-class who are so utterly detestable and parasitic that you hope they'll all be the culprits. Except that happened once already and then he let them get away with it. It's not an unusual occurrence. In fact, I watched another episode the other day where he let a jewellery thief abscond just because she was charitable enough to show him some brief attention. She even gave him a little peck on his fat, balding head as she was making a getaway. It's good to know that the most cunning criminal can evade the brilliant Hercule Poirot by showing him a bit of leg and slobbering on his face.

And his methods are deplorable. He views himself as a "psychological detective". He laughs at the idea of crawling on his hands and knees to collect clues. Instead, he leans back in his chair, eating buttered goose and psychologically profiling his adversary. No, Poirot. That isn't the mark of a great detective. Take, for example, the unsurpassed Mr Holmes. He went in disguises so brilliant even his dear friend Dr Watson (who, like Scotland Yard's Lestrade, was brazenly stolen and poorly reproduced by the egregious Agatha Christie) couldn't recognise him. He went without sleep and food when he was involved in a case, subjecting himself to horrific physical and mental abuse when he needed to untangle a particularly tricky clue. I doubt Poirot has ever missed a meal in his life, much less suffered serious discomfort for his work. He and his fatuous pop-psychology are not suitable for the role of a detective.

I've almost now exhausted my rage. Yes, this post hasn't been very coherently argued, but my defence for this is that I'm blinded by my anger at the fact that Poirot infects television with his mediocre and half-arsed methods, and lack of detective style.

Less Poirot, more Holmes!