Personal Music and Banality

Life is woe and ecstasy. But, more importantly than that, it's enormously embarrassing and it's filled with other people. I've deleted a few personal posts and rewritten a lot of drafts for posts which were too revealing. They're now all... just terrible. They have the senseless vacuity of the idiot coworker expounding their new-found belief in reincarnation and the same draining sort of banality you'd expect if you removed the pictures and number lists from Buzzfeed and tried to write their pages into worthwhile prose. And, from this, I deduce that such revealing embarrassment is the only method by which I can be interesting, which explains my love of class-clownism.

Here's one: make a random playlist of assorted important or significant songs. Don't think why they're important or significant yet, just make the playlist. Then write a sentence on two on why each of them are. Here's my effort with the songs removed:

• That artist represents the moment I realised that shrugging impassiveness was the best defence to every argument I'll ever face.
• This was the time I tried to introduce Queen to a friend using "Too Much Love Will Kill You". It set our friendship back 6 months.
• This was before I liked music and thought Britney was the height of sophistication. In my defence, I was very, very young.
• This represents THE cult film of university.
• This was the time that I decided I needed a new gimmick and determined I would officially recognise Carlsberg as my preferred lager choice.
• That was the time I stayed up all night crying because I only got 2 kisses on an important text reply. I was very, very young.
• This was the song I listened to at Reading during a moment which at the time I decided was a life-changing moment, but it wasn't.
• This was Nine Inch Nails.
• This was the time I was in a pit at Earl's Court and collapsed under half a dozen other people and thought I'd die.
• That was the song a high school love rival played at a minor Battle of the Bands event. It was impossible to enjoy the track for 8 years. I was very, very young.
• This is the song I've never shared with any acquaintances because it has to be uncontaminated.
• This was the time I discovered that some music suits some alcohol better than others.
• This was the best song in the world for years but is now unplayable due to the artist's subsequent involvement in heinous crime.
• This song's lyrics were a betrayal. And also pretty crass. I was very, very young.

I'm not sure what I learned through all that. Still, it killed some of this Saturday morning when I was supposed to have a lie-in but didn't.

New Employment, New Dangers

I've settled comfortably into my new office role. Despite expected teething problems, such as horrifying initial incompetence and why-is-no-one-else-wearing-a-suit-syndrome, it's going okay. The people, though different from my usual crowd of hapless, giggling misfits, are affable and approachable. The office, though lacking in privacy and humidity, is spacious and calming. The work and procedures, though at first bewildering, are slowly sinking in and becoming familiar and comfortable. My major current concern is the office radio.

I like good music, not popular music, ffs. I feel like an old man, or, more accurately, a fraudulent geek. I don't understand these new cultural references. Why is everyone laughing when someone says a singer sounds like Avril Lavigne? I thought it was Avril Lavigne. And, anyway, what happened to Avril after her fabulous I'm With You. Wow, that was a cool song. Pretty nifty, in fact. Hip n' shit. But I don't understand. How come some of these new-fangled accepted songs have industrial-like instrumentals on when my own music is disregarded for its "noisome" tone? For what purpose auto-tune?

And why do they only ever sing about their worthless, failed relationships, their disgusting history of the inbreeding of the vacuous and the banal, their half-baked misremembrances of fictionalised saccharine pairings, concocted in the sweaty mind of the songwriter and regurgitated by a singer devoid of personality or flair, and whose entire claim to celebrity entitlement stems from a stealthy act of fellatio gleefully delivered to an emotionless Simon Cowell at the beginning of a long and sticky journey through a well-watched but ultimately soulless reality television show?

I even had the chance to put an end to the madness today. There was some dispute in the office when the Luddites in the row behind complained that their analogue radio clashed with the echo of the DAB radio next to me. I stupidly, selflessly fixed everything by pointing out that our radio could also receive and transmit an FM signal. Now I'm stuck in the Dark Age of analogue listening to popular music.

I can feel it eroding my soul. I have to come home and bathe in the disinfectant of Black Sabbath.

But they also have a nice water cooler here. So, like, swings and roundabouts.

Kaiser Chiefs: A Brief Study of Lyrical Mediocrity.

This study is almost so brief that it may as well be left to the title to say it, but I'll expand a little.

The Kaiser Chiefs, along with The Killers and suchlike, were one of the new indie bands everyone liked when I was about 15. Indie had nothing to make me like it. It was popular and bland, and thus beyond redemption. It stood out in no category. Musically? Below average. Passion? Below average. Lyrics? Below average. And yet I decided I liked the Kaiser Chiefs enough to refrain from turning off their music where possible.

It is possible, if not likely, that I professed to like them purely to increase my credibility should I ever make the dubious claim that I'm a tolerant person with regards to music.

Anyway, they were, for the album I had, mostly harmless. 


And then I heard their single "Ruby". The first two categories remained unchanged, but lyrically, they had gone from "below average" to "psychotically poor". For those who haven't heard this delight, the chorus goes something like:

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby
And do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya
Know what ya doing, doing to me?
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby

Well, they still sold well, so I'm told, so clearly my opinion is less commercially-viable than your average music fan's. But what annoyed me even more than Ruby was a different song I happened to hear, called "The Angry Mob". Why did it annoy me more? Because it crossed over from the vapid and unimportant to the vapid and "political". 

Maybe I'm just a snob. I mean, In and of itself The Angry Mob isn't so vapid (of course, it's not so worthy that it deserves a proper lyrical synopsis here. Suffice to say that it doesn't like Daily Mail readers). It ends with the repeated chanting of: 

We are the angry mob
We read the papers everyday day
We like who like
We hate who we hate
But we're also easily swayed

And, in many ways, this is a fair and accurate summary of the right-wing paper-readers they speak about. So maybe I'm wrong to criticise it. It's bland and inoffensive (and harmless), just like the band itself, you could argue. The problem is that, as recently shown at Glastonbury, many people appear to regard this as the pinnacle of lyrical excellence. Wondering around near the back of The Other Stage, I saw people chanting this with such devotion and such wonderment. There's no way that this is because of its hypnotic music quality. It has none. Perhaps people are simply caught up in the moment of seeing an act they've seen on TV before. However, when criticising the lyrics, I was informed by an intelligent and astute friend, that I was wrong in my choice of target.

Regardless of what people actually thought of the lyrics (and, as indie fans, there's a good chance they weren't thinking at all), the problem is that people will see that this group is popular, hear their lyrics, and place an unnaturally large emphasis on the worth of what the Kaiser Chiefs have to say to them. However, people sometimes forget that indie, as a genre, is devoid of any lasting political significance.

I'm not a snob and I appreciate and empathise with what I assume the Kaiser Chiefs' views are. However, reaching such a wide audience, they have a responsibility - when using political lyrics - to be outstanding, to show real intellectual worth, and make people really think. With such simplistic and monotonous lyrics, they waste this opportunity. They appeal to the lowest-political-common-denominator. With laziness like that, they may as well write papers for the angry mob themselves.

InMe

Dave McPherson, frontman of InMe, one of the most criminally-underrated bands in history, is releasing a long list of signed/personalised memorabilia, gig experiences, and other awesome gifts as part of a pledge drive to raise money for UNICEF and to promote his new solo album. The prices are fantastic too, considering the level of devotion which InMe inspire in their followers. Of the people I know reasonably well, maybe 4 could be considered InMe fans. We're all borderline obsessed. They're addictive. I find myself going a week at a time listening to nothing but InMe because, by comparison, everything else seems crap. The lyrics are beautifully written and sung with haunting vocal hooks, and the guitar work is superb, particularly in the later albums. People don't always like them the first time, but listen twice or thrice, and you're hooked. They don't have a big following, unfortunately, but those people who know them love them.

I guess it's good that their following isn't too big really. It means I can buy a home gig for £500. Now if I only had £500... I can still afford the handwritten lyrics or the signed photos. Maybe the VIP pass for the Brighton gig. Fantastic stuff. I urge everyone to listen and love.

P.S. I'm now tempted to ask my brother to pay for InMe to play at his wedding. His fiancée probably won't mind.

P.P.S. ALMOST FORGOT! Here's the link to the pledge drive where you can buy the stuff:

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/davemcpherson/pledge

P.P.P.S Here's me with the man himself!
Image removed as part of the privacy drive (26th July 2011)