2015: an alternative review (part 2)

As promised, here’s part 2 of my alternative take on 2015. Same format as part 1, but a different set of irritations. Dig in, you beautiful, beautiful people…

Kanye West

If there should ever come a time when a man is permitted to marry a cloned version of himself then it’s a safe bet that Kanye will be first in line. I know you want to tell me that he’s a genius, an innovator, a true maverick, and that strutting around alone on the Pyramid Stage in filthy decorator’s overalls under a job lot of lightbulbs constitutes some sort of triumph over his critics. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but please don’t expect to sway mine any more than I would expect to sway yours. I used to have a great deal of respect for Kanye – he made genuinely decent music and wasn’t afraid to speak out on issues such as homophobia – a stance largely unheard of in hip-hop circles. But somewhere along the line he has become so absorbed in his own self-importance and the apparent need to remind anyone that will listen (and even those who won’t) that he needs to be respected as an artist that he has effectively been reduced to self-parody. I’m resigned to the fact that he could shit in a paper bag on stage and people would still declare it the boldest artistic statement in the entirety of written history, but personally I’d find him a whole lot easier to respect if he didn’t persist in being a dick at every given opportunity. You’re rich, famous and successful – what are you still trying to prove, and to whom?

Music award shows

I’m going to let the Mercury Prize off the hook here because although it’s been responsible for some highly questionable winners in its time (hello, M People), it does at least recognise that British music extends beyond the lukewarm, play-it-safe fare of Ed Sheeran, James Bay, Sam Smith and Adele. Nope, my ire today is reserved specifically for the Brit Awards and the BBC Music Awards, which may as well be one and the same given their relentless pursuit of celebrating the offensively mediocre. My thoughts on this year’s Brits can be found here and speak for themselves. The BBC Music Awards are basically more of the same, but with Chris Evans (now dyeing his hair a rather fetching ‘Chernobyl sunset orange’) and Fearne Cotton (apparently still a thing) doing their whole ‘we’re still down with the kids, honest’ shtick, desperately trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else that we’re all having fun celebrating The Best of British Music. Rather predictably, the awards were dominated by the wailing banshee Adele (who couldn’t even be arsed to turn up) while Song of the Year (the only category voted for by the public) went to Hozier’s dismal Take Me To Church. That’s right: THERE WERE NO BETTER SONGS THIS YEAR. Honestly, some people don’t deserve ears.

Justin Bieber

Hasn’t he grown up a lot? Hasn’t he matured as an artist? Wasn’t ‘What Do You Mean?’ such a wonderfully strong choice for a comeback single? The answer to all of those questions is, of course, NO. He may look a little taller, a little more tattooed and have a ludicrously lop-sided haircut but he still comes across in interviews as a spoilt brat with absolutely nothing to say for himself. ‘What Do You Mean?’ is the most sorry-sounding, directionless excuse for recorded music I’ve heard all year, not helped by that incessant, panpipe-heavy ‘tropical house’ masquerading as a backing track. Even David Guetta would probably dismiss it as ‘too generic’. That clear enough for you, Justin? Textbook fucked-up child star.

The X-Factor

A confession: I didn’t actually watch it this year, but that’s okay because apparently neither did anyone else (for the most part, anyway). Each year, this low-brow corpse is subjected to the ritual humiliation of being dug up from its grave, dressed in new clothes (from River Island, naturally) and paraded through the streets under the pretence that it’s still new, fresh and relevant. Except viewers are now starting to get wise to the fact they’re being made fools of and switching over (or off). They’ve seen their reflections in the polished turd Cowell’s presenting to them and it’s all starting to feel a bit tired and smell a bit stale. Maybe people are fed up of watching twat-for-hire Grimmy and Rita Ora (from the mean streets of stage school) coming across like your uncle and aunt trying to be down with the kids. Maybe the new presenting team of Murs and Flack didn’t resonate with the viewers in the way that O’Leary apparently did. Maybe people have just stopped caring about someone with a predictable sob story (and a tabloid-unearthed assault/drug/theft conviction) being moulded into whatever Cowell thinks hysterical teenage girls or bored housewives will go for. One thing has always been clear, however – the best thing about X-Factor is clearly earlier in the series where the proudly deluded and genuinely tone deaf are given their five minutes of fame and then ritually rejected from the competition (even better when they storm back in to tell Cowell he’ll be sorry when they have a number one album and their toothless face is adorning billboards across the world). Trouble is, a show focusing entirely on this element would either be tantamount to bullying or the greatest outsider music showcase you’ve ever seen. With that in mind, let’s leave the corpse to fester in the ground next year, eh, Si?

Martin Shkreli

I grow more and more convinced each day that some people are put on this earth with the sole purpose of showing everyone else what a complete and utter twat looks like. A case in point is Martin Shkreli, a snivelling excuse for a bunch of cells who has had both the best and worst year. The kind of person who would genuinely wipe his arse on bank notes, Shkreli first came to the wider world’s attention earlier this year when he acquired the rights to HIV drug Daraprim – and promptly hiked its price by an eye-watering 5,000 per cent from $13.50 to $750 a pill, giving the rather dubious excuse that the extra profits would be used to develop an ever better product (but only after tweeting about raising a middle finger to his critics). He also reportedly paid $2 million for the only existing copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album – although to be fair, no one bought their last commercially available album anyway. His luck now seems to have run out after he was arrested on suspicion of running a Ponzi scheme at his previous company, prompting him to resign as CEO of his present company (are you keeping up with this?). Let’s see the twat buy his way out of this one.

2015: an alternative review (part 1)

2015, eh? It’s been a year of ups and downs, and all that… blah, blah, blah. You’re probably sick of reading about the highlights of 2015 by now, so in keeping with my own personal tradition, here’s a slightly different take on some of the year’s events in the world of music and popular culture in general, with a tiny smattering of politics (but not too much) thrown in for good measure. Part 2 to follow very soon.

Adele

To be clear, I have no issue with Adele as a person. I’ve no idea what kind of human being she is but I’m more than willing to tolerate her continued existence. What I do have an issue with, however, is the hype which surrounded the damp sleeping bag of a third album she saw fit to unleash on us this year. I don’t think anyone was expecting a radical change in direction (a psychedelic jazz-funk opus, for example) but surely the most hardened Adele fan (I’ve no idea how such a concept would even manifest itself) was hoping for more than a tepid regurgitation of EVERYTHING ADELE HAS EVER DONE IN THE HISTORY OF ADELE BEING A THING? Everything about this album smacks of a total lack of imagination, from the uninspiring title (looking forward to ’86’) through to the same lazy preoccupation with trying to patch up shitty relationships. And that’s before we even get to the music, which is basically the aural equivalent of the bitter disappointment experienced on discovering that the cup of tea you’d be looking forward to has now gone cold. It’s a truly sad indictment on the British music industry when this utter puddle of whinge breaks all sales records. She’s getting away with murder and we’re all letting it happen.

Sam Smith

Maybe I just hear things differently to other people. I remember having a conversation with someone at university about M People caterwauler Heather Small and how her voice really grated on me – an opinion met with genuine surprise from the other party who genuinely felt she possessed a perfectly fine voice. History is now repeating itself in the form of Sam Smith. A work colleague agreed with me that his songs were dull, dreary and largely forgettable and then added “but what a voice though, eh?”. See, where a lot of people are apparently hearing the saviour of British soul music, I’m just hearing the incessant whining of a child about to break into a full scale tantrum because his mum won’t let him go to a family wedding dressed as Spiderman. His voice is not only unremarkable, it’s also downright unpleasant to listen to, like a shrill, never-ending apology for wetting the bed. Sometimes, if you listen hard enough, the sounds he emits form actual words. He also has the distinction of making a Bond theme worse than Madonna’s ‘Die Another Day’, something anyone with ears had hoped wasn’t physically possible. Like I say, maybe I just hear things differently, but there are times when it would be preferable not to be able to hear at all.

Donald Trump

There was a time when The Donald was little more than a figure of fun because he didn’t really understand how hair worked and, let’s face it, Trump means fart (if you’re British). And fart jokes never stop being funny, right? In short, he was seen as an eccentric but ultimately harmless character, a bit like Simon Cowell, Lord Sugar or Mr Bean. Somewhere along the line, however, he’s turned into some sort of bright orange bouffant Hitler, spouting the type of venomous rhetoric which ended in old Adolf lying face down in a ditch, on fire. I don’t know whether Trump actually means it, whether he’s just saying what he thinks ‘his’ kind of people want to hear or whether he’s just trying to see what he can get away with, but one thing is clear: if you were standing next to him at a urinal, you’d sure as hell splash the fucker’s shoes.

NME

Yeah, it went free and, in the process, defied accepted science by actually being worse than it was before. Cover stars since they stopped expecting people to pay good money for the ‘pleasure’ have included Sam Smith and that gimp from Twilight who went back for seconds when they were handing out eyebrows. Inside, the magazine is so dumbed down that its few remaining staff may as well come round to your house and act out its contents using brightly coloured sock puppets. As a product, it’s clinging on for dear life but as the go-to music magazine of record, it died a long, long time ago. What a shame it wasn’t allowed to float off to the great newsagent in the sky with at least a modicum of dignity still intact.

TFI Friday

Admit it – if you had your own TV show, wouldn’t you just fill it with your mates and things you like? That’s basically always been the formula for TFI Friday, which made a long-awaited and much-trumpeted return to our screens this autumn following a successful anniversary special in June. But now the dust has settled it’s becoming all to clear that the new series has failed quite miserably to live up to expectations. The format remains largely unchanged and all the familiar ingredients are still there, but it no longer seems to work. Evans grates in a way that he didn’t back in the ‘90s (even when he was in the grip of his very public meltdown) and the whole ‘look at me, I’m rich, I have famous friends and can get away with anything’ vibe no longer feels like good-natured, laddish banter, but now has a distinctly vulgar tone. The music has been dire (U2, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, James Bay, Texas, to name but a few), making Later With Jools Holland look like the Bangface Weekender in comparison, while the celebrity interviews feel stilted and awkward, punctuated by pointless little skits and routines shoehorned into the show for the sake of it. In the 90s, TFI Friday worked perfectly because it captured the alcopop-fuelled lad culture of the Britpop era, but in the 21^st century it just feels like you’re listening to a particularly embarrassing speech full of jokes which fail to land given by an obnoxiously inebriated relative at a family party. Come in TFI Friday, your time is up.