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 21st 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.
