A kick in the mouth

There are few things more poignant or tragic than the plight of a former rock star. When the lights have gone down for the final time and the last ligger has departed for more lucrative shores, what do ex-musicians do to pay the bills? It’s a thought that’s been preying on my mind lately, because I’ve been listening to a series of CDs from obscure British rock bands who never managed to swim into the profitable waters of commercial success.

It frustrates me that there is more talent, intelligence and creativity in one song by certain rock bands than in most of this (or any other) week’s top 40 combined. Listening to the brainless bleeps and squawks of modern urban/R&B music could not be further removed from the sculpted melodies, intricate time signatures and considered lyrics of bands like AP&S, Pitchshifter or Reuben. These bands didn’t make vapid and disposable music that appeals to stupid drunk people in nightclubs, and as a result, their fanbases were a fraction the size of their dance and R&B contemporaries, whose songs often were (and still are) written by a committee.

Synthesized beats and Autotuned vocals can cover a multitude of tonal sins, but they fail to disguise the paucity of talent or emotion in a song’s lyrics. However, in popular music, the lowest common denominator usually wins – nothing else can explain why talentless people with nothing to say for themselves (you know who I mean) continue to dominate the singles charts. Glorious exceptions like Plan B or Lucy Spraggan remain exactly that – occasional opportunities for Radio One to punctuate their A playlist’s stream of urban waste.

The greatest tragedy about Reuben’s commercial failure and eventual break-up is that they saw it coming. Consider the following lines, from 2005’s ‘Return of the Jedi’ as a foretelling of the future:

“Guitarist and songwriter – that’s what I thought I was
I never had no dreams of being a waiter,
But these here Helmet rip-offs, they don’t buy my lunch,
So I will get a real job in the office.
And I won’t bother to make my music
And I won’t bother to sing my songs.”

In fact, the guitarist and songwriter in question is now an illustrator, which I suppose is at least a creative industry, where imagination can be unleashed and spleens can be vented. Far worse to end up in the accounts department of some faceless mid-sized company, armed with three cheap suits and a company laptop, sitting through interminable meetings while remembering the show when 600 people bounced in perfect synchronicity to what was then your latest (doomed) assault on the singles chart. Far worse when you once described yourself as a musician, and now you introduce yourself to neighbours as working in logistics, with a deckle-edged business card on permanent standby in your shirt pocket. Far worse to think that nobody listens to your music nowadays because it’s not on Grooveshark or iTunes. But rest assured, alumni of Pulkas, Capdown and Midget. As long as I live on, at least one person will continue to party like it’s £19.99 from Tower Records.

The irrationality of rationality

Here’s an interesting observation, based on a discovery of mine earlier today. If you enter ‘Place de la Mairie Aix-en-Provence’ into Bing Maps, it will sit there for the rest of time, calmly asking you to “wait a moment” while it does the square root of fuck all. On the other hand, you can enter the same search string into Google, and within 0.35 seconds, it’s found the address, shown it on a map, and displayed beneath it the first ten of 2,980,000 web results. Now, consider this. If your chip pan caught fire, and you needed to know the best way to put it out, which search engine would you call upon?

I did actually see a chip pan fire once. It was in a mobile display vehicle outside a Sainsbury’s store, as part of a roving Strathclyde Fire & Rescue public awareness programme, and when I say it went up in flames, I mean the flames were two feet out of the pan. I’ve never cooked chips at home since, and I have had a great respect for the staff at Mr V’s in Battlefield from that day to this. They risk their lives so you can eat greasy carbohydrates, and I bet you don’t even tip them when you collect your deep-fried heart attack with extra pickles.

Which brings me onto my Rant for the Day (you knew it was coming, didn’t you?) Why do we tip people? It’s completely irrational that we tip the person who carries plates across a restaurant, rather than the person who actually cooks the food we’ve gone there to enjoy in the first place. We tip taxi drivers, but not bus drivers. We tip the guy who carries your luggage to your hotel room, but not the maid who’s charged with removing all the evidence of last night’s debauchery and bodily fluids. I tip delivery drivers who bring me the aforementioned greasy carbohydrates, but I’d no more tip my doctor for giving me sound medical advice than I would fly to the moon. And if I did fly to the moon, I probably wouldn’t tip the NASA astronauts who ensured I returned to Earth in the same number of pieces as when I set off. Nor would I play among those stars, but to be frank, that’s another story.

In America, where immigrant children earn $2 a day sewing chillies onto goats, tipping is a valuable way to supplement meagre incomes, and it is regarded as something of a necessity. In Britain, it’s pretty much superfluous, not to mention hugely selective. I worked in retail for six years as a student, and never once did I receive a single penny in tips. And before you judge this (perhaps correctly) to be the embittered rant of a never-tipped sub-minimum-wage shelf-stacking gimp, I didn’t need to be tipped – I was paid for what I did. I would only have spent any tips on solvents and alcopops. And yet I feel guilty leaving a restaurant without tipping, even if the waitress has poured hot consommé into my crotch while picking her nose and criticising my other half’s hairstyle. Admittedly, it would be difficult to manage all three of these things at once, but I’ve met a few waitresses who looked ready to give it a try. One, down in London (where else?) was so surly, she remains a running joke in our house seven years after her night of the long faces.

So anyway, Neil’s Tip of the Day is this. Don’t tip anyone. You’re just sustaining a culture of complacency and expectation that has little justification in the modern age, and what’s more, you’re tipping the wrong people. Tip the ambulance driver who collects you when you dial 999, not the barman who pours you a pint of lager, which is his bloody job, after all. You don’t tip search engines for giving you a world of information in 0.35 seconds, although since Google don’t pay corporation tax in the UK, they’re hardly short of cash as it is. Ooh, I can feel another rant coming on...

Imitation is the sincerest form of battery

My fiancé has become a blogger. This startling revelation became apparent after I spent a couple of hours setting up her account and teaching her how to navigate the CMS software, since when she has blogged variously about crap song lyrics, hating weddings, the subjectivity of humour and the process of ageing. These are all topics close to my heart as well, and I have discussed some of them at various points during my brief blogging career. Indeed, at first glance, it appears there is competition for my title of the best blogger nobody’s ever heard of, except my fiancé isn’t really eligible for that accolade, because her blogs are far more popular than mine. 

In fairness to me, my last blog about feminism was the most-read entry I’ve ever produced. If you missed it, it’s below this one, and if I do say so myself, it’s rather good. However, its readership figures are still dwarfed by anything my dearly beloved consigns to print, which suggests one of several things. Either (a) she’s a lot more popular than me, (b) people prefer to read the words of a pretty girl over anything written by the owner of a scrotum, or (c) she’s a better writer than I am. Or all three. Or any combination. It’s intriguing, and perhaps a touch dispiriting, to realise that the student is teaching the master a thing or two about how to be a successful blogger. And to think I wrote her university dissertation for her. 

It is quite odd reading something a loved one has written. You can almost follow the thought processes from sentence to sentence, but then something completely random and unexpected will appear, and you’ll think ‘crikey. I wouldn’t have thought of/had the nerve to say/questioned the illegality of/ever fancied that.’ It makes me realise that for the last eight months, my other half has probably been clicking onto my blog with the same mixture of enthusiasm, intrigue and slight trepidation I now feel clicking onto hers, in case some sensitive nugget of information has escaped into the public eye. And we’re hardly famous. How much worse must it be if you live your life in the piercing spotlight of publicity? 

Imagine you’re Brad Pitt. No, go on. Just for a minute. Now imagine that your wife’s breasts are trending on Twitter. Not a nice feeling, is it? But wait, it gets worse. Now imagine that their removal is trending on Twitter. A traumatic and deeply personal medical procedure, undertaken to avoid the risk of a life-threatening illness, has become the subject of countless tweets and comments by people you’ve never met, and never will. Can you even imagine how you’d feel going to bed that night, knowing that your life is being splashed across newspaper columns, and dissected on social media sites by avaricious and anonymous people from LA to Larkhall? 

You might have noticed that I don’t reveal too much about myself in these blogs. That’s because I have no idea who’s reading them, or what they’re looking for, or whether an unguarded disclosure might come back to haunt me one day. As a result, I tend to stick to acknowledged facts or general musings, rather than anything subjective or opinionated - I’m quite happy to keep my innermost thoughts, fears and predilections out of the public eye. I just need to hope that my soon-to-be-betrothed is of a similar mindset. Maybe she’ll write a blog about it, to let me know?

Incidentally, if you want to know more about the musings of this sultry wordsmith, her blog can be found at http://bloginstripedpyjamas.blogspot.co.uk. And no, you can’t have her. I bagsied her first.

Here comes the monster

There is an insidious and pervasive force at large among our green and pleasant land right now. You might not have paid much attention to it, alongside daily worries like the gas bill or that parcel that never turned up, but it’s brewing on the horizon like an electrical storm on a hot summer’s evening. It’s taking shape on social media, in press interviews and among the more righteous members of society. And no, I’m not talking about the start of the football season. It’s the jackbooted march of the pro-censorship brigade - led, I’m sorry to say, by a mutant strain of militant feminists.

Let me say at the outset that feminism per se is an entirely laudable aim. Of all the many isms you can accuse me of, sexism isn’t one of them. I disdain prejudice against women, I flatly refuse to visit strip clubs, I abhor boorish chauvinists and I think institutions with female bosses are (dare I say it) generally better run than their male counterparts. I would hate for my daughter (if I had one) to face a tougher life than my son (if I had one), and you certainly won’t be seeing me at Muirfield. Although that’s partly because I hate golf.

So why am I so upset about the recent efforts to force lads mags to obscure their front covers in supermarkets? I hate lads mags, and I find them unutterably depressing. Once, on a flight back from Paris, I was given a straight choice between reading Loaded or Le Monde – they were the only publications in my seat back pouch. Even though I don’t speak French, I chose the newspaper, preferring to try and translate the essence of each story rather than reading about why Chelsy from Wigan prefers pink to brown.

However, there is something deeply worrying about the campaign against lads mags, and it basically boils down to an assault on freedom of speech. Once upon a time, feminism was about demanding equality, and that’s a fine and noble aim. Nowadays, it’s increasingly about banning anything that displeases feminists. In isolation, you may think forcing Zoo and Nuts to cover their, well, covers, is fair and reasonable. But collectively, it’s the thin end of a wedge, and who knows where that wedge stops?

Let me put it like this. It won’t stop here. The more this campaign against what Viz once referred to as ‘the objectification of wimmin’ rumbles on, the more momentum it gathers, and the more danger it poses. What comes after getting lads mags covered up? Why, getting them banned, of course, which is this particular campaign’s underlying aim. Then what? Soft-porn mags. Then what? Max Power (they regularly publish pictures of scantily-clad girls draped over Citroëns, as if either party benefits from this miserable juxtaposition). Then what? The Pirelli calendar. Then what? Erotic art. Then what? Presumably any publication, media outlet or artistic field that in any way, shape or form says, implies or hints that women are in any way different, inferior or distinguishable from men at any activity, ability or function, let alone anything that dares to objectify, glamorise or comment on their aesthetics. Heat magazine is utterly fucked.

The fact is, men and women are different, and the more sensible members of our society embrace and celebrate this, regardless of their chromosomal composition. Sadly, this is not currently a very fashionable perspective to hold, which is why I expect to lose one or two Twitter followers after posting a link to this blog. C'est la vie. I find society’s slow, blinkered march towards the censorship of entirely legal publications unutterably depressing - which, if you were paying attention earlier, is also how I feel about the magazines themselves. I hate them. But to paraphrase Voltaire, although I disagree with what they have to say, I will defend their right to say it. I’m a writer too, just like the teams of journalists and editors who put those magazines together every month. And a ragtag collective of self-righteous moral crusaders should not be able to dictate what I choose to read and write in my lunch hour, just because it offends their sensibilities.

Do you disagree with me? Good. You have every right to. I can say it and you can disagree with it. We live in a free country, where people can make their own decisions about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, risqué or recidivist, and we still have a free press at the moment. I just hope and pray we never live in a country where those who shout the loudest get to dictate what everyone else can read. Or do. Or think.