Art of Badger

Procrastination

2006-05-03T00:21:00.000+01:00

I've had some great ideas to post here, but I never actually seem to get down and write them. So, here's to PROCRASTINATION! I promise to try harder with this whole blog thing. I've decided to write some more stuff about pop music and Madness and maybe The Doors and things like that. It seems to appear when it's good and ready, so perhaps this is the start!

2005-06-05T19:13:00.000+01:00

Danny McNamara from Embrace's singing voice sounds just like the honking of some kind of wading sea-bird

Westlife

2005-05-17T23:40:00.000+01:00

I'll be the first to admit, I was a bit late to the Westlife party. The first that I'd really heard of it, Brian 'westlife' McFadden had left Westlife and was touting his 'lite' Bryan Adams around the place. If you can imagine Bryan Adams without his pop nous and a less raspy pop/rock voice then you're pretty close to how he sounds. I managed to sit through almost one and a half minutes of his latest single when I saw it on the television before I dug out the remote control and muted the tv.

His songs are an utter abomination, they have seem to have no intellect behind them. I can't quite begin to comprehend the mindset behind somebody that can be in a pop band for almost 5 years, or whatever it is, and leave with almost no idea about what makes a good arrangement for a 'pop' song. The song splutters into a pseudo chorus, and the listener is left wondering, 'Was that the chorus? It didn't sound like a chorus. Is it even in the same key as the rest of it?' If I worked on a farm then I'm sure I'd have a pretty good idea when the farmer was driving a tractor backwards around a field. Granted, he didn't write any of the songs while he was in Westlife, but surely you'd get some grasp about what made a good song through working on a farm, or in this case, singing insipid karaoke bollocks.

When Take That appeared I loathed them, they were everything that my teenage mind rebelled against, I was listening to Rage against the machine and The prodigy, and they were just another awful boyband. In hindsight they wrote some pop classics, and in my mind there is no greater ideal than the perfect pop song. For notes on the perfect length of a pop song, watch this space. Take that at the time seemed to be devoid of any 'edge'. When I say that, I don't mean a bearded Irish guitarist who goes by the same moniker, I mean danger, excitement and intrigue. Suddenly they turned into something interesting with good tunes, danger, excitement, intrigue and Lulu.

Take that quit while they were ahead, which is a lesson in sense for a lot of bands. The top of the list of distinguished bands who should have quit while they were ahead begins with Madness, which will be left for another time. From the ashes of Take that rose Boyzone who were like Take that, but with no tunes and no danger. At the time, I remember thinking that Boyzone were an insipid photocopy of Take that. Garaunteed to cause zero offence to any given demographic, and with zero charisma. Robbie Williams had more charisma in his fringe than the entire of Boyzone.

If you can imagine a safer, more non-descript, more insipid, more karaoke, more wank version of Boyzone, then you'd NEARLY be close to how safe, non-descript, inspid, karaoke and wank Westlife were. They should be given some kind of rusted backward, retarded trophy for pushing pop music back into the dark ages. This is the sort of stuff that can turn somebody off pop music for life. It's the sort of thing that could turn somebody to listen to Jet.

From this, Bryan McFadden arose, and spread his shit smeared clipped pop wings. This sort of evil should be banned by the government, it rots the mind of the populace. As David Bowie once said 'This ain't rock and roll, it's GENOCIDE!'

This ain't rock and roll it's

EVIL

Phil Collins (I thought I'd never say these words)

2005-05-17T18:42:00.000+01:00

I never thought I'd say these words, but I'm about to say them

'I prefer the Phil Collins version'

It's sticks a bit to say it but it has to be said. After hearing Steve Brookstein's cover version of 'Against all odds' it makes the Phil Collins original seem like a soulful, moving ballad. Morrissey was asked to review a crop of singles for the magazine 'Star hits' in 1985. He described 'Golden Days' by Bucks Fizz like this :

"One would hear more vocal passion from an ape under anaesthetic."

This exactly how Steve Brookstein sounds. I was shocked to hear this song, it sounds like Seal after a bottle of wine and 40 Valium, or Lemar after a car accident, which left damage to his frontal lobes. The most surprising thing is that somebody who has supposedly spent so much time playing to audiences (16 years according to his website) seems to have failed utterly to comprehend what makes a performance special. He apes ( ! ) the singing style of other artists without grasping that it's not necessarily the notes that you sing, it's the feeling behind them. If you listen to the guitar solo from 'Southern Man' by Neil Young then you can get an idea of what this means. Neil Young plays the same note a grand total of 14 times in one part of the solo, and generally makes a bit of a hash of the whole thing. Neil Young gets across an emotion to you without actually doing very much and in a very sloppy way without much skill, but you can FEEL what he's getting across to you. The guitar howls in frustration. Steve Brooksteins' singing has no feeling whatsoever, it sounds like he's singing your pizza order back to down the phone. If I saw this guy doing Karaoke I'd give him a polite clap, and hope that he stays sitting for the rest of the night. I have heard better Karaoke than this.

The most surprising thing of all though, is his popularity. It makes me wonder what goes on in the minds of people who go out and buy this stuff. Why are they in on a Saturday night? There are much better things to do than watch television. If television is chewing gum for the eyes, then Steve Brookstein is dog dirt for the ears. Is the reason for his poularity the fact that he's on the TV every saturday night for several weeks? Wouldn't life be better if somebody with at least an atom of talent had won this pathetic contest, or do people actually believe that he's talented?

Imagine a twisted universe where Ray Charles is dead, and Steve Brookstein is held up as a man who has 'Soul' Unfortunately that place is this universe, and no matter how many scientific theories about parallel universes that you read about, none of them can help us with this particular problem. If you can imagine the cack-handed daubings of a chav 'graffiti artist' in the car park of your local Kwik-Save and then imagine the Mona Lisa, This is the difference between Steve Brookstein and pretty much anyone else who'd ever recorded a song. I could release a single of me singing 'Two garlic breads and a litre bottle of coke' in the style of Stevie Wonder, and I'm pretty sure I could get across more emotion than this turgid pile of festering beige mundanity

Is there any hope for mankind with this sort of injustice in the world. Sometimes I think not.

Good evening

The beginning

2005-05-17T17:33:00.000+01:00

I normally run a mile from the idea of a blog, but I thought it might be quite a nice idea. Most of the other blogs I've read seem to be written by illiterate morons with nothing interesting in their sad, self absorbed lives. Only time will tell if mine is going to be any different.

I wanted to get something down about music mainly. I'm sure that nobody's interested in what goes on in my life, it's dull enough for me, never mind anybody else to have to read. I've seen ones with god-awful sixth form poetry so I suppose I'll start with my take on sixth form poetry

I post infrequently on the Board of Biffo. Mr Biffo was the writer of 'Digitiser' which was a computer games review page on Teletext up until a few years ago. It was rather subversive and he used to have constant battles with the bosses of teletext about what he could and couldn't put on there. He started off a forum for people who liked digitiser and there's a few good people who post there. One of them spotted a poetry message board based in the states and we descended on it and posted some really good stuff. We were pretty much rumbled within a week and we haven't been back for a while but it was fun while it lasted. This was my first contribution.

It's a poem about alienation, mainly, I wanted to get across exactly how I was feeling right now.

Rotten ham, like a smock of mince
I too own a full hat of meat
Disown me, trouble me
But don't mock my hat of meat.

Take away my offal loafers,
smear me with cheddar and tease my teddy-boy hair,
But don't mock my hat of meat.

Free me,
spill me,
over-fill me with pomegranates,
But don't mock my meat hat.

http://mb.sparknotes.com/mb.epl?b=128&m=1038595&h=mince

To think that anybody could read this and think that it was a serious poem beggars belief really, but we are dealing with Americans mostly. It's a scientific fact that their irony gland is underformed.

That's enough for the moment.

Good evening.