Obsolete

Don't you long for the days when pop music was daring enough to be radical, when its main practitioners weren't drug addicts with nothing to talk about except their own innate self-pity, angst and brain-addling relationships? When social comment amounted to more than just saying "Britain is shit" and bands like the Enemy would have been bottled off any stage they dared to step on?

It seems then that we have a champion in Kate Nash. Yes, that would be the same Kate Nash who over the past year has been entertaining the nation with such profound lyrics as

You said I must eat so many lemons,
'cause I am so bitter.
I said "I'd rather be with your friends mate,
cause they are much fitter"

Her most recent single, Mouthwash, rather than being a completely empty, vacuous, vapid song shat out to help fill up an album being rushed out to follow up the bewildering success of "Foundations" is in fact a comment on the Iraq war. Here are the lyrics to Mouthwash in full:

This is my face, covered in freckles with an occasional spot and some veins.
This is my body, covered in skin, and not all of it you can see
And, this, is my mind, it goes over and over the same old lines
And, this, is my brain, it's torturous analytical thoughts make me go insane

And I use mouthwash
Sometimes I floss
I got a family
And I drink lots of tea

I've got nostalgic don't know
I've got familar faces
I've got a mixed-up memory
And I've got favourite places

And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night (2x)
And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night and I hope everything's going to be alright (2x)

This is my face, I've got a thousand opinions and not the time to explain
And this is my body, and no matter how you try and disable it, I'll still be
here
And, this, is my mind, and although you try to infringe you cannot confine
And, this, is my brain, and even if you try and hold me back there's nothing
that you can gain

Because I use mouthwash
Sometimes I floss
I got a family
And I drink lots of tea

I've got nostalgic don't know
I've got familar faces
I've got a mixed-up memory
And I've got favourite places

And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night (2x)
And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night and I hope everything's going to be alright (2x)

Even the most intrepid of literary critics determined to find a wider meaning or interpretation of the above would struggle to come to any other conclusion that the song is merely anything other than the insecure ramblings of a teenage mind unable to think about anything other than themselves. Nash, however, has other ideas:

“With ‘Mouthwash’ I read this play called Guardians about a female soldier who was pictured torturing Iraqis,” Nash explained to DiS.
“There’s a monologue from her and the one thing she says she couldn’t get out of her head was these women buy toothpaste, like they’re in a totally different world but they’re the same as her.
Perhaps not as ridiculous as some might first think, Nash explained:

“When you strip away everything from someone you have the same basic needs like brushing your teeth so this was saying don’t judge me... it’s a bit of a protest song really.”

Nash's own clutching at such pretentious straws would be more tolerable if so many other music critics hadn't fallen into raptures over her piss-poor compositions. In the wake of Lily Allen, who at least has an eye for some detail, even if it leads to similarly bad lyrics, the music industry, as incestuous and unimaginative as ever has sent out the call out for other young women with affected accents to sing about their inane thoughts. Instead of pointing out the fact that Nash, like other current indie year-long sensations such as the Kooks, are all the products of arts colleges and about as far removed from the working-class backgrounds they pretend to be from as is possibly imaginable, Kitty Empire and other so-called critics have lapped it up. She entered Pseuds Corner for the final paragraph of her review:

For all Nash's exciting newness, her observations can be as prosaic as they are fresh. Indeed, her genius is sometimes accidental. 'This is my body,' she lilts on 'Mouthwash', like some female Jesus, offering herself up for consumption.

Alexis Petridis is one of only a few admirable exceptions.

It's not so much that Nash is a one-off, but rather she epitomises the current wave of "indie" bands and performers. Taking their cue from the incredibly overrated Libertines, the likes of the View and the previously mentioned Enemy, who draw more from the Jam's music without bothering with their lyrics have both hit number one this year with their mundane ordinariness. When you consider that the View's most well-known song is about wearing a pair of jeans for four days, it's hard not to think that what was once counter-culture has like everything turned full circle. You can't help but welcome the likes of Ian Brown's "Illegal Attacks" (mp3) which has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer when the rest of the crop can't see beyond their own navel.

The Arctic Monkeys' second album, which eschewed the dreary obsession with clubbing and pubbing of the first album in favour of a wider view, Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City and the Rakes' Ten New Messages have been the few exceptions from this year's rather meagre crop of new music to dare to address issues such as terrorism, being in an minority and the emptiness of modern existence while not sacrificing the need to come up with a decent tune while at it. We perhaps ought to leave the final comment to John Brainlove:

I think the Iraq War was actually influenced by Kate Nash because she's so fucking brain splittingly awful in every possible way that she brings out the human genocidal impulse.

Labels: Kate Nash, music lyrics, pseuds corner, shit music

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Thursday, July 05, 2007

Cameron in still being an idiot shocker.

Do music lyrics really contribute to a broken society? Actually, scrap that, we know full well what David Cameron really means. Are rap/hip hop lyrics really contributing to a broken society? Are the black kids (because we all know that white kids don't listen to rap/hip hop, and again, they are whom Cameron is more than obviously targeting) that listen to rap/hip hop songs then going out, having listened to the violent, misogynistic, materialistic lyrics, and decide that it's a jolly good idea to form gangs and go out on rape and pillaging sprees?

Dear old David Cameron sincerely thinks so. Not content with making himself look like a complete idiot last year by claiming that Tim Westwood was destroying the moral core of our society by playing other people's records, he yesterday returned to the theme, this time in a bizarre address to the British Phonographic Industry. He apparently proposed, in return for the industry heads taking into account his belief that music lyrics are helping to create a regressive counter-culture, that the copyright for sound recordings should be extended from 50 to 70 years, something the Gowers report of last year opposed and which the BPI has been lobbying heavily for. I posted on that last year, and Tim similarly lays into Cameron here.

While Cameron claims in his speech that he is most definitely not calling for censorship, legislation or the banning of content, as he is after all a liberal conservative, it's more than apparent that he'd certainly rather that such music didn't exist, which ought to show just how intolerant of artistic freedom, or at least musical artistic freedom he is. He wouldn't call for the "banning" of books or ask the publishing firms to consider their responsibilities when distributing literature which contains explicit violence or horror, and while I wouldn't put it past him to call for similar restraint from the film industry, he doesn't seem likely to do it anytime soon. No, the targeting of the music industry is because it's an easy scapegoat, and due to the fact that most of the music Cameron dislikes comes from the United States, few artists and producers are also going to challenge his hypothesis.

In any case, to suggest that it's just one genre of music that has a problem with troubling lyrics is a nonsense. The various offshoots of metal have more than a reputation for misogyny and violent imagery, although maybe it's because that those within that music sub-culture are almost entirely white that Cameron doesn't have a problem with it. He also hasn't referred to the surge of "emo" bands which so excised the Daily Mail last year, scaremongering about how angsty middle-class kids were being indoctrinated with self-hatred and arm-slashing, again probably because its adherents tend to be hideously pale.

More than anything, Cameron has picked on song lyrics because it's something he thinks he understands. This is a man who hasn't ever had to spend a day on the streets of inner London or other cities, except for the cameras. His only other idea for dealing with a "broken society" has been to promote the family, which is all well and good except that it similarly ignores the reality on the ground: you have to deal with what is there, not what you wish was. Most of all, it misses the point. He's blaming the lyrics for having an influence on society rather than person that might have been influenced by them. For a man who supposedly wants to promote personal responsibility, blaming the artist rather than the perpetrator only shows up his continuing political bankruptcy.

Labels: BPI, David Cameron, idiots, music lyrics

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7/05/2007 09:28:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

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