The reason I need to rant is summarised here. Yes, having your wife die of cancer apparently absolves you of all sins if you believe the tabloids. If your clicking finger has failed you, let me summarise.

Jack Tweed, professional hanger on and husband of the late Saint Jade of Bermondsey has been sentenced today to twelve weeks imprisonment for what The Sun admits was a ‘vicious assault’ of a taxi driver in May last year. Despite this, there is an incredibly sympathetic air to the above article, with Tweed being pitied as ‘grief-stricken’ and ‘tender’ in his nursing of his terminally diseased wife.

The main bugbear for me is how it seems to gloss over the violence that Tweed committed purely on the basis of who he was married to. This is wrong. If you commit a crime, you deserve the punishment. In Tweed’s case, the crime was commited previous to his now wife’s medical problems, and therefore cannot justifiably be used as an excuse for his actions. Whilst it is obviously sad that a man has become a widower at 21, it should never be a reason why he should be given special treatment when it comes to the law. The fact is that this is a man who, whoever he is now, has seriously injured two people through no fault of their own. Since when is it OK to gloss over that just because you’re in the papers a bit?

A secondary issue is why this man is excused from questioning for his post-Goody actions. If someone you knew went out for a Chinese the night after their wife died, would you not question the genuinity of their love for that person? Would you not think it was a bit off for them to be going to a theme park with a glamour model a week after her funeral? I would hope so, and yet because it’s Jack Tweed, it’s put down to grief. Call me cynical, but it makes me feel like he is using her death as an excuse, that he saw an opportunity to be absolved for his actions by marrying with a dying woman.

It all makes me a bit angry. The Saint Jade saga in general has had that effect on me, if I’m honest. It’s the change from complete vilification to Princess Diana like adoration which is now being transferred into pity for a violent criminal. So what if Tweed has changed since then? He still did those things. And there is no telling whether he even has changed. Are we supposed to believe it just because he supposedly cared for a terminally ill woman? Can we even believe that that happened, considering his actions since his wife’s death?

Soft soaping of idiots in the media shouldn’t be happening. It gives the message that it’s OK to hit a bloke with a golf club if you have a famous dead wife, or that it’s OK to be a racist when you get cancer. Anyone with sense probably knows that it’s not. But then, such people are probably about 1% of The Sun’s readership. And it’s nobody’s fault but theirs for buying it.

I knew as soon as I started this project that I was going to have to listen to Metal Machine Music. How could I not? It’s infamous, considered by many to be the worst album of all time. A piece worse than anything Yes could produce. Worse than a Razorlight album, as utterly baffling as that is. It’s considered so bad that it’s widely considered to be a joke, a fulfillment of a contractural obligation, or a “fuck you” to the people who adulated his sublime glam-rock extravaganza Transformer, then abandoned his more challenging, downright depressing Berlin, a rock opera about two junkies whose love affair is ultimately doomed. As myth, I think I like the latter; it encourages you to imagine Lou Reed, so pissed off at people who were expecting another Transformer, alienated by the darker subject matter and downbeat tempo of Berlin, rejecting it like a cast-off jizz tissue, that he spends months of painstaking studio work and where he sets up the guitars to basically play themselves to come up with an album so offensive to the ears that thousands of people return the album after buying it. A middle finger cast in noise.

I like that Lou Reed. But the rational part of me suggests that Lou Reed is not that bitter and twisted, more’s the pity, and Metal Machine Music is at least semi-serious, even if, to paraphrase the great man himself, he was pretty much stoned the whole time. The “Metal Machine Music is Lou’s revenge for the poor treatment of Berlin” theory kind of goes out the window when you remember that there’s an album between Berlin and Metal Machine Music, one which was actually the highest charting album Lou Reed has made. People always forget Sally Can’t Dance; then again, it is instantly forgettable. At least Metal Machine Music will be permanently seared into my brain, a hot branding iron of pure twisted musical hell into my noiseholes.

Again, I was prepared to be charitable; some people have found something to love in it. Certainly Lou Reed has, who claims rather grandiously from time to time that he invented the entire genre of heavy metal with this album. (One doesn’t have the heart to tell him Black Sabbath existed at least 7 years before Metal Machine Music was a whine in a guitar’s amp.) Others have made similar, though less utterly laughable, claims; from punk to electronica, to industrial and yes, heavy metal, anything vaguely discordant have been suggested as genres inspired by Metal Machine Music. So I went into this with my prejudices ready to be disabused, if not discarded.

It’s an hour of feedback.

Let me say that again. It’s an hour of feedback.

For those hard of reading, once more. It’s an hour of feedback that I had to listen to.

That’s really all I need to say on the matter; it’s all you really can say on that matter. There’s no real breaks, no real pauses, it just drifts on and on, a screeching squall of useless noise. But that would be kind of a cop-out, so let’s explore this a little bit further. What are the effects of listening to a full hour of feedback on the human body?

One starts almost bemused. “Surely it’s not as bad as people have been suggesting?” And you begin to listen, and you hear feedback. You’ve heard it before. It’s been used to great effect; most successfully, in my opinion, in Gang of Four’s song Anthrax. So you begin to think “hey, this can’t be that bad. I quite like feedback. Then it begins to get hypnotic. The repeated, discordant sounds fill your brain and you can begin to think about nothing else. Here’s a short, sharp squawk which sounds like a hawk swooping down on an unsuspecting prey, followed by what sounds disconcertingly like the scream of something frightened and dying. Over here, the repeated vibrato that reminds you of echoes in a dark, dank cave. If I close my eyes, it’s probably as close to an experience in a sensory deprivation tank as you can get for free, you mooching bastards, without being caught doing naughty things for Allah in some desert hellhole and being sent to Guantanamo, and even that’s nearing the end of the line (cheers, Big Barry Obama).

The smartest of you will realise I have just compared Metal Machine Music to torture. That’s because it is, after a while. The noises, after worming their way into your brain, begin to take on a more concrete form in your brain. It begins to throbb. This is what a migraine sounds like, and after Part II you will begin to wish you hadn’t been born. The initial Metal Machine Music had a cunning little groove which meant that the last 3 seconds or so looped on infinitely if the record wasn’t stopped, making the album technically infinite. I think that was removed because of the Geneva Conventions. Honestly, more than an hour of this and I think you would begin to go slightly loopy, especially if you were doing the whole sensory deprivation experiment on the cheap.

Then very loopy. To go into a slight tangent here, the experiments into sensory deprivation (which were secretly funded by the CIA in order to find out ways to prevent Soviet brainwashing and possibly carry out some of their own, along with good ol’ fashioned torture; I know I sound like a ranting hippy here but this shit really is true) noted that one became, initially, first hallucinating, then very suggestable when faced with total sensory deprivation, (that is, placed in a darkened capsule, floating so you can’t really touch anything, and with white noise not unlike Metal Machine Music‘s distorted feedback pumped in so you are unable to think) to the point where one would abandon one’s sincerely held beliefs quite readily. The experiment was cut short after it was found people really found it utterly unbearable, and the experimenters noted that it would be quite a lapse in ethics to take the experiment further, since it seemed to actually be a form of torture, as severely mind-shattering and awful as any form of physical abuse. Remember that the next time some spineless, lisping jackbooted twat from the Daily Mail scoffs that these unruly Dusky Hordes just can’t handle a bit of white noise, scoff scoff scoff we’re not electrocuting anyone’s genitals so it’s not torture (well, we’re not, we just employ those that do).

So, yes. Metal Machine Music is pretty much migrane-inducing at the micro level, and very probably torture at the macro. But I can’t, wholeheartedly suggest that it’s the worst album ever. I’m not really sure that it even counts as an album, in any kind of way that we’d normally think about it. It’s just there, seeping into your very pores until you can’t stand it. It loops before those last two seconds, by the way, a dull, throaty roar that makes your ears itch and your fingers begin to tremble. And then it stops, and you breathe a sigh of relief. Metal Machine Music is not really an album in the normal sense. It’s an experience. Now I know that sounds unbearably wanky and stupid, but I mean it in a very physical sense, not in the way most music journos use it, when they want to claim that yer latest three-chord-wonder is some kind of superlative visionary and “experience” is the only word they’ve got to express that in the Big Book of Music Journo Cliché, visionaries only in the sense that Zack Snyder is “visionary” (“What?!?” I spluttered as I saw the trailer for Watchmen. “I guess in the sense that he is able to see.”) It’s an experience in the same way BASE jumping for non-mentals, or running with the bulls in Pamplona, or cycling the Tour De France as a rank, wheezing amateur is an experience. Something it’s interesting to do once, to test your tolerances, and as a point which commands instant bragging rights, but something you’d be insane to want to do again. That’s as close as I can explain the appeal of Metal Machine Music, although obviously getting a bit headachey is a very poor comparison to things that involve genuine mental and physical strength. But I’m a wimp, so it’s the closest I’m getting.

I was prepared to defend prog rock, you know. Well, not exactly defend, but explain that it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. One of the big founding myths of punk was the early-70s-as-cultural-wasteland. Pop music, in the guise of “prog rock” had become flabby, flaccid, stale, too disgustingly arty and impure, filled with pretention and masturbatory attempts at marrying jazz style improvisation with classical pomp, detached from a world which seemed to be in decline, more interested in dragons, feudal Merrie England and Tolkienesque pastiches than the social situation in 1977. Something had to be done to destroy this, just tear it down, go back to basics with just three chords and a lot of rage and anger and bring the whole edifice of rock crumbling down. A new rock revolution.

This is, to say the least, an overstatement. The early-70′s-as-cultural-wasteland theory only holds up if you ignore the collection of personalities and bands that existed, fairly successfully, in an off-kilter sort of way; Lou Reed, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, all trying to do something interesting with music in a way that the more bloated prog rockers weren’t. And more than a few punks had early 70′s influences, especially the more experimental end; when Johnny Rotten stopped being a cartoon and became John Lydon again (helped by a legal injunction by Malcolm McLaren who insisted that he owned the name and the rights to use of the name) he waxed lyrical about his love of bands like Captain Beefheart, Can, King Crimson, and Van der Graaf Generator, many of which had a decidedly proggy lilt to them, not to mention Lou Reed and David Bowie come across as the original art-rockers. When the time came, once punk had stopped its’ useful function in tearing down and became a parody of itself, once bands had to make a self-conscious decision about building a new music and punk fragmented into new genres and new possibilities, there were certainly lots of bands that decided to make music just as self-aware and self-consciously art-rock as the prog rockers that were supposedly the enemy. Except this time you could usually dance to it.

Of course, just because it’s a myth doesn’t mean it’s not also true, in a way, and oh god, does Tales From Topographic Oceans make you realise how utterly awful prog rock could be at its most corpulent. This is an awful, awful album, utterly sure of its own artistic merit, which is non-existent. There are only 4 songs in what was a double album, each song taking up a whole side of vinyl. The songs (which are meant to be based upon Shastric scriptures; yeah, that’s obvious, isn’t it) continually change tack, moving on to different arrangements in what is obviously meant to be an attempt to do classical music for the late 20th century, all sparkling arpeggios and emotional heft. But since none of these fuckers are Mozart, it’s just pish. The arpeggios just become noodly, organ-grinding melanges, doing a lot and saying little, glorified church organ pieces. There is no emotional heft, especially when anything remotely interesting gets sidetracked by another twat trying to show off his virtuoso improvisation skills. They’re not Miles Davis either, so again, it’s pish. I can’t believe someone could try this hard to be self-consciously arty and come up with something that, at heart, says nothing. It screams “trying too hard”. It just goes on and on and on, saying bugger all about anything until the rocks have been worn away by the oceans and the universe has contracted into nothingness. It’s just boring. And really, that’s a cardinal sin.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, if Rick Fucking Wakeman thinks it’s a bit excessive, then you’ve got a fucking problem.

The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn): Fuckers.

I mean, what can you say to that? It means fuck all, the kind of pseudo-deep jizzspatter that hippies find interesting but the rest of us just want to blow our brains out to. When I first put this on, I thought there was a problem with my speakers; I heard nothing. Except a slight windy sound. “Thanks for that Mike, now here’s Yes with the weather.” Slowly, 50 seconds in, a totteringly slow keyboard begins to make itself heard, thin and reedy, like a Borg-assimilated organ that’s had the shit kicked out of it. We’ll be hearing a lot of that. The dirge continues. It’s all so desolate! Not really, it’s just boring the shit out of me. Fuck’s sake, the Ramones would be finished by now. I mean, how could anyone listen to this? Anyone? How would you go to a gig for this, how would you be excited to hear this pish? Would you clap? Laugh? Stroke your beard? God, a Yes gig must be the only place where someone shouts “Freebird” and expects a shorter song than the one being played.

The dirge is building up, slowly, ever so slowly. But there’s no feeling to this. I mean, I can take slowly as long as I know its’ going somewhere – that’s one of the big strengths of post-rock groups like Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Explosions In The Sky or Mogwai. Perhaps the closest we have to prog right now, actually, without all this wearying excess that makes albums like Tales of Topographic Oceans so annoying to listen to. A couple of minutes in, the singer starts to sing, finally, the Injured Borg Organ complementing his thin, reedy, nasal voice, but not in a good way. He’s almost chanting, but the effect is one of “fucking hippies” instead of “wow, this is really significant!”. Especially since he keeps using words like “amid” or “cached”. The monotonous voice makes me want to stick something sharp in my face. There is nothing nearby. Another monotonous voice kicks in, and I am now actively searching for something to stab myself with.

You couldn’t make up the lyrics, by the way. A more hilarious form of astral bullshit you will never see. “disjointed but with purpose,
Craving penetrations offer links with the self instructor’s sharp and tender love as we took to the air, a picture of distance” This is the Chewbacca Defense of music. It Makes. No. Sense. But Chewbacca lives on Endor. So yeah.

Meanwhile the Injured Borg Organ goes into death spasms, the drums kick in and a keyboard riff begins. It’s all very 70′s Doctor Who Action Sequence. A guitar riff plays in the background, and the noodling begins. Oh, the noodling. It is an endless array of despair which makes me weep pure tears of rage. And we’re only 5 minutes in. Of an 80 minute track. This is going to make my skull rupture. I am going to track down the members of Yes and give them a hydrochloric acid enema.

“What happened to this song we knew so well?” chorus the band, and I can give them an answer, though it might not exactly be Shastric. It’s buried in interminable noodling and wasn’t very good anyway, fuckers. At this point, I went to go cook some jambalaya, because jambalaya is fantastic and maybe it would stop me from trying to reach into the screen and strangle the notes from this song at birth. To prevent them infecting my ears.

Back with the jambalaya, and it is a spicy party in my mouth which I welcome. Meanwhile the Yes guys are still chorusing and not much has changed. Did they ever look at themselves and realise the disease which was inside of them? Wait! nine minutes in and a kind of tom-toming drum beat begins, everything gets a little more rapid and slightly easier to handle. I’m still not sure why this song needs to do in 20 minutes what most songs do in about 3 though. OOH YOU CHANGED TEMPO, NOW I TRULY BELIEVE IN THE ASTRAL STAR CHILDREN. Shitweasels. There’s a guitar solo at the moment, wailing its way through the chorusing Yes members. It sounds all a little too 70′s car chase, really. Basically Yes have been contracted to make one big chase sequence and fucked it up. This is my theory. We’re back to the Injured Borg organ again, as the crescendo dies down, but really, that was the most boring build up ever. And now they’re just playing arpeggios. Hell man, I understand why they are important to music, but really you can’t fill a minute or so of song with them and expect people to not wish your scrotum to be slowly grated. Another guitar solo, this time over that keyboard sound which makes it sound a little like a choir of people with too much reverb. I get it man, you’re obviously a good player. But that is how you choose to spend your time, and it is not a good way to spend other people’s time. Unless they’re mocking you, which is totally worthwhile.

This whole starchildren shit is getting me down. This was released about the time of the three-day week, two general elections in a year, a time when Britain was in the midst of political and social turmoil, the old certainties less certain, fascism gaining a fringe of support, a ferment where industrialism and Keynesianism seemed not to have any answers. And Yes are just noodling on about all this crap here. Now, I’m not one to ask everyone to come up with a political manifesto in every artistic endeavour they take on, that just seems like cultural Zhandovianism. Obviously people want to sing about different things, and that’s fair enough. But really, in the midst of social and political turmoil, you expect there to be cultural turmoil as well, some kind of acknowledgement of the times. But Yes just seems to have retreated into astral wankery, detached, loose, nowhere near the decline itself for actual comment.

Meanwhile there has been at least two guitar solos and one keyboard solo. Get tae fuck. I bet if you sped it up a bit you might have something interesting, a particularly crazy-ass proto speed-metal, or maybe some happy hardcore. Couldn’t be worse than it now. And oh, we’ve changed again, and it sounds like something out of the Bionic Woman. Seriously, Yes missed a trick not going into 70′s action movies and/or sci-fi series. Done a lot more work and people wouldn’t want to kill them for the pointless solos and that fucker’s deeply irritating voice and lyrics. We’ve passed the 20 minute mark! Hooray! And there is still nothing of any interest! Whatsoever! We seem to be in another crescendo, everything’s building up now, but in such a flabby way, with so much needless virtuosity, that it again provides no real way to connect with this music on any level. On an intellectual level it’s repetitive, stilted, and the lyrics are completely fatuous. On a gut level it’s too boring and noodly. Fuckin’ beard strokers.

And it’s over!

There’s three more songs, but.

Fuck.

The Remembering (High the Memory): Fuckers. I mean, that’s almost as bad as the first one. They’re begging me to take them seriously, but I just can’t when these song titles are so full of fail they could generate at least 0.5 milli4chans, which is an extremely dangerous level.

It’s actually quite lively to start with, descending keyboards underlaid with shimmering, sparkling sounds that segue into a slow, repeated musical phrase picked out on the guitar. It’s almost nice, and for a second I begin to think it can’t be all that bad, really, even after the horror that was the first track. Then I remember that this, too is also 20 fucking minutes long, and there’s no way my interest can be sustained for that long.

And sure enough, it goes on. And on. And on. And what was initially hypnotic becomes self-indulgent, torpid, depressingly dull. The lyrics haven’t gotten any better, meditations on bullshit, “forests of the sun”, “dreaming as one”. There are no forests of the sun you fuck because the sun would burn any tree there, there isn’t even any fuckin’ soil so how would a forest take root. After all, it is a mass of incandescent gas. Anyway, we’re building up the music here, but as usual, it’s hard to get involved in any of the musical parts, which this time are almost something listenable, since they get drawn out too long and anyway there’s going to be a fucking guitar solo that lasts 3 minutes along any second, which will rape your soul.

And there’s a really abrupt jump-cut here, about 5 minutes in, leading to a lot of astral-sounding wispy music which pisses me right off. Which reminds me of how much I hate fucking hippies, really. I’ve talked before about how hippies ruin everything, but this must be the key example. I know, I know, it’s probably a bit overgeneralising to suggest that Yes were all fucking hippies, but who gives a fuck about mystical Eastern teachings except the fucking hippies? I don’t think even the Yogis take all this stuff anywhere near as seriously as yer common or garden hippy, looking for something nice and postmaterialist to cling onto to build some kind of spiritual system, having been inevitably disappointed by the transformational power of bad weed, mud and gratuitous nudity. All three of which are good things, but alas, did not lead to any actual revolutionary content. So you get hippies looking for something more, which leads to the almost offensive Orientalism of yer “mystical Eastern” bullshit, which leads directly on to this overindulged crap.

Fucking hippies.

So now we’re onto some good ol’ fashioned finger-picking. It’s like we’re at ye olde folk fayre! Except even folkies have a better sense of themselves than this excuse for music. You know where you are with folk music, especially if you’re a woman, viz you will be up the stick, lamenting your lost lover who’s gone of to war, only he comes back and he ignores you so you top yourself and haunt him till he runs himself through with his bayonet to end the misery and you’ll both be together in the afterlife in torment, a too-lay whack-fol-a-diddle wey-oh.

Fuck Morrissey, no-one’s got a better handle on vicarious miserablism than yer English folk singer.

Anyway, meanwhile, we’re halfway through and we’re back to what happens when Yes try to do a fast bit. Yes, it’s 70′s action show again! This time I am imagining Bodie and Doyle kicking the shit out of a few long haired fuckers with capes, proto-synths, and too much time on their hands.

And a sudden shift back to ye olde Ren Fayre. I’m pretty sure that’s a mandolin, which just goes to prove that that instrument is truly a tool of the Devil. The fiddle just got a bad press. Actually, we’re oscillating between 70′s action sequence and Ren Fayre quite rapidly here, it’s intriguing only to wonder the kind of show that that would make. “Tonight, on Feudal Police, Bayliff Qualms has to track down the mysterious poacher of Abboten Wood, which by right belongs to the local Lord. Meanwhile, an bow amnesty is declared, as the village lashes out against the ever-rising effects of the archery culture infecting the area. Also the Black Death happens and some people fuck a chicken in the feverish, sweaty, bubo-encrusted hope of a cure.”

I’m not talking that much about the music any more. It’s kind of impossible at the moment, it’s gone all wispy again, like what would happen if ambient music had been invented in the mid-70′s by utter fuckwits. Aaaaaand cue obligatory guitar solo. I hate you, guitarist. What’s his name? I’ll wiki it. Steve Howe? You’re a dead man, Steve Howe. I will do to you what Patrick Bateman did to New York. Thank God! It’s over. Now on towards the valley of death!

Fuck, they’re making me pretentious now. Well, more pretentious.

‘The Ancient’ (Giants Under the Sun): Motherfucking fuckers.

More wind. And jingly bells. This does not make things portentious, Yes. It makes things sound like you’re recording it on Life Day whilst freezing to death on Hoth (look it up, kids.) We start with a quasi-funky 70′s baseline, like only candy-assed white boy crackers can do. I am getting black rage in sympathy. A guitar starts up, trying to RAWK. But failing, because it’s prog. And it’s Yes. A crappy, wailing solo plays on, over the faux funk and the crackly, rattling drumming. This is truly awful music. I think I am going to listen to some Einsturzende Neubauten just to stop my head being messed with here.

Finally, we go ambient again, and your basic look-my-keyboards-are-faking-being-a-string-section happens. A blarting, crappy sound keeps playing, like the heartbeat of a 200 pounds overweight 6 Million Dollar Man running up some stairs, beating its last. Inexplicably, this keeps breaking up the song. And will continue to do so throughout. Yes obviously think it’s a DRAMATIC NOISE, but I just keep wondering when they’re going to get the poor guy a treadmill. It’s killing any kind of song that might be salvaged at some point through this song, breaking up any kind of consistency the song has and to boot is just a really fucking annoying noise, the kind of squelchy electronic noise that makes you begin to grind your teeth. Bizarrely, real strings have begun to join the fake strings. This doesn’t make anything much better, since the disjointed heartfart starts up every so often with soul-crushing inevitability. Mind you, it does mean less time for endless noodling, which is essentially what this whole song is made up of and continues to be. I won’t get any of this out of my head, you know. It’ll just be forever, some psychedelic Windows Media Player visualisation flashing against my brain like an epileptic’s lament, and always, everywhere, that fucking noodling. This is the shortest song on the album, a mere 18 minutes and 35 seconds, and it’s by far the worst.

Ren Fayre! Up next, on “When Classical Guitar Goes Bad”. Yup, it’s a solo again, just a single acoustic guitar, which simply means compared to everything else, it just sounds like a Learning Zone ident. I’m reminded strongly of Look Around You, and begin to youtube “Little Mouse”. But I have to keep going on this, because we’re already late and there are important things for my dear readers to do horribly to my precious musical collection. Can’t keep them waiting longer. Only two minutes of this song left! There’s another one, but the end is in sight!

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW THE RAAIIIIIIIIIN HAS GONE

I CAN SEEE ALLLLLLL OBSTACLES IN MY WAYYYYYYY

God, this project truly is fucking me up royally. Ha, we’re back to the heartfart again, because of course they had to remind me of that horror, and a tinkling of sleigh bells finishes the masturbatory session. One more to go…

Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil): Fuckwitted Fuckmonkeying Fuckspasms from Fucknut, Fucktopia.

I am mildly annoyed by now. As you can probably tell. But this just sounds like all the other song, noodly, utterly devoid of feeling, pretentious shit. It’s killing me, it really is, and I’m close to tears, so bored am I with this ongoing spasm of musical wrongery. Babababababababababababa, is what they’re singing. Hey, I can dig it. It’s closer to anything intelligible than has been sung before, thank God.

I’m pretty sure this is the kind of music a BBC Micro would compose. Maybe there’d be a few more dragons. I don’t know. We calm down again to the sloshing of the waves, it’s calming, innit. Only if you’ve not been brought to paroxysms of blinding rage by the fucking continual noodling that swithers all over it, drunkenly groping its way over your ears. you feel sick, and slightly dirty. I need a shower. The waves stop, but the noodling continues. And he’s singing in French! How debonair! What elan! In reality, as supposed to outside the singer’s gurning, tosspot head, it of course sounds overbearingly self-indulgent. This is a boy who always got all the Jammy Dodgers when he asked for them, surely. You can’t produce work like this without being fundamentally broken in some way, mentally. I know, I know, I can talk, being a full-strength brainwrong, but it takes one to know one, to quote that supreme philosopher, That Kid In The Playground.

I can’t really say anything now that I haven’t repeatedly said, not even getting onto the bizarre, triangle-clanging tribal drumming section that, whilst as close to original as this album gets, still has to deal with what I’ve been complaining about all along; the motifs hammered into your brain with no poise or suspense, no emotional core, a dead-eyed eternity… If I get any more plain, I’ll be in danger of becoming a Rake. I suppose that’s the problem, really, with the three albums I’ve looked at so far, the core problem I mean; they are, fundamentally, trying to do different things, but when you get down to it, they’re all incredibly one-note. They hammer in the same musical style, the same lyrical bent, with a complete lack of self-awareness and subtlety. It’s boring because they can’t do anything else. And I kind of pity them, when not hating them for every torment they subject me to. Because to only really be able to express yourself in this one note, turgid fashion, completely without recourse to any alternate viewpoints, alternate sounds… I mean, this album was meant, in a way, to be experimental, but it comes across so one-note as to sound as ancient as the Caveman Sonata for Bone-club and Skull-drum in the key of Ugg. It’s obviously, permanently “of its’ time”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I suspect the reason why it sounds so dated is because by this point, especially, they weren’t going for any kind of “new sound”. It was just an attempt to indulge their inner whims as far as possible, without reference to anything but a massive, spoiled ego, and thus we get music that cleans colons, so up it’s own arse is it.

And I weep. I’m not afraid to say that. This album produced much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

“It wasn’t my fault I married a daft bird, you know.”

I hadn’t said anything, hoping he had ignored me. I sat down and looked at him with humanist concern.

“You know she got a boob job?” he wailed.

“…I did not.” I said, truthfully.

“The only point of marrying a daft bird and I missed the boat.”

“I think that’s a trifle harsh. I mean, what attracted you to her in the first place? A subliminal, dark, psychosexual attraction to Paris Hilton?”

“Fuck off.”

“Well, really. If you assume that Paris Hilton is the Platonic ideal to which you strive, to which you can never hope to achieve in reality, the next best thing would be someone who, prior to their own brush with fame, also strived towards the same ideal; although I guess with the new tits that ideal has become somewhat skewed.”

“To say the least.”

“Could it not be some form of karmic retribution, though?”

“For what?”

“Well, I want to be polite here; for being you.”

“And you said I was harsh.”

“Well, Chantelle, for all her faults, isn’t actively harmful. She’s just, to use a phrase, “living the dream”.”

“Very nice. I see what you did there.”

“Thank you. But you could be said to be a negative influence on society.”

“How so?”

“Well, let us take, as an example, your first album, Over The Counter Culture.”

“Why that one?”

“Well for one thing, it ties in with an interesting theory that Thomas Frank has.”

“The editor of The Baffler?”

“Yes, him. How do you know him?”

“Well, this whole conversation is a figment of your imagination, I pretty much know everything you know.”

“True, but irrelevant. I’d know you wouldn’t know about him.”

“Yeah, says you.”

“Ok, ok. I’m being a little unfair.”

“But yes, what about Thomas Frank, to get back on to something people will actually find readable?”

“Well, he’s sceptical about the idea of the counter-culture in and of itself. Both the opponents and the supporters of counter-culture, especially as it manifested itself in the sixties, was seen as fundamentally a threat to the established order; by which it would be a threat to capitalism as well. The original counter-culture was born of idealism, revolution, transgressivism, always everywhere May ’68; attempts to ape it in the new millenium come across as sad, corporatist, soulless and just not cool.”

“That makes sense.”

“Frank disagrees.”

“What?”

“Or at least, he thinks it messier than both opponents and supporters give credit for, especially as regards business and the counter-culture.”

“You do realise I was just making a bit of a smug joke, don’t you? I don’t need this lecture.”

“I do, but you’re a twat, so shut up and listen. Frank argues that the counter-culture was not as alien to the business world as has been suggested; the idea of a grey, monolithic “The Man” at the head of a corporation, worried by the hippies formenting revolution was always nonsense. There were elements of that, but also business could see the opportunity of the flowering of a counter-culture, new forms of art, new music, all of which in a capitalist system needs money to be produced.”

“You mean they saw them as new consumers rather than an antagonistic force.”

“Exactly!”

“Ready to be co-opted, to sell out!”

“No! See, this whole idea of selling out has always been one of the big myths of popular music. Unless you decide to live in a cave, everyone is a sellout. We all take part in the system that produces the fakes, the phonies, the frauds, the kinds of people we view as hacks. To take part in that system itself, to “sell out” is not the key thing that makes bad art bad. It’s probably a major force, but it does not by itself produce bad art. All artists shill for coins, and some produce greatness through it. What I meant, and what Frank is arguing, was simply that society in the mid-twentieth century was on the cusp of a massive change in all forms of society, whether it was counter-cultural or not. The hippies weren’t the catalyst of modern society, they were the product of forces – economic, social, political, and cultural – that had existed beforehand. The business of business might still have been business…”

“You pretentious tit.”

“Certainly. But it was doing it in different ways from then on, some of which did involve aping counter-cultural trends, and “selling out”, but on a spectrum of co-option rather than a dividing line; “from MC5 to the Monkees”, to paraphrase Frank himself.”

“So what does any of this have to do with me? And would anyone still be reading by this point?”

“Well, it attacks a major thread of your album.”

“Which you apparently hate.”

“Quite a lot, or I wouldn’t write this conversation up on a blog.”

“But are incensed about enough to go on a long tangential summarising of an obscure American cultural critic no-one who is likely to read this dialogue will ever have heard of.”

“Yes…”

“I think you protest too much. You own it, don’t you?”

“That’s perceptive of you.”

“I bet you quite enjoyed it at one point. I bet it’s just coloured by the whole Celebrity Big Brother thing, and you’re doing a retroactive hipster defense to throw it down the memory hole.”

“In part, but I didn’t really care that much about Celebrity Big Brother. I do actually rather hate it now; I certainly haven’t listened to it for a while. Not since I was in my mid teens.”

“Right.”

“But here’s the thing; in my mid-teens I was a cock, as is every teenaged male, especially when it comes to music. Pretentious jumped up little cocks with a sneering attitude towards almost everything around; smug twats far too sure of their own opinions. Nobody understands! It’s all fucked up! They’re all awful! Sell outs! God, if I met myself from back then I’d punch myself square in the balls.”

“But you still think like that. You’re writing a blog about terrible albums.”

“Almost, but not quite; I still think things are bad, and some can even be said to be so in an objective way, but I’m definitely not sure of my own opinions any more. I’m mostly doing this because I think other people will find it entertaining, and because I hardly ever finish anything. But I’m nowhere near that assumption of superiority any more, because we are all sellouts. We’re all working within that system and we’re all muddling along as best we can. There’s something all too human about it. And it’s a sure sign of massive twattery to portray yourself as above the fray, sneering and masturbating at your high position above all the talentless proles, especially when you’re doing the most shameful reference-humping known to man.”

“This is where I come in, isn’t it?”

“Too fucking right it is. Over The Counter Culture, from the very start, whines and moans about new fads and disposable celebrity culture. This is why everyone fucking hates you, Preston, because you won’t admit you’re wrestling in the mud with the rest of us. You have the bare-faced chutzpah to go on Celebrity Big Brother, and claim that you’re not part of all the collective shit we all put together and claim is our culture. It’s why people hate hipsters and hipsterism in general; you’re just as disposable, just as much a part of the society we’re in, not above it. Admit it, and we’ll hate you less.”

“Well.”

“Not to mention Week In, Week Out is another example of that fucking middle-class ennui again. I told you fuckers I’d had it up to here with The Rakes, why should I have to deal with you, too?”

“Hey, come on…”

“And if you ever do another Specials cover, I will cut you. I swear to God, I will come round your house and I will kill you right in the face.”

“Aw, well…”

“How can you sit there and claim to be above it all when you’re pulling the exact same shit all these other fucking bands pull? Even worse than them, really. You manage to find the ennui in a trip to the seaside. Fuck off! There’s ice-cream and donkeys and shit, the beach is awesome and you know it. It’s lovely to be bored with everything, really it is, but I got over that shit when I was sixteen and realised that life is really a bit shit when you treat it as one long boredom filled yawnfest to the grave. Live a little, you fucking cunts.”

By this point he was despondent, having been convinced, by superior logic, of his own redundancy. I did the only decent thing, and shot him. The sudden crack of a bullet burying into his skull rang out with more authenticity than anything that had previously entered Preston’s brain. I smiled as I knew I had done the world a great service.

A mitigation; I’m seeing a counsellor, on account of the whole “being a mental” thing. This Monday focused heavily on a lot of stuff that I don’t talk to anyone about and was incredibly painful to talk about. It left me feeling drained, conflicted, incredibly upset, and really not in any kind of state to do very much at all. I’ll still do the forfeit if people want, since it’s only fair, but I think a day late to start with is a small price to pay on the road to comparative mental health.

If I do it again you totally get to burn my sh*t up. Or whatever.

So yeah, the post will be up today, Tuesday, in a wee bit, rather than Monday. It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette not-very-ironic kind of way.

That said, on with the show. Various albums were suggested by my good friends at the Vegetable Revolution, but I ignored them for now, at least. The first album is one I already have, Capture/Release by The Rakes.

The Rakes are one of those post-punk revival bands that popped up in the wake of bands like The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. Whilst the latter two were fun enough, at least initially, in providing a little danceable nostalgia to the early 2000′s, they unleashed far too many bands that are of no consequence whatsoever; they make no statement that isn’t clunkingly obvious and cliché, no sound that doesn’t ape a thousand better bands. All of the style exists, but it’s like copies made with a photocopier that’s run out of toner; faded, dull, drained.

The Rakes are particularly egregious in this respect. With a lot of the post-punk revival clones, you at least get some semblance of individuality, working within a very limited milieu. They might be hacks, but you can tell there are at least people in there, perhaps not the most creatively gifted, but a group of people trying to make music with the references they have; Kaiser Chiefs’ “Northern cheeky chappy” approach, Bloc Party’s straining, yearning vocals, almost emo at times, Hard-Fi’s po-faced workerist cant. Some bands like to choose to ape a single band in particular, viz. The Enemy’s shameless ripping off of The Jam.

I’m normally not this kind to any of these bands, but that is because the Rakes have made me appreciate the touches of individuality these bands maintain, however slight. This is because The Rakes have no individuality whatsoever. None. It’s undetectable. If there was a musical Voight-Kampff test, The Rakes would have failed it. I suppose in some ways they’re the perfect band in an era where music has become increasingly commodified; The Rakes produce utterly disposable, throwaway music. Comparing mass-produced products to fast food is a hoary old metaphor that’s probably due for retirement, but it still fits. Have you ever properly tasted a Quarter Pounder (Or, indeed, a Royale with cheese)? I mean properly, not just tasting the sauces, pickles, and assorted condiments, but the actual burger itself? You can’t, really, you taste grease, fat, and salt, not actual meat. You’re left satiated for a second, because, hey, fat is superficially tasty and it fills you up briefly. But then you think to yourself for a second and suddenly you realise; “hey, why didn’t I taste any beef? I just ate a fucking burger! Where’s my fucking beef?“

That’s how I felt listening to this album. Where’s my fucking beef?

God. One album in, and I’m already doubting whether I’ll get through this. And my sanity. Below the fold, my thoughts on each track, in a quasi-stream-of-consciousness kind of way.

Strasbourg: An anti-communist song.

In 2005.

Truly you are on the cutting edge of political comment.

I mean, I was prepared to be charitable and suggest it was some kind of metaphor, however awe-inspiringly tone-deaf it was, for our own growing police state, the kind of nannying authoritarianism that pisses everyone off except wanky middle-class liberals, but you realise pretty quickly that the Rakes don’t do subtext. They barely do text.

The music didn’t grab me, very basic. Not sparse, basic. Generic. Cookie-cutter. If that song was an instrumental I could not have told you who it was by.

Actually, fuck, I just realised, the fucking Iraq War was happening during this point. And the Rakes are railing against Moscow. Or something. Fuck off.

Really, if you want to delve into a little Ostalgie, musically, I can only recommend the Associates’ “White Car in Germany“. Dripping with ceaseless, creeping, paranoid dread, neatly juxtaposed with Billy Mackenzie’s arch, high-camp vocals, it’s a song to turn up loud when you think you’re being wiretapped.

Retreat: Most people suggest that the worst genre of song (as opposed to genre of music, we’re talking about what the song is about here) is the political song, and it’s certainly true that the crap-to-awesome ratio in that particular genre is incredibly high. But there are enough gems to suggest that the Worst. Song. Genre. Ever. is in fact what I like to call the “middle-class plen-t-plaint”. It’s an ennumeration of how terrible it is living a middle-class life in a modern, developed country; how alienated we all are from our own lives, how repetitive everything is, how all we do is drink, fuck, work and sleep.

(As for the music, the music is having no effect on me whatsoever, and it’s hard trying to find a way to talk about it. The mix is curiously flat throughout most of this album. I think they were going for something sparse, minimalistic, or at least I hope. But they just got flat instead.)

But yeah. Done well, i.e. as a wider critique of society, capitalism and its mores, this kind of song can be very good (see, for instance, Gang of Four’s Natural’s Not In It, or Return The Gift) but of course they put an explicitly Marxist bent on the lyrics; even if Marxism’s not your bag, baby, it’s still a novel take on the idea. And the songs are actually listenable. Yes, even Anthrax. Especially Anthrax, motherfucker.

The problem is, if you’re not going for radical Marxist critique of society and its mores, and just bitching about how you get up, work, drink then fuck, you sound like a whiny, overprivileged bitch. Middle-class life is pretty fucking rad. All privileges, no problems; especially compared to the rest of the world (which is where that radical Marxist critique comes in pretty useful). Being, say, sodomised by an angry bear isn’t dull, but I wouldn’t particularly want a life full of it, and I’d certainly take student ennui over it any day.

22 Grand Job: Even the greatest of us can make mistakes. And I’m pretty fucking awesome, so, y’know, you’ve got no chance. The reason I’m doing this album first is because, as I said above, I already have it. For some unknown reason, I bought this album in late 2005.

Actually, the above is a lie; I bought the album primarily because of this song. A rookie mistake, I know, I know, but hear me out. Excited, waiting for Editors (yeah, ok) and Franz Ferdinand (hey, fuck you), at least two pints down, in the hot fetid air of the SECC, it seemed like a pretty good song. Still throwaway, but danceable. You’ve got a repeated phrase, both lyrically and musically, which makes it something you can chant along to.

I’m consciously defending myself here, of course. It’s not a good song. Again, it’s incredibly flat, boringly so. And again it’s middle class, plen-t-plaint, rat race blubbering. Boo hoo, I am earning money. In the current economic climate it sounds even more obscene. At least it’s short.

Open Book: Oh, you did not just use that cliché. Fuck you. The Mockney accent is hurting me now. “Witching hour”? Are you shitting me? How many clichés will they use? Maybe it’s a Joycean subversion and they’re making a song entirely out of cliché. But that would be witty.

Look, I fucking get it already. You’re alienated. From what? OH IT IS A GIRL. HOW UNIQUE. (unfair, I know, but I’m no longer feeling charitable.) The two chord playing single guitar is beginning to act like a reverse ibuprofen.

The “woah ohs” in the background are also irritating, but it’s hard to get angry at the music. It’s inconsequential. Uninteresting. It inspires ennui. OH THE MIDDLE CLASS LIFE. Yay, more clichés!

“warning signs” “falling through the cracks”.

You are useless hacks, Rakes. Four people – four different people, with different personalities, hopes, likes, dislikes, dreams and aspirations – wrote this song, and NONE OF YOU COULD MAKE THE SLIGHTEST BIT OF IMPACT. I’ve seen less generic things get sued by pharma companies to keep them off the market. Of course, those are of actual use. At the end, the shittiest handclaps ever. (see Broken Social Scene’s “Stars and Sons” for better ones).

The Guilt: “This is a trueeeeeeee story” intones the useless pop muppet. Rake No. 1, we shall call him, because he does not have any actual individuality. (BUT HE WROTE A SONG ABOUT COMMUNISM LOL HE MUST BE INDIVIDUAL) Anyway. I go in hoping its’ the true story of what these faceless automatons are going to do next in their crazed lust for power. Shoot Mark Benton, perhaps.

…No, sorry. No such luck.

As an aside, I realise the Rakes are meant to be taking the idea of a “rake” – the cad, the bounder, the thoroughly unseemly young gentleman, but they’re so devoid of personality I find myself thinking of them as the garden implement.

An illustration of what listening to the Rakes is like.

At last, it’s a bit thrashy, not entirely flat like has happened before. “waking up feeling fucked” but alas, as you can tell from the above lyric, we’re still in that middle class ennui zone, can we pull it out?

Yes. In the worst possible way.

Our protagonist realises he’s in someone else’s bed. “She was overweight”, he says.

…You are not singing this song to tell me you fucked a chubby lassie and now you regret it. I immediately want to give this man a Glasgow kiss with a half-brick in a sock. Does “overweight” (for what given value of “over”?) automatically mean undesirable? Unsexy? Depends on the person. And the fat bird he’s ploughing, of course, but I suspect that our hero is recoilin’ because for once he didnae stick his dick in a stick wi’ nae tits. But I’m uncharitable like that, especially after listening to five Rakes songs. Let’s give him a chance to explain himself.

“It was paradise, in between her thighs, it was quick and nice”

…

No, really.

“It was paradise, in between her thighs, it was quick and nice”

Aye, but the rest of her, fuck that shit; all that matters is the vagina. I bet she didn’t even come. Why guilt? OH YOU DID NOT JUST USE MAN UNIRONICALLY. And, also, second worst use of horns ever. No buildup, no payoff, no class. (The worst is always, forever, Hard-Fi.)

Binary Love: Trying for an electronic undertow here. Failing, but I appreciate finally trying to mix it up a little. But I have heard this kind of faux-electronica sound before, and I’m not impressed.

“Dividend?” It’s an odd word for a song which is essentially as many electrical references as a schmindie wanker can make. Which is not many and is thus generally metaphors about wires.

So yeah, robosex, I get the conceit. But done so much better. 3 words: Are Friends Electric? Get tae the back of the queue, Rakes.

If “fire rushes through your wires”, you really should get some kind of diagnostic check. Probably the most interesting musically; this isn’t saying much.

We Are All Animals: God, I hate the title alone. Repeat after me, Rakes: Nuance is good. Subtext is not a bad thing.

The drumbeat suggests upbeat music, if not lyrics, suggestive of Fascination by Alphabeat, maybe Footloose. Actually, really reminiscent of Footloose. Is a twangy guitar going to kick in at any moment? Handclaps? (please, God, no, based on Open Book experience).

Ok, so not jaunty.

“We are the animals, we’ve lost our hair, retained some teeth”. What. I mean, what can you say to that. That is the most painfully obvious shit ever. You fucks. I had to listen to that. At least Sam Sparrow made evolution sexy. Fuck. Give the man a prize for least interesting, most overdone philosophical point of the last century or so. And they ran with it straight. You utter, shameless, useless HACKS.

At this point, I would maybe go into a rant about evolutionary psychology, and how we shouldn’t take too much of it as yet, but this piece is long enough already. In short, yeah, we’re animals, but we invented the microwave oven, the bassoon, and Shirley Bassey, so fuck you spider monkey.

Fucker.

But yeah, this is all pretty “Oooh someone’s read the Selfish Gene and being a cock about it” stuff. Being a cock is a perfectly explainable behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, of course. Aw fuck. They namechecked Darwin. I swear, these boys have taken subtext round the back of the bike sheds and spitroasted it into submission, didn’t they?

CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK. That is the sound of an idea falling into the head of a Rake. Then they write a song about it. It is terrible. THE CREATIVE PROCESS REVEALED! Fuckers.

“biology and chemistry reducing our souls, to 4 letters” Actually, obviousness aside, this would be semi-witty; Could the 4 letters be AGCT, or something more obscene? Would being the operative word, if I wasn’t so sure I was reading this into the song to give them some charity points, so po-faced they’ve been so far. Retain control? I do it every day that I do not come round your house and firebomb you, Rakes.

“We’re just mammals, just primates (like chimps or gorrillas)”

Really? REALLY? Did you really think it necessary to tell us dribbling proles exactly what primates are? The thing is, that backing vocal doesn’t even scan all that well in the song, so yes. The Rakes are insulting your intelligence. Or, as shape-shifting lizardmen, assume the necessity of explaining our genetic inferiority. Fucking monkeys.

Yeah I mean you, fuckface.

Bleepy little keyboard in the background annoying the fuck out of me…

NO DOES NOT NEED MORE COWBELL.

NEEDS A SOUL.

Violent: Ohhhh fuck. The Rakes go all reggae/dubstep on us. This is the only alternative sound shameless post-punk revival humpers with no clue can ape (cf. Ordinary Boys, The). It’s simply due to the prescence of 2nd wave ska (Two-Tone to you and me) at the same time as yer original post-punk, not to mention the Clash’s occassional (well continual) forays into reggae and PiL’s absorption of the dubstep sound into their own abrasive post-punk, godluvem. But even good white boy reggae is still white boy reggae, and derivatives get really old, really fast. This being the Rakes, it is laughably derivative. Violence. Bad Part of Town! OH NOES!

Probably fucking deserved to get a kicking.

This is just useless. I cannot care one jot about this useless shit. I hate these people for apparently having no creative streak whatsoever. Yes, violence is bad. Stop fucking lecturing me because someone nicked your shitty jeans once.

T-Bone: This is definitely the drumming that begins Banquet by Bloc Party. It’s shameless rip-off time by the end of the album, hooray! So, guesses as to what it’s about, children. Meat, maybe? There has never been a good song abut veganism, ever. Even Morrissey failed. But I doubt it’s about that. That would be at least an interesting experiment. Will they surprise me?

As I’ve been thinking all this, the intro has gone on for far, far too long. Is it an instrumental? It must be an instrumental. Come on. It’s repetitive and achingly dull, but it must be an instrumental, you’re going to surprise me here, right?

No, no. They are starting a song this far in. I’m bored severely but would have given you props for making it a drearily repetitive instrumental. Maybe it represents Work. or Booze. Or Ennui. Or… nah, those are the only three topics you have, isn’t it? When you’re not focusing on the fat bird’s muff. This is just shit. Weary MCPTP again.

This is grinding me down, and I’m fairly sure this is nowhere near the worst I will get. What have I done?

Oh T-Bone is a person! And he’s scary, apparently. Bit thrashy again, musically, but it’s such a mockery of it. The desperate flop of a dying fish gasping for air, it’s not a symbol of life or vitality, but of inevitable brain death.

Terror!: Oh fuck off. Violent wasn’t scary. Neither was T-Bone. You’re not going to do any better here. Yer basic indie-disco beat. I am not scared of Mexico. Haunted hotel! Oh it’s a dream! Well done Rakes, this has as much integrity as Dallas.

I like trying to include “the news” in the lyrics to try and attach a vague topicality to the fact you’re having a BAD DREAM OH NOES. But hey, “the job in the city won’t matter no more?” Really. This is the 22 Grand Job, yeah? The job you’re bitching about for the whole of this album. Oh for god’s sake just quit! Fly to Bolivia, catch an interesting sexual disease, I don’t care, just STOP BITCHING ABOUT YOUR JOB.

The Rakes are showing us, really, helpfully, unlike their piss-poor lecture on Darwinism, the difference between a unifying theme on an album, something which ties the album together, a recurring motif, and just plainly lacking ideas. Look at your lyrics, budding songwriters. Get out a pen and see if there’s a word that appears repeatedly. Underline it. If it appears as much as “job” does in a Rakes song, burn your lyrics. Start again. Never speak of them again. If a word continues to repeat itself continually in ALL YOUR SONGS it is not a theme, it is your inability to GET A FUCKING CLUE. Or, at the very least, a thesaurus.

But yay! It stops. And starts again. With no change at all. It’s just a pause. All my hope is gone. Aw fuck, and at the end, terrorism paranoia. POLICE STATE? What police state? Isn’t that in Strasbourg?

Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club, Sleep)

Get tae fuck.

Do I even need to explain? This is the purest example of the MCPTP I have ever seen? Pure, concentrated wankery. They don’t seem to be trying any more. The music is languid, listless, more uninspired than usual, than I thought possible. It’s meant to be vaguely upbeat from what I can tell, ruined by the fact that the lyrics are dreary, the mix is flat, and they’re just shit.

They did not just namecheck Wetherspoons. I have lost the will to live.

Yes, I get it, you haven’t changed your clothes. Get a fucking washing machine and stop bitching, Worky McEnnui.

“Just drift along, with no focus on anything”

Finally, they understand what it is to be a song written by them.

For those not in the know about Irish politics (for shame, for shame), Fianna Fáil, formed in the wake of the Irish Civil War, is the dominant party in the Irish Dáil, the lower chamber of the Irish Parliament, or Oireachtas. It’s been the largest party in the Dáil since 1932, and has been the major party in government, usually in coalition because of the STV electoral system in Ireland, for most of that time. Due to the origins of the Irish political party system, with the two major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, representing the pro- and anti- Anglo-Irish Treaty factions in the Irish Civil War respectively, some of the coalitions with minor parties necessary to form a majority in the Oireachtas have been decidedly odd, and ideology, especially for the two major parties, has been tenuous at best. But they’ve both managed to keep their positions as the two major parties since more or less the founding of the Irish Republic.

So to see Fianna Fáil polling behind the centre-left Labour Party for the first time ever in the Irish Times/TNS mrbi poll seems to suggest something major is happening in Irish politics at the moment.

Now, of course, this is subject to all kinds of hedging and betting, as befits polling analysis. Since the TNS mrbi site is just a corporate puff piece, and doesn’t contain the results of any polls, as far as I can tell, unlike polling outfits in the UK like Ipsos-Mori or YouGov, I can’t really compare numbers, or more importantly look at TNS mrbi’s accuracy in political polling. And you just can’t look at one poll alone and divine answers from it, an Irish election doesn’t have to be called until 2012, and in any case Labour’s lead over Fianna Fáil in this poll is well within the margin of error. But nontheless, the Irish Times seems to be a reputable paper and the TNS mrbi poll seems fairly venerable, so I’m fine with taking it at face value for now. And it suggests significant trouble for Fianna Fáil, who garnered 41.5% of 1st preference votes in the last general election, which is almost 20 percentage points up on the result in this poll. That’s some hole to dig out of, even with Fianna Fáil’s remarkable political survival skills.

So is this just a reaction to the current economic crisis? In part; Ireland has been hit pretty hard by the current economic crisis, due to the kinds of deregulation which previously got it called the “Celtic Tiger”. Turns out relying on the construction industry for economic prosperity is a bit of a problem when house prices crash. But Fianna Fáil, having presided over most of the boom, is intimately linked with the construction industry in the worst possible way. Numerous scandals have continually rocked the current Fianna Fáil Government, with one in 2008 putting paid to Bertie Ahern, no stranger to financial irregularities. Now, the Irish have normally been curiously blasé when it comes to political and financial corruption on the part of the governing classes, continuing to not punish Fianna Fáil electorally even in the midst of numerous tales of corruption and financial misdeeds. But there might be a qualitative difference between putting up with people feeding at the trough when the going’s good for everyone (after all, wouldn’t you do it in the same position?) and putting up with obvious corruption when it seems to have directly contributed to your current poorly economic situation.

To make it even worse, what is the current government’s proposals for dealing with the financial crisis? Massive cuts in public spending, including a levy on public-sector pensions that could cost public-sector workers as much as £2,500 a year. No wonder Fianna Fáil’s support has cratered spectacularly, with 120,000 people marching in Dublin in protest. At a time when even America is spending huge amounts on public works to try to provide a stimulus to a nosediving economy, this belt-tightening seems spectacularly wrongheaded, from both a political and an economic perspective. But the Irish response to this suggests that even in crisis, the old neoliberal responses of belt-tightening and financial cuts, even in the midst of guaranteeing toxic financial assets, can still hold a pretty powerful sway.

UPDATE: Both the Soldiers‘ representation organisation PDforra and the police organisations ASGI and GRA are taking part in the protests. This is obviously huge; you’d normally find soldiers and police on the other side of mass rallies.

As a primer for why the Irish economy is going the way is going, I highly recommend this guy, who has also been blogroll’d.

I want to shoot the whole day down.

I’ve been fairly lax in projects that I want to complete, including, as is painfully clear due to our hiatus, The Patch, and that’s a personal failing of mine. It’s one, really, that I’m not prepared to accept. And it’s one that I want to rectify by taking something to fruition. Something interesting. Something, hopefully, funny. Something that can challenge my writing skills. And, because it’s me, something that will inflict terrible levels of mental and spiritual pain.

The project is this; every week, for one whole year, I will find a terrible album, either requested in comments here or at our sister site, The Vegetable Revolution, or one I’ve found myself in a search for unremitting horror. Then I will listen to it. Then I will write about it, hopefully in a way that conveys the sheer horror of what I’m listening to. I would like to say that this is making a statement by converting bad art into good art, or how we might be pleasantly surprised by where our journey takes us, how we might rehabilitate the reputation of that which has been unfairly maligned, or saying something about how music can touch us, even if in this case the music touches us in a way that puts it on the Sex Offenders’ Register.

But alas, mostly it is for laughs and my own high levels of self-flagellating masochism.

The rules for this project are as follows:

1) I’m doing this. Every Monday, for one whole year, a post should appear. Only death, ebola, or serious accident should prevent me from doing this. If I’m not, you have permission to kick my arse. Failing that, a more suitable punishment; fail to do this and I will destroy one album from my collection that I do not consider it a mistake to have bought, chosen in a poll by members of VR, in a manner chosen by members of VR, with photographic evidence posted on both sites.

2) The album has to have sold reasonably well and/or be reasonably well known, in other words, have some kind of cultural cachet. No basement-dwelling unsigned wanker who was so bad even the general public rejected him, because that’s far too easy.

3) Related to 2, the album must be acquirable through means that allow me to listen to this kind of stuff without any money. You didn’t think I was going to pay to listen to dreck, did you?

4) Variety is the spice of life. I don’t think I’d be able to write consistently or engagingly about 52 different dance albums, or 52 different pop albums, etc, etc. Differing genres and differing styles will be welcomed and ruthlessly slated.

5) Related to 4, only one album per artist.

6) No kids albums. Kids don’t know shit about anything. That is why all the stuff made specifically for them is shit. Again, far too easy.

7) All rules except number 1 can be broken in the interests of entertainment of you, the viewing public.

Comment suggestions, or rules you think should exist that I’ve missed, and hopefully the terror shall begin, the Monday after next.

Stick with it. It is mildly amusing.

His Girl Friday

If your area is anything like mine, your local Blockbusters is now a cheap mall called ‘Kwality Goods.’ Presumably, they don’t sell a spell checker in the mall. As a result, I have to find movies that I want to watch online. I figured that if they are not pirated new movies, I’m in the clear. Also, Cary Grant is lovely and everyone should have access to him, regardless of what their Blockbusters was replaced with.  

Alberto Gonzales resigns and hopefully recalls this memory on Monday morning.

Yay.