“Sure, we understand irony…”

“..it’s like rain on your wedding day, right?  Or a free ride when you’ve already paid. ”

Good Old American Indie-Dependence

There’s a huge underground hype-machine winging its way to Whelan’s later this year, if whispers whizzing around hip musical circles are to be believed.  A new North American 5 or 6 piece are pencilled in to be the new ‘thing’ for the entire month of November.  From Baltimore or Brooklyn, or maybe it’s Canada, they’re said to be from that peripheral country-folk branch of American indie, with a good dollop of Talking Heads thrown into the mix to make them extra unique.   The four people who’ve actually seen them in rehearsal are already comparing them to Clap Your National Grizzly Cold War Wolf Fleet Horses Parade, Yeah.  And Talking Heads.

Don’t worry if you think you might forget about them by the time the tickets go on sale, you won’t be able to avoid the hype, particularly as their stunning, never-been-done image will be all over the press by then: checked shirts (worn outside saggy jeans), beards, receding hairlines and at least one member, most likely the bassist, or possibly the drummer, will be wearing a baseball cap. 

So Far, S*ph*m*re

I know, Dear Reader, that I’m a persistent curmudgeon, but even reading online music reviews, as I do on a daily basis, gets me riled beyond accidental Emmerdale viewing.  Today (well, like every other day since I started using the Internerd) there are two Titanic funnels’ worth of steam emerging from my ears over the dogged, moronic insistence of non-American music reviewers to use the word ’sophomore’.  In case you don’t know, this hugely unattractive word refers to a second-year student in a U.S. college. Due to American review outlets like Pitchfork, its use (before the word ‘album’) has now come to refer to an artist’s second long-player. Which is quite all right over there; I’m absolutely sure normal, everyday Americans pop the word into normal, everyday conversations.  Quite patently, however, we do not.

Please “Give It Up”, For God’s Sake

I dreamt about Fame Academy the other night.  There are reasons for this that I won’t get into but it’s fair to say I woke up terrorised, breathing like a hyper-ventilating Phil Mitchell.   Mercifully, Patrick Kielty isn’t on the telly so much these days – but it’s not nice that he came crawling into my head during the night.   Anyway, the dream reminded me of something Kielty always said on the show and I’m going to rant about it now:  “Give it up for… (Daniel Bedingfield/ James Blunt /Jamie Cullum, etc)”

American… Wonder Pests

“The phone/ The phone is ring-ing.” What the hell has happened to Wonder Pets?  Or, more specifically, the UK version?  Any parent who spends their mornings, afternoons and evenings being blasted by the unremitting fire cannon of kaleidoscopic, hyperactive, cacophonous, epileptic programming on Nick Jr knows what an oasis of calm and cuteness Wonder Pets was.  The everyday tale of a hamster (Linny), a turtle (Tuck) and a duckling (Ming-Ming) who reside in a school classroom by day and become heroic, bungling, inquisitive, resourceful and impossibly adorable rescuers by mid-afternoon, the series is, as you’d expect, an American import, which is revoiced for the UK audience by a team of beautifully well-spoken youngsters.  Until recently, anyway.  The most recent series have, either by terrible accident or less-than-intelligent design, done away with much of its adopted Englishness and allowed hideous psuedo-Americanism to creep into its dialogue.  Same accents, just a woeful slackening of standards, diction and jaws.

The Wonder Pets‘ signature tune previously featured the refrain, “What’s going to work? Teamwork!”  This has been replaced, without notice or parental advisory warning, by the awful, “What’s gunna work?”  In what way will this advance children?  Why introduce the fundamentals of text-speak to toddlers unless there’s a new Nick Jr Uk charter to wilfully dumb-down their audience?  Frankly, I was Outraged of Chiswick and shook my rolled-up copy of The Daily Express at the telly.  It was my absolute parental duty to risk life, limb and eardrum to switch this monstrosity off and change over to the relative safety of CBeebies – which would be my natural choice, anyway.  Mind you, I had an agenda.  What, you mean you haven’t seen Space Pirates?  You’re crumbling before me…

Americans… Have Talent?

America’s Got Talent, apparently - but it takes Michael Knight and two vastly unqualified British goons to separate the weird from the chavs.  And what have they uncovered so far?  4-year-old Kaitlyn Maher, an impossibly cute little girl whose suitably adorable version of ’Somewhere Out There’ (tragically, not the Nina Hynes one) melted the hearts of the audience and the supposedly ruthless panel.  What a gruesome display of sentimentality masquerading as talent.  What chance does genuine talent have next to to a 21st century Shirley Temple?  You wouldn’t expect David Hasselhoff to express discernment under these circumstances but even Piers Morgan couldn’t mallet the wailing wee one back into the arms of her opportunistically wholesome parents; she was, after all, the only 4-year-old on the show and infinitely cuter than the tap-dancing octegenarian who brought back terrible nightmares of Les Dawson’s beloved, rotund dance troupe, The Roly Polys.  For Morgan and Sharon Osbourne, little Kaitlyn must have stoked latent nostalgia for 1970s’ Opportunity Knocks, when Paula Yates’ father, Hughie Green unearthed such precocious young talents as Lena Zavarone and Bonnie Langford.  I hope they find the new Jim Davidson while they’re at it.  The only word (after “awww”) I could utter after this brazen exploitation of childhood was “yuk”.  Morgan and Osbourne’s fawning gullibility makes me more than a little embarrassed to be British but it helps to explain how they got the gig in the first place; in America, violin-screeching sentimentality matters much more than substance, as Disney proves time and again.  If they don’t decide to rename this TV travesty America’s Got Schmaltz, they should at least replace Morgan with Russell Brand at the first opportunity.

American… Pizzas

A colleague has got me thinking, in the way that colleagues often do – by inadvertently riling me.  The poor blighter asked, in all innocent ignorance, ”how do they make ‘pizza sauce’ in Italy?”  Pizza sauce?  Sauce? They don’t use sauce, they use tomatoes. Fret not, dear reader, I didn’t start ranting at him, I thought I’d do it here instead.

It isn’t really his fault, you see – it’s those people with whom we have a ’special relationship’ across the ocean.  Americans have been responsible for many culinary atrocities in their short time on earth but little compares to their sacrilegious contempt for pizza.  Thanks to them, the very word ‘pizza’ has had its definition so mangled and pureed beyond authenticity that British and Irish people now associate it with stars, dots, huts, spongey slabs of dough, sweetcorn and bloody pineapple.  Oh, and dog food too, if the ’steak’ topping another colleague had on his dotty birthday pizza last week is anything to go by.

What is most galling is the Disney-like fashion in which the U.S. has hijacked the name ‘pizza’ – it’s not pizza.  There should be a entirely different name given to this thick, doughy, sweaty, rubbery basin of fat; especially when it’s used as an open sandwich for ingredients you wouldn’t normally keep together in the same fridge – pineapple, sardines, chicken, banana, sausage, shrimp, ‘barbecue’ sauce and extra tupperwarezarella (don’t get me started on that).  And, in America, where they eat piles of these things, they have to bring along another table and a cake stand in ‘pizzerias’ to house them – no wonder they needed a bigger Hut.

Instead of trying to ruin the reputation of this traditionally subtle Southern Italian peasant fare, they should simply give each one of these monstrosities a different, un-catchy, entirely American title, so we’re all clear about where the blame lies – things like Chicago Deep Dish Meat Feast Fish Face Fruit Splat Dough Head should cover most of them – just anything but pizza.  Not even pregnant women should be craving such dreadful combinations.

A proper pizza, yesterday

American… Voices

I’ve just heard that ad on the radio again:  “Muse – LIVE at Mawwrlee Pawwrk, Dublin”. I’ve a few issues with it.

First and foremost, the only thing I can think of that’s worse than spending a wet August night in ‘Mawwrlee Pawwrk’ is spending a wet August night in ‘Mawwrlee Pawwrk’ watching Muse.  Secondly, the ad states that Muse were, “voted the best live act in the world” – which only goes to prove that our provincial cousins spend too much time filling in surveys and not enough time going to gigs.

But, knowing that thousands of people will still willingly leave their irony at home and toddle along to the see this puerile display of camp-prog from the southern English sticks, the biggest issue I have is the advert’s voiceover; in fact, the same is true of almost all radio ads for big gigs.  Why do promoters feel we need an American voice to sell it to us?  What is it about being American that makes things supposedly more thrilling?  Aren’t Irish, or even British, accents sufficient to convince us to part with our money?  How many Americans actually know where ‘Mawwrlee Pawwrk’ is?  How many Americans can actually pinpoint Ireland on a world map?

It’s not even a particularly convincing accent either, sounding like a piss-poor pub pastiche of the voiceover bloke who begins every film trailer with the words, “in a world…”

We don’t need Americans to sell us chocolate, cars, spectacles, computers or furniture, so why inflict every rock cliché in the Big Book of Rock Clichés on us by trying to flog us Muse tickets with a voice that should be trying to extol the wholesome family value system that is KFC?

It’s truly appalling but, much worse, it has been entirely accepted as normal by people who hear it. Everyone comments on Harvey Norman ads because they’re voiced by a hyperventilating Aussie, but Americans and their famous voices are so ubiquitous, we barely even register that that’s what it is.

While Muse fans are not pondering this matter, can I just draw their attention to the small print on the gig itinerary?  That’s right, it says Kasabian.  Oh dear.