“Baada boom, baada bang!” said Boom Boom as she burst another lock with her little balls of destruction.
Here’s how Ray Davies smiled.
Ray Davies is a sweet smiling guy. He is playing his guitar, he’s playing his guitar,
…and then FLASH!
then another Flash since he paid to be in this post…
…and then, Flashback.
Once, Professor Petworth goes to Slaka to deliver a lecture at the university and meets Ms. M, one of the brightest undergraduate students there. Ms. M is most eager to seek criticism of her work; she is proud of the culture of criticism she comes from. “I come from a great culture of criticism,” she says – “I eagerly seek your criticism so that I can incorporate it into my work.” Petworth asks her what her thesis is called. “Critical Analysis of the Poetic Technique of Woolworth.” “Ah, you mean Wordsworth!”
Upon which criticism, Ms. M promptly bursts into tears, swears that the Professor’s lecture has been an utter monstrosity, and runs away, refusing to engage with such a spiteful man any further.
Pay heed, O ye artists: The next time you choose to foist another of your “projects” upon the world, don’t start off with a bio which reads like this: “The Whores of Babylon are an eclectic collective of musicians forging unique sounds and charting hitherto undreamt of frontiers with their groundbreaking blend of electronica and jazz“. Using words like “eclectic” automatically qualifies you for a cunt; besides – I don’t know if it’s ignorance, or hubris, or both – carrying on about yourself like that won’t make you any friends, not if you haven’t the beans to show for it.
It takes a lot of doing, and the stars and the gods aren’t usually in favour, but there is still such a thing as a good night out – a genuinely good night out, I mean, not one of those where you have to grit your teeth and force yourself to believe that yelling yourself hoarse over an oblivious crowd drunk to idiocy is somehow more genuinely fun than just staying in and wanking to cam sites, listening to the Heebie Jeebies’ Greatest Hits – and, no, not even the broken, ill-lit ugliness of this city, nor the deadening conviction that the little happiness you squeeze from it is provisional and frail, can take that away.
This is India, which is a very polite way of saying this is totally screwed-up. The popscene, such as there is a popscene, is basically a bunch of big-shots pulling seniority to bully their way into headlining slots at events: if you’re a little band trying to carve out a little working niche for yourself, you’re stuffed, and all the skill and vision in the world won’t save you. As the business stands, it’s the deep-pocketed movers-and-shakers of the coffee-table alt-culture set paying to book a weekend’s worth of entertainment. You’re the dancing monkey. Suck it up.
India’s hasn’t any street-cred. Bring up Jamaica, that dinky, crime-ridden, no-account island state, and people think of groove, dreadlocks, and weed: everyone secretly wishes they were Jamaican, and they wish for it because it’s cool. India isn’t cool.
Okay, you nasty, evil-smelling dickheads, I bet you all thought old Uncle Moop were a-dead-and-goner, didn’t you? Bet you all partied out on your Thermal-in-a-Quandary EPs all over Smoochie-Woochie-Let’s-all-Send-Silly-Messages-to-One-Another-on-Facebook-so-we-can-Pretend-we-Have-a-Life-Day this St. Valentine’s Day; well here’s bringing back good taste and an urgently needed sense of proportion to your lives. As it happens, nobody’s dud-and-gum, I still inhabit the Land of the Living, and I still worry myself to death over the awful, close-minded, backslapping bunch of inbreds who move ‘n’ shake the Indian popscene; worst of all, I worry about the poor souls who have to make a living selling their music here, in the third-world, which is plagued by so many troubles that, by the time you’re done figuring out where you stand on the BT brinjal and infant mortality, you’ve no space left in your head to work out if a pop record is any good or not.
The smartest thing the minds behind the Bacardi NH7 Weekender do is to cut the festival up into bite-sized pieces: instead of a single, vast, dust-ridden field, you get six manageable, more or less isolated gigs running all at once. This works for a number of reasons. When the programmers at NH7 book their acts, they do it from across the board: you have everything from acoustic balladry to dancehall, from indie to novelty fusion. Separating it by theme is not only a bit of clever space management, it also weeds the neo-hippies from the scrappy indie kids, the EDM bum-wigglers from the weepy folk-music waifs, and the metalheads from everybody else. As a punter, you get to make up your own listing as you go along. As a performer, you aren’t burdened with having to pull a whole stadium’s worth of crowd. The fact of it is, few of bands the bands on the roll have any particularly sizeable following: the Weekender turns this marvellously to its advantage, and gives you six cosy, tidily done festivals for the price of one.
Give the crazy old girl her due. Roisin Murphy has walked the thin line between weird and saleable with astonishing skill for nigh on twenty years now, and if she’s decided that squeaky-clean floor-fillers are her thing, at this point she can be forgiven.
Okay, this is the perfect song. It’s the best song ever written, and the best take on it ever done, and you lot can’t see it because you’re such a bunch of sad-faced dullards, whining and moaning all the time about how nothing works etc. etc.; the fact of it is, none of you recognise class when you see it, which is why you’ll always be unlaid and miserable.
Moop City 