Archive for the ‘Brits’ tag
Duffy? DUFFY?
That lipstick-clad walking sedative? I rest my case…
Why the Brit Awards suck
Yawn the night away with Kylie, Robbie and Phil Collins at the Tescos
All award ceremonies suck. The awards that suck the most as those that “mean so much more as it’s voted for by you, the fans”. What, so when we paid to buy your crappy single and got it to the top of the charts, that wasn’t enough? You want us to phone a premium hotline to tell you again that you’re great? Are we that dumb? Hold on…
The BRITs aren’t like that though. Nor, like some other ceremonies, do they make any pretence of redressing the balance between the freeze dried coffee appetite of the great unwashed and the knowledgeable and trustworthy arbiters of taste: previous winners of the “outstanding contribution to music” award include Cliff Richard, Status Quo and The Spice Girls.
The BRITs are about product. The crass and unabashed commodification of an artform that at its best can move men to tears. It’s buy one get one free. It’s 12 months for the price of 10. It’s distilling variety down to the lowest common denominator until we’re faced with a choice of Brand A or Brand B because Brand C, although far superior, wasn’t promoted well enough and it’s become uneconomical to store on the shelves. It may as well be called the TESCOs.
Recently they even learned the supermarkets most insidious trick: the premium label. This isn’t just three-lunged soulful teenage angst in a can, this is “Critics’ Choice three-lunged soulful teenage angst in a can”. And Adele sells a bucket load more records.
The BRITs will go on, just like Tesco will go on. And for every Chumbawumba or KLF pissing all over the dairy counter, there’ll always be some fame-hungry Little Eichmann ready to whore themselves out re-stacking the shelves to the beat of some marketing man’s stick (step forward Duffy, Leona Lewis, Scouting for Girls) and there’ll always be a public too lazy to go to the market, the butcher or the greengrocer to seek out quality produce. We’re just that lazy.
But imagine what a world it would be if we turned our collective arses stage-wards and did for this gut-crunchingly banal parade of mediocrity what Jarvis Cocker did for Michael Jackson. What a wonderful world it would be.
