Q)

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I've just been invited to an event called 'Recession Party' in Manchester tonight. What the Jesus Christ is that about?

BIZARRE '80s REVIVAL VIGNETTE #1 (IN WHICH THE MYSTERY JETS MEET DREW BARRYMORE UPTOWN)

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I think it's worth pointing out that the new Mystery Jets single 'Young Love' bears an uncanny resemblance to 'Way Back Into Love', a Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore duet featured in seminal modern rom-com classic Music and Lyrics (essentially an even-shitter Wedding Singer).

I don't really know what this says about anything, but it is intriguing nevertheless. Aside from the blatant formal-melodic similarities, both tunes feature boy/girl lead vocals, and both are engaged in the kind of superficial '80s nostalgist whimsy currently doing the rounds in just about every walk of popular cultural life.

Both tunes are also pretty good, a fact you might want to situate somewhere on a scale that runs from grimly-disheartening to weirdly-actually-quite-life-affirming.

(Curious Barrymore/Mystery Jet fans should also check out 'Pop! Goes My Heart', another artistic highpoint in Music and Lyrics, and further showcase for Hugh Grant's surprisingly OK vocal skills.)

JAMESON'S FINEST (PRESCIENT CULTURAL COMMENTARY)

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‘As for the postmodern revolt against [modernism] … it must be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.’

‘What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the various kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage … Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror’.

- Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Q) IS THE PANDA BEAR ALBUM ALL THAT?

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Nigerian-born Newcastle United striker Obafemi Martins says:

'It's ok, though the kind of lavish praise heaped on Person Pitch by the indie fraternity baffles me slightly. I mean, Pitchfork naming it album of 2007? If this womby esoterica is supposed to define the epoch then I say we should be a little bit worried. The album doesn't get off to an great start: 'Comfy in Nautica' is just so many arch-Beach Boyisms buried under an Everest of water-logged reverb, and this formula pretty much sticks for the remainder of the record. Things do start to brighten-up after obscurely-titled third track 'Bros', which sees the unremitting drum-patterns finally beginning to click with the strung-out melancholia of Noah Lennox's vocals. Album closer 'Ponytail' benefits from a melodic directness not in evidence elsewhere, but it's difficult to banish the impression finally that this is an egocentric, if artfully-wrought side-project'.

'To be fair, I'm not dismissing it out of hand. Actually, I think it could be a grower as they say'.

Obafemi's name translates literally to 'the king loves me' in his native Yoruba language.

APPARENTLY MUHAMMAD ALI WAS MARRIED IN SOUTH SHIELDS: DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT ON EARTH THE CRAIC WAS WITH THIS?

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The Greatest:



South Shields Metro station:

A NON-COMPREHENSIVE, SELF-PROCLAIMEDLY RIDICULOUS LIST HINTING REDUCTIVELY AT MY SENSE OF NATIONAL IDENTITY

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'Englishness' having become an unmistakably HOT TOPIC in recent times, I thought a totally absurd, borderline-bigoted summary of my personal Manichean take on things might be a good idea.

So, in an imaginary play in which English good fights English evil, and in which any faults or redeeming nuances are clumsily ironed-out of characterisation, the cast sheet would probably read something like this ...

ENGLISH GOODIES
The Beatles
Kevin Keegan
William Shakespeare
William Blake
William Morris
Shelley
Robin Hood
Lauren Laverne
John Peel
Tony Wilson
Basil Bunting
Johnny Marr
Delia Derbyshire
The Futureheads
The Stone Roses
Tony Benn
Gina McKee
Oasis
Charles Dickens
Milton
Anne-Marie Duff
The BBC
Michael Eavis
The Venerable Bede

ENGLISH BADDIES
John Betjeman
Margaret Thatcher
The entire aristocracy since William the Conqueror
Jo Whiley
Jane Austen
Evelyn Waugh
Virginia Woolf
Peter Stringfellow
Johnny Borrell
Geri Halliwell
The Duke of Wellington
Dennis Wise
Jeremy Clarkson
Lord Kitchener
Alan Sugar
Simon Cowell
Archbishop Laud
Sharon Osbourne
Richard Curtis
Robert Baden-Powell
Lily Allen
Cecil Rhodes
Kingsley Amis

SPAWN OF LOADSAMONEY

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Here is an excerpt from a conversation between Lily Allen and Lauren Laverne from the TV show Lily Allen and Friends broadcast last week:

[Just by the way, Lily Allen sounds precisely in these exchanges like a spoilt, not-very-bright public schoolgirl. This is because she is a spoilt, not-very-bright public schoolgirl.]

ALLEN: Peter Stringfellow is a nasty man.
LAVERNE: Yeah.
ALLEN: I mean, respect to his trade and what he does.
LAVERNE: What do you mean respect?! Respect to what? Respect to the lapdancing trade? Yeah it’s really important to respect that! Do we?
ALLEN: I like it.
LAVERNE: Do you? Oh my god.
ALLEN: When I signed my record deal I went there.
LAVERNE: Did you? To Stringies?
ALLEN: I got quite into it. [coquettishly] I liked sitting there while they gyrated in front of me.
LAVERNE: I’m sure it’s very nice; they look like very pleasant girls.
ALLEN: Yeah yeah, it was fun, umm [turning to the camera as if to say ‘moving on …’]
LAVERNE: But yet, a little bit sad isn’t it, really? The thing is …
ALLEN: A lot of girls do it to fund their education …
LAVERNE: Nah, do you know what Lily, that’s fucking bollocks, right, cos even if they spend the money on that, it’s one of those things that, it’s one of those lies that blokes try and sell you that, you know: ‘you’ve got the power, cos like, you’re getting the money for it’. Frankly, if you’re being paid to be naked, you’ve not got any power in that dynamic. It’s not a good thing. It’s a bad thing.
ALLEN: [holding up her hands, perhaps realising she sounds slightly ridiculous] But I think it’s a woman’s right to sell herself. If there’s a market for it, why not?
LAVERNE: [magnanimous, but clearly utterly appalled by this stage] Let’s do this on ‘Loose Women’. For now, back to the show …

Now, I should begin by saying that, as far as myself and Lily Allen’s music is concerned, I think it’s mostly not that bad. Or, put differently, while it would be slightly disingenuous of me to say that I have a lot of time for her first record, it might be said that I have something approaching a little bit of not-very-valuable time for it, some of the time.

So, I was initially willing to give Lily a chance. But then strange things started happening. Lily had made a fairly decent, sometimes innovative album that appealed to a wide range of the British listening public. This was pop, but it was the kind of mildly urbane, occasionally trenchant and witty pop the alternative fraternity could appreciate just as readily as could a twelve year-old girl. The music was a neat, hi-fidelity hybrid of The Specials, St Etienne, and The Streets, and underneath the bubblegum sheen there appeared to be a sort of laudable combativeness and belligerence, a hint of marginalised rebellion and feminist vigour which set Lily apart from the Bailey Rae/Melua school of say-nothing mediocrity.

As such, it was confusing when Lily began to behave not so much like an alternative musician, and quite a lot like a first-year graduate intern at Price Waterhouse Cooper. Lily began to make statements like: ‘I just want to make some money. Maybe I could retire at 25. I’m only going to do one more album’, and [see article below] ‘So what if we're middle class? Just 'cos your mum was too lazy to get her fat ass up off the sofa and make some cash. I shouldn't be able to make tunes, yeah?' Apparently, we were told, such comments had to be viewed in light of Lily’s difficult upbringing. Lily’s poor mum had struggled for years to raise Lily and her siblings in the face of innumerable hardships such as having to fork out for her kids’ private education, being the wife/girlfriend of successful commedians Keith Allen and Harry Enfield, and producing multi-million dollar international blockbuster movies. Lily’s cynical, money-minded careerism, we were told, arose from a desire to ensure she herself would never have to return to this world of Dickensian privation.

Soon Lily’s face began to appear with increasing regularity on the cover of lifestyle magazines throughout the land, commenting on yet more aspects of her arduous life: Lily was after all going out with moderately famous Chemical Brother Ed Simons, taking cocaine now and then, and suffering from the bane of having an arse she thought was just that little bit too voluminous. Despite this, Lily became a ‘fashion icon’ and role model for young girls everywhere, a paragon of good style-sense and straight-talking neo-‘girl power’ sensibility.

Then it was announced that Lily was to be become a chat show host. Now, I am quite prepared to admit to being the holder of principles that might strike some as being woefully puritanical and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, it seems to me that hosting a chat show is probably not the sort of thing anyone interested in producing challenging, worthwhile art should be indulging in. Chat shows, surely, are vehicles for people like Terry Wogan and Oprah Winfrey, people with a penchant for suave, inoffensive affability, celebrities adept in the art of entertaining as many disparate people as possible with professional inanity and a studied genial populism.

Yet it seems that, for Lily, there is nothing wrong with trying to be, on one hand, something like a poppier Kate Bush, and on the other, a cooler, ‘feistier’ Davina McCall, nothing incongruous with being a serious musician at the same time as being a flirtatious celebrity style-icon. Presumably, as with most things where Lily is concerned, money provides legitimacy for this indiscriminate willingness to conflate mainstream and anti-establishment characteristics.

The above quoted conversation is a useful case in point. Here we see a young, inordinately rich musician defending the woman’s right to sell herself as a lapdancer, to the total bafflement of another, rather more scrupulous musical figure from a not-so-distant period of history, in which the justification but if there’s a market for it … was not some kind of quasi-postmodernist get-out clause masquerading as a proclamation of self-empowerment, with the potential to excuse all manner of corporate evils.

If Lauren Laverne personifies alternative music past: funny, articulate, principled, politically aware [Laverne, remember, memorably labelled The Spice Girls 'Tory scum' back in 1997] , then Lily Allen epitomises with horrifying exactitude the present state of the musical-cultural landscape: a place in which consumerism, fashion, self-objectifying sexuality and a kind of reactionary Burchillian brattiness have come to define the public persona of a girl who initially promised something a lot smarter and more creative.

A NEO-FREUDIAN NUGGET OF WISDOM FROM ONE OF OUR NATIONAL TREASURES

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INTERVIEWER: Who are you trying to impress when you perform?
KEN DODD: Oh, almost certainly it’s your parents.

CONTRASTS

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MICKY: She’s got a certain je ne sais quoi, hasn’t she?
PAUL: She’s got a pair of titties.

THE NEW FUTUREHEADS'

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I love ‘The Beginning of the Twist’ because it has a chord sequence more monumental than Penshaw Monument and a melody with more serpentine involutions than the Lambton Worm.

There’s localism for you.

That is all.