Thursday, December 09, 2004

A Post Designed Expressly to Piss Furious Jessy Off

I'm tough because I love.

Neil Young: "Like the poor and Pauline Fowler, Neil Young is always with us, a reminder of the drearier things of life. Venerated by paunchy Mojo-reading types, Young - whose reedy voice is the exact timbre of a continental dial tone - has changed neither his riffs nor his plaid shirt since he left Buffalo Springfield in 1968. Forever droning on about a mythical, moral America, Young has even-handedly bored three generations equally thoroughly, and unleashed some unspeakable musical atrocities. His last record, Greendale, was a concept album apparently scripted by William McGonagall, the anti-communist dirge Rockin' In The Free World remains one of the direst songs ever penned, and so relentlessly maudlin is Young that poor, impressionable Kurt Cobain quoted him in his suicide note. The apologists who boast that Neil Young has "never sold out" forget the main reason things don't sell out: people don't want to buy them."

The Beatles: "Thanks to these four, Britain's high watermark of musical creativity is still considered to be pub rock made by white idiots. As if polluting the 1960s with their safe, insipid music wasn't bad enough, they've exerted a stranglehold on culture since, inspiring generations of terrible bands and being feted by Chris Evans and Alan Partridge. Between their toe-curling rhyming couplets, tax-dodging, horseshit "spirituality" and Octopus's Garden, the Beatles embody everything wrong with the 60s in general and hippies in particular."

Both of these little tidbits from here.

To show I'm not completely mean-spirited (all of the time), I'll give myself some of my own business.

The Rolling Stones: "For years the debate raged - who's best: the Beatles or the Stones? Well, the debate raged between cretins, anyhow. Anyone with an ounce of sense and a pair of functioning ears knew there was no contest: the Beatles were better by a factor of 15,000. The Stones recorded some undeniably great tracks. But they also shat out a load of dull, ugly, clumsy rock. And don't start protesting that Mick Jagger is the most charismatic frontman the rock world has ever seen - he's a hideous, tulip-mouthed cadaver with nothing interesting to say, and the most grating voice this side of Sybil Fawlty (ed. note: ???). The most interesting thing about the Rolling Stones is the amount of drugs they took - and there's nothing more boring than that."

The Clash: "They had white jeans and big gums and they went "WEUUUURRRGH " because they were punks. Only, unlike the Sex Pistols, who turned punk's musical limitations into a corking art-school pantomime, the Clash were beholden to cliche, their every discount riff, "spontaneous " guitar demolition and mucus-filled roar plucked from the lichen betwixt the flagstones of 60s rock. What's more, Sandinista! - a triple album of rubbish reggae, children's choirs and rub-a-dub dub - proved they were as prone to self-indulgence as the prog-rock braggards they had avowed to overthrow. "But," bleat the apologists, "they were political." The only sensible response to which being: "So was Enoch Powell (ed. note: once again, ???), but even he'd have drawn the line at white jeans."

To conclude, something with which I think we all can agree:

Jim Morrison: "Only a blowhard stockbroker's son like Oliver Stone could fall in love with a boorish, spoiled admiral's brat like Jim Morrison. He styled himself "the Lizard King - I can do anything". This lizard didn't even survive a strenuous wank in a hotel bathtub, but he popped his alligator boots just in time to secure unwarranted legend status. If he'd lived another two years they'd have found him out - as they would James Dean. Cool band, though, for two albums (out of seven) and a couple of singles; pity about the pretentious name and the ridiculous high-school revolutionary lyrics. I cite the album Waiting For The Sun and the alleged poetry on the RIP-exploitation disc, An American Prayer, as evidence of Jim's profound inch-deepness. The one time it all came together, on LA Woman, he had to screw it up with all that "Mr Mojo Rising" crap in the middle. Always the knob with Morrison. Arthur Lee's Love is the real 1967 LA band. Who are those fools at his grave?"