In 1985 Siffre witnessed documentary footage of a white police officer shooting black children in South Africa. He was so moved by this atrocity that he penned the timeless anti-Apartheid anthem ‘Something Inside So Strong‘. Whereas I, well… I heard a song by Nicki Minaj, called ‘Stupid Hoe’

First of all, let’s be clear that there are some, though very few, good points about this song. At long last! Someone has successfully soundtracked the experience of living through a minor earthquake: lots of sirens going off and your CD player skipping. Also there’s now an anthem for anyone who has ever felt an irrational anger towards gardening equipment.

And yet despite this, there’s so much to be angry about. It’s the sort of music that makes you wonder if you’re getting older because the music the young, fucking stupid people, apparently listen to these days is ‘just a lot of noise’ to you, or if this is genuinely ‘just a lot of noise’. I can’t help but feel it’s the latter, surely. 

There’s times when this borders on parody. It’s hard to believe that any intelligent being could seriously think lines like  ’Stupid hoes is my enemy, stupid hoes is so wack’ deserve to be coming out of anything other than a horse’s ass.  

It’s so fucking depressingly awful that its hard to even get angry about because it’s so soul-destroying and defeating. The sheer inanity of it all! What sort of shit-brained attempt at an insult is ‘you’re just a stupid hoe’ anyway? Even a response as feeble as ‘I know you are but what am I?’ is too good for that. 

I always thought it was really unfair how people ridiculed Rebecca Black for her pisspoor efforts at songwriting, especially when people like Nicki Minaj, twice her age and making more spirited attempts to pretend to be some sort of musical entity get by without the same, although much more warranted torrents of abuse. But one thing that this abhorrent piece of musical tragedy proves, there’s nothing fair about anything, anywhere, at all. 

The fact that I don’t hear much commercial radio these days, and when I do it’s all Korean stuff that I don’t know the name of, and is ineligible for inclusion on this blog because KOREAN POP MUSIC FUCKING ROCKS, has contributed to this being a sort of mini-series on those musicians that have an uneasy relationship with popular acceptance.

Much like his namesake Phil Collins, Billy Joel has a shed-load of good songs but it’ll never be cool to like Billy Joel. He’d have to wear a meat-dress or something, and even then, he’s too weird looking for people to think that was cool. I defy anyone to look at any picture of Billy Joel and not feel slightly disturbed.

This thinly-veiled excuse to insult popular musicians centers around nothing more than a throw-away line from Joel’s popular hit song ‘The Piano Man’. A great song for those who love pianos and the men that play them….and drunks. The curious line occurs about 40 seconds into the song.

There’s an old man sitting next to me
Makin’ love to his tonic and gin

He says, “Son, can you play me a memory
I’m not really sure how it goes….

Actually, never mind that, what the hell are you doing to your drink?? If I were going to write a song about that scenario, the subject wouldn’t have been about playing a few tunes in a bar on a Saturday. I would have written about the deviant performing lurid sex acts on an alcoholic drink…and I’d have called the song ‘The Ginfucker’…but then, not for the first time in my life, I realise I am not Billy Joel.

See Billy Joel probably doesn’t realise the folly of his ways. He probably wrote that without really thinking about the consequences. He probably thought that nobody would think about that line at much length. The first time you listen to the song you won’t take notice of it, and then every time after that you’ll be waiting for the bad-ass piano bit in the middle. But Billy Joel was wrong. And that is why he’ll never be cool…..or…whatever…

Yeah you’re right. He’s a bastard isn’t he? And he looks ridiculous, like a potato with hair.

But this song is perhaps the gravest of his myriad sins:

She calls out to the man on the street
“Sir, can you help me?
It’s cold and I’ve nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me?”

He walks on, doesn’t look back
He pretends he can’t hear her
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street
Seems embarrassed to be there

Oh think twice, it’s another day for
You and me in paradise
Oh think twice, it’s just another day for you,
You and me in paradise

Yeah that’s a great message, helping those less fortunate than yourself but…why don’t you help her Phil? You’ve got more money than me! You are more likely to have spare rooms in your house! Stop being such a sanctimonious git and help the woman in the song! Instead of preaching to us about why we’re so lucky to live in a world where we can afford to buy Phil Collins albums. Being lectured at to help the less fortunate by something with £115m in the bank is not great motivation.

It’s sort of like the urban legend that accompanies ‘In The Air Tonight’ – to quote Eminem:

You know the song by Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight”About that guy who coulda saved that other guy from drowning. But didn’t, then Phil saw it all, then at a show he found him?

Yeah so in that scenario, Phil Collins apparently could have saved the drowning man too but presumably would have been weighed down by all the cash in his wallet. And now he’s witnessing a man not help a homeless woman and then criticising him for it. The hypocrite. He probably watched the whole thing through a diamond-plated monocle.  What an utter bastard.

I’m glad I did – the band’s back-story is hilarious enough in itself.

See, they’re very deliberately named CN Blue. The CN part stands for code-name. I thought one of the basic principles of a code-name was that it had to be…you know…code for something, and not widely publicised. Seeing as the presumably real names of each band member are readily available via a quick Google search, there doesn’t seem to be much point in them having a code-name. But you know, let’s not quibble about trivial things.

Just kidding, let’s make that the sole purpose of this entire post/blog.

The obsolete ’codename’ prefix isn’t the funniest part of the band’s name though. They’re called ‘blue’ because that’s a handy acronym representing each band member’s personalities, ‘burning’ ‘lovely’ ‘untouchable’ and ‘emotion’.

Strange adjectives to define individual personalities by aren’t they? Plus ‘lovely’ isn’t really in keeping with the others, who are so intense their personalities can only be described by abstract concepts. Unless the ‘burning’ guy is always starting fires.

I mean ‘lovely’ is a bit too much a word that a grandmother would use to describe someone. I’d like to know if he protested at all when they were deciding on a name. ‘Aw man, lovely? Really? But you get to be ‘untouchable’, and you get to be ‘burning’! Can’t I be ‘lightning’? Or at least ‘likeable’?’ – No, you’re lovely and that’s that.

And ‘emotion’ sounds like a weak insult a school bully would give to a kid who cries all the time.

It’s also handy how the definitive attributes of each band member come together to make the word ‘Blue’, if I tried that with 4 of my friends the best I’d end up with is WDSP. Which is probably one of the reasons why I’m not  a Korean pop star – the other reasons being that I’m not Korean and have no talent.

Also the ‘W’ stands for wanker.

But either way it seems like she’s finally broken this habit of inconsistency with a run of brilliant singles, well two in a row. Only Girl (In The World) was good, right? And though Drake tries his best to take a shit on What’s My Name?, the quality of Rihanna’s vocals carry it over that obstacle. Even Pitbull couldn’t derail such a great song.

‘S&M’ is her subtle new single and despite being filled with embarrassingly clumsy references to whips and chains it’s really, really good. Either this means that Rihanna really has broken the habit of a lifetime or that she’s due a really, really shit song soon. I don’t know which I prefer. Probably the latter, being the gloating, schadenfraude-filled bastard that I am.

The pre-chorus is a thing of real poetic beauty. Rihanna concedes that she ‘may be bad but I’m perfectly good at it’, an awful lesson to impressionable youths everywhere – you shouldn’t be proud of underachieving. She also makes a comment about ‘sex in the air, I don’t care I love the smell of it’, which sounds like a serious problem with an air-conditioning system. There’s also some handy advice for anyone looking to bully her: ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me’, so you know now what the most effective methods are for both. Gratuitously obvious lyrics do have some purpose.

It wasn’t always this way you know.

Still I don’t know how gay rights lobbyists will feel about this. By far the best lyric is ‘You don’t want to mess with us, got Jesus on my neck-a-lace’. Not only is this the first time necklace has been turned into a three syllable word but it also somehow holds special powers that will come in handy in a fight because it has Jesus on it. That’s what Jesus was all about, starting fights and kicking ass.

I also don’t think that Ke$ha and her friends will have had to put much effort into ‘dancing like we’re dumb’ but this might just be the embittered comment of someone who can’t dance in any style. Do dumb people have a distinctive dancing style? And when was Ke$ha ever sober enough to take notice of this?

Despite the tough questions  ’We R Who We R’ poses the listener, it’s a great song, just really, really brilliant. If you disagree you either are opposed to the advancement of the gay rights movement, in which case shame on you, or you’re just in denial about how brilliant Ke$ha is.

I was wrong about ‘Tik Tok‘. That’s also brilliant.

Of course. Simon Cowell loves charity work. Especially if it gives him a chance to promote all his artists and show how lovely and altruistic they all are. That’s why the X-Factor finalists appear every year with a charity single. It’s like he expects the audiences to say “Hey look! There’s Leona Lewis! And JLS! And Joe McElderry! And Susan Boyle! Wow, they must all really care about Haiti”. It would make a much greater statement  as a charitable deed if he actually didn’t seem to be getting shitloads of publicity out of it at the same time.

But the real reason that ‘Everybody Hurts’ grates is the insensitivity of the message. ‘Everybody hurts’, yes, everybody experiences a devastating natural disaster in their stricken country at some point or another. It’s just part of life. Only a song like ‘Shakin’ All Over‘ or ‘I Feel The Earth Move‘ could be more crass and offensive. The Quietus wrote a typically excellent feature on this at the time:

A humanitarian disaster of unimaginable proportions has hit a country long buckling from centuries of corruption and poverty. And what is pop’s response? Everybody hurts. It’s not just you, poor, things. We poor creatures hurt too. “When the day is long” – hey, we sympathise, those aftershocks must be a right bitch, especially when you don’t know when they’re going to bury your family home deeper in debris – and “the night is yours alone” – especially when your wife and children are dead, and you haven’t got any food or water, that must be a right bummer – well, “hang on”.

That’s what pop says: “hang on”. The temerity of that lyrical twist, its jaw-dropping tastelessness, telling people that have had to hang on already, forever, to just bolster their spirits in the face of devastation – a state unknown to pop stars who wouldn’t piss in a bottle for less than ten grand – makes it pop’s grimmest moment of all time. Not only does it rip the soul out of a song that had something to say, but in the warbly throats of Cowell’s Cabal, it turns ‘Everybody Hurts’ into a surreal, empty ode to positive thinking, performed by people who’d have a tantrum if their tea wasn’t served in bone china.

That perfectly sums up the problem I have with this song. There’s so many reasons to object to this as a charity single but the sheer idiocy of the message is the most galling. Why is a charity single necessary anyway? Is that what it takes for people to donate to the cause? The guarantee of a tasteless, pisspoor cover version in return for a good deed? Maybe so, but there’s something seriously wrong with that.

Comments on the YouTube link below suggest that this actually is the case -

the 28 people that liked this are the kind of people that get kick out of kiking puppys

how could you even hover over the dislike button!!

Idiot.

Musically and lyrically it might not be the worst song of the year, but in the context of its meaning it wins this dubious title by some distance. At least when Akon is prattling on about trying to find the words to describe a girl without being disrespectful he’s not doing any harm – except to common sense.

I mean even Vanilla Ice thought Jedward’s take on ‘Ice Ice Baby’ was funny. This is coming from a man who remembers his music career as ‘that one year when I wasn’t painting houses’. It doesn’t get much more degrading than that. Does it?

Yes it does. Because Vanilla Ice is actually on this song!  There can surely be no musician that actually wants to appear on a Vanilla Ice song, even Vanilla Ice isn’t that crazy about the idea!

Still Jedward probably can’t believe their popularity endured for long enough to actually release this single, and an album full of cover versions (which went to #1 in Ireland, shame on you all). I suspect that the second half of the album is just silence because nobody would bother to listen to it all the way through and if they would they have greater worries than the awful music Jedward make.

So that’s that. This is a steaming pile of shit. Which was totally predictable. But as long as there are people who spend their money on Jedward singles instead of putting it to better use like donating to charity or throwing it in a river, there will always be garbage like this kicking about. That’s a sad reality of living in the first world. Even stupid people have money.

James Corden’s involvement in this is no surprise because it was obviously a terrible idea from the beginning and it was a chance for him to get some much-needed exposure, as this article points out.

But Dizzee Rascal, wow. He’s really trying his hardest to get rid of all that pesky ‘credibility’ he used to have, isn’t he? He’s only a few miserable steps away from appearing on a charity single with Tony Christie and Peter Kay. He’s becoming a family friendly version of his former self, and as about as respectable as N-Dubz. Go on, keep making a tit of yourself Dizzee, it’s great fun to watch.

‘Musically’ the song is an insane mixture of jarring samples, a big cacophonous mess that even Boyd Rice couldn’t hope to match. Never before has the work of Tears for Fears been treated with such disregard and contempt.

Then again, maybe the actual music isn’t important – just that everyone SHOUTS and that we have yet another platform for James Corden, to make us question how talented you need to be to get on television and to re-affirm that football songs are generally, almost always rubbish.

It is a mean, sneery off-the-dial insult of a song that makes Vicky Pollard seem like sophisticated satire and a Daily Mail editorial a shining beacon of enlightened liberal thinking. If it is meant to be knowingly affectionate, any ironic winks were lost in the edit.

What sort of people would really laugh at this? Apes? People with only the most basic cognitive skills? Yes, there are people like those that Harry is making fun of but there’s nothing inherently funny about that. All this song seems to be looking for is a grunt of recognition from the audience: ‘ha ha chavs !’ Is that really a standard we should expect from one of the country’s most popular comedians? Is it fuck. Do better.

As the article in the Guardian points out. Lots of comedians have turned poking fun at ‘chavs’ into a something resembling social commentary but Harry is just looking down on people for cheap laughs. It’s totally classless and there’s nothing clever about it at all, it’s just stupid. Why did he do this? What the fuck was he thinking? Fortunately he’s been somewhat taken to task for this, but the damage can’t be undone. It will live on, offending all the senses, including common, forever.