It’s pronounced Disney-blood!! And look at that little dude on the cover!!! ‘NeverEnding Story‘ coded and I am fucking here for it!!!!
that wink is rather salacious and I’m not sure if I like it
Although – and I hate to be pedantic about this – but as we all know ‘NeverEnding Story’ was actually a Warner Brothers property, so how does that fit into the whole Disiniblud (pronounced Disney-blood!!!!) thing? Actually, I’m not sure, do Disney own Warner Brothers now? I know that everything that has ever existed in any medium is now owned by either Disney or Netflix, so flip a coin I guess.
I was born an open wound that only suicide could sow up But I refuse that healing thread, I wanted God to look at us And she whispers you sweet nothings, you hope it’s true enough To keep you here ’til you give yourself up
Do you know what happens when you open an album with a line of delicious ideation like “I was born an open wound that suicide could sow up”? Do you know what door you prise open when you begin your album career with such a beautifully nihilistic suggestion like that? Do you know what you get if you awaken my never fully dormant but always pathetic Richey Edwards fandom??
I am my father’s daughter in the end He says, “Watch your ego, watch your head, girl You’re so smart, so talented But now the water’s turning red And it’s all your fault, and it’s all your mess
Ah good, enough of that privileged bollocks like Olivia Rodrigo, time to hear from some real artists who have clawed their way up from the very bottom through sheer force of talent. When you’re willing to pull yourself up by your bootstraps like Caroline Polachek (daughter of James, classical musician, MD at Harvard, PHD at Berkley, taught Chinese History at Columbia and Princeton) then anyone can.
I’m being flippant, of course – I know! Me!? Can you imagine! – I just wanted to highlight how any discussion of supposed ‘privilege’ is a bit of a box of wasps, and a lot of people are going to have to get stung. Just be aware that you’re unlikely to sting just the person you intend to complain about if you open that box, and also that advantages exist beyond appearing on Disney shows growing up.
Canada! Throw another steak on the barbie and… No, that’s the other one isn’t it? Throw another poutine on the Mike Myers, aye! We all love Canada, don’t we? They’re like the USA it’s OK to like! So polite! So, like, a bit American, but not offensively so, but then also a little bit English, so that’s OK! There are bits of it that are French, I believe, but I don’t really have time to logically process that right now. Those white Canadians, they’ve, like, always been there, right? There was never any indefensible stripping of natives’ land, like there was in the USA, as far as I – wider culture – am aware of. No old Canadian movies celebrating the Canadian John Wayne brutally murdering the native population, so I have to assume that it never happened. Who’s the Canadian John Wayne, I hear you ask? Probably Drake. No, I can’t explain it, it just probably is, I dunno. Oh Canada! That’s how the anthem starts, innit? Lovely country, lovely people, such a lovely counterpoint to all the divisive silliness that happened ‘down south’! Shows that actually, yes, it is possible to build a civilised society over there.
Hey. Hey. Hey you. Yeah, you, future cultural historian. Yeah. I’m contacting you from the past. Wooooooooooo! Wait… no, I’m not a ghost, am I? Scrap that last comment. Just put down your Diplomat smoking pipe and remove your monocle, listen to me for a second. How’s the future treating you? Flying cloud storage, you say? Electronic cigarettes with AI sentience? Well that all sounds absolutely pointless, but good luck to you. Gig economy for cultural history, is it? Because Elon Musk is now the Great Leader at more than a thousand years old and can’t afford to give any workers at all any rights because he needs to fund his great humanitarian expedition to carve a visible doge meme onto the surface of Jupiter? For the lols? You have to pay for your own monocle and pipe?? Yeah, yeah, that all sounds awful, but not much different from my time and I kinda wish you’d stop going on about it, it’s my turn to speak.
How are you currently gauging the cultural mood of the years 2020-21 out there in the year 3000? Sure, if you wanted an inspiring and comforting read on everything you could just go to Arlo Parks’s debut album. Perhaps if you wanted a glimpse into how humanity strived (and often succeeded) to make creative connections despite the viral barriers you could take a listen to Charli XCX’s magnificent ‘how i’m feeling now‘. Or, yeah, if you wanted to go all Pitchforky I guess you could name that Fiona Apple album. What’s that? You’re actually currently evaluating the era through the prism of Emily in Paris? Damn, that’s a good angle, and I’d love to see what horrors you’ve unearthed during your studies. But can I suggest something far more advantageous? How about you study the illuminating trilogy of albums released by Big $ilky over that period?
If this blog has one true aim, then it’s to introduce and promote new…
Well… no, actually, if this blog has one true aim then it’s to extensively psychoanalyse myself and admit my private shame into what I believe to be essentially ‘The Void’, all under the laughable pretense of ‘reviewing music’. Ha! I haven’t done any ‘music reviews’ since I was highly scathing as a twelve/six year old of the 1996 Dodgy album ‘Free Peace Sweet‘. Three piece suite! Now I get it! Sorry, Dodgy, that review was unnecessarily harsh. Reappraisal: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
OK, but if this blog had a secondary aim, then it’s to introduce and promote new artists to…
No, the secondary aim is just an excuse to talk about Manic Street Preachers as much as possible, isn’t it? With ‘Official Prince Chat’ sprinkled on the side as garnish. I might just rename the blog to ‘Artists I Liked When I Was a Kid, At Length (While I Wait for the Next Hotelier Album)’. Dot WordPress dot com.
“If it had a third purpose it’d be […] no actually it’d be [BANTER]. In that case the fourth purpose would be […] actually, it’d probably be [STONE COLD MEGALOLZ]. But the fifth purpose would definitely be… (repeat)”
Language is very much like that green growth on my left testes, in that it keeps growing and changing in occasionally unpalatable ways, no matter what we intend and what efforts we take.
Words rarely mean the same thing for too long. ‘Faggot’ used to be a derogatory slur of homosexuals, but now it apparently just means someone whose opinion you politely dispute online. ‘Gay’ used to mean happy, and it seems now many people are so against this shift that they attempt to make gay people’s lives as unhappy as possible. That’s brilliant! I love irony! Sherlock Holmes ejaculated over Doctor Watson many times in the 19th century, and though he would also do so countless times in early 2010s Benedict Cumberbatch fanfic, the meaning was not quite what Conan Doyle had originally intended. There have actually been over a dozen officially recognised semantic shifts that have happened since dawn this morning. At 6:46 GMT it was decreed that the word ‘viscous’ now refers to Beijing Opera. At 8:12 GMT we received news that ‘tableware’ was actually a derogatory term for people of South Vermont. We heard at 11:02 GMT that dogs were now called cats, cats were now called mice, and mice were now called Total Network Solutions. Most confusingly, we were informed at 11:53 that we could no longer call a spade a spade, but a digidigdigdigdigdigdigdigggytron*
(*I had a… different joke there… but I chickened out… Feel free to tell it if you can tell what it would have been, but give me full credit. It it’s funny. If it’s racist, then that’s your fault)
I found a lot of the euphoria surrounding Black Panther’s release rather abhorrent.
Firstly, as you might have noticed if you’ve been paying close attention, I am a white gentleman. And even though I’m actually one hundred and seventy sixth Shoshone (because apparently just saying shit like that makes it true) I would probably identify as white. Despite white men being the face of literally everything, ever, I still understand the need for representation. As a glib and probably entirely offensive example, since my ‘accident’ by general bodily make up and bone structure has been so royally kejiggered that I can no longer urinate standing up. I used to think that was a disgraceful and embarrassing secret shame that nobody else could possibly comprehend. I then heard a sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Sound that referenced somebody getting so badly beaten up that he now ‘had to wee sitting down’. I was overjoyed to hear of my affliction being so universally understood and no longer felt so weird.
That film was sixty four minutes long. Sixty four minutes!!
+6
Back in 1941, film makers knew how long a film was meant to last, there was no scene in ‘Dumbo’ where Timothy Q.Mouse had a bath in a fucking magic pool and screamed as he was tortured visions of the Olsen twins exploded into magical CGI confetti as Robert Downey Jnr made some tortured pun about cheese or some shit, in order to expand on the Dumbo Cinematic Universe (DCU®). Boom, there’s your fucking film, now fuck off home. Life was great in 1941
Necessary Evil 