I was in Waitrose this morning, as is my wont during the week on those days where I drop my daughter off at school. The reasoning is simple. Waitrose has a coffee machine wherein anyone who is a Waitrose card holder can get a free hot drink (one per visit) while shopping. Waitrose have recently done away with paper cups (as well as the cheap plastic bags) so you have to have your own cup (which I take with me). While I sip my freshly prepared beverage I can peruse the shelves and usually make a small purchase or two, although there are those rare times when I'm broke and I just go in and get the free drink, pretend to be shopping and then sneak out at the exit, avoiding eye contact with staff as I do so. What? I'm not supposed to do that, you say? Hey, I'll keep doing it until they have burly coffee bouncers on the door, inspecting everyone's purchases.
But I digress.
As you may know, if you follow me on social media to any degree, our local Waitrose is sometimes patronised by none other than the Fourth Doctor himself, Tom Baker. I hadn't seen him in town for quite some time, so when I did see him this morning it made me quietly happy and relieved, as he is in his eighties now and the last time I saw him, he was quite wobbly and using a stick. So to see him sans stick, pushing his trolley around and hailing all and sundry with his booming voice was good. All is still well with the Doctor.
He was greeting one of the female staff there as I walked past. Not wishing to interrupt, I simply said, "Morning, Tom" as I made my way past him, and he greeted me similarly. I stopped a few feet away to look at some items and could hear his half of the conversation with the lady employee. She is a lady that I have known since the late '80s, and he was complimenting her on her long service, asking her how long she'd been working there. I wasn't able to hear her response but I know she has worked for Waitrose a good many years. And like I said, I know she is at least as old as me.
After hearing her reply, Tom responded "Well, that must have been your first job after you left school, eh?"
Tom Baker, 86 years old, still flirting with the ladies.
Good on you, Tom, you silver-tongued rogue.
Friday, July 5, 2019
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Gripes About Music
I cannot remember the last time I used this blog as a means to rant about something completely inconsequential. I used to whine on about music, adverts, TV, films, and human behaviour in general as a way of getting things off my chest. After a while, I stopped.
Possibly it was because I had run out of things to get hacked off about, but I don't think so. I always get bothered by stuff. I think it was because I was in a different job and had become a new father and thus had less time on my hands. It also had something to do with my new passion - podcasting. All in all I was able to devote less time to the blog and when I did have any free time, I was too tired to bother. And to justify my lack of activity I bullshitted myself into believing that my views were no longer unique enough to be worthy of weighing-in on the topics of the day. I felt that my little soapbox would be lost in the maelstrom of the Interwebs.
But something has been getting right on my ever-lovin' titties for a while now, and I feel a good old fashioned rant comin' on.
Unsurprisingly, it's about music.
Back in the day when I would rant about music that I disliked, I would find that a few years down the line I would look back and see the musicians I complained about in a fresh light, and one of these was a chap named Dizzee Rascal. Coming back to the UK after 18 or so years Stateside, I couldn't cope with hearing rappers with an English accent. It didn't seem right. Nowadays it's so commonplace that I can't see what I was so bothered about. Sorry, Dizzee. However, now Mr. Rascal's hits seem to have dried up somewhat, that fact that he is now in a commercial for Ladbrokes (a bookmakers) pushing their online gaming app where you can gamble your life savings away via PayPal is even more disappointing. Gambling is an addiction, Dizzee. A sickness. And while Ladbrokes' ad for online gaming is by no means the only one, and not even the only celebrity-endorsed one (Paddy McGuinness, anyone?), Dizzee's ad truly horrifies me. I thought you were better than that, mate.
One of the overriding themes of my previous rants about music seems to be the lack of quality or care that is put into the creation of music. A lot of it is about formulas - find a formula that seems to resonate with the masses, then you can replicate that time and again, and like the sheep they have been taught to be, devoid of any critical thinking skills or any true ability to discern bad from good, the masses will time and again lap it up. Which is why the Top 40 or even the Billboard Hot 100 is 75% crap.
Even when something is presented as unique and different, strip away the layers and underneath you'll find something fairly pedestrian.
Take Billie Eilish, for example. Her music is all the rage now because of the way in which it is presented. Minimalist in style, with unusual sampled sounds taking the place of traditional instrumentation, coupled with a singing style that barely rises above a mumble and utilises strange pronunciation (more on that later), and visually she and her videos are quirky, odd and arrestingly different. The sound is cool, but you can bet those songs were written on a guitar and sung normally to begin with. And they probably sounded like nothing much to write home about.
The funky pronunciation thing isn't new, in fact a few years ago I wrote about Katy Perry rhyming 'world' with 'us' because she twisted the life out of both of those words to get them to sound similar.
What does appear to be new(ish), however, is the prevalence in advertising of using existing tracks by modern artists to sell your product. This is a perfectly legitimate way to sell two products in one go, because the assumption is that a big budget ad featuring a little-known performer's tune will be shown often enough that the tune will seep into even casual viewers' heads by osmosis, and they will then find out what it is and download it. Again, nothing wrong with that in terms of marketing, really. It's another form of the impulse buy at the checkout.
However, there are several ads on at the moment in the UK where the songs used are either (a) incredibly annoying, which means that now you have an annoying tune stuck in your head all day; (b) songs that use the weird pronunciation along with strange Elton-John-meets-Elizabeth-Fraser-like phrasing so that when you actually find out what the words are, you cannot believe it: or (c) both.
Now, I have a touch of tinnitus. A constant high-pitched whine in the background which I can generally ignore when there are lots of other sounds in the room, but when in a silent room, that's all I hear. I've had it to some degree for as long as I can remember, but only in the last few years has it begun to have any measurable effect on my hearing.
Currently, I have the TV set to subtitles most of the time so that I don't have to have it at top-notch volume all the time in order to compete with all the other noises going on around me. But what this means is that in some cases, the ads get subtitled and when it is one of the aforementioned ads, you can read the lyrics and say "Hang on! Those are the words!?!?"
Let me give you an example.
The song is called 'Look After You' by Aron Wright. Never heard of him. But that song is in my brain. But you see what I mean? His low-key phrasing means he barely says the word 'look' and 'you' except in the chorus. All I heard was "I will kafter..." and until I put the subtitles on one day, I had no idea what he was on about. I was like, speak up, man, speak up! Enunciate!
Here are a couple of others where the phrasing leaves one perplexed and feeling like you've just been listening to AM radio in the 70s.
The track is called 'The Man' by Aloe Blacc. And I doubt that you all heard "A king is born, I told you before" and "Ain't no-one like me, I'm a legend" in there. If you did, you only picked up bits of it.
The following one is a little better, but I still had to turn on subtitles to find out exactly what was going on. It's a track called "I'm A Wonder Woman" by someone named Lion Babe.
Speaking of annoying ads, there's nothing worse to my mind than seeing people who are supposed to be musicians portrayed by actors who clearly haven't ever picked up a guitar in their lives.
Alright. Rant over.
Possibly it was because I had run out of things to get hacked off about, but I don't think so. I always get bothered by stuff. I think it was because I was in a different job and had become a new father and thus had less time on my hands. It also had something to do with my new passion - podcasting. All in all I was able to devote less time to the blog and when I did have any free time, I was too tired to bother. And to justify my lack of activity I bullshitted myself into believing that my views were no longer unique enough to be worthy of weighing-in on the topics of the day. I felt that my little soapbox would be lost in the maelstrom of the Interwebs.
But something has been getting right on my ever-lovin' titties for a while now, and I feel a good old fashioned rant comin' on.
Unsurprisingly, it's about music.
Back in the day when I would rant about music that I disliked, I would find that a few years down the line I would look back and see the musicians I complained about in a fresh light, and one of these was a chap named Dizzee Rascal. Coming back to the UK after 18 or so years Stateside, I couldn't cope with hearing rappers with an English accent. It didn't seem right. Nowadays it's so commonplace that I can't see what I was so bothered about. Sorry, Dizzee. However, now Mr. Rascal's hits seem to have dried up somewhat, that fact that he is now in a commercial for Ladbrokes (a bookmakers) pushing their online gaming app where you can gamble your life savings away via PayPal is even more disappointing. Gambling is an addiction, Dizzee. A sickness. And while Ladbrokes' ad for online gaming is by no means the only one, and not even the only celebrity-endorsed one (Paddy McGuinness, anyone?), Dizzee's ad truly horrifies me. I thought you were better than that, mate.
One of the overriding themes of my previous rants about music seems to be the lack of quality or care that is put into the creation of music. A lot of it is about formulas - find a formula that seems to resonate with the masses, then you can replicate that time and again, and like the sheep they have been taught to be, devoid of any critical thinking skills or any true ability to discern bad from good, the masses will time and again lap it up. Which is why the Top 40 or even the Billboard Hot 100 is 75% crap.
Even when something is presented as unique and different, strip away the layers and underneath you'll find something fairly pedestrian.
Take Billie Eilish, for example. Her music is all the rage now because of the way in which it is presented. Minimalist in style, with unusual sampled sounds taking the place of traditional instrumentation, coupled with a singing style that barely rises above a mumble and utilises strange pronunciation (more on that later), and visually she and her videos are quirky, odd and arrestingly different. The sound is cool, but you can bet those songs were written on a guitar and sung normally to begin with. And they probably sounded like nothing much to write home about.
The funky pronunciation thing isn't new, in fact a few years ago I wrote about Katy Perry rhyming 'world' with 'us' because she twisted the life out of both of those words to get them to sound similar.
What does appear to be new(ish), however, is the prevalence in advertising of using existing tracks by modern artists to sell your product. This is a perfectly legitimate way to sell two products in one go, because the assumption is that a big budget ad featuring a little-known performer's tune will be shown often enough that the tune will seep into even casual viewers' heads by osmosis, and they will then find out what it is and download it. Again, nothing wrong with that in terms of marketing, really. It's another form of the impulse buy at the checkout.
However, there are several ads on at the moment in the UK where the songs used are either (a) incredibly annoying, which means that now you have an annoying tune stuck in your head all day; (b) songs that use the weird pronunciation along with strange Elton-John-meets-Elizabeth-Fraser-like phrasing so that when you actually find out what the words are, you cannot believe it: or (c) both.
Now, I have a touch of tinnitus. A constant high-pitched whine in the background which I can generally ignore when there are lots of other sounds in the room, but when in a silent room, that's all I hear. I've had it to some degree for as long as I can remember, but only in the last few years has it begun to have any measurable effect on my hearing.
Currently, I have the TV set to subtitles most of the time so that I don't have to have it at top-notch volume all the time in order to compete with all the other noises going on around me. But what this means is that in some cases, the ads get subtitled and when it is one of the aforementioned ads, you can read the lyrics and say "Hang on! Those are the words!?!?"
Let me give you an example.
The song is called 'Look After You' by Aron Wright. Never heard of him. But that song is in my brain. But you see what I mean? His low-key phrasing means he barely says the word 'look' and 'you' except in the chorus. All I heard was "I will kafter..." and until I put the subtitles on one day, I had no idea what he was on about. I was like, speak up, man, speak up! Enunciate!
Here are a couple of others where the phrasing leaves one perplexed and feeling like you've just been listening to AM radio in the 70s.
The track is called 'The Man' by Aloe Blacc. And I doubt that you all heard "A king is born, I told you before" and "Ain't no-one like me, I'm a legend" in there. If you did, you only picked up bits of it.
The following one is a little better, but I still had to turn on subtitles to find out exactly what was going on. It's a track called "I'm A Wonder Woman" by someone named Lion Babe.
Speaking of annoying ads, there's nothing worse to my mind than seeing people who are supposed to be musicians portrayed by actors who clearly haven't ever picked up a guitar in their lives.
Alright. Rant over.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
