Emperor Fuckshit

If this is an attempt to parody my writing style, then you need to brush up a bit. "Airing on a population"? "[D]ue to their actions due to it"? Good Lord, man -- that is not English sentence construction. I'm not sure what exactly about The Fall or their fans makes you think that a realisation of, like, The Fall Programme (the very existence of this is dubious, which is one of the main reasons why I think it should be obvious that I was joking in part) would lead to a society that was "deceitful, callous and hypocritical." I think that any discussions of MES' politics begins with a reference to the fetishisation of the working-class in a way that is anti-bourgeois but also non-Communist. This is an interesting issue, and one that I was thinking about yesterday and which prompted me to make the above comment. In his interview on "The Culture Show", the Standard Bint who was struggling to make something presentable of the spectacle asked MES if he thought that The Fall were "the best band in the world." To which MES replied, "yes." There seems to be an idea that one doesn't say a thing like that. It seems like that unease should be a product of "British" modesty, and maybe it is in part. But I think it's maybe more to do with the ascent of liberalism and individualism in all facets of life -- the "democratisation" of culture in which there's "something for everyone." That's a noble principle to a degree. Obviously a world in which all bands were xeroxes of The Fall (which is something slightly different than we were originally talking about, but I think that the two things are related) would exhibit certain cultural limitations. A lot of genres would fall by the wayside (although quite a multiplicity would continue), and the themes dealt with by artists would also narrow. But aren't there aspects of musical production and articulation which it's virtuous to get imperious about? I have no problem with saying that, yes, I would like to see all bands take up social and political issues at least partially in their songs (as MES does even if in a slightly circumlocutionary way). And, yes, I would like to see all bands exhibit the hardcore suspicion about the music industry and the media more generally (as MES does). I'd like all bands to be as funny and knockabout as The Fall are (or can be.) Fuck, ideally I'd like to see all music labels adopt parecon, as G8WC has. (And even that might only be a starting point...) I am comfortable with the implications of this -- i.e. that there would be no more Arctic Monkeys, no more Warner Brothers, no more Radio One, etc.. That would be fine. I think that this brings us back to what a Fall Republic would look like. It most definitely would not be "liberal" in the most specific sense of the term. And, again... good thing in my eyes. The language of prescription can never just be sloughed off -- even an opposition to imperiousness is a statement in favour of liberalism. I mean, even the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau knew that. Winkz. Only for pig ignorant dullards like you, lover.

If the world consisted only of Fall fans, it would be virtually utopian. Other bands to which this applies: Propaghandi, Half Man Half Biscuit. I think those are the only ones.

"Just churning up this butter to see if it'll MELT in your MOUTH." ^^ that became an in-joke between me and a friend for literally a million billion trillion years.

"Who is that man, Mummy?" "That is Simon Callow. He is wretched."

Casey Affleck and Max von Sydow. e: Am I the only one who has never had this thought about any pair of people ever? I guess it's indicative of what people look for in films. I have a lot of favourite directors, but I don't think there's a single actor who, by his/her appearance alone, would make me want to check out a film any more or less. Except maybe in the realm of comedy -- Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Sellers, etc.. But, even then, it's not like I'm hunting down Scary Movie 4 or whatever because I've JUST GOTTA SEE more Nielsen. So it's more likely that I'm in actual fact a ZAZ fan who has become a Nielsen fan by proxy/accident.

Yeah, so my above post is probably unnecessarily ill-tempered. It's a major bugbear of mine. But there you go. More helpfully: The General -- do you really believe that the "two sides" of this debate (I don't think that's a fair presentation in any case... as I say in the article, I know plenty of people who think that TO is just "mediocre") are necessarily and intransigently locked inside a kind of solipsistic prism? That people couldn't respond to my arguments about, say, TO's lack of originality by saying, "well, actually, I think you've missed elements x, y, and z, which are all unique to the show, or at least represent significant innovations -- and these manifest themselves in that bit in episode 2.3 where Brent burns a Pentecostal church down..." or whatever? And then that I couldn't respond by saying, "hmm... well, actually I think that those aspects have forerunners in "All Gas and Gaiters..."", etc.? This is the way debate -- good debate -- works, isn't it? A "weak" version of your argument might say that the two sides (again, simplifying) have too much invested in their positions to concede, or are already entrenched in their existing positions. But that's a radically different way of putting it. And I don't think it's true in any case -- I was basically agnostic about the show until someone made some very good arguments that convinced me it wasn't up to much. And the idea that one has to be "unable to explain" a joke in order to "understand" it is just pretty mad. I guess it's a slightly odd formulation of the hackneyed old "deconstructing comedy destroys it" bon mot. Well, I'll say -- I can explain why the joke about Elton John wanting to "feel mercury up his arsehole one more time" is funny, and also understand it. And, to the general idea that I think you're gesticulating towards: I once wrote a 500 hundred word analysis of a "Shooting Stars" sketch on a message board. It still makes me piss my pants. I find it fascinating to discuss the way that humour works, and do not think that this in any way erodes my enjoyment of comedy. It may make me more "discerning", but that's quite different. And what, ultimately, do you think will be the benefit of noting that "it's just personal preference" or whatever?

liar liar pants on fire Hahahahahaha. Sorry. But as someone who spends a lot of time discussing the (de-)merits of music/TV/books/films/etc, I don't think there's anything I dislike more than people who wade into debates by noting that "it's just down to personal preference." I even wrote a post about it shortly after the piece on "The Office." Especially since people only do it when arguments get lengthy/passionate/nuanced/negative. I mean no-one would burst into YI's music mega-thread and quote every passing opinion on an album, band or song (positive or negative) and say "yeah, well... that's just your opinion!" Seriously, try it with your friends: "So, what did you think of the movie?" "It was OK, I guess." "OH YEAH???? But the quality of all culture is INHERENTLY SUBJECTIVE!!!!!!!"

Roland Barthes: "Neither-Norism. By this I mean this mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both. (I want neither this nor that.) It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism. We find again here the figure of the scales: reality is first reduced to analogues; then it is weighed; finally, equality having been ascertained, it is got rid of. Here also there is magical behavior: both parties are dismissed because it is embarrassing to choose between them; one flees from an intolerable reality, reducing it to two opposites which balance each other only inasmuch as they are purely formal, relieved of all their specific weight. [...] [O]ne no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse." Look, man, the point of discussing culture is not to reach some kind of unassailable conclusion that ascribes one or another Manichean property to a work. I don't think that anybody argues that, and to glibly make reference to the primacy of "personal preference" as though it's a groundbreaking Maharishi-ish insight is dull, smug and insulting. (Insulting particularly inasmuch as it reduces stances to "pro-" and "anti-" without considering either their merits or peculiarities.) The point of cultural criticism is to encourage the proffering and exchange of worthwhile viewpoints that address salient factors of a work or a medium. That "it's personal preference" is neither worthwhile nor interesting to note -- this is why Theodor Adorno's essay on astrology did not consist of him going, "well, some people like it and some people don't... it's just down to choice, at the end of the day, isn't it? Different strokes for different folks. What you don't realise is that this is an essentially subjective issue..." If he had done that, then Max Horkheimer would have gouged his bollocks out with a rusty tuning fork. This, on the other hand, is just bollocks at a basic empirical level.

What an odd way to die. Just press the "help" button and wait it out, man. I have a couple of !!! albums. I was never hugely into them -- they were a bit right-wing and "brah"-ish for my tastes, but "Me and Guiliani..." is a fantastically danceable single. Anyway, he was a young guy, and still widely active at the time of his death. So I can imagine that this is a real and material loss for people that were into Maserati in particular.

Just a thought: One of the effects of the American-style "big writing team" approach to sitcom production is (often) the diminution of a show's sense of specificity. Obviously the characters and style of jokes and narratives still say reasonably consistent even when complex (see "Seinfeld"). But the "stamp" of individual creators is reduced significantly. That can often be a bad thing: I don't think something like "Absolutely" (unfortunately a sketch show is the first example brought to mind, but there you go) could be produced by that method. But when the personalities being rendered opaque belong to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, it might well be a fantastic thing.

Wrote a 5,000 word blog post about it. Never want to discuss it again. e: I should say, though, that I've never seen any of the U.S. version. So I can't contribute at all on that score.

Did Cook really embrace this fame and adulation uncritically, though? Considering both his personal and comedic personalities, I doubt that he could have done so -- at least not with any comfort. And if he did do that in the sixties, then he alienated a good wedge of people with the Derek and Clive material later on. D&C received a panning from David Quantick in the NME; TMB appear on its front cover. Cook was too divisive and disdainful to gain the kind of indie hero worship that vacuous twats like NF and JB can. And to the extent that PC did do so, I'm not sure how complicit he was in the process. Cook's "I find that I'm watching television that evening" response to Frost kind of sums that up. I can't imagine such disdain from the Boosh towards a respect industry elder statesman. (Except for that interview where Barratt revealed that he's not big on Peter Kay. Take that, Peter!) Haha, a Boosh fan describing something as "too comedy". Winky face...

Re: TMB, MPFC and American fans: I've always thought that it's kind of interesting that two of the exported British comedy series that have gained most purchase in America are MPFC and "Keeping Up Appearances." Both of those shows seem to sell quite explicit and obvious aspects of Britishness. In the case of MPFC, it's the eccentric, quixotic yet learned whimsicality. In the case of KUA, it's the twee and rustic reification of a class-obsessed Middle England. One might argue that MPFC itself was in some way responsible for weaving the qualities which it exhibited into the fabric of recognizably "British" culture. But, even then, it's notable that PBS didn't air MPFC until after the series had broadcast its last episode in the UK. When I hear Americans talk about "British humour", it seems to me that the first part of that couplet is as important the latter, and is also operating as more than a designation of origins. Are there styles of comedy which America "expects" from Britain? Flipping this around might explain why "Seinfeld" was poorly received when aired by the BBC, whereas "Friends" became a huge national hit. "Friends" is basically "Seinfeld" for dullards -- simpler characters, simpler plots, simpler jokes. But "Friends" also repudiates the "no hugging; no learning" ethos which made "Seinfeld" kind of a modernised and un-familial "Married... with Children". (Only better, obviously.) Do British fans respond better to US exports which "sell" American frivolity and optimism? It's notable that, unlike "Seinfeld", almost none of "Friends" occurs within a workplace environment. The environment of "Friends" is almost like a weird parody of America as seen by Jean Baudrillard. And has anyone heard an American comedy fan wax poetic about the joys of "The Young Ones"? I've heard Aussies and Irish people do so, but never an American. Just a back of the envelope theory, like... Re: The Boosh "hating comedy": I think that to make this argument you have to marshal evidence more related to the Boosh's seeming belief that they've 'gone beyond' comedy. They've become pop culture / indie icons, and this undoubtedly limits the kind of material that they can reasonably perform (could anyone imagine F&B producing a "Joking Apart"-style tradcom, for example?) A lot of good comedy contains a self-awareness that TMB's status as cultural icons can't seem to support. The website "Some of the Corpses are Amusing" argued in a review of a TMB live show that "good comedy is never cool." That overstates the case; but there's something in it. Re: "Little Britain": To argue that the show was "good at first" but then lost its way due to repetitions of characters misses the point, since the show was designed to be basically a cookie-cutter template in which gags were minimally re-written for each episode at the point of conception. This flaw might only have exhibited itself (on first viewing, anyway) after a couple of episodes, but it was baked into the pie from the start. A good comparison to make with LB is "The Fast Show", which was quite a lot better and used a similar formula (corpus of characters with particular catchphrases, each placed into a minimally different settings each week). But "The Fast Show" also threw in occasional surprises, and was unafraid to be daring also. The "Arthur Atkinson" character is a great example of this -- funny on the surface, but made even better by a working knowledge of wartime music hall comedy. And one of the sketches featured a reference to "Krapp's Last Tape", for fuck's sake. L&W would never do something like that. Additionally, "Little Britain" in its later stage especially relied on a lot of annoying and smug "ironic" racism which was very much de rigeur at the time (and still is, most probably). TFS deserved its name as well -- the set-ups might have been predictable; but they rarely had time to be tedious. Indeed, some of the sketches in "The Fast Show" seemed almost to be bored of themselves, which maybe brings us back to the Boosh discussion. It's worth noting that, whatever its merits, TFS unknowingly created a monster, though. Sketch shows these days seem only to get commissioned if they basically just comprise a list of characters, each with a catchphrase, each placed into similar situations each week. It's easy to sell comedy this way -- repeat phrase, get the papers to viral them, get a million white-collar cunts without a clue to spit bits of sandwich at their mates whilst performing comedy kareoke. I'm not sure if there are any comedy performers in Britain right now that could produce something as good as "A Bit of Fry and Laurie". But even if they could, it's moot, since no fucker would buy it. "The Office" is a great choice if one accepts that the gap between public accolades and actual quality and innovation is what makes shows bad. But I've already written a ~5,000 word blog post about this, and so am now thankfully liberated from ever discussing the subject again.

I'll add my weight to "The Mighty Boosh". Pair of coiffed cunts pissing about. It's like "The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer" without the joy and variety combined with "The Young Ones" without the anger or surreality. And it's adored by a whole fuckload of studenty twats, chief amongst them being adolescent girls who have never seen any comedy ever, but want Noel Fielding to fuck their hairless cunts. It wins awards and rave reviews constantly, which places it on a different plane of annoyance to stuff like "Naked Jungle" or whatever, which no-one in the world enjoys unironically and which are eminently avoidable. In short: chronically depressing and absolutely shithouse.

I saw it a few months ago and thought that it was pretty good. The problem is that a lot of the debate around the film centres upon whether or not it's a "realistic" portrayal of New York in the 1990s. That kind of becomes a necessity, since I don't think the specificities of the plot really have much to commend them by themselves, and the characters appear basically to be intentionally synecdochic of the social climate that has created them. Also, the fact that a lot of the criticism of the film referenced its supposed celebration of depravity encouraged the counter-arguments to be phrased in a "yes, well real life is depraved" sort of way. As a person who has spent all of his life in working-/lower-middle-class Britain, how am I supposed to judge the extent of the film's "realism"? It seems to me that a lot of critics who defended the film along those lines were ill-placed to make such a judgment, but basically meant "realistic" to mean "grittier than It's A Wonderful Life". I just get the sense that Korine's main aim as a writer is to shock the squares. He has managed to create genuinely surreal and touching landscapes, as in Gummo. And I don't think he's in any sense talentless. But when his films are brought back essentially to the real world, they lose their oneiric quality and become significantly more boring. Ken Park is kind of the apex of that. But Kids isn't Ken Park -- it's obviously better than that. Its images of urbanity and the uncomfortable sense of unbearable proximity that pervades the film kind of ensure that. And at least Korine can, via reference to the 1990s Aids scare, claim that he was to some extent making reference to material social conditions. Rather than just writing some film about a bunch of cunts I don't care about, per Ken Park. e: There's also the fact that a bunch of critics expressed their distaste for Kids at the time by denouncing it as "child porn". So that in itself kind of proves that there was something for Korine to rail against -- presenting children of that age as sexualised subjects obviously met with some significant resistance from within the audience. This also means that it's difficult to dislike the film without aligning oneself with a bunch of retards.

"I thought you spent most of the time just restringing the rackets..."

Although the latter were sometimes obscured by little patches of white powder. Weird.

A key sketch in explaining the man's humour and career. As this extract from Ronnie Barker's appearance on the radio talk show The Tom O'Gormliss Interview handily illustrates.

Yeah, I think about this sometimes too. I guess there's no single answer, both in the sense that we won't all end up listening to the same genres, and that we won't all either stay musically "static" or become one with the kids. To take a few examples: my Mom actually listens to a lot of stuff wot "young people" are supposed to like these days. After going through a phase of enjoying standard Radio One-sanctioned guitar pop (The Kooks, The View, Kaiser Chiefs, etc.) she has branched out into some less soulless shit (Johnny Foreigner, Dananananaykroyd, Dismemberment Plan, even Sunny Day Real Estate who don't really fit into this grouping). So she has maintained essentially a life-long interest in guitar-pop, but has branched out into slightly more obscure aspects of that broad genre. On the other hand, my Dad was majorly into punk, ska, reggae and oi when he was growing up, and now he barely seems to listen to any music at all. I guess for him music was more of a social thing than something that he would just sit back and enjoy privately. As the "scene" with which he was associated has died (and he is in any case incapable of partaking in such a thing), his interest in music has waned quickly and almost totally too. He does like Oasis, though. My parents are in their early forties, and so arguably belong to the first generation that has grown "old" whilst still having been young during a period of really diverse and accessible popular musicianship. To compare them to two of my university tutors (both in their mid sixties) is kind of interesting. One of my tutors was in the sort of autumn of his youth when the Beatles came along, was a big fan of theirs, and they remain his only real interest as far as popular music is concerned (he's a big classical fan). The other guy actually kept a pretty strong interest in popular music until well into the eighties -- he'd probably know as much or more about that milieu as my Dad, despite being twenty years his senior. As for myself... I've already given up on a lot of contemporary music. Maybe that will change, and I'll use my middle years to get into 90s/00s bands that I've unfairly dismissed, since they will no longer possess the crude vulgarity of novelty (and won't be being shoved down my throat either by the industry or by fan-bases). Or maybe I'll still basically consider the 90s to be some kind of arbitrary cut-off point. I've been meaning for a long time to get into more reggae and hip-hop, though, so I'll probably do that. And even within the parochial pastures of (post-)punk/indie/etc there's always new ground to be uncovered.

Heh heh, I know next-to-nothing about Queen, but here's a nice little nugget that adds weight to your theory: "Rolling Stone" critic Dave Marsh used his review of "Jazz" to call Queen "maybe the first truly fascist rock band." The "user rating" for the album over at RollingStone.com is four stars.