To be honest, by the time The Brits hove into view yesterday evening I was both very refreshed and not in the least bit fresh whatsoever. When The Brits were on a weekday evening, usually a Tuesday, or at least I think it was a Tuesday, one had to be careful as to the style and content of one’s beverage. This meant one was more alert and therefore the whole show would seem so much more painful to behold; and don’t be fooled, The Brits are one of the most painful moments in the entertainment calendar – better than The Oscars, but only because they have the saving grace of not being exactly the same as The Oscars. You would imagine, therefore, that with a tilt of a touch harder towards total inebriate, awards ceremonies such as these would be that little bit easier to stomach, but somehow the opposite applies. Never before have I employed so many semi-slurred expletives in a quest to deride and chastise the British music industry. If the evening had a tagline it would probably be “and what the fuck is this now?”.
There’s no point in me going over the same stuff again and again. I’m 47 and I believe that quite a big bit of the best music ever made got done between roughly 1968 and 1976. I never, ever listen to Radio 1, I can’t remember the last time I saw a copy of Smash Hits (does Neil Tennant still edit it?) and I rarely have the first clue who is, as they used to say before Operation Yewtree put an end to the BBC Paedophile Department, ‘Top Of The Pops’. As a result I have failed most miserably to keep up with music that is popular amongst the youth of today and so The Brits are as irrelevant to me as I am to a gender-confused teenager with a more than mild dose of early onset ‘massively crippling anxiety syndrome’. Moreover, when I hear most songs that appeal to youngsters and deluded, tone-deaf, middle-aged, buggy park-run hipsters alike they tend to sound like childish, autotuned crap, are usually the result of an ill-advised collaboration and generally sound exactly like the last one, which was a charming yet barely comprehensible romantic little R&B number all about a semi-literate gang member, packing a kitchen knife he stole from his mum, trying to get a quick bit of anal sex on the back of the night bus before a spot of breakfast at a KFC (note: collaborations, aka someone featuring someone else and someone else on top of that, are only as good as the sum of their parts, at least in the sense that all of their parts are equally awful and therefore only the same can be said for the song they are releasing; a song so shit that no one individual has the heart or stamina to take full responsibility for the ear cancer they have just let loose over the airwaves).
It is the sheer lack of variety and imagination that has ground music to a virtual standstill. This is no longer an artform we are talking about, but rather a very blatant recycling centre for music so poor it should never have been made in the first place, let alone be cloned and mutated until all that is left is the equivalent of a clubfooted retard with three thumbs, no tongue and a permanent chest infection. Last night’s big winner was Raye. I wouldn’t say her success on the night was a particular surprise because everyone has been saying she would win almost everything for the last fortnight. She scooped six awards (the first couple to be announced were accompanied by a well rehearsed look of manufactured bafflement, but after that she gave up and you could literally see her start to think that maybe her faecal output really had started to not stink as much as everyone else’s) but you have to remember that she scooped those not because she’s the best but because all the competition is marginally worse. Raye, it would seem, is the sound of the future, but to me she just sounds like someone who wants to be the next Amy Winehouse, only with a touch less of the emaciated, heroin chic, alcoholic malnutrition that left her idol such a miserable, staggering tragedy by the time she mustered the strength to crack open her last bottle of Smirnoff.
To my ears (and eyes) there is nothing about Raye that is in the slightest bit new or original. It’s not that it sounds bad as such, it’s just that it also sounds much the same as some other stuff that didn’t sound bad either, but that also never managed to sound much better than average. To prove this Raye performed a medley of hit snippets to an audience that looked almost as half-cut as I was starting to feel, each tune tripping into some slight variant of genre that we’ve all had to endure at some point in the last decade. She did, however, do me one small favour, which was to remind me that unless you’ve been round the block a few times a medley of hits is often just used to disguise the fact none of your hits are up to much good on their own. Maybe one day I’ll get Raye, like I sort of got Adele. Or maybe one day I’ll just forget to bother trying to remember who she is and what she does for a living and accept that I’d always prefer a bit of Dusty Springfield instead.
But to be honest Raye was, ahem, a shaft of light compared to the darkest corners of this years Brits. For a start I hadn’t realised that when you come on stage to collect an award these days you are contractually obliged to dress like an explosion in a charity shop and then make some statement in support of the LGBTQ+ community whilst simultaneously throwing sharpened rainbows around the room like a demented unicorn. I did a bit of research and it turns out that 89.4% of British adults identify as heterosexual, but to watch The Brits you would have thought that there were only 89.4 heterosexual individuals left on the planet. It’s not a criticism, and I’m certainly not going to say anything stupid that will get me into trouble with Peter Tatchell, but it does feel like our culture is experiencing a severely disproportionate swing towards some ill-considered, gender-liberated utopia that most day-to-day members of the population really aren’t all that interested in. Mind you, most of the people selling you this utopia are opinionated, depressed, self-diagnosed ADHD kids with almost no experience of any sort of a realistic life. And you know what kids know, don’t you? That’s right, kids know fucking nothing.
Even worse was just how environmentally scary The Brits have become. We live in an entertainment world where a carbon footprint is just something that other people have to worry about, and it’s not even done with any sort of subtlety. You may as well be watching Formula 1. There must have been at least four performances by ‘solo’ artists that may have started with some modicum of restraint but soon escalated into scenes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Cleopatra. The singer would strut up and down on a stepped stage or along a huge catwalk, under-lit by more shiny bright things than you’d find on a very foggy night at Heathrow airport, dressed in exactly the sort of outfit that no parent would want to see their daughter in, ever, and accompanied by dozens of dancers whose exact roles never seemed to be completely clear. This is what pop music has become today – less about the music and more about the dance routine. Every single extra body would have needed to travel and be dressed and fed and all for very little reason other than to hide the shortcomings of a singer that has to dance for a living. These events really do expose the live chops of cotton wool strength performers such as Ellie Goulding (who somehow managed to dress like a bizarre, semi-angelic, confused virginal prostitute) and so what better way to distract you than through routines that have been choreographed and rehearsed to somewhere beyond exhaustion, with massed gospel choirs and firework displays that would have made Guy Fawkes get all moist and unnecessary? What happened to the singer that just turned up and sang? I’ve got a short attention span but this is just ridiculous.
The Brits gets more vacuous and silly by the year. It would be nice to think this has happened by mistake, but delivered to the generation it serves most closely, so insecure about the future and so easily diverted by quick flashes of empty nothing, it all makes perfect sense. If anything, it has turned into a variation of Eurovision, a circus tent filled with all sorts of confectionary and monstrosities, catering to every screwed up, TikTok obsessed, job-shy, bipolar outcast; anyone planning their next cry for help, a voice in the darkness, a course of cognitive wellbeing workshops funded by the NHS. I lost count of the number of times I promised myself not to come back to it after the next advert break (I should have just counted the number of advert breaks and divided it by the total sum of my boredom), and yet there was a cheap thrill in watching much being promised and none of it being delivered. The Brits are now next to nothing about music and almost everything about performance and spectacle and seeing how long the next big thing on the scene can get away with it. I’ll still be watching it next year, for the sport, but don’t you dare try telling me it has anything important to say or that you’ll remember the last one 364 days from now. And can someone please, please tell me why Roman Kemp has to be everywhere these days? Is he a permanent fixture? But, again, in promising much and delivering little I suppose he was the perfect man for the job.
G B Burton. 03.03.2024
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 