2007 Music Review
- Posted on February 19, 2008 12:56 PM
- 0 comments
In sickness...
Hospital bound Matt Killeen casts a caustic eye on the year past.
As I sit in my sickbed attached to a drip, denied live gigs, real cinema and finally other three dimensional people, I am willing to accept that my mood may be tending towards the curmudgeonly. I am also prepared to accept that my misery may be casting a shadow over my opinions. However, looking back on the last year I have to declare 2007 truly shocking.
It is the nature of pop culture to consume itself yet last year shows every sign of being some bizarre nadir. Checking back through my reviews and the lists of releases, the mantra seems to have been REMAKE, REISSUE, REPACKAGE, RERELEASE, REFORM and REHASH.
The US top ten highest grossing films featured five sequels, one remake and two big screen versions of TV series, one of which existed with the soul purpose of selling toys. Franchises like Oceans..., Shrek and Pirates ticked listlessly into their third iterations becoming steadily less interesting as Hollywood rolled through the 60% of income, not quite 60% as good cycle of diminishing returns. Hannibal Rising happily defecated on its source material with the knowing consent of the original author. Yet another video game was murdered in Hitman. Two of the most talented storytellers of our times made a risible shot at retelling Beowulf to visually stunning but morally dubious effect.
My last batch of reviews featured a straight to video sequel to a remake and two singles based on prominent samples, neither of which could hold a candle to the original. The best album I reviewed last year? The Proclaimers, for god sake. It doesn’t suggest a vibrant music scene.
Neither does the continued use and abuse of women in the industry. We watched Nelly Furtado turn from folksy, endearing if slightly annoying kook to an emaciated plastic clotheshorse, spewing rent-a-producer urban dross – proof positive that the early Noughties trend of sonically interesting R&B is well and truly over. Watching the shredded shell of her personality spouting the PR line that she was happy and fulfilled now was one of the years more unpleasant experiences. Anyone who believes that absolute equality of the sexes has been achieved need only see what women are forced to do to achieve success even now. It went on: Amy Winehouse’s entertaining self destruction became a pathetic cabaret as she stood on stage threatening her audience with violence at the hands of her jailed husband. Their crime? Booing because she was crap.
2007 saw an unquestionably new low – the disintegration of Britney, a horror show of the most disgusting self deluded and perspective free myopia. We watched a grown woman who would rather shop and take drugs than see her children. We were all implicated in enabling this, with her personality free drivel actually selling to voyeuristic public as we shook our heads at the monster our society created. How do we sleep?
On the subject of people who are shadows of the former selves, the return of the Spice Girls, became the most pointless reformation ever. It is said that you can never return to the past, as it is a place that no longer exists. Their soulless performances and unheard new work only served to underline what a special moment in time they represented and why it is gone. The Spice Girls were never important for their music as they were a cultural phenomenon. Girlpower as a concept was undermined and revealed as the one dimensional ethos that it was, reinforcing the negativity it sought to fight as it trundled to it’s backbiting and stereotypical doom.
On the blander end of the scale, the reformation of Take That resulted in the worst kind of valedictory hokum. As stadiums filled with tired 30 year old women reliving their days at Uni, flush with disposable income and personal wistfulness, it was deemed proof of some kind of reconstitution of the natural order. Apparently what was at best a happy little vacuous pop act for teens can claim natural superiority over music that has pretensions to qualities beyond the transitory.
Of course, those very forces had a bad year as well. When you aim higher there is much further to fall. The latest fad for folksy noodling so beloved of mobile phone adverts has lead to every man and his dog thinking that using acoustic guitars and mandolins lends trump card gravitas regardless of content. This delusion is viewed as some kind of licence to create aimless, soulless, whinging wet newspaper blanket music under the guise of keeping it real. Some child of satan saw fit to cover Massive Attack’s Teardrop believing that his voice could be comparable to Liz Fraser, his desultory strumming equal to the original soundscape. Narcissism of the highest order.
Things indie fared as badly. Kaiser Chiefs pumped out a shabby by-the-numbers album and the ‘free’ Radiohead album was worth exactly that much, each track a limper copy of the last. As for the Artic Monkeys, the darlings of the ‘ipod generation’ – whomsoever they are – I don’t feel I can really comment, at least not with any venom. I wasn’t onboard that paddle steamer with everyone else, didn’t see what made them special and have definitely resented the sudden presence of fake-ass local accents throughout the music world. They were OK, no more, no less. In 2007 they continued to do what they did, albeit in a less catchy way and with the slime spouting juggernaut of hype and exaggeration. It is very hard for any band to maintain integrity, especially in a world where efforts to remain cool, uncommercial and detached just look like masturbatory self involvement. They’re stuck between the devil and the deep whichever way they behave. However, what is unacceptable is the songwriter turned producer racket that they have going on. Like the extra-curricular activities of Jack White, the only result is a slew of albums based on an apparent desire to create multiple cloned covers bands.
Like another million others I didn’t get to see Led Zeppelin, missed the Stooges & The Jesus & Mary Chain with less excuse and was on the wrong side of the Atlantic for the Rage Against the Machine reformation. In this manner I was deprived my own personal brand of nostalgia, given a little run out at the turn of the year with the jolly Gallows version of Staring at the Rudeboys, a breath of air only as fresh as your memory span.
I did get to see the Police, and as I contemplated the £100+ I spent to see them I realised that it marked a shift in the order of things. Madonna’s deal with Live Nation, a group of promoters rather than a record company, raised many eyebrows. However with a ticket running at three figures and a CD bringing in £15, it seems priorities have been reversed. The tour is now supporting the loss making music rather than the other way round. Prince was outstanding, but his new album? Where did I put that? No, really?
This breakdown in the status quo is hitting the major record companies hardest as they pay the price of too many years jealously painting themselves into a corner. Experience tells us that it will be low level employees and new talent development will be paying the price.
Football should provide a consistent number of highs and lows but England’s campaign to qualify for Euro 2008 was a failure of truly staggering proportions. Such a mixture of hubris, incompetence and wayward priorities is still quite difficult to understand and the eventual elimination from the easiest group in the competition occurred after not one but two get out of jail free cards beggars belief. After international humiliation on this scale the fans were then decried for booing players at games.
Within certain boundaries, excluding but not limited to racist and homophobic chants, paying customers should be able to say anything they like to people paid offensively ostentatious amounts of money for the single purpose of entertaining those self same fans. Contrary to popular belief football fans are realistic, players do move clubs all the time, yet they also have a keen sense of justice. When a player moves from Spurs to Arsenal, for example, what other reaction can be reasonably expected? While players remain listless, selfish, greedy and disloyal may the bile continue. To expect anything else is to forget why the game works at all.
Can I raise a smile at anything in 2007? 28 Weeks Later made a decent fist at a sequel to Danny Boyle’s zombie flick and the man himself waded in with Sunshine which was an eminently watchable and classy piece of sci-fi. Hot Fuzz was entertaining enough but unlike Shaun of the Dead relied too much on knowing references to Point Break, Bad Boys et al. Ratatouille was better than Cars but it really couldn’t be worse. Reverend and the Makers have potential, in a smug middle-class kind of way and Operator Please might prove to be Australia’s best export since Chandon Greenpoint. Thou Shalt Always Kill is unquestionably the year highlight, managing to stand astride a world without absolutes like a colossus.
So in reality, was 2007 so different? The cult of personality didn’t exactly suffer from another two free papers in the London area, both short on real news and both long on Kate Moss uber-skank style inebriation photos. Also the public appear to be willing to buy any old rubbish if it’s associated with someone staggering out of Chinawhites in the early hours wearing no underwear. Is this, however, any different from Beatles Wigs or tartan scarves?
In the opinion of this writer, yes. We are supposed to be a more sophisticated society, a more culturally literate people than we have been in the past and yet we seem to be increasingly accepting the most appalling banality, hypocrisy and corporate filth. As we stand eyes wide shut to genuine evils in the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay it shouldn’t surprise and yet this fragile piece of humanity, IV by bedside, wishes for, nay demands, more.
As soon as I’m out of bed, I’m on it. Bring on 2008.
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