Postby Penk! » 10 Feb 2011, 21:52
So you’ve done it. You’ve got what you’ve wanted. I’ve been beaten; I’m out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind. I’m out of the cup. I’m sure you’re happy now, BCB. Happy that you’ve put such a limp, premature end to my plans, to my hopelessly romantic, quixotic dream. You have spurned my list.
But I shouldn’t call it a list, should I? That would demean it; claw it down to the level of the rest of your paltry selections, your micromanaged, lustreless, hackneyed and tiresome mixes. Party bags from a child with stingy parents; chocolate boxes with only the boring solid ones left.
Mine was not a list. Mine was an experience: a glorious, sweeping hymn to all that is great in music. It was my magnum opus. My child – I shall call it so, I shall not be ashamed – was sensual, subtle, stirring, supple, and all kinds of other handily alliterative epithets. It had grace, it had flair, it had beauty and colour. Look through it, savour it, drown yourself in it: you will not regret it. It represented more than just a selection of songs: such banalities I leave to the rest of you. This represented feeling; it represented power and honesty and sensitivity and sweetness. It was a masterpiece, deft and richly detailed. Each track complemented its companions; each track added its own special fascination and joy: the impression is not of stepping through a list but rather of sliding, serpentlike, through an intricately detailed, stunningly beautiful tapestry: the tracks were not there as individual entities but as part of the whole, subsumed into its overwhelming, life-affirming wonder.
This is what you have wrought, BCB: you have destroyed this beauty with your own ignorance and caprice. This is what you have robbed yourselves of, this heartfelt, Daedal prodigy. You have forsaken beauty and magic for tedium; offered heaven, you have preferred the everyday.
And everyday you will get: you actively chose it. You chose list A: the great deceiver, a cheap, gaudy lie. You chose a list which sucked you in with mummery and falsehood. It told you it came from leftfield and you believed it; you fell for its sneaky, slatternly glitter. It had Joyce, it had Neu!, and it had The Easybeats.
Yet we all do: I used Neu! last year, and every year they crop up somewhere. The Easybeats provided ‘Sorry’, its generic riffery proved among the weakest of Nuggets II picks by the synch-listen just a fortnight ago: hardly new, hardly exciting, hardly original: one poster pointed out that he’d used the same track last year and, again, I myself used an Easybeats track two or three seasons ago. And Joyce? Token Brazilian selection. Everyone talks about her. Yet she lacks the fizz and fun of Rita Lee, she spurns Rita’s flamboyant eclecticism for polite, already-dated tropicália. A mirrors my own choices, and finds itself wanting. It goes for something modern, something with sex, and what does it pick? Jhelisa Anderson; Jhelisa Anderson and her bland, acceptable trip-hop-lite. Yet you voted for her! You voted for her over, say, Mr Fingers; Mr Fingers and ’Can You Feel It’, a track which burns: even its name is erotic. There should be no choice: gorgeous, echoing, sensuous groove, or a woman dancing carefully around her own coffee table? Anderson is the DFS catalogue to Mr Fingers’ Victoria’s Secret; list A’s dogs playing poker an ashamed, vacuous counterpart to my list’s Sistine Chapel.
And you voted for it, you fools. You voted for it, because it wanted you to and because it begged you to. It had The Rolling Stones, it had The Kinks, it had The Lovin’ Spoonful, it had Jimmy Cliff, it had Gladys Knight, it had a token jazz and a token hip-hop track and it had Curtis Fucking Mayfield. Curtis Mayfield! Curtis If-Any-Artist-Embodies-Predictability-in-the-BCB-Cup-It’s-Me Mayfield. And it had Pere Fucking Ubu. It didn’t even have Pere Ubu in its first ten: it picked Pere Ubu, the most overused, overfamiliar band in the history of the fucking cup, in its second round five. The point at which most lists start to develop their personality, start to look for those surprising or inspiring tracks, start throwing in the ones which it knows might be a big risk, and list A throws in Pere-Fucking-BCB-Cup-All-Stars-Ubu.
And you fucking voted for it. You voted for it because you have no imagination, because you can’t use your brain. Because you were fooled by its heavyhanded, nothing-to-see-here nods to the world of music outside The Big Book of BCB Cup Clichés. You were idiots. You thought to criticize me because I picked ‘Use Me’: you thought that because two – two! Out of ninety-five! – other lists had chosen it, there must be some conspiracy. You didn’t think Withers was an artist who’d been discussed on BCB in the past year and had inspired new fans, no, you thought that three people had colluded to all use the same fucking song because for some stupid fucking reason they thought it might increase their chances of winning.
You feeble fucking morons. You don’t deserve my list: you don’t deserve ‘Fotheringay’ and ‘Dancing Girl’ with their delectable prettiness, and you don’t deserve the playful, electric ‘Uncontrollable Urge’, the unstoppable raunch of ‘Fairchild’ or the style and brains of ‘Street Life’. You should be fucking ashamed to be in the same fucking room as the gorgeous ‘Ocean’ or ‘Just Once in My Life’, as close as popular music has come to divinity. It disgusts me that I even considered allowing such ungrateful, helpless worms as you to experience this. My failing was in expecting you to appreciate it: you never could. Your minds just can’t cope. You should be kneeling and weeping before my list. Instead, you turn away in fear, confusion and dumb, animal stupidity.
My exit has proved one thing: my tastes are not those of BCB. And this, itself, has proved something else, something I know I can take with me and cling to as I leave the competition: by voting against me you have not destroyed or weakened me. You have done quite the opposite. You have strengthened me, proved for once and for all the thing I always thought I knew: my taste is clearly miles, miles better than yours.
You bunch of wankers.
fange wrote:One of the things i really dislike in this life is people raising their voices in German.