OK, I'm in considerable pain - I've actually pulled chest muscles from coughing so much. It may be the infection I've got, or it may be the sheer spleen-busting disbelief occasioned by watching U2 and Primal Scream performing at Glastonbury. It wasn't the musicians so much: U2 were reliably pompous, while Primal Scream yet again pulled off the trick of persuading the public that they're somehow interesting or relevant.
No: they do what they do and some people - unfathomably - like it. What made my intestines make a bid for freedom was the jaw-dropping idiocy of the BBC's presenters. U2 were discussed by Jo Whiley and someone called Zane Lowe. The pearls of wisdom spilling from their mouths would have shamed a toddler. Mostly, of course, just unconnected adjectives ('amazing', 'awesome' etc.). But then Mr. Lowe started claiming that U2's power was due to their set being 'raw', 'stripped down' and 'all about the music'. Really? Doing a live video link from the stage to the International Space Station so that an astronaut (the one whose Congresswoman wife was recently shot in the head) can mumble some platitudes to a drug-addled bunch of hipsters is somehow 'raw', rather than 'incredibly pretentious', 'arrogant' and 'pompous'? They then 'interviewed' U2 afterwards with the kind of journalistic incisiveness that inevitably leads to the interviewee having to wipe drool from the soles of their shoes.
This idiot - or it may have been some other idiot, all BBC yoof presenters are pretty much interchangeable - then proceeded to claim that Primal Scream's set proved that they'd 'always looked forward' in their music. For feck's sake: they're touring their Screamadelica album in some kind of retro cash-in. You know, the one that was released 20 years ago. The one that was a deliberate retro homage to the Rolling Stones' 60s work. The band which released and album with a bloody Confederate flag on it. How, in the name of all that's holy, is that 'always looking forward'?
Bloody charlatans, the lot of them. Time for a salad to calm me down.
1 comment:
Where's the 'like' button on this thing?
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