Candy and lullabies: new column for Morning Star

I have an itch in my brain. It's called 'Fireflies', it's a twinkly, inoffensive little song by a band called Owl City, and it's been squatting in the radio charts earworming any poor sod who happened to hear it for some weeks now. The song is about falling asleep and dreaming about a variety of friendly invertebrates and, bar a few lyrical contortions, that's about it. Oh, and it's brilliant.

Listening to 'Fireflies' is like wandering through a magical petting zoo made of ambient sound. It's like your higher functions have been handed a glass of warm milk and tucked under a fuzzy blanket. It goes 'plinkety'. People downloaded it in their millions; it soared to the top of the charts in a happy haze of shiny beetleish bleeping, and stayed there for five weeks, and the only thing that managed to topple it from the number one slot was a bunch of dreary, anodine pop stars covering a dreary, anodine REM song in an effort to raise money for a high-profile humanitarian disaster that everyone had seen on the telly. Modern music is a big bag of candies: sweet, addictive and cloying, failing to nourish even as it congeals into a homogenised mass of sugar.

This season's fashion is another huge sleepy faceful of candyfloss. Sugary pastel colours, drapey sportswear, flowing, 'feminine' shapes, curves and softness everywhere, except on the models themselves - if Paris, New York and London fashion week are anything to go by, the brief trend for 'plus size' (size 10) models hasn't lasted the winter. Ruffles, flounces, florals and 'fairytale' styling were all over the catwalks, trends which will soon be filtering down to the high-street; the look is sugar-sweet and high femme, with advertising spreads already begging us to buy branded blush and lipsticks in a variety of candy colours. The escapism was overpowering. Unfortunately, the tragic suicide of designer Alexander McQueen right in the middle of Fashion Week, at the height of his career, belied the sickly fairytale logic of the shows: real life, even for the young and stunningly creative, has few happy endings.

Last weekend I went to see The Indelicates, one of the last real angry, clever, poetic bands, launch their new material. The upcoming album, 'Songs for Swinging Lovers,' is a white-hot work of nihilistic lyrical brilliance with its dark, dank roots in 90s grunge and Weimar cabaret. Be Afraid of Your Parents is a glorious parade of paranoid cadences, whilst Flesh is a jangling, brutal critique of contemporary pseudo-feminism: Hey doc, can you take my skin and melt it into plastic? Beauty isn’t truth, it’s just youth, and it’s adaptive, and it’s elastic. There is no place for this type of songwriting in modern culture, because there is no place for grim, searing originality in modern culture. Anyone who tries to give the lie to bland sex and plastic romance is probably doomed to commercial failure.

Cotton-candy pop culture isn’t nourishing, but it is addictive. In the depths of winter, in the depths of a recession that shows no sign of abating for those of us who are precariously employed or unemployed, with nothing to look forward to but climate change, Strictly Come Dancing and death, there's a part of me that doesn't want to be challenged.

There’s a part of me that doesn't want fire and rebellion and words and images that terrify and energise, that doesn’t want culture to be an acid-etched reflection of a nightmare future. I want the fairytale. I want sweeties, fluffy pastel frocks and pretty, vapid songs to lull me to a sleep full of fireflies and starshine. And that frightens me more than I care to admit. When the world is grey and uncaring, it’s far too easy to find oneself complicit in the chilling, soporific impulse that's slowly strangling contemporary creativity.

[written for Morning Star, 21.02.10]

I actually do predict an actual riot!

Right, first off, to persuade you that the content of this post is much better than it actually is, I want you to stop, open a new window, and listen to this song. It's the new single by The Indelicates, 'The Recession Song', feat. Nicky Biscuit and Mickey from Art Brut. I have been stamping around to it all day; it takes a very special song to make my heart hammer like a tiny flywheel, and this is it.

There's trouble in America, trouble you can touch
You can't go to rehab 'cause it costs too much!
No career, no hope, no fun no fashion
Thank fuck for the fucking recession!

Several posts are cooking, delayed in the ether by other journalism, the kind of writing which I enjoy less but which might possibly pay me enough to carry on eating duchy's original prescription medication, smoking finest gold leaf and keeping the boyfriend in gin and ribbons. I have what I believe to be some incredibly subtle and well-reasoned ideas about what the commentary on Ivan Cameron's death says about the nation, but I'm so damn angry about everything else right now that I just don't trust myself to reason well, or to be tactful in any way. So you'll just have to live without my stunnning insights there. The discussions from Monday's post really did get me thinking, though; would anyone be interested in a separate post about the private school system, if I promised to try and keep it mostly free from disgusting middle-class guilt?

Oh, also: if you woke up this morning even vaguely satisfied with the state of the world, check out the Daily Mail Racial Purity Test, published to great acclaim yesterday. I'm actually not actually joking. Sunder Katwala, Chair of the Fabian Society, has a fantastic response over at Liberal Conspiracy. Essentially, guys, it's not enough to have been born here - both of your parents have to have been born here, and all of your grandparents as well, or you simply aren't German British. That counts me out then, as I don't have even one British grandparent. Perhaps I'll write to them and explain that, whilst I am a lefty and a shortarse, it's not my fault, because I'm a filthy furriner and I don't know any better, and anyway Frank Field says that I won't have a detrimental affect on community cohesion because, yknow, I'm white.

Or perhaps they can get to fuck. I'm PROUD of my immigrant heritage. I have the dark eyes and curves of my mother's Maltese family, the pale skin and fine dark hair of my father's Lithuanian roots; I have the work ethic of my immigrant Jewish family and when I get drunk I sing like my Irish cousins. I was born in the heart of London. This city pounds in my blood with its thousands of cultures and races, its colours, its music and its misery. I'm glad that on my daily walk to the tube I can hear Turkish and Polish and Hindi and Swahili being spoken; that on my way home I can stop and buy halva, or sour cabbage soup or a fresh pide for my tea, or best of all, staggering back high and dazed from a night out, I can stop at the corner shop and pick up a stick of rose kulfi, which is the absolutely nicest thing ever and tastes like a rose might taste if it made love to a mini milk lolly in the back of a seedy pink limousine coated in sugar. I'm proud to live in the most racially diverse city in the world - there are not many things that make me proud of my country right now but that's one of them. Living here has made me a wiser, more knowledgeable and more tolerant person, and I believe that one should only be patriotic about the bits of one's country that challenge you to be better than you are.

I had more to say, but the corner shop shuts in ten minutes and I've made myself want kulfi now. Hold that thought.

The Queen is Dead. The Queen of England is Dead.

Genitals, ladymen, rabid fans, frothing trolls, music-lovers everywhere: glory at the wonder that is Withiel finally getting his attractive posterior in gear to put his fabulous music (self-produced in our living-room, so if you listen really closely you can probably hear me cackling in the background) on the interwebs.

I said, glory at it!

And make sure you listen to the Smiths cover first. Although Ashtray is my most favourite song of this year. Right, I'm going to cough up my own pancreas. Be seeing you.

Behave? No, no, no!

Even considering that she's been splashed over the front pages of 'Metro' and 'London Lite' pretty much constantly since January, it's been quite the week for Amy Winehouse. The Wino party bus rolled into Birmingham amid the aftermath of husband Blake Fielder Civil's imprisonment for trial-fixing; that the subsequent tour dates have been 'shambolic' is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the fact that Amy's crowds are still surprised by her on-stage breakdowns, fits of tears and shouting, drugged-up mania and stagey strops such as, lately, hurling away the microphone and walking out in the middle of a cover of the Zutons' 'Valerie'. Guys -it's Amy Winehouse. You pays your money, you makes your choice.

Let me make a confession: I'm a huge fan. Never mind her bizarre hairdo and manic, self-destructive fits. Never mind her drug-use, her obvious eating disorders, her boozy, floozy, shambolic nicotine-diva behaviour. Never mind the fact that she's a glorious trainwreck. I think Amy's great.

The simple fact is that Amy Winehouse is breaking new ground. Never before has a female rock star -and Amy is unmistakeably a rock star, despite her sultry jazz-pop numbers - been so badly behaved, so publicly. From Jagger to the Doors to Nirvana to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to the Libertines, male stars and groups have used drugs, turned up on-stage drunk or not at all, got into fights, trashed hotel rooms, had ill-considered, public love-affairs, and made a great deal of mess for their well-paid managers to sort out. This trend has rarely extended to female stars - in fact, 'messiness' of this sort has routinely spelt career death for any starlet with an eye on her own perfume label. Not so with Amy's, whose lifestyle and cleverly constructed lyrical manifesto are all about hard-drinking, drugs, crazy men and glorious emotional anarchy, served up on a platter of ice-cold cynicism with a vodka chaser. I hardly dare to imagine what an Amy Winehouse perfume would smell like, but I, for one, wouldn't let it anywhere near my pressure-points.

Stunts like, say, stepping out in blood-soaked ballet slippers are perfectly pitched to subvert the 'sweet and innocent' paradigm perpetuated by singers like Britney Spears in the late nineties. Alright, so Amy's not exactly taking care of herself. She's openly admitted to having 'a bit of bulimia, a bit of anorexia', and seems to be living on a diet of booze, fags and attention. Her car-crash of a marriage, up to and including the latest jail debacle, hasn't exactly struck punches for female independence; the extravagant, passionate way Winehouse and Fielder-Civil have conducted their love-affair, however, is framed on more than an equal footing: Amy very much wears the trousers (or should that be the ballet slippers?) in this relationship.

She's clever, non-conformist, and has a wonderful, cynical sense of self-deprecation. I can't help it. I think she's fantastic. Winehouse's summer anthem, 'Rehab,' was a rallying-call against the forces of conformity and behavioural pathologisation. 'They tried to make me go to rehab,' she belts out with the force and passion of a woman three times her physical size, 'but I said, no, no, no.' Strange, then, that 'go to rehab' is exactly what newspapers and feedsites across the world seem to be suggesting that Amy do - the press have leapt, drooling, upon every drugged-up appearance, every instance of diva-like behaviour, as a sign that the singer should lie down and line up for institutionalisation like a good little girl.


Catastrophe Princess?

Funnily enough, noone has yet tried to suggest that Mick Jagger - or any other male musical icon you care to mention - is clinically insane and should be institutionalised for his own good. Amy's self-destructive non-conformity is much more threatening to a social paradigm that has always been able to cope with wild young men, but still can't quite handle wild young women, except as charity cases or warning stories. Across the pond, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan have jumped on the Catastrophe Princess bandwagon, falling out of nightclubs without their knickers on and being locked up for drunk driving. Winehouse, though, refuses to fit neatly into the box the media have drawn up for female stars gone feral.

For one thing, she's still very much on her feet. For another, she's a phenomenal talent: Back To Black, her latest album, was this week confirmed as the top-selling record of 2007. Her music has even made me - me! - hum along to blue-eyed soul, and I normally like my noise with three chords and a man from Belfast shouting. Her lyrics are powerfully raw, emotionally honest; her compositions demonstrate a musical range and a depth of feeling remarkable for a 24-year old from Enfield. 'Rehab' ends with a confession that brings an unanticipated lump to the throat of anyone who's ever tried to self-medicate for depression:

They said, I just think you're depressed
I said, yeah, baby, and the rest...
It's not just my pride
It's just till these tears have dried.

She's been justifiably lauded as the most important British musical talent to emerge in the past few years. Alright - so Amy Winehouse isn't a good girl. She's probably mad, certainly bad and quite possibly dangerous to know. She's emotionally anarchic, self-destructive and an unashamedly bad role model for clean-knickered young people everywhere. And I, for one, hope that she never starts to behave.