Thinking some more about the decade just ended, one thing seems clear: Girls Aloud were the band of the decade; indeed, I can’t think of any other group that’s even a contender. Well, as long as by “band of the decade” we mean, if not the best band of the decade, the band that encapsulated the most positive aspects of the decade. If “band of the decade” simply means the band most symptomatic of the decade, of course a much more depressing candidate appears: U2. U2 are certainly the worst band in recent memory, and I think are strong contenders for worst group in the history of popular music (reading Phonogram recently reminded me of the existence of Heavy Stereo and Northern Uproar, onetime bywords for terribleness; but, in part for that very reason, they don’t approach the apocalyptic awfulness of U2)
Thinking about what might be an album of the decade, Read more↴
It reminded me of something about pop music that occurred to me when The Saturdays’ album came out. I thought, while listening to the album, that it sounded like the Sugababes, which then struck me as odd, as there are obvious ways in which the group are more like Girls Aloud. But while their may be some stylistic similarity between Girls Aloud and The Saturdays, there’s what seems to me to be a more important difference of affect, adds some further distinctions to the concept of cold pop. Read more↴
When I thought, while watching the new Girls Aloud video, “I wasn’t expecting that white phosphorous imagery,” I filed it away as the sort of trivial and rather bad taste joke twitter is made for. But the more I thought about it, the more odd it seemed. Is it a kind of return of the repressed, the appearence, out of context, of the images of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that don’t appear in the media? Read more↴
The new tATu single “220” has apparently been causing some controversy among fans, which is pretty incomprehensible, as it’s wholly excellent. I don’t think I’ve mentioned their last single, either. I saw somewhere that they thought its video carried an anti-abortion message, which is disappointing; we may have to count them out as leaders of the cybernetic communist revolution. It’s a pretty great video, though, all giant concrete structures and soviet goth uniforms:
I think the only thing that could make Girls Aloud better would be if they started filming their videos in Britain’s decaying industrial heritage.
I wonder what the chances are that Girls Aloud will release “Control of the Knife” accompanied by a video featuring them all in braces and two-tone trousers? Probably not, really, all that high. It’s just as well I’m busy writing a paper on the welfare state, otherwise I might have accompanied this post with a photoshopped picture of Girls Aloud as Bad Manners. Instead, I’ll have to leave you with this YouTube clip:
That’s from 2006; Buster Bloodvessel’s lost a hell of a lot of weight, no?
