(NB: Kidding! I love Lucia really and there is no beef between us whatsoever. Not even a small cow, and all insults towards her are intended as affectionate teases. She is aware of this. Fucking bitch.)
But let’s have some background information. Both me and the woman have purchased ticket to an event that is known as the ‘Reading Festival’. Now, before you leap to assumptions, this is NOT – as the name would indicate – a chance to sleep in tents and catch up on our reading, maybe with complimentary pipes, glasses, Ovaltine and Chocolate Bovril, but – in fact – what is known as a ‘Rock Festival’. I have read in the periodicals that in such ‘Festivals’, young people stay up very late, then sleep in muddy tents before partaking of – often illegal – narcotics and then listening to ‘modern music’ while ‘dancing’ with each other – often using very inappropriate and sexually suggestive dance moves. To be honest, it sounds like quite a headache to me. Things have certainly changed since the Music Festivals of my day:
However, I have decided to give the entire thing a try as a kind of anthropological experiment – like watching monkeys cavorting in their native environment. Therefore, I will play along, but plan to bring a clipboard with me and make notes on the revellers as the debauchery continues. I was quite excited when the line up for this festival came up on the internet (Could I, in fact, refer to it as a ‘Reading List’? AHHAHA), because I was kind of hoping that The Pixies would be playing. It wasn’t really a hope tbh, but like, a far off dream of paradise. I mean, if they had been playing, I would probably have eaten my hat, then plasm’d myself. (I have no idea what plasm’d means, but I assume it’s probably quite messy and/or painful). Well, I would have been pretty excited, anyway. However, when I DID look at the list, I was somewhat consternated to find out that not only was there no Pixies, there appeared to be a whole load of bands that I hadn’t even heard of. :o! Equally, they all had stupid-ass names. Like, who or what the hell is a ‘Biffy Clyro’? Sounds like slang for a really excellent tampon - "Man, this Clyro is so BIFFY, it really sucks up all of the leakage!" That is what a girl would say. There was another band called ‘Enter Shiitake’ which I think sounds like a bad idea. Why can’t they have sensible names like in the good old days, such as “Alvin and the Chipmunks”? You know where you are with “Alvin and the Chipmunks”. There’ll be some dude named Alvin, and then some chipmunks. If that band was named “The Twang” then you’d have no idea what to expect and if you were wearing some pants made out of chipmunk food then you might be in for all sorts of pain.
[At this juncture, I have to point out that a typo of ‘chipmunks’ is ‘chimpunks’, which is basically only a small step away from ‘Chimp-punks’, and if that doesn’t pave the way for an awesome new genre of music I don’t know what will]
However, I suppose that I’m not completely clueless, as there were SOME bands playing which I’d heard of. For example, the band ‘Razorlight’, purveyors of top-quality boring music since 2004, or whenever they were formed. Equally, the band ‘The Klaxons’ were playing a ‘set’. ‘The Klaxons’, yeah, I’ve downloaded about ten or so of their tunes, so I'm well aware of their awesome musical range. Ummm… well, at least they they did ‘Golden Scans’, so I guess if they play that four or five times in a row, each time singing the chorus a bit louder, that ought to fill their slot with room to spare.
However, the band that has caused all this beef – and is the reason for the writing of this post – is ‘The Red Hot Chili Peppers’, which from this point onwards will be affectionately referred to in this post as “RHCP”, “Chilis”, “Reddies”, “Peps”, or “Chilipeps”. Haha Chilipep is a great name for a band. I can just imagine Chilipep playing a set right after The Chimp-Punks. That’d rule. I’d pay good money for that. But to get back to the beaten track, basically Lucia was, like, melting with excitement at the point of seeing the Peps, and I was just, like ‘Meh’. This has caused some beef. She thinks that I don't understand music, and I think that she is a knob.
The fact is, I think that RHCP is just a really boring band. Now I reckon that this might be quite a controversial viewpoint as apparently the Chilis are like the band that defined my generation – and yes, I can’t remember the last party I’ve been to that hasn’t featured some of their patented blend of Non-Offensive Plastic Rock blasting out of the stereo. And to be honest, I don’t mind their music much. There is nothing particularly offensive about any of it. I quite like a lot of their songs individually. Under the Bridge, Saviour, Dosed, Venice Queen, Don’t Stop, Fortune Faded… these are all good songs that I can quite happily sing along to. But the fact remains that I could quite happily never listen to any of those songs every again for the rest of my life, and not only would I not be that bothered, I’m doubtful if I’d even particularly notice or care.
To the modern teenager (of which I am one), RHCP have become almost embarrassingly ubiquitious, to the point that everyone knows every drum-beat, every word, every bass introduction, every annoying whiny note of the singer’s voice. It’s got to the level at which they all blur into one samey mush of alrightness. The reason that people like any specific song is because they can associate it with a particular event or emotion in their lives. Like, I associate the song "Where is my Mind??" with cycling down Weybridge high street, or the Theme to "The Flumps" with that time we formed that vigilante gang and beat that hobo to death with pool cues. I can’t do that with the RHCP because THEY HAVE BEEN CONSTANTLY BEEN PLAYING THROUGHOUT EVERYTHING. They are the elevator music of my generation and thus I don't associate any of their with anything. It’s like associating your first love with ‘carpet’ because you happened to be standing on a carpet when you first saw her. They are too overplayed. They have lost all significance. I mean, can anyone - from memory - remember the difference between “Throw Away Your Television” and “On Mercury”? Can anyone even REMEMBER those songs off-hand? It doesn’t count if someone plays them to you and then you go ‘Oh yeah’ and sing along to every note. Anybody born after 1987 can do that. Not a talent. Even their new stuff has the same problem – we all know the Peps so well, we all know the singer’s voice so perfectly, we all recognise the way the band sounds, we all can figure out what’s going on in like the first two lines. So while I might quite like ‘Tell Me Baby’ as a tune, I’m not going to care about as much, as, say, Debaser, which actually IS the song of my teenage years. I listen to the Pixies, and I’m still caught out sometimes, and I’m still picking up new things about the lyrics and the way the songs are played. Not an issue with the Peps. They can’t surprise me. Screw them.
To be brutal, the Chilis aren’t cool any more. They aren’t rebellious or ‘out there’ or represent a way to release emotions. Maybe they did once, but not now. Mums listen to them. Dads sing along in the car. They are used as the ‘cool music’ that the rebellious teenage brother listens to on CBBC Children’s shows. I bet Summer from Neighbours listens to the Chilis and thinks they are really cool. Twat. They have now reached the cultural level of cream. Everybody knows what cream is. Everybody thinks it’s kind of ok, I guess. Nothing offensive. Wouldn’t be particularly upset if our bedroom walls were painted it. But nobody could distinguish two shades of cream apart. And nobody goes and looks at a cream wall when they want catharsis. And to be honest, I wouldn’t be that impressed if I went to a gallery, and everybody was really excited about going to look at some pictures of cream because ‘There are so many different shades of cream, and, like, they are all so well painted!” Screw cream, I want to listen to some red. Or even maroon. Turquoise would be pretty ass-kicking.
And THAT is why I’m not jazzed about seeing the Chilipeps at Reading.
AND WHILE I’M AT IT, STOP WRITING SONGS ABOUT CALIFORNIA. We get it, you’re from the West Coast, it’s a really crazy fun place, shut up. The same goes for drugs and sex. Write a song about something crazy, like a badass mofo of a turtle (it could be called Yertle!) or cake or something. Or cover a Pixies song.
