25 Aug 2010
Why do people continue to want to believe in The X Factor? The revelation that auto-tune has been used to enhance (and possibly, in some instances, even worsen) performances has been greeted with shock, with fans voicing disappointment and tabloid headlines denouncing it as the TV scandal of the year. But, for me, the biggest surprise is that anyone is surprised.
The use of post-production studio trickery to shape contestants’ vocals simply adds another layer of manipulation to a show that is contrived to the point of near-outright fraudulence. Defending themselves against accusations of sharp practise, ITV boss Peter Fincham declared “The X Factor is the biggest entertainment show on British TV,” carefully avoiding any use of the dread phrase “talent contest”.
So that’s entertainment? It is as if Simon Cowell has been recast as a cabaret act, a magician pulling pop stars out his hat. We all know it’s a trick, we just don’t want to see how it was done.
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August 25th, 2010
Bob Dylan in 1965 Photo: rexWith all this talk about auto-tune, I’ve been wondering what Bob Dylan would sound like if the pitch correction device had been available in the 60s? “Someday everything’s gonna be smooth like a rhapsody / When I auto-tune my masterpiece.”
Better not to go there. As someone said to me on Twitter, the thing about auto-tune is that good musicians don’t need it and bad ones don’t deserve it.
There has been much controversy about the use of auto-tune on the X Factor, and I weigh in with my thoughts on it in tomorrow’s Telegraph. But, for anyone surprised at revelations about the ubiquity of vocal enhancement in modern recording, it is worth making the point that auto-tune is not inherently evil.
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Published: 11 Jun 2010
Perhaps the vuvuzelas will drown out World Cup pop songs Photo: AP
To be honest, I dread the World Cup. It’s not that I’ve got anything against the beautiful game: it’s a little side-event that disturbs my equilibrium, namely the question of which mercenary team of pop stars, minor celebrities and comedians is going to see off the competition and hold aloft that most cherished of prizes, a chart-topping spot as chosen anthem of England’s World Cup campaign.
For, come tournament time, we music critics are called upon to turn our attention from Bob Dylan and Arctic Monkeys to evaluating the aesthetic merits of, say, the cast of Hollyoaks mugging their way through Sing For England or Terry Venables belting out If I Can Dream with a 60-piece orchestra and guest appearances by Harry Redknapp and Ian Wright.
I don’t deny that football and music go together. Indeed, a football stadium is probably the last place in Britain where you can hear outbreaks of spontaneous communal singing. And then there are the musical efforts of footballers themselves. Show them a microphone and they will soon be wailing away with an enthusiasm usually reserved for goal celebrations, even though most players deserve to be mown down by the groundsmen for their less than perfect pitch.
There was a time when real rockers would have nothing to do with football, unless (like Elton John) they were rich enough to buy a team.
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Why My Way is a karaoke killer
Frank Sinatra: if you're going to sing My Way, better come properly equipped
I have heard people murdering songs before. But I have never previously heard of people being murdered by songs. Yet somehow, the news tha
t ‘My Way’ is being blamed for karaoke killings in the Philippines doesn’t seem all that surprising. Some of the versions of that song I’ve heard, you could shoot the singer and claim self defence.
I have witnessed how dangerous karaoke can be first hand. I walked into a hotel bar in Havana, Cuba some years ago, where a fat, sweaty, drunken man in a loud shirt was singing ‘My Way’ not just out of tune but in a complete different tuning altogether, in a different time and a variety of different keys. It was truly horrible, but two other men were applauding enthusiastically, swigging from beer bottles, while a harem of slinky, glamorous women stared into the air with glazed eyes and frozen faces. The bar was otherwise empty, which was hardly surprising, since potential customers (like us) would halt at the door, cock an ear to the awful performance, and beat a swift retreat. The barman had the expression of a stoic sufferer who knew better than to tamper with the volume control, or attempt to wrest control of the microphone. My companion, a local fixer, explained to me that the singer was a gangster, his henchmen were probably armed, and it was safer for everyone just to turn a deaf ear to his tone deaf performance. As we slipped away as discreetly as possible, the singing Godfather moved on to an indescribable version of ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’.
As the expression goes, people have been killed for less.
I am broadly in favour of karaoke as a concept, I just don’t want to have to listen to it. One of the strangest things that has happened in music over the last hundred years, since the invention of recorded music, is that it has somehow turned into a professional activity, with the world divided between music makers and listeners.
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Last updated: February 1st, 2010
Piers Morgan: the naked truth. As seen in his Burger King commercial
Apparently Simon Cowell apologised to the live audience of a Britain’s Got Talent audition in Cardiff last week, saying, “you have just witnessed one of the worst days in Got Talent history.”
And I thought, oh no, here we go again.
His fellow judge, Amanda Holden, added, “This afternoon there have been no potential winners and no talent.” And lets not forget, this is an actress who should know a thing or two about lack of talent, having progressed from being a contestant on Blind Date all the way to the stellar heights of being a minor TV soap actress better known for her marriage and affairs than her dramatic work.
As someone who sees and hears more interesting music than I have space to deal with, I would (dis)respectfully suggest to Cowell and co that if they are having trouble locating talent its because they are the wrong people, looking for the wrong thing, in the wrong places. Which is a pretty comprehensive list of wrongs.
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Last updated: January 26th, 2010
Simon Cowell: he just wants you to hurt like he does
It’s not bad enough that Simon Cowell ruined Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Now he’s going to trample all over REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’. And you can’t even complain, cause its for charity. Quick, everybody, hide all the Bob Dylan records before Cowell discovers them too.
The original ‘Everybody Hurts’ is one of my favourite songs, a strung out, tender offering of compassion, a song about fighting depression that gains real power from the grit and gravel in Michael Stipe’s voice and the toughness and understatement of the arrangement, which has a bitterness to it where a more obvious structure would just make it saccharine. The counter-cultural context of REM’s alternative rock oeuvre allows them to strike to the heart without pandering to cheap sentiment.
Now just imagine the same song, with (I’m sorry, it pains me to say this) Susan Boyle, Mariah Carey, Robbie Williams, Take That, Leona Lewis, Cheryl Cole, James Morrison, Alexandra Burke, Michael Buble and JLS swapping lines.
Cheryl: “Don’t let yourself go …”
Leona: “Everybody cries …”
JLS: “And everybody hurts sometimes”
Mariah Carey “Wo-o-oh-oh-yeah, evereebodee hu-u-u-urtsssss!”
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January 14th, 2010
My article about the underlying technological and social factors driving the global success of Susan Boyle has stirred up a hornet’s nest.
Alongside a plethora of mainly derogatory comments on the Telegraph website and Susan Boyle blogs, I have been receiving insults on twitter from fans who apparently think attack is the best form of defence (although I am still confused about what they imagine they are defending her against). As danzelldark commented on the Telegraph forum, “Haven’t you realised yet that SB is surrounded by a praetorian guard of thousands?”
Well, yes, I could hardly have missed it. Judging by the internet responses to articles I write, Susan Boyle’s self appointed defenders are only second in their rapid response to perceived offences as Bono’s even more vocal detractors. One you can’t offer the least criticism of, the other it is apparently forbidden to praise. But I have a solution. Maybe Bono & SuBo should do a duet as BoBo, then the SuBo defenders could take on the Bono haters & cancel each other out.
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Published: 5:40PM GMT 13 Jan 2010
At the turn of the century, when starry-eyed pundits gazed into crystal balls and imagined what the future of pop might look and sound like, not even the maddest visionary would have predicted that by 2010 the biggest-selling star in the world would be a frumpy, middle-aged spinster singing showtunes.
I Dreamed a Dream by Susan Boyle shifted 6.2 million copies worldwide last year, and shows little sign of slowing down. It reached number one in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and has spent six weeks at the top of the US charts. Indeed, such is her popularity in America, that yesterday she appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, having, it seems, regretfully declined an invitation to perform at the White House for Michelle Obama’s birthday. “The President and First Lady absolutely love her voice,” according to White House sources.
It may be hard to imagine how Boyle fits between Stevie Wonder and Jay Z on the ultra-cool Presidential iPod, but she has a narrative that chimes with Obama’s message, the showbusiness personification of the audacity of hope.
The transformation of a reclusive amateur singer from a Scottish backwater to overnight global superstardom seems to be a storyline as ancient as a fairy tale: the frog princess (symbolically kissed by dashing Prince Simon Cowell) or Cinderella (recast as one of the Ugly Sisters). Yet Boyle’s unlikely success story is not really a triumph of old-fashioned values. Boyle is a thoroughly modern star, the beneficiary of a confluence of powerful factors – the internet democratisation of media, the collapse of the economic base of the music business, the demeaning of the concept of celebrity, the rise of the amateur as star and television’s colonisation of mainstream pop with reality-based entertainment. Above all, SuBo (as she is often referred to on the internet, in an affectionately mocking parody of urban pop alter egos) is a social-networking sensation who could never have made it at any time but now.
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Published: 06 Jan 2010
- The return of pop’s greatest imaginary band: Gorillaz
Will 2010 mark the beginning of the end of the reality-TV pop talent show? Or at least its dominant role in the mainstream pop business. All pop phenomena have a shelf life. The public eventually tire of familiar formats, which gravitate towards excessive sensationalism to retain interest. Simon Cowell’s shows have become dependent on increasingly artificial storylines, but how do you top a narrative like the fairy tale of Susan Boyle, the frog princess? Well, perhaps by abandoning the pretence of reality, and employing scriptwriters.
So bid hello to US TV phenomenon Glee. A scabrous satire of The X Factor and High School Musical, featuring all-dancing social outcasts, pregnant cheerleaders and idiot jocks, Glee has been a pop sensation in the US, with cover versions by the cast selling in the millions on iTunes and notching up 25 hits on the Hot 100. That’s the second-highest hit rate in the US chart’s 51-year history. Only the Beatles have done better, with 31 US hits in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania. Glee starts its runon Channel 4 and E4 this month. Will the future of pop be fictional?
Cartoon band Gorillaz release their third multi-media concoction in spring, titled Plastic Beach. I have been surprised that more virtual pop avatars haven’t followed in their wake, but perhaps with music from one of rock’s most prodigiously talented songwriters (Damon Albarn) and visuals by a comic strip genius (Jamie Hewlett), Gorillaz set the bar impossibly high.
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December 21st, 2009
An angry, obscene, political rap metal rant beats a sugary, X Factor shoo-in to the number one spot, and suddenly it feels like Christmas. Rage Against The Machine’s unlikely hit should remind us that Xmas has not been rebranded Xfactormas, an annual marketing opportunity for Simon Cowell’s slick, light entertainment TV juggernaut.
Cowell, Cheryl Cole and others with a vested interest have complained that this was a negative campaign that has robbed an innocent boy of his dream (I’m sure Joe McElderry will get over it, hopefully on a cruise ship to Antarctica), while insulting the tastes of ordinary consumers to boot. But they just don’t get it. A lot of people are genuinely sick of the distorting affect Cowell’s formulaic karaoke shows have had on pop culture. And, guess what, it turns out there are more of us than there are X Factor fans.
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