Everything Counts

It's a competitive world, as the Depeche Mode boys said, and that was in the 80s. It's got more competitive since. You have to be on your game all the time if you're to stay in the lead. The world of blogging is probably no exception to this, so with that in mind, welcome to my first blog post since December, when I got off the game (that's blogging rather than prostitution, just in case you're wondering). In truth I was never really on it, at an average of one post a month, normally when it got to the end of the month and I realised I hadn't posted anything, but it was always in my to do list.  

So what competitive advantage have I lost in my absence? Has anyone missed me, apart, maybe, from the person who tried to post comments in relation to my last two posts, telling me how much he agreed with them, had found they had a lot to say, and echoed what he had been saying on his blog that he helpfully posted a link to, and that turned out, on not so close inspection, to be nothing to do with The X Factor or the Gibraltar National Football Team.

Traffic has of course gone down in the last few months, no doubt as people clicked on their favourites and found, yet again, that there was no new content here, and yet there were no internet debates asking what had happened to the man who posted 'Jumping the Shark of Revenge' 'Naked Royals Here' and 'There's no Nashville in Nashville'.  It appears that unlike David Bowie, there was no speculation about unpublished material, and the blog posts I might be planning to unleash on the world when the time was right.

That's not to say I've had no readers. There have been visitors, and in fact there has been a shift in my audience. The majority of visitors in 2013 were from the United States and yet in the last month, two thirds of the traffic has come from Russia. Who'd have guessed it? Maybe it was all the winter Olympians sitting on their shared toilets showing each other the post about the World Cup in Qatar and saying 'and you think that's bad.' Or maybe it was Vladimir Putin looking at the blog, because it's one of the few that has never said anything bad about him and the putative laws he's passing in Russia. If it is, here's a message 'Vlad - come out of the closet, you are fooling no-one'. And that's another reader gone.

Except that I doubt it was him, or indeed anyone applying their translation skills to discover why National Record Store Day was a rip off or why it's a good thing Jackie Mason is no longer doing stand up in the UK. At best, it will have been people searching for nude pictures of Royal family members, and stumbling on my greatest piece of Search Engine Optimisation - the post about nude pics of Kate Middleton. They will have scrolled to the bottom, just in case the pictures were at the end of the English that they couldn't read, and then clicked off and looked at another site. At worst, they won't even have been people. They will have been some automated internet trawling device looking to find something they could clone, hack, or do something else with, to demonstrate just what an unlovely place most of the world is today. And that sort of gets us back to the start of this post, although it's taken a massive detour to get there, and the routing still won't be that clear. 

We live in a world where everything is an opportunity to be exploited, and where misery has become a profit making business. From the pre-recorded phone messages of ‘had an accident (sue the bastard and give us some of the money)’ and ‘Government legislation means you can write off your debt (and pay us some of it)’ to all the other dubious cold calls and internet scams, people around the country and around the world are doing unto others what they would be pissed off with if anyone did to them. They justify this on the basis that it’s a business, it’s making them money and so what if people fall for it, they shouldn’t be so feckless. It's a competitive world and you have to do what you can to get on. Competitiveness has been accepted as the default position of the human condition,  All men (and women) are equal, but we should all work to disrupt that equation and get ourselves in the lead. 'Get ahead in business ' 'get yourself higher in search engine rankings' ‘get one over on the opposition’ - success is everything and we should all live by that motto. 

But, here’s the thing, it's not true.  Competition is not always healthy, and first place isn't what we should all be striving for. By it's very name, first place is something only one person, or group, can occupy, and that means a lot of people either making themselves miserable in their relentless quest for it, or making other people miserable by pursuing it at their expense with calls they don't want, emails they won't read, and other far worse things that show just how much profit is valued above people. It didn't used to be that way, it doesn't have to be that way now. Even if it is a competitive world, it doesn't have to be one where the success you have equates to the number of people you piss off or exploit. Depeche Mode were not singing a mantra for business in the 80s, let's just remember that. 

Gibraltar joins UEFA – Nations quake

So, after years of trying and at the risk of exacerbating already strained relations between Spain and its British owners, Gibraltar has finally been recognised as a nation by UEFA. Not quite enough for it to qualify as an answer on Pointless, for which you’d need the less important UN recognition as a Sovereign State, but surely enough to send tremors around the world of international football as a long surpressed giant is finally allowed to strut it’s stuff on the international stage. Almost like post-apartheid South Africa being readmitted to the international rugby community, the potential impact on the countries that dominate the game cannot be underestimated.

Except, hang on a minute, this is Gibraltar, a country with no professional football league, a ground that does not yet meet UEFA requirements for competitive fixtures, and no players who play in the top level of any major domestic league. Maybe we should tone down the hype, and run that first paragraph again.

After years of trying, and no one caring, Gibraltar has been recognised as a nation by UEFA. San Marino, Andorra and the Faroe Islands now face a battle to retain the title of crappiest team in international football. A new kid is on the block and he might be about to join the teams that boast played 10, won 0, drawn 0, lost 10 records in the qualifiers.

That is sadly what the reality is likely to be. If you want to know why, just contrast Gibraltar with Iceland, who narrowly failed to become the country with the smallest population to qualify for a World Cup. Gibraltar has a population of 30,002, Iceland’s population is just over ten times that, while the team that currently holds the smallest population title are Trinidad and Tobago, with a population of 1.337 million.

Iceland’s squad include players plying their trade at the highest levels in Holland, England, Italy, Belgium and Denmark. Gibraltar’s first post-recognition friendly squad had just three players who play overseas, Scott Wiseman from Barnsley, Danny Higginbottom, nephew of the Gibraltar manager, whose football league days are now behind him at  conference side Chester and Adam Priestly who plays for Farsley FC in the Evo-Stik Northern Premier Division. As to the league structure in the two countries, Iceland has a five tier domestic league consisting of 70 teams, Gibraltar has two domestic leagues with 20 teams in total and no sign of a professional game emerging. 

The closer comparisons population wise are San Marino, whose population is just over 1,000 higher, and the Faroe Islands with just shy of 50,000 inhabitants. Andorra’s population  meanwhile is almost three times the size of Gibraltar’s.

None of this it to say that Gibraltar should be excluded from the international football party, but maybe it’s time for FIFA and UEFA to realise that a lot of these teams haven’t actually been invited to the party. They’re just there for a pre-party humiliation, turning up in the knowledge that they’ll be sent home long before the trifle’s gone in the fridge let alone been served out. Like the school kid picked last by the captains, they know their chances of ever playing in a proper game are less than zero, but they’re still expected to turn up and subject themselves to ten embarrassing games where the results are a foregone conclusion.

There’s something slightly cruel about it when you look at it. You don’t want to watch a team playing out of its league and with no chance of defying expectations. As anyone who followed Derby on their 11 point relegation season will tell you, it’s not a nice experience knowing that every week you will be out-played, out-classed and just prolonging the inevitable. But that’s what they’re doing.

If they were gaining anything from the exposure to the top footballing nations, you could argue it wasn’t all bad, but the evidence suggests that they’re not, and there is no chance they will ever make it to a World Cup or European Championship. It’s a hiding to nothing. At least with the FA cup qualifying rounds all teams know there is the vague chance it might lead to a place in the actual cup itself, and if it doesn’t, at least it will be a quick and bloodless exit, not the two year, ten game bashing that even the Champions League recognised was a bad idea when it abandoned the second group stage.

Fans want to feel that they have a chance of getting somewhere, not just that they’re making up the numbers. Wolves fans are enjoying the first division far more than they enjoyed the Championship, or the last days of the Premiership after they sacked Mick McCarthy with no plan B, because they are no longer whipping boys. There is hope and expectation. I would guess that the average Wolves fan is having a better time than the average Crystal Palace fan this season, even though they left the Championship via a different exit route.

And this is why, rather than continue the cruel and inhumane practice of every national team being put into the qualifiers, FIFA and UEFA should look at taking them out of the main competition, and creating a new competition just for them, a Small Nations Cup, where all the countries taking part felt they had a chance of making the final, and a reason for taking part. Like the FA Vase, or the FA Trophy, it could be played out at the same time, and have a final in the same stadium, as the big competition.  The finalists could also earn automatic places in the qualifiers for the next World Cup, with the losing semi-finalists, and quarter finalists battling it out for another place or two.

It might pass the rest of the footballing world by, but does that matter? It gives all nations a chance of actually having a tournament they can win and enjoy, and given the latest addition to the countries that could enter it, along with FIFAs love of handing tournaments to small nations with no footballing infrastructure, maybe the inaugural competition could be held in Gibraltar? It’s just a thought.

THIS ARTICLE APPEARS IN THE NOVEMBER 2013  EDITION OF LATE TACKLE MAGAZINE. 

Talk about Pop Music – Please

A woman ‘earns’ the nickname Screwbo because she’s on a talent contest, is 36 and can sing, and because a 48 year old woman who could also sing ‘earned’ the nickname Subo when she appeared on a talent contest a few years go.

On the same programme a 16 year old girl who turns in a performance that’s a carbon copy of Beyonce is told she should be herself, when, at 16, being herself probably means imagining she’s Beyonce.

Finally, on the latest edition of the same programme, we have a guest appearance from Miley Cyrus, a woman who claims to be channelling the attitude of Sinead O’Connor, because her video has a close up of her face as she sings and cries, only to be told by O’Connor that she is doing no such thing, because she also gets her kit off in the said video.

All of this elevates debate about the artist above debate about the music, with judgements cast not on the basis of their talent, or lack of it,  but on the implications that can be drawn from ill-considered sound-bite comparisons.

To begin with Sam Bailey, our X Factor prison worker. What are the real similarities between her and Susan Boyle? She’s 12 years younger than Boyle was when she found fame. She’s married with children, whereas Boyle was a virgin spinster living with her mother. She has a job  and, on the face of it, a perfectly normal life. All things that Susan Boyle didn’t have.  Okay, in a looks obsessed media, you could probably note that like Subo,  she is not what you would call a stunner, but if that’s all you need to draw a physical comparison, then you’re lumping a hell of a lot of people into the same bucket. And you’re probably one of them.

The actual similarities come down to the following; she is on a talent show, can sing, and is over 25. And that becomes enough for the comparison to be made and embedded in the nickname. And what of the nickname? If we’re being honest, we have to admit that there is something about it that is slightly insulting and derisory towards her, as if anyone over the age of 25 who is trying to be a successful singer must have something wrong with them. It can’t just be that they’ve been doing something else with their lives and now want to try and do something they enjoy. There has to be something more than that, because they haven’t realised that the natural state for people like them is to stay quiet and in the background for fear of ridicule and patronising remarks if they dare to break out of the box we put them in. That’s what the name is implying.

And doing it because they want to be famous, as well as wanting to use their talent, well, that’s really  no excuse - albeit that we should excuse all the cast of TOWIE, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore and every contestant on every series of Big Brother for also thinking they have a right to be famous when they have no talent whatsoever. One rule for you, one rule for me, Screwbo. But she can take comfort from the fact that whether or not she wins X Factor, she will either have a number one single or a number one album,  even if people whose intelligence stretches no further than thinking of a wacky patronising nickname try to make her feel like a freak.

Skipping over Tamera Knowles and on to Sinead O’Cyrus as she would like to be known, the implication that she cannot be on the same emotional level as Sinead O’Connor, because she gets her clothes off, doesn’t automatically hold  weight, and the assumption that it does condemns a lot of clever people to a place in the dunces class. It’s not to say all page 3 girls are PhD students in disguise, or that you have to get naked to be intellectual or even capable of independent thought, but it’s a sweeping generalisation that allows no room for debate. Dismiss everyone without going beyond a headline.

Madonna in her Erotica/Sex/Body of Evidence phase went a lot further than Cyrus, but no-one would claim that means she’s stupid. We’re told the difference is that Madonna was in the driver’s seat for all of her 90s flesh flashing, whereas Cyrus is being manipulated by her managers, but how closely is anyone looking at this claim?  Yes,  her managers are probably rubbing their hands, if not other body parts, at the thought of the money it will make for them, but that’s not to say she isn’t a willing participant, and is stupid, or even just naïve, for doing it. But everyone is happy to say that’s what it is, that she is not in control of her image, and that the emotion she felt when making the Wrecking Ball video cannot, as she claims, match O’Connor’s in the video for Nothing Compares to you, because she is happy to then swing around naked on a wrecking ball. But one does not preclude the other.

That’s not to say that Cyrus is operating at the same emotional level, however. For me, the clincher that proves she is trying to manufacture a level of intensity she doesn’t really feel, comes not from her being naked, but from how obvious the attempt at getting that emotion is. It isn’t natural, it is the most forced thing in the video, and the staccato ‘wreck-ek-ek-me’ line confirms this. If you were bringing forth natural emotion and tears, you wouldn’t stretch a line out in such a syllable repeating manner. Also Cyrus’s continued habit of sticking her tongue out every time she sees a camera, suggests that she is going through some sort of postponed adolescent rebellion, rather than being a fully formed mature adult, but this is on a different level from just the clothes off video, a level that the usual summary dismissal of her doesn’t get to.

It also opens up a wider debate about her current behaviour, both in terms of what is behind it, and whether it’s right to condemn her for it.  On the first of these, the rebellion is ‘shocking’ because ‘she used to be so sweet’. Unnaturally so. The reality is rebellion is normal. Cyrus’ was postponed in order to fulfill the media desire for her to remain a sweet and innocent virgin, long after an age where she should be, and as a result, it’s intensity is possibly stronger than it would have been.  

She’s not the first of course, and her progression to maturity will be portrayed as part of some sort of emotional and physical meltdown, rather than anything caused by management designed arrested development, until it does indeed become just that, in much the same way as it did for Britney Spears, and probably is going to for Justin Beiber.

Which brings us to whether it’s right to condemn her. Beiber will only be ridiculed, he will not be condemned like Britney or Miley. Bad behaviour will not be tolerated, let alone celebrated, when it’s a female. The reason for this is probably because, for the rebellious female, be they Miley, Rhianna or Britney, the rebellion seems to come in the form of sex, as well as drink and drugs, and that makes people uncomfortable.

I could go on, but that would be missing the original point of this, which is that the people I’m talking about are first and foremost singers, and yet I can quite easily fill over a thousand words with almost no reference to their vocal ability or their records.  Newspapers, blogs, gossip columns and social media do this every day. It’s like talking about a football match and saying a ball was kicked by Wayne Rooney who once slept with an old prostitute but is now happily married to his childhood sweetheart with whom he has two children and lives somewhere in Cheshire where he has a house and a garden and basically anything other than reporting on the match.

But in music this now seems to be the norm. It’s the life and the problems and the scandal, not the music, that people latch on to, and that dominate column inches whether the person they’re writing about likes it or not.  The days have gone when the centre piece of an article about a singer would be a focus on their music and talent, rather than a reporters ill-informed  opinion of their life. It fills column inches, but it elevates the background to a higher level than the subject, and starts to reduce things to a lowest common denominator.  

Sam Bailey is a talented singer, not a subo replicant. Tamera Foster is a talented singer whether or not she wants to be a Beyone replicant, and is of an age where that’s a perfectly natural thing to be. Miley Cyrus isn’t particularly good, but that’s not because she swings around naked in her videos, it’s because her records aren’t good, because the image creation and promotion has always been put above quality of music in the list of marketing priorities for her. If stars put image before music, it’s always the music that suffers.

So artists, remember what you do and focus on that, and reporters and journalists, remember what the artists do too, and when you’re talking about a pop star, talk about pop music. That way we might get people who make decent music rather than people who make decent gossip column fodder.