It doesn’t bode well: ‘Mumford & Sons, Lana Del Rey, Frank Ocean win Brit Awards’. Fair enough, the NME has it’s so-self-conscious-it chafes Brat awards, but the Brits have become – ok, have always been – a pat on the back for record sales. I could not discern one single piece of artistically credible matter in the entire reportage that I glanced at on the cocaine-fest (not the glamourous, pained Bowie/Richards style of cocaine user; more the bored banker/Wetherspoons barman on a night-off type).
I recall Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood delivering an awful, and retrospectively utterly fantastic, Brits in 1989. Unrehearsed, shambling, mis-matched, uncaring, incompetent and only-there-for-the-money, the terrible duo in fact delivered entertainment gold, as the nation squirmed, and the editors rushed to edit. What we have now is an annual, heavily drilled, operation in light-entertainment ‘professionalism’; and as any pretentious writer will tell you, professionalism is the enemy of good art.
Muse kick off. FUCK OFF YOU BORING FIRE-HAZARD-LIKE YOKELS. Emilie Sande wins things. YOU TOO YOU FAUX SOULFUL/SYMPATHETIC, IDIOTIC WASTE OF SPACE. Lana Del Rey strolls up. TWO GOOD SONGS FROM A CYNICAL PRODUCT PROPELLED BY MEDIA-CANNY AND DADDY-MONEY. Oh hello, Mumford & Sons, missed you. PISS OFF BACK TO AMERICA AND KEEP YOUR RIDICULOUSLY INSINCERE SHOUT-OUTS TO YOURSELVES AND YOUR REVOLTING MARKETING COMPANIES. The Black Keys are over-polished blues-rock, and Frank Ocean overrated R&B, and the once-decent Alt-J embarrass themselves by out-marteteering their own marketing men (who are presumably too busy to bother being preoccupied in the legendary toilet cubicles blowing coke into each other’s bell-ends).
Apparently Robbie Williams was there too, but I sadly missed it, and really he doesn’t need mentioning. If the recording, nay entertainment, industry is on it’s hands and knees, then despite it’s cosy, comforting, reassuringly capitalistic Jonathan King/Jim Davidson/Gary Glitter/Jimmy Savile appeal, the Brit Awards stands alongside it, maniacally primed like in the famous photo of the Vietnamese soldier on the brink of blowing that naked boys brains out.
