There really is a lot of dreadful tat on MySpace masquerading as content. I have just come back from an unwise excursion outside of my usual MS area and I am franky appalled. But it's kind of my own fault.
I was feeding my ego, you see. I am at a loose end, having managed to come and visit James and Louise in London on the weekend the entire paternal family are in town for a christening. I am home alone. As it is, several leisure opportunities are there to be had. I could watch TV, read a book or do what D H Lawrence used to do, which was throw his post out of the window rather than walk to the post box, and wait for the replies to arrive. He did this in the solid belief that no good Englishman would steal another chap's correspondance. He would instead, post it, possibly saluting the image of King George VI on the stamp as he did so, and he was nearly always right, too. He was only let down by the man who stole his revised draft of The Rainbow, which took out all the dross and replaced with exciting car chases and hot sex with green alien babes. Sadly this draft never reached his publishers, so we are left with the pile of shite we know and hate today.
But back to me. Lacking as I do either post to send, stamps to affix to said post, or to be living in the twenties before civilisation collapsed entirely, the answer was the same as it would be any other day - a session on MySpace. I re-did my last posting about the Pips gig, as I originally wrote it at 1:30am and could see floating shapes in front of my eyes as I typed. I demand blog perfection, and am not above a bit of Stalin-style revisionism to get it. This post will no doubt undergo some pretty heavy edits before it goes up.
But I also, and this is where I fell down, looked at the rankings page to see if I was anywhere near the top. I have taken to using Paulio's neat little trick, which is to enter my nonsense into the most obscure and pretentious category there is, namely Dreams and the Supernatural. I would have put it under poetry, as I did English Literature at university and would regularly amuse myself by pissing off as many poets as much as I could by refusing to take them seriously, or at least as seriously as they took themselves. However, after a while I started getting threatening odes through the door and blood-curdling haikus in my pidgeonhole, and so I abated a little. Sensitive souls are quite often one sonnet short of a portfolio, that's for certain. I didn't want to find any of my housemates pinioned to the porch of our shared house with a very tightly rolled-up volume of Donne by a short sighted but vengeful poet-assassin.
So I chose Dreams on the reasonable certainty that the most regular posters there would be asleep most of the time, and so a bit too muzzy to spot me interloping in their 'hood. And so it was. My last one about Germany winning against Argentina got to No.7. I was proud of myself, and quieted my suspicions that it only got so many comments because it was full of pictures. Of course, we all know where this is going. I had transgressed, and I had to pay.
Hubris is not pretty. And nor is the fall. My blog was not there any more, replaced by one that was actually about Dreams and the Supernatural. What was that doing there? I sagged. Like Icarus, I had got too cocky and flown too close to the sun, and my waxen wings had melted under the glare. I fell into the sea below and was enveloped, assailed even.
I was drowned. By the most popular blogs on MySpace. As we all know, "Popular" does not always, or even ever, directly correlate with "Good". For example, the most popular programme on TV in Britain is the final of Big Brother. In 2001 more people voted for Brian than voted for Labour. That's not a hopeful sign, no matter how you look at it. Tony Blair for one was so offended that he immediately lent our armed forces to our neighbours opposite, and they still haven't given them back, even after we pointed out that they have labels on them saying "Property of the United Kingdom". They'd better not break them.
Anyway, what is popular is not always worth it if you have an IQ of more than, say, sixty. The Sun, Carling Black Label, oven chips, Anthony Worral-Thopmson, Ricky Gervaise or Crazy Frog, I really would be happier to do without them. And we can add to that the blogs of Tila Tequila. I won't go into what's wrong with her specifically, because that kind of thing can get you into all sorts of exciting legal trouble, but I am not happy with what she represents. It is the idea that as log as you have a tight enough bum and funky-fresh enough attitude you will be successful. Well, I am unconvinced. I would urge you to listen to the music she provides and read some of her writing, but I think you can make a guess at what you'd find. A bright child of nine could do better. A stupid child of nine could, come to that.
Well, now I think about it, we can see that Tila herself isn't the problem, but she is certainly the most noticable symptom. MySpace is obviously a phenomenal way to sell things. It offers direct contact with artists that just wouldn't be possible before, and I am fine with that. If it weren't for MS I wouldn't know that Belle and Sebastian need a harp player (I sold mine to fund my badminton shor habit - if only I'd known sooner). And the fact that we can communicate directly with the artist means we are more inclined to buy their stuff. But the more people there are, the lower the Lowest Common Denominator falls, the more there is to sell the more blatant and therefore mindless your advertising becomes, and we pretty soon end up where we are now - the most popular person on MySpace is not a writer of note, or the personal page of a creative and acclaimed rock star, but a dim bulb Britney Spears wannabe who sells her shoddy products with pretend non-conformity and patently fake tits. And she's just the most visible of a million of them. It's all so... Rupert Murdoch, isn't it?
What I really don't like is the perpetration of yet another lie to make the male and stupid part with our cash. I am both male and stupid, but I learned long ago that a Lad Mag cannot be judged by its cover. Tila is currently gracing the cover of UK Maxim (seemingly unaware that she is only there because all of the cast of Hollyoaks are busy this month), surrounded by the usual excitable headlines - "The Hottest Girl On The Web!" and so on. There she is, covered in a thin film of engine oil, nearly pulling her knickers down and pouting at the camera with her blow-job lips. Call me jaded, but I may have seen that pose somewhere before. But as long as the kind of men who dig holes in roads and fifteen year old boys too scared to buy proper pornography part with their £3.50 every month, on it goes. It's her out of Corrie next month, then Jennifer Ellison again, as long as she hasn't put on any weight.
But anyway. We all know how dreadful and deadening to the soul 99.9 percent of the media is, and I shouldn't be too surprised that MySpace is basically the same. At least I still have the ability to pour scorn on it whilst slavishly checking to see if I have any messages every two to three hours. People of the towering cynicism of Tila and her ilk are only so annoying due to their dominance in MS's image. MySpace is the world, and as we know the world is full of the images of the heartless selling the unneccessary to the credulous with the untruthful. Most of the rest of the popular blogs were of the text-speak-heavy pink-goth teenage girl sort, and although their spelling and syntax can induce stomach ulcers in the pedantic, they are harmless enough. At least they are enjoying themselves I suppose. And accordingly, mst of the people in the world are nice people who think basically the same as me, but, crucially, don't type it all out in punishing detail and then expect people to read it. I am just bitter that I wasn't at no.7 any more.
All this is really doing is revealing myself to be not so much the master of the quirkily mundane as the kind of person who writes to Feedback on Radio 4 to complain about something I heard on Front Row (Mark Lawson, normally, the egg-shaped windbag). Plus I have just had a text message from nick asking me not to tell him what happens in the final episode of Doctor Who tomorrow night. So I'm off. I have a pizza, kindly supplied by mine fine hosts, to cook, and a choice of viewing - either a bizarre French comedy about dinner and briefcases, or Johnny Halliday's 50th anniversary concert in Paris, featuring topless dancers, terrible music and the man himself driving a tank down the Champs Elysees. Now that's what I mean by high-brow entertainment.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment