The Nameless

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is bad album names.

Yesterday I was listening to Harry's excellent radio show (Tuesdays 5-6pm on University Radio York) and he played a song by Californian whinge-rockers Hoobastank, from their album For(N)ever. This got me thinking, is that the worst name for an album I've ever heard? Yes. But recently there have been a swarm of terribly named albums, so I thought I'd give you my 10 Worst Album Names Ever. Then I remembered that I'm lazy, so decided to limit it to last year. It's also worth noting that most of these are included because I have a problem with the actual artist. So here are my 10 Worst Album Names Of 2011. As usual, conducted with zero research and even less consideration.

10. Michael Bublé: Christmas - I would love to have been in the primary school classroom in which this name was chosen.

9. True Widow: As High As The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth - I've never heard any True Widow, but if their music is as unwieldy and pretentious as that album name, I never want to.

8. Owl City: All Things Bright And Beautiful - gggfhvghgggggg Oh sorry, I fell asleep on the keyboard.

7. Jennifer Lopez: Love? - No?

6. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues - When naming albums, some words should just be avoided. On that list, above Residue and Pudding is Helplessness. It's barely even a word. And it feels like it goes on forever. Which is appropriate, because it's by folksy bore-block Fleet Foxes.

5. Adele: 21 - Don't hate Adele for her appearance; hate her for her music. Hate her for complaining about having to pay tax on her earnings from the sale of 6.5 million copies of her first album. She said that upon receiving that tax bill, "I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire." It's almost a shame she didn't, because she'd have been sent to prison, where she wouldn't be able to release more albums. That first album was called 19, because that's how old she was when writing it, and this one is called 21, because that's how old she was when writing it. That seems face-punchingly lazy, but in fairness, she does look sleepy on the cover.

4. Earth: Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light I - Having looked them up, Earth seem like a band I might really like. Which is a shame, because I will never ever listen thanks to this laughably self-important album name which sounds like Dan Brown-meets-Spinal Tap. Here's a tip: Never release albums split into Part 1 and Part 2. You're not writing Henry IV. Let's look at the rest of Earth's album names:

Earth 2: Special Low-Frequency Version

Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions

Pentastar: In the Style of Demons

Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method

The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Ok I've genuinely changed my mind, those are brilliant names, I'm downloading them all now.

3. Beyoncé: 4 - So called because it's her fourth album, making Adele's system look like creative wizardry.

2. Ed Sheeran: + - For me, Ed Sheeran is filed under "Things I hate despite never having heard or seen them", alongside the Zooey Deschanel sitcom New Girl. Incidentally, I just looked her up to find that her albums are called Volume One, Volume Two and A Very She & Him Christmas. Nice how these things all come together. But when I found out that Ed Sheeran had called his album + I spent days and days deliberately and repeatedly stubbing my toe on a brick.

1. Florence + the Machine: Ceremonials - Florence Welch and her brother The Machine Welch are seemingly omnipresent; the Abi Morgan of music. One of their typically whiney songs was used in this week's episode of How I Met Your Mother, as if a special committee had got together to specifically design the worst thing for me. Album names of a single word can be brilliant, but only when that word is well-chosen. Unlike Ceremonials, which just sounds too similar to Cereal or Chlamydial.

Thanks for reading, I'll leave you with the Slipknot song that this blog is named after, from the suitably terribly-titled album Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses). Enjoy!

Party Politics Part 2: Mehdi's Revenge

As you know, I love everything in the world, with the exception of three things. One of those things that I love is the New Statesman magazine.

About a year ago I wrote a blog about the New Statesman, so now I'm doing the inevitable: Ruining it with a sequel. And as with most sequels, the audience are bored, the writing's getting lazy and the idea was never that good in the first place. Here are 3 things that have annoyed me in the New Statesman recently:

3. This interview with Abi Morgan, writer of Thatcherite creepfest The Iron Lady and just about everything currently on British TV. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that she was secretly writing the news. Firstly, I hadn't heard that the director Phyllida Lloyd had called The Iron Lady a "Shakespearean" film, but as the self-inflicted staple-wound on my face shows, I have now. I'll go through some of Abi Morgan's quotes:

"I think there's a vividness to Phyllida's work" - I assume she's using vivid in its meaning of "brightly coloured". In which case, a fair comment. If anything can be said for Mamma Mia! and The Iron Lady, it's that they're brightly coloured. You know, like Shakespeare.

"It was always my intention to interrogate Thatcher's political life" - Well in terms of interrogation, it was more a Rural Affairs Select Committee than Guantanamo Bay.

"This is a very small film" - No it isn't.

"I saw it as a small film" - IT FUCKING ISN'T.

"A kind of King Lear for girls" - Presumably because girls don't understand Shakespeare, the idiots.

2. This article by Mehdi Hasan. I love him, but this is a staggeringly punchable piece of non-debate. He starts by posing an interesting question: "Can you believe in God and science?" And then he argues that yes you can, because look at all of these people that do! Case closed, right? WRONG. Simply pointing out that there are people who believe in both God and science completely evades the issue. Yes people do believe in both, but the debate is about whether that set of beliefs is coherent.

It's like the argument about religion and morality; when the religious just reel off the same list again and again (Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Bono) to prove that religious people are "good" people, the real debate is neatly sidestepped, and kicked in the groin.

The question Mehdi Hasan initially asks isn't, "Are there people who believe in God and science?" But that is the question he chooses to answer. And a very boring question it is too, because of course there are. The question is "Can you believe in God and science?" That's the interesting question, and that's where the debate lies.

Then right at the end, "The biggest threat to science and scientific progress is not religion or religious believers, with our superstitious or supernatural beliefs, but the arrogance of those atheist fundamentalists..." Firstly, surely the "arrogance" lies with those claiming to be watched over by an all-powerful God, and secondly, if anything is a "threat to science" then it's "superstitious" fucking beliefs.

1. This political cartoon, which are things I've complained about on here before, but this one is just so brain-meltingly lazy and dreadful that as I was scanning it in, I had to repeatedly slam the lid of the scanner shut on my fingers just to render myself physically unable to phone the police and report the New Statesman for crimes against humanity.

And people say the New Statesman lacks the academic clout of The Economist...

Thanks for reading, this blog is named after a Catch-It Kebabs song which obviously I've used before, so I'll use their song 5 Years because it's also political, enjoy! Oh, also I'm willing to bet that the title of this blog has the best New Statesman/A Nightmare On Elm Street crossover joke in the world.

2-Tone Army

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is those adverts for army jobs.

If adverts are the devil incarnate, then army adverts are him putting on a hat and dancing around on your TV screens during the breaks in Come Dine With Me. It's bad enough that the military has to force its agenda into our living rooms, but what's really troubling is the glamorisation of war. I'm also deeply suspicious of anyone prepared to join the army, but let's not go into that now. The commodification of violence aside, here are the 5 worst army jobs adverts (that I could find online):

5.

I choose [D] Cry and eat biscuits.

4.

A fairly disproportionate response for a snowball fight...

3.

Because the army can also be really fucking boring.

2.

"You kill people. You get killed. A life without limits."

1.

I'll stick to the thousand hours of TV thanks. You patronising fucks.

Tanks for reading (some army humour for you there), I'll leave you with the song by The Toasters that this blog is named after, enjoy!

Exit Music (For A Film)

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is this piece of news.

Ooh I should start with a follow up to my last blog about Skins... Channel 4 emailed me back and said: "Unfortunately, the information you have provided does not enable us to accurately assist you." I'm not sure how much clearer I could have been, but anyway...

You know that annoying thing David Cameron does? Every Prime Minister has a sort of embarrassing tick that they do. Gordon Brown had that jaw thing, Tony Blair had the flappy hand gestures and David Cameron has that annoying habit of fucking TALKING. Talking about stuff that it is not his job to talk about, like music videos. Giving his opinion without even being asked, and yes I appreciate the irony, fuck off.

This is the latest example of him gruntingly spewing his salty judgement all over something about which he has no fucking clue; the film industry, he says with all the wisdom of a Lego brick, should support commercially successful mainstream films like The King's Speech.

As everyone has pointed out, we don't know which films are going to be "commercially successful"; that BBC article uses the example of The Artist, a black and white, silent film, which is enjoying enormous unexpected popularity.

That said, we can sometimes tell when a film is going to be "commercially successful". For instance The Iron Lady, a film so flimsy and so blatantly targeted at a mainstream trans-Atlantic audience that it can be folded up into a paper plane and thrown at America.

I won't go on about that excuse for a film, which I reviewed here, but I will say this: What does The Iron Lady have in common with The King's Speech? They both celebrate members of the ruling class. Oh and they both include montages in which the protagonist is taught to speak differently, but only one of them made me wish that the cinema in which I was sitting would go all Inglourious Basterds.

But that's what David Cameron means isn't it? When he says that we should be making more "commercially successful pictures", what he's saying is that we should be making more films that glorify archaic British institutions. This is for two reasons: Firstly, as a conservative he wants to see these traditional values celebrated, and secondly, those films make money.

Look at the recent successful British films. The Iron Lady is a big hug for a Tory Prime Minister. The King's Speech and The Queen are big kisses to the monarchy. Even Harry Potter is a celebration of elitist private education. And remember that nightmare you had in which Shakespeare In Love won the Best Picture Oscar? Well that actually happened, because it's a film that wallows in export-friendly olden-days bull-shit.

The comedian Greg Proops recently said that the reason the British are good at making these period pieces is because we kept all the costumes. And that's just it. The Academy and the export market lap up this outdated view of Britain and what David Cameron is suggesting is that we pander to them. "You know," Britain says timidly to Oscar (I assume that's a guy), "we're not actually all about the posh people and the frilly clothes and the stiff-upper lip and the big houses so much these days..." To which Oscar simply laughs and unzips Britain's fly, as we churn out "Meryl Streep IN... The King's Speech for cunts." It's embarrassing.

It's embarrassing because the monarchy is embarrassing and our political institutions are embarrassing and our class system is embarrassing and Shakespeare In Love is fucking embarrassing. That's not what I want to be cinematically representing Britain. It's like Blue representing us in Eurovision.

2011 gave us some of the best British films I've ever seen; Kill List, Submarine, Wuthering Heights, Wreckers, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Attack The Block, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN! And of course Senna, which has been eliminated from the Best Documentary Oscar category, despite it being the best documentary. Weird. If only Ayrton Senna had worn a crown...

Incidentally, Senna was commercially successful, but like The Artist, that was a surprise. Senna is not the type of film Cameron is talking about putting money behind. He's talking about Phyllida Lloyd's upcoming musical entitled Lady Di!

British films that are challenging and interesting, films from Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold and Ben Wheatley, films that aren't formulaic or condescending or stuffy, won't have a chance if David Cameron gets his way and keeps fucking talking. He should really get some therapy for that. *Cue montage!*

Thanks for reading, I would leave you with the Radiohead song that this blog is named after, but that would leave things on a bit of a downer. So here's a great reggae cover by Easy Star All-Stars, enjoy!

New Skin(s)

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is Skins.

As it returns soon for its 74th series, I sent the following email to Channel 4.

_______________________________________

Dear Channel 4,

It has come to my attention that your pro-abortion campaign show Skins is returning soon, so I thought I'd share with you my 10 ideas for Skins storylines. They might come in useful if ever the Skins writers forget their weird dreams before they have time to write them down. I should also add that I don't watch Skins, so have had to guess names and things.

1. Sam "STD" Davis fails his driving test for trying to smoke the car's exhaust pipe.

2. One of the infamous Skins parties is shut down by police due to the amount of semi-naked children in attendance.

3. The Skins gang are on their way to see the band Enter Shikari live, when their bus explodes, killing them all in a painful, fiery death.

4. Roxxxie fails to pay back her unstable drug dealer, who is also her boyfriend, so as punishment he welds her BlackBerry® to her hand permanently; directed by David Cronenberg.

5. The Skins gang stop taking hallucinogenic drugs for long enough to see that in reality they are a bunch of boring fucking borderline rapists.

6. Suzzzie comes out as a lesbian, then decides she's straight after all, then changes her mind again, then goes back to being straight, then turns into a cat and gets run over.

7. The Skins gang, having snorted every single possession including money and laptops, are forced into abject poverty and finally have something real to whine about. Starving and desperate, Sam is the first to be killed and eaten...

8. Crazy Dave sleeps with a prostitute and contracts a bizarre STI which makes him wake up in a cold sweat and furiously itchy in the middle of the night, but inside MySpace.

9. Johnny The Cunt has a particularly heavy night and wakes up with a broken wrist, which he sustained while fisting someone, and a severe hangover. He realises that he's late for his art exam (because he's arty). Due to his wrist injury, he has to draw using his left hand and as a result repeatedly snaps the lead of the 80 pencils he gets through. His unsettled stomach leads to him "expressing himself" all over the canvas. He gets an A*, but is left a forever shaking wreck scarred with debilitating mental illness.

10. Skidmark's ego grows to the point of self-awareness and becomes a new character.

You're welcome.

Yours faithfully,

Daniel Meier.

_______________________________________

But hey, 30 Rock is back tonight! I'll leave you with the Incubus song that this blog is named after. Enjoy!

Top Five

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is 2011.

The BBC news was dominated by headlines about the royal family, but then why would we want to read about boring, unimportant shit like foreigners being killed? Then yesterday Geoffrey Howe tried to deny stuff that definitely happened. Poor man, it's as if you say one thing and suddenly you're branded as having actually said that thing. Though my memory is obviously not great, considering my summary of the events of 2011 only goes as far back as yesterday.

I may have become blinded by anger. Just a few nights ago I dreamt that I went up to Beyoncé and said, "Oh you fucking cunt." Then last night, after becoming disproportionately annoyed with 2 people on Facebook, I spent about an hour thinking, "if I could line them both up so that if I punched one of them, their head would knock painfully into the jaw of the other, which one of them would I punch?"

But instead of all that, I'm going to talk about my favourite things of 2011. Because in spite of everything, some great stuff came out of this year. Here are five Top Fives:

Films:

5. Take Shelter

4. Wuthering Heights

3. The Guard

2. Drive

1. We Need To Talk About Kevin

Not forgetting Senna, Super, A Separation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Super 8, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Scream 4, Attack The Block...

TV Drama:

5. The Shadow Line

4. This Is England '88

3. Doctor Who

2. Black Mirror

1. American Horror Story

Seriously, American Horror Story was a brilliant mixture of The Shining and David Cronenberg and every horror film ever and Glee. Well not Glee, it was just created by the same people, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. The perfect cast even included Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy, whose character is simultaneously old and young and dead. In fact 90% of the characters are dead. It is set in "Murder House" after all, hence why there's a thing in the basement and a thing in the attic. They might as well have included the exchange:

"In the interest of full disclosure, I should warn you that this house is known as "Murder House."

"We'll take it!"

"No seriously, all the previous owners were killed in here."
"I'll double the asking price!"

"Listen to me, you will definitely be brutally murdered in this house."

"You had me at Murder!"

TV Comedy:

5. Him & Her

4. Fresh Meat

3. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

2. 30 Rock

1. Community

And my thoughts remain with Community during its hiatus. Thank fuck for the return of 30 Rock to keep me sane during this difficult time.

Music (Gigs and Albums):

5. If Not Now, When? - Incubus

4. Queens of the Stone Age - Queens of the Stone Age (Originally released in 1998 but thankfully re-released this year)

3. Incubus at the Manchester O2

2. The Skints at loads of places

1. Jamiroquai at the O2 Arena

That Jamiroquai gig was one of those special, unforgettable experiences, and not just because Jay Kay spoke to me.

Live Comedy

5. The Future Is Another Place - Josie Long

4. Richard Herring (Christ on a Bike and What Is Love, Anyway? and AIOTM *aiotm*)

3. Carpet Remnant World - Stewart Lee

2. Curse Sir Walter Raleigh - Michael Legge

1. The Trap (X and Bad Musical)

Not forgetting the brilliant Robin Ince and his ridiculous amount of stuff; people with shows so great that I saw them twice such as Tony Law and Tim Key; and those geniuses that I finally saw for the first time like Simon Munnery and Dave Gorman.

Thank you for reading, happy new year! Enjoy 2012, even though there's going to be that big, ghastly, expensive affair with all the nationalism and shooting. No not the Olympics, the US Presidential election! Hahahahah oh fucking hell let's just hope the Mayans were right. I'll leave you with the Hotspots song that this blog is named after, enjoy!

Without A Face(book)

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is Facebook.

So here we are are, at the final chapter of my trilogy of blogs that I'm calling: Failing My Degree. And what a ride it has been. Remember how it all began? Two days ago, we began this saga. They said we'd never make it. "You're crazy," they said, "get out of my bedroom." But we persisted. We never gave up, even during that difficult middle section of our journey. Yesterday. Dark times indeed. But we made it out the other side, ready to face the biggest evil of all: Facebook.

Last month I blogged about Twitter, and now I turn to Twitter's sex-offender uncle, Facebook. Don't get me wrong, I love The Social Network. But I often wonder what it is that I really hate: Facebook, or most people that I know. The answer is both. The former because of the way it constantly restyles itself like a fucking celebrity, because of the way it shows everyone exactly what you're reading and watching and wanking over, because of Facebook Chat acting like a temperamental, uncooperative, moody teenager. We're all "experiencing some problems" Facebook Chat, get over yourself.

But what really makes me want to put my hand in a toaster is that persistant irritant, Other People. With their Facebook Statuses. The kind that make me want to comment saying "CUNT" and then claim I was fraped. The kind like these: The 10 Worst Kinds Of Facebook Status - Oh and if you're thinking, "why don't you just hide the people who piss you off?" Fuck you.

10. The Mundane - eg. Loving X Factor and pizza tonight - People complain that Twitter is full of mundane "I am eating" style tweets, but clearly they're not friends with the same people as me on Facebook. Every other status is "I am in a library" or "I am bleeding to death, please get help." YAWN

9. The Wry Observation - eg. How come the more you sleep the more tired you are?! - This covers "that awkward moment when..." statuses too, which I've complained about before. "That awkward moment when you walk into a room and forget why you went in there!" Thanks Michael McIntyre.

8. The Copied Joke - eg. David Cameron's wife has given birth. I didn't even know Clegg was pregnant! - Yeah we've all seen Sickipedia.

7. The Link To The Thing I Hate - eg. I love this new Florence And The Machine song! - Followed by a YouTube video. Equally awful is when someone I hate posts something I like. Shit, THEY like Fight Club? Time to find a new favourite film. And stab myself in the leg with a corkscrew.

6. The "Ironic" - eg. S Club 7 back together. Life is complete. - That one is a genuine status from someone I hope never reads this blog.

5. The Smug - eg. That's 8 hours in the library done, time to start another essay! - Like I don't feel bad enough about doing fuck nothing with my day.

4. The In-joke - eg. Shoelaces! LOL @Jamie Jameson - I hope your head gets stuck in a boiling kettle.

3. The Lazy Frape - eg. I love cock. - New rule: Only Dan is allowed to frape. He is the master. He fraped someone when they were LOGGED OUT of Facebook. And even if he does just do an "I love cock", it's funny when it's Dan.

2. The Pretentious - eg. Now dance like a dandelion in the wind on the hill underneath the pines, yeah move like the river flows, feel the big drum down deep in your toes. - Another genuine status. From a male. These statuses could be song lyrics or a nonsensical quote. "'Healing yourself is connected with healing others.' - Yoko Ono". Just because it's incomprehensible doesn't make it clever. Statuses like this are just pretentious, meaningless, smug, attention-seeking, self-absorbed, self-centred, self-involved piles of nothing.

1. The Night Out - eg. Can't wait to get on it tonightttttttttt! - When the last letter of a word is held down like that I always hope it's because they've collapsed in pain on to their keyboards. But no, because the next day they have statuses that just say things like, "Hanging." Which leaves me hoping it's literal. These boring cunts have mistaken telling everyone about how drunk they get for a personality.

The name of this blog is a genius play on the Rage Against The Machine song with which I will leave you, enjoy!