Self-Referential Media

A few days ago I heard Scott Mills announcing an Ed Sheeran song on Radio 1 and to my great surprise it was not ‘The A Team’, which, if Radio 1 is to be believed for the past 4 months, is the only song he’s ever attempted to write or play.

This song, You Need Me, not only seems to hail the artist as a necessary entity and demotes ‘you’ to a lowly parasitic being, unable to function without the glorious Mr. Sheeran, it also comments on Ed’s song writing process and his thoughts on his career. This is what today’s moan is going to centre around.

http://www.pyromag.com/music/9902/ed-sheeran-the-a-team-exclusive-review/

 

Most music played on Radio 1 at the moment is bloody awful and this song has made me realise part of what is so annoying about the new breed of artists. Songs seem to now be an ego trip of artists, a platform upon which they can discuss the fact that they are musicians or to describe themselves in ways that are almost certainly exaggerated, misguiding or simply false.

Another instance of this happening I have noticed is on the ‘Street Summer’ advert shown on Channel 4 every 15 minutes; someone called ‘Mz Bratt’ claims the following: ‘I am big, I am Bratt, I am bruffer dan brat, I am tougher than a lion’, another line does follow this but the words have been so lost in ‘ghetto’ that they have drowned into an oblivion of nonsense.

Who the hell are these people!? This seems to be their replacement for walking. Walking has evolved with us over millions of years, why's that girl on one arm!?

 

I have no guess what ‘bruffer dan brat’ means, but I’m fairly sure it’s as unlikely as her being sturdier than a lion. Why do these hideously over-confident people feel the overpowering urge to bombard my ears with these ill thought out lyrics that, in effect, means absolutely sod all?

This genre of music seems to have escaped the normal constraints of humanity; if any other medium were to spend 50% of its air time commenting on the fact that it was a part of the media spectrum and described falsehoods about itself it would not last long, it would be ridiculed and branded as pointless.

If I were to spend most of my time writing this blog going over the fact that I am writing, occasionally making up phrases such as ‘bruffer dan brat’ and exaggerating parts of my own body, personality and credibility then an even more negligible number of people would bother sifting their way through my various mumblings.

If the BBC were to do the same... Actually, here I’ve found a stumbling block. But this is also something that has annoyed me. Onwards I plough.

 

BBC nature documentaries, such as Life, are amazing. The effort gone to to get right shots and to enlighten the ignorant masses is fantastic. These documentaries are amongst my favourite programmes on telly, and I would love to see more of these on. The recent fascination with the final 10-minute copout at the end of each of these, however, frustrates me no end. I have watched some of these, and it is amazing to see the lengths gone to to secure the perfect few seconds of film, but it does seem to have become standard to include this at the end, cutting a good hour-long programme to a measly 50 minutes when other publicly funded channels are already cutting down programme length as ad breaks are getting increasingly longer.

http://battlebunny.com/2010/04/26/bbcdiscovery-life/

This has quickly gone off-topic, my rage is towards ‘urban’ music and hideously bad lyricists.

Despite the obvious inappropriateness of this technique (providing we ignore the BBC’s current form), ‘street’ music has picked up this annoying habit and its fans lap up the lies of these idols thoughtlessly.

There’s very little else I’d like to do more than to trawl through more terrible music on YouTube to find more examples of this music in order to provide my observation with more ammunition, but unfortunately I’ve got better music to listen to, so if you wish to prove it to yourself, listen to any music liked by the popular kids and you’ll soon find too many examples to shake a stick at.