Thursday Music Link

I've said in the past that the greatest publishing industry triumph of the last ten years was to take womens' magazines, change the pictures around but retain all of the design elements, obsession with meretricious trivia, ungodly ad load for branded goods, etc etc, and sell them to men. That's what Nuts and Zoo are, and when you see them in the supermarket stacked up against a load of equally worthless womens mags, you really do begin to question the value of mass literacy[1].

All of which is by way of introduction to the definite truth that, however much one might malign Sex and the City, you damn well know that the next few years will see a male version, where an ill-assorted bunch of "mates" are always meeting up at the pub (because they are "lads" and that's what lads do) and talking about sport and waving their expensive consumer goods around and having unfortunate relationships with absurdly thinly characterised and usually rather repulsive women and in general being christ-awful. I would put this in the category "Idea for a sitcom", but I really can't see myself pitching this one; frankly, the Abu Ghraib shredder repairman[2] would have more cause for pride in his work than the eventual writers and producers of this inevitability.

Update: Oh my god I've just realised. Three or four men of indeterminate age, standing around yakking about expensive consumer durables with lashings of laddish banter. I'm talking about Top Gear aren't I? Shiver. TG is actually really quite popular in America and on the internet, too. And think of the number of ways in which the format could metastatize if a) it escaped from BBC public service broadcasting principles b) the remit was broadened to include other sorts of consumer goods c) the soap-opera angle of the relationships between Clarkson and the other presenters was emphasised d) of course, they decided to sex it up a bit. Makes my blood run cold. In general, the British media industry is a kind of Porton Down petri dish of unpleasant creations, waiting to run riot over the rest of the world (Alex did a bit on this subject once but I can't find it).

The Model. Basically a poshed up version of Depeche Mode meets Boston Pops, but not necessarily the worse for that.



[1] Fundamental cultural differences between the US and UK, probably reflecting priorities in childhood education: in the US, morons are usually able to speak in coherent sentences but don't read. In the UK, morons typically shut up or grunt in monosyllables, but they do read newspapers and magazines. With various, probably not very important consequences, that aren't true anyway.

[2] Bad taste I know, but not really such bad taste given that even now, nearly ten years later, there is basically no evidence of such a thing having existed.