The face, up on a grimy Edinburgh billboard, was not a pretty one, its pasty skin and flared nostrils giving him the look of a gigantic, severely constipated albino bat nursing its grievances in a sooty belfry.
Closer inspection revealed that this specimen belonged to a crew known as the Arctic Monkeys, a rock posse of some renown. Their mothers must be very proud, but one imagines that subtropical monkeys, indeed all those primates who recline in balmier environs, must have been hugely relieved when this particular troupe decided to head north. But I digress.
The monkey in question was angry and misunderstood, a fact made evident by his snarling features and enormous text underneath his southernmost pimple, which screamed, ”Everything you think I am, that’s what I’m not.”
Really, Cheetah? Everything? How about this: I think you’re someone who doesn’t believe he can be described. Put that in your juice bottle and backwash it.
It’s just too easy; but this is what happens when monkeys are taught language. One day they’re signing ”Yum orange yum” and the next they’re publishing their lyrics in softcover.
It goes without saying that those musical effluents solely reliant on lust and a heavy beat, and whose central narratives involve humpin’, pimpin’, doggin’ and cappin’ are unspeakably stupid. But at the very least R&B, hip-hop, mainstream rock and pop do not claim any aesthetic or artistic high ground. Deep down they know that they are cultural haemorrhoids, and they frame their struggles in those terms: if you’re going to be a pile, at least make sure you’re the pile on top of the pile.
But such honesty is still entirely lacking from a relatively new eddy in the oily shallow end of the musical gene pool, for it is here that the floppy-haired proto-tenors romp, groaning out that newest and most vile genre: inspirational quasi-classical schlock-pop. In this soup of sentiment nobody slaps their bitch up, being too busy dying of unrequited lurve. There are no 9mils pointed at this ambrosia sky, only gently swaying arms, sheathed in immaculately tailored black suits.
Tenors are difficult to enjoy. Their range requires that they always seem one sharp away from popping something off that only a proctologist can rivet back into place; and the tone that they produce is the musical equivalent of a cat scratch: raised, hot, itchy and potentially fatal if left untreated. Teaming up three of them tested audiences, but the horde currently rampaging through cruise ship lounges is a genuinely dreadful idea: the Ten Tenors present a veritable catfight of bulging veins as they rupture their throats in unison around scantily covered Phil Collins odes. (A dreadful idea, but perhaps not an original one: it’s possible that the Three started as Ten, before Pavarotti ate the other seven, mistaking them for stuffed nightingales.)
But man shall not live by the drinking song from La Traviata alone, and it seems that for the moodier artiste there is always the option of going semi-solo with a gaggle of similarly pensive Italians, to spend his days leaning against Roman street corners, slightly tousled as if he has just fought his way free of Anita Ekberg’s cleavage, and to moo his saccharine laments at the feckless gods as he plucks at his unbuttoned tuxedo shirt. Alas, echoes of the Rat Pack are muted by modernity: cigarettes are bad for you, and it’s difficult to bed dames when you live with your parents; but still the Gerbil Pack perseveres …
Of course, anything the Italians can do, the Irish can do worse, and the current explosion of Celtic claptrap has swung the balance of awfulness squarely in favour of the tap-dancing, fiddle-sawing gingers from the Amarald Oil. Indeed, a squad of thin-lipped, steely-eyed Colleens called Celtic Women has recently explained why Celtic men drink as much as they do. Faced once again with the prospect of the haunting tale of Flay McQwerty, who fell in love with a yew tree and was carried away by the Fairy Queen on a white bull called Ronan Keating, drunken oblivion appeals.
But all this kitsch sizzles to nothing in the super-heated schmaltz of one Josh Groban, a terrifying hybrid with curly Italianate hair, a surname resonant with the gobby death rattles of Dublin consumptives, and a voice like a foghorn. Josh has one song. It is Danny Boy, but pipes and boggy romance don’t sell in Palm Springs, and so Josh has switched a couple of notes, whipped out the original lyrics and inserted a quasi-religious sludge of pious cliché; although one wonders how the religious right took to the bit about him being raised up ”to walk on stormy seas”. Stone him!
Not that one wishes him harm, of course; and it is good that schlock-stars don’t do drive-by’s, which means Josh isn’t likely to be capped outside a pimpin’ club by Helmut Lotti. But all the same, one has to wonder — and hope — that there’s a career-ending hairball with his name on it, the result of kissing the downy heads of 10 000 babies. You raise me up, hawk, hok, gak …