It's Festival Season
As per usual, I cannot afford to get to any of the major festivals this year, which irritates me greatly. But which field would I be pitching my tent in if my financial situation wasn't completely dire? Here are a selection of the major UK festivals and their headliners...
The big daddy of UK festivals, Glastonbury is entering its 40th year of mud-infested debauchery, and features a line-up sure to annoy knuckle-dragging imbecile Noel Gallagher, infested as it is with non-guitar playing interloper Snoop Doog. Gallagher has so far failed to pass his judgement on Tha Doggfather's inclusion. I imagine the reason for his silence has something to do with how badly his criticism of Jay-Z backfired a while back, with Jigga recieving a huge ovation from the Glasto crowd, the hightlight being his [admittedly ropey] cover of tedious Oasis track Wonderwall. Glasto organisers Michael and Emily Eavism, unlike Gallagher, do not live under a rock and know full well that in the year 2010, hip-hop belongs in the mainstream just as much as tiresome pub-rock. It was a tough task to find a name bigger than Jay-Z, but in Snoop Dogg they have found a worthy successor.
Joining Snoop on the Pyramid stage are [among many others] pompous douchelord Bono and the rest of U2, East London' finest, Dizzee Rascal, confirming, as if confirmation was needed, that he has graduated to the top table of UK music, soul legend Stevie Wonder, guitar hero Slash and pretentous space-rock prog rockers Muse. Personally, I would be more enamoured with witnessing Mos Def [Friday, West Holts] A1 Bassline [Annie Mac's Opening Party on Thursday] Rusko [Friday on the West Dance Stage] and Foals [Saturday on the Jon Peel stage]. But this is the beauty of Glastonbury. Every single taste in music is catered for, such is the sheer scale of the event. Personally, if someone were to offer me tickets for every festival of the summer and tell me I had to pick one, I would beat them down and take all of them, keep the Glasto one and put the rest on eBay, because you seemingly cannot possibly not find something to enjoy.
The headliners of this year's R&L are incredibly hit and miss. I'm sure there will be a lot of people excited about Guns n Roses, but personally I would have no interest in seeing a washed-up Axl Rose and a group of musical mercenaries. Ditto Blink 182, a band I didn't really much care for back then and I certainly don't much care for now. Canadian eccentrics Arcade Fire are also here, along with vile pop-metal irritants Paramore, the excellent Queens of the Stone Age and recently-reformed British rock royalty The Libertines. Further down the line-up there is a mini 90s revival taking place revival theme with Limp Bizkit, Weezer, Cypress Hill and NOFX all making an appearance on the main stage.
On the NME/Radio 1 stage [there are 2 brands which send a shudder down one's spine] we have a suprisingly good line up, my personal highlights being Godlike Genius [in my eyes anyway] Serj Tankian, new-rave progenitors Klaxons and bleep merchants Crystal Castles. Pendulum, as disagreeable as their more recent material has been, are worth a look if not just for when they play the Hold Your Colour-era tracks, Foals are riotously enjoyable live and Kele Okereke's solo material may be worth a listen.
Would I pay the really quite lare asking price for a ticket to Reading or Leeds? If I were to base my decision solely on the quality of the musicians on show, my answer would have to be no. For me, the line up is just not good enough to warrant such a large amount of my hard-earned being handed over.
V festival has always been seen as a corporate-centric event, more suitable for families and children than the more hardcore festival experience of Glasto or R&L. This attitude is refelected in the line-up, the names of which are regular fixtures in the nation's music charts. While the last couple of years has seen their musical output decrease markedly in quality, Kings of Leon would still be worth a look on the strength of their earlier work. Along side them are Kasabian, who like KoL have evolved into one of the biggest names in the UK music industry [I know KoL are American, but they are still pretty huge here]. Most of the rest of V Festival is sadly choc-a-bloc with rock/pop drudgery, such as Stereophonics, The Kooks, Scouting for Girls and Editors. Florence and her relentless money-making Machine may be worth a look, as will Robyn and..... ummm..... nope, that's it. Not a single other name catches my eye here. As I said, V Festival reads as who's who of British pop music of the past year. Mika, La Roux, Kate Nash, Sugababes, Pixie Lott etc. It's just not very interesting to me. And certainly not worth the asking price. As i said, one for families looking for a nice day out. And there is nothing wrng with that. It's just not for me.
Featuring a more hip-hop centric line up than most, the big names being Snoop Dogg, Jay Z, Missy Elliott and D12 alongside other names from the pop and rock world such as Pink, Lily Allen, The Gossip, The Ting Tings and Friendly Fires. Slightly leftfield inclusions include pop-punk Americans Bowling for Soup and Slash.
For 2 reasons, Wireless would be my festival of choice out of these events. One, Missy Elliott. I love Missy Elliott too much to not go to this [but I'm not, so that kinda defeats that point..] and two, the location [Hyde Park, London]. And the prices aren't too shabby either. Of course, you aren't getting as much as you would at many of the bigger events, but that is reflected in the sigificantly cheaper price for a weekend-long stay [£105].
Catering mainly for the danceheads among us as well as a big emphasis on art, Glade is one of the up and coming festival experiences that the UK has to offer. This year's musical treats come courtesty of electro stalwarts Simian Mobile Disco, Drum & Bass legend DJ Zinc, Dance veterans Orbital and rip-hopping Bristolian Tricky. Alongside the music there will be theatre performance art and much more besides, making this an attractive proposition if you are looking for an alternative to being knee-deep in mud and getitng your shit stolen from your tent.
Personally, glade isn't something I would be interested in, mainly because I don't have enough of an interest in both the art side and the music side of what they are offering. And the price, £125 for the weekend, I feel is slightly too much considering what is on show.
Of the festivals I've covered, I would have to plump for Wireless, the reasons being the low price and the location. As it is, I will probably have to plump for none, and sit at home while everyone else enjoys the great music and what not. Fuckers.
Do I vote for some racists or some hippies or some nutters?
If you can block out the attention seeking, name-calling playground antics of the big 3 of Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, you may be able to hear the distant sounds of the smaller organisations trying, and most probably failing, to get themselves behind the desk of no. 10 Downing Street in a few days time, or a least win a seat or two in parliament. I decided to have a scan of the websites of some of these hopefuls, so I could make an informed decision about who to mark my big cross next to [if I were able to vote.... I forgot to register....]
Of all the smaller parties out there, the BNP are the ones who have arguably made the most noise the past few years. Their leader appearing on Question Time, winning seats in the European Parliament and steadily increasing it's seats across England. But have the BNP made gains significant enough to have a member elected to parliament? The short answer is probably not. As much as they protest otherwise, The BNP is still seen by the majority of the nation as a motley crue of far-right fascist imbeciles, and in my opinion, rightly so. Every time one hears or sees Nick Griffin deny he is at the helm of a racist party, one thinks back to his trial a few years ago when he was in the dock for inciting racial hatred. Or the time recently when he described East London as "like Nairobi" and expressed his disgust at mixed-race relationships ("they're part of the black tribe now). Or how the BNP were forced to allow non-white members into their ranks. I could go on and on. The fact is the BNP deny they are racists because it is not a vote-winner. Immigration, on the other hand, is. By nailing their flag to the immgration issue, the BNP have tapped into anxieties which many perfectly tolerant citizens (myself included) have regarding the flood of people entering this country. But to suggest that the solution is to remove every non-white person from our shores is at best misguided, and at worst disturbing. To suggest, as they do, that every Muslim is a terrorist catastrophe waiting to happen, and that every terrorist is indeed muslim, is utterly absurd. By focusing on the immigration issue, the BNP are roping supporters in without giving them the full story about what they are all about. This is, after all, a party born from the National Front. A party that in the not too distant past, promised that if they were to get into power would have every non-white female either leave the country or have a hysterectomy, preventing her from breeding any more non-white humans. This, maybe aboe all else, should tell you everything about the kind of people the British National Party are, and what we could expect in the extremely remote event that they gained the premiership of the United Kingdon.
Best known for winning the Bethnal Green & Bow seat from Oona King and Labour in 2005, thus thrusting George Galloway back into his preferred spot, the public eye. Respect describe themselves as "The anti-war, anti-privatisation, pro-equality, pro-choice party" with an oppositon to privatisiation of public servies and to the war in Iraq, the war being one of the catylists for the party's formation. I am a big fan of Respect's policies regarding crime, in particular the focus on targeting the causes of crime and their idea to provide more help for drug users (as opposed to the BNP's policy of reintroducing the death penalty for drug users and dealers). I am also a big supporter of their policies regarding equality and the NHS. But the more i read through these policies, the less impressed I am. I find it hard to believe the claim that Britian is not overcrowded and we have ample room for people to come to the UK and use our services for free. They say we should "Give asylum seekers and refugees the right to food and shelter, plus access to education, health and social services." In Britain today we have a social system which is so overrun that social workers cannot spot that chidren are being tortured and beaten to death in their own homes by their own relatives, a system where people have to wait up to a week to see their GP, a system where people are forced to live on the streets because there are no council properties available. How will the social system manage with more work when it cannot handle the work it has at the moment? It simply would not work. Another issue I am struggling to get on board with is their plan to probide free education for all. In theory, this is an excellent idea, but in reality how will this be paid for? Well, a glance at their proposals of how all this free education and extra social work will be paid for tells me that they will scrap spending on our military interests. Now, what I'm thinking is that as a nation that has gotten itself involved with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, severely agitated Iran, and is seen as standing shoulder to shoulder with the USA, we are in no position to get rid of our means of defending ourselves if the shit hits the fan.
Respect mean well, but they seem to live in a "can't we all just get along?" land of harmony and peace, which is just not the way the world is. I would love to be able to say their way would work, but it wouldn't.
I don't really have much to say about the NF. Anyone who votes for these idiots is a psychopath. But I just felt it was worth mentioning this, from their utter HTML and grammar FAIL of a website."The NF is opposed to abortion on principle and would only sanction one where a mother has conceived as a result of rape, where medical opinion asserts that there is a genuine and serious danger to the health or life of the mother if the pregnancy is allowed to continue, or where medical opinion asserts that the foetus is seriously damaged or malformed" The last bit..... Just completely batshit mental.
A party that seemingly exists only to bring a degree of comic relief to what is a pretty fucking tedious general election. Their manifesto covers health (Child vaccinations to be scrapped and replaced by nurses with sniper rifles and tranquilizer darts), Crime (banning superheroes from using their powers for evil) and equality (Changing the Isle of Wight's name to the Isle of Mixed Races). If a Facebook group can get the public to go out and buy Rage Against The Machine songs, SURELY a Facebook group can get the Loonies a seat in parliament!
Lost? Yep, me too.
A few months ago, I decided I would track down and watch all of the episodes of Lost I had missed. Considering I hadn't watched it for about 3 years, this was a lot of missed episodes. I got hold of seasons 2, 3, 4 and 5 [season 6 was yet to start] and caught myself up in a matter of weeks. My understanding of the Lost saga is as follows:
. Oceanic 815 crashes onto a remote tropical island. As well as following the group's lives on the island, we see their lives before the crash in a series of flashbacks.
. Survivors of said crash run into a group of people already living on the island, who become known as 'The Others.'
. Some people manage to leave the island, but feel like they need to go back, which they do. By now, the flashbacks have become flashforwards, showing us the fate of the group which escaped and why they feel the need to retun.
. A big wheel deep underground is turned, sending the island travelling through time, visiting several periods of history until resting itself in the 70s.
. Some of the group manage to make a life for themselves as part of the Dharma Initiative, a group of scientists located on the island to study the island's unique electromagnetic powers.
. The group that escaped the island return and all hell breaks loose, culminating in the detonation of a hydrogen bomb which, in theory, will reset their timeline and plonk them back to the time before they boarded the plane which crashed on the island in the first place.
. The island seems to be unaffected by the bomb blast. However, we are now being shown not flashbacks or flashforwards, but what seem to be completely different timelines, each character living an entirely different life to the ones we had seen in the flashbacks/flashforwards.
And this is all without even mentioning the polar bears, a man who can manifest himself into a plume of black smoke, the characters seeing into the future, the characters able to move between two different periods of time, the characters that can see/talk to dead people. Basically, Lost makes no fucking sense. Even with 4 episodes left until it is all over, I still find myself utterly unable to make any real guess as to what is going to go down. The last episode hinted at the island being some sort of purgatory, with a supposedly dead character saying that he is one of the ones stuck on the island and cannot move on, or something to that effect.
I've always been optimistic that, in the end, everything will make sense. Well, maybe make sense is the wrong phrase. Maybe its better to say I hope everything is explained. I've always kept faith that all these bizarre goings-on were going somewhere, and even with little over 4 hours of Lost left to go, I remain cautiously optimistic that my faith will be rewarded.
Is a school massacre storyline out of the question?...
Why is everyone so utterly in love with Glee? MAN, IT IS SO ANNOYING. Everything about it is just so over the top, so camp, so irritating and grating and unfunny. I hate how every week a gaggle of easily-persuaded morons lap this shit up in CD/MP3 form and give this shit the publicity and credibility it scarcely even deserves. I reckon the makers of this garbage are laughing their balls off at how easy they have it. What do they have to do? Most of the show is already written for them, what with every episode just being a load of ugly outcasts butchering every semi-popular song of the past 30 years.
Actually, you know what is worse than Glee?
NOTHING.
Not a thing on earth is as face-achingy bad as this shit.
I want to beat every single one of these people to death with the severed head of the person next to them. Especially that wretched little homo at the bottom in the middle. Closely followed by that cretin with the glasses and the face of a brain-damaged camel.
