Opinion: Giving up subtlety... (or a massive chunk of context for a throwaway gag)

Today would have been Michael Jackson's Birthday... if he hadn't died that is.

I was an obsessed Jackson fan as a child. The first Vinyl I bought was 'his'... 2 actually, 'Legend' and 'Triumph'... oh and I know they were both 'Jacksons' albums, but I was about 5... I wasn't there for Tito or Jermaine... I was there for Michael... and I know my Jacksons...

I stuck with him until the 90s, before abandoning him... for musical reasons... He'd changed his management, production team and even lost Rod Templeton as a song writing collaborator. He was given formulaic pop to sing, songs that could have gone to anyone...

I never gave those allegations much credence, believing that if even if hormone based medication given in his teens* hadn't actually 'chemically castrated' him, it had certainly altered his sexual drives. So although I do believe some of the the things that were alleged were inappropriate, and in fact someone in his staff should have grown a pair and told him to 'fucking pack it in with the kids sleep overs and stuff' I don't think he was a nonce... just foolish and coddled... it wasn't sexual behaviour... just lonely... and sad...

(*There are two versions of the 'hormone' conspiracy theory... one states that he was given a particularly powerful Hormone receptor inhibitor treatment for teenage acne, the dosage being enough to distort his hormone system permanently... the second version states the same, except that it was given to him with the intention of blocking puberty to delay changes to his voice)
But I respect his legacy... (maybe not as much as Prince, with hindsite.... although back in the day I would have cut my tongue out before saying anything like that)

When he died I was at Glastonbury. Tributes gushed from stages and jokes flew from tent to tent... some were good... most were not.

I remember seeing a man walking that morning, just hours after the announcement was made, with a T-shirt saying: 'Jackson 4'... That is a good joke. It is the best joke about his death I witnessed and is, to this day, the only one that made me audibly laugh. Most aren't like this, they're shockingly lazy, often recycled and with a nasty malice at the core...

So... why have I started a Blog about subtlety and the internet with a HUGE discussion about Michael Jackson?

Well, today... I posted a Michael Jackson Joke on Twitter and then on my Facebook. Facebook is fine. It's mainly real people I know and any douche is being a douche on purpose. Twitter on the other hand...

Well... let's just say it 'polarised'. Some were shrieking at me about whether I should even make a joke about him, whilst others tagged onto my post with a stream of exactly the bullshit, lazy, regurgitated pap-gags I just mentioned... and what was my joke? What was the group of nasty words, grouped nastily together to cause such ire?

"Today we commemorate the birthday of a legend, the late, great Michael Jackson and remember his gift to the world... jokes about Michael Jackson"

And how I wish I'd had this post, ready in advance, to send to both, equally dogmatic, ends of the spectrum.... it is the context... the life support system that allows subtlety to breath...

It's a horrible thing to dissect a joke... a joke reacts the same way as a frog woukd... i.e... it dies. But I'll do a few snips and hopefully leave it well enough to hop away...
At heart it's a simple misdirection gag. You think the 'Gift to the world' will be 'Music' if you're a fan, some bollocks about kids or plastic surgery if you're not... but it isn't it's 'jokes'... you are surprised and hopefully you laugh. That's the simple bit... the 'face value' bit...

It's also a joke about jokes, particularly the kind of joke that it is itself...

Honestly. That sentence does make sense. It's a joke about viral style celebrity gags and how they can blot out a genuine legacy... be honest, after Jackson died how many texts did you get discussing whether 'Off the Wall' is better than 'Thriller'?* No... you got texts about kids or surgeons... maybe Chimps...

*Off the wall is better than Thriller... fact

So that is what that Joke is about... it's neither pro or anti Jackson to be honest... it's a joke about jokes... and it's subtle. Which is why nobody on Twitter got the point... The internet can only deal in binary oppositions... black hat/white hat... like an old western. So to some I was a dick because I was making a joke that happened to mention their idol... to others it seemed I was inviting them to link a crass, stolen, ill thought out, gag, to mine...

No... I wasn't... I wasn't even starting a debate...
It was just a joke.... a subtle joke.

But, when presented with the evidence, I reckon it's time for me to give up on subtlety... so...
Duuur Duurrr Duuurrr Sex offences against kids are automatically funny whether they happened or not duurrr durr durrr you made a joke about someone I like so you know nothing and are bad durrr durrrr durrr plastic surgery is, by it's nature, hilarious durrr durrr durr durrrrrrrrr....
Repeat ad nauseum...
Die inside...

Opinion: Only the best in Human Achievement... oh and Will-I-Am...

So... you're in charge of a mission to Mars... the furthest place our youthful species has intentionally left it's first, tentative  mark... (I say intentionally because we've flung plenty of Astro-rubbish and board-stiff cosmo-dogs out there whilst taking these baby steps... do you think anyone spent millions retrieving the corpses of all those monkey-pilots we sent up?)

A robot called 'curiosity' will trundle around, taking pictures, zapping stuff with a laser, tweeting cute updates and generally being a hipster version of R2D2 without the potential for that Hilarious 'whistling noise which might be mistaken for censored swearing' gag...

At some point it is decided that this cute little big-trak will send back some music... the first Mars to Earth musical broadcast ever... in fact the first interplanetary dj set ever... Nothing like this has happened in the history of the universe... It's a big deal...

So, the pressure is on... It has to be right. Lucky you have the entire back catalogue of musical achievement to pick from, from the greatest symphonies, to the most heart-breaking ballads, to the most intricate IDM , to the most experimental jazz, to the most inclusive pop...

Given that, would you choose Will-I-Am?
Would I fuck!

Now... anyone reading this might think that a whole blog is a hell of a length to go to just to regurgitate an old Will-I-Am gag that I've done on Twitter before... probably not just me either... it's a sitter... I mean... it's the first think I thought of when I saw him... Literally... Will-I-Am, Would I Fuck... then I laughed myself into a coma... and by 'laughed' I mean 'Wept' and by 'Coma' I mean into 'my third bag of Haribo that night'

I remember the second thing I thought was: He would be a fine representative for a small English village if they ever happen to have an Olympic torch relay...

Honestly...

Anyway... the first ever broadcast from Mars Fm will be that guy... Not Bowie, the British Bard of space travel, not a piece by Mozart or Hendrix or Bach.... not 'Pump up the Volume' or Radiohead or Stevie Wonder... or even George Clinton and Afrika Bambaataa who are probably the most appropriate, being almost certainly aliens themselves...

Nope... we get William... Bill... Boring Bill... one of the ones from 'that band where they do a sample, then sing over a beat, repeat until fade or mass suicide'... But Why?

At first I thought we must have intercepted a broadcast from another civilisation... having painstakingly decoded it we have decided it is threatening in nature and this is our riposte... an auditory declaration of war on these far off adversaries...

Well, maybe warning shot... we'd save the big gun, Cheryl Cole, for when things got really dodgy, whereupon she will be shot at the alien race in order to deliver Geordie, 'Non-racist'* fisticuffs and horrifically off key vocals until they surrender or voluntarily explode...
(*No no no you cynics... Cheryl Tweedy didn't hit the black cleaning lady because she was black, it was because she was a cleaning lady.. so... not racist... legally... just a horrible, horrible person)

Unfortunately, despite being bad, Willie Yam isn't even good enough at being bad to be bad enough to broadcast for this reason... he's too... too boring. Any Alien hearing him might well imagine it was the audio equivalent of wallpaper paste... it's there for a job, but there's no way you'd notice it on it's own...

So, why use a poster child for tedious mediocrity... a 'rapper' that would make the Wham Rap look edgy...

Well... I think we did intercept a signal from Aliens, it is threatening and so, instead of sending out anything that might provoke an invasion we've opted for something so dull that nobody in their other-worldly minds would ever think of coming here...

"Fuck... what's that sound... where's it coming from?"
"The red one... it's sending it to the Blue/Green one"
"fuck... are those planets at war or something"
"Doesn't look like it"
"They should be... just... just turn it off... even though I can't understand the language you can tell he just keeps saying the same things over and over with the same noises happening"
"Must be what they're into in that Galaxy"
"Well...fuck going there... if they like music that takes longer to listen to than to make... they can piss right off... oh and tell all the other advanced races, until this lot can tell the difference between 'music' and 'a job lot of expensive samples unimaginatively assembled behind 7 or 8 words' there's no point in making contact"
"we could.. you know... just blast the galaxy into atoms?"
"They are suffering enough already"

So... in conclusion three points.
1) Will-I-Am is the greatest hero the earth has ever seen and all are indebted to him for every breath they draw

2) Space Travel is fucking awesome, but shouldn't pander to silly trends... it's a fucking Robot... and it's broadcasting from the surface of FUCKING MARS... if someone thinks it needs Will-I-Am to get 'the kids' interested then both they and those kids can fuck off... (although I suspect this isn't even the case judging by the Global reaction, from all ages, to the death of Neil Armstrong)

and,
3) I can't wait for the politicians to come back from wanking about on their holidays so I can actually write about something interesting... well not interesting... nothing is more interestinger than space travel... but something where I don't need a science doctorate to write something coherent and instead resort to a demented wibble about shit pop stars to find an 'angle'
*sobs*
Come back Clegg... all is forgiven...

Opinion: The Not-So-Current Bum (Or, 'news' without the 'new')

Today, that bastion of inestimable print jornalism, The Sun decided to bravely print pictures of a naked Prince Harry, caught in the act of 'Having Fun' in a vegas Hotel Room...

Some quarters are up in arms about this... it's all: "Post-Leveson" and "Intrusion" and "Blee" and "Blah"
Others are ecstatic about this... it's all "Post-Leveson" and "Press Freedom" and "Blee" and "Blah"

Anyone insane enough to have read this blog before might expect me to take the side of one particular set of Blee Blahs on this, and they'd have a point... I've never been shy in stating that print press is a running sore, and quite a dangerous one, spewing feculent puss into the trusting eyes of it's readers, and permanently warping the way they see the world...

I've never entirely bought that whole, 'we just hold a mirror up to the world' schtick...and the phrase that I am most proud of, as a writer, is the description of newspapers as 'Wanky Opinion Comics'... so I would scarcely call myself 'unbiased'...

(oh and I know this Blog is all opinion... that's why I put it in the title line... I also know that it's more than a little bit 'wanky'... but I never claim moral authority, and the only thing I hold a mirror up to is my own ravaged visage and then only briefly, before dropping it and shrieking...)

Anyway... although I don't 'like' the Sun in general and don't think they should have 'dun' it, it isn't for the usual "Oooh, Tabloids are Icky" reasons... in fact it's quite sympathetic... and I'd like to offer them some tactical advice... but in a nod to narrative convention I shall leave that to the end, hopefully forming some sort of conclusion that will make you nod to yourself in the cafe, take a sip of your 'victory' coffee and tearfully think to yourself 'I Love new Media'

So, perhaps as word padding, here are some of the reasons against publishing the pictures that I don't agree with/care a row of buttons about.

1) Intrusion.
I think it's fair to say that the 'intrusion' ship has sailed... thoroughly... in fact this ship has sailed, arrived, docked, been decommisioned and replaced by an airline service. That airline service is called 'The Internet' and it was airdropping these pictures whilst it's rival was still loading up the 'Limes for Scurvy'

This isn't a tabloid buying gutter pics of gussets, or doorstopping some poor unfortunate caught up in a celebrity affair, or even showing an 'evil' picture of someone accused of an atrocity, but who may well be innocent.. No... this is someone, allowed into the inner sanctum, armed with one of those 'oh-so-rare' camera phones the kids have these days... whether they were 'leaked innocently' or not, it still has more in common with a misjudged Facebook Pic going viral than a guy dressing as a comedy arab billionaire for stings.

No, the intrusion was that douche who brought the camera, and then let then pics onto the internet.... the currant Bun simply doesn't have the readership to beat it...

2) Respect for the Royals.

This... well I couldn't care less about respecting them. That's the Sun's job... I have nothing against them particularly, for the most part I don't consider them at all, until the media force them down our throat or someone uses 'Royal Assent' to ease us into a war. I find them a vaguely amusing tradition, quaint little set dressing that looks good on the periphery of things like... say, the Olympic ceremony... or that Jubilee thing... imagine that without royals... just a bunch of soggy boats and Paul McCartney singing Hey Jude... to himself... that would just be upsetting

The Sun seems to veer wildly in it's opinion, from serf-like deference, usually when some Johnny Foreigner makes some small faux pas against the myriad inexplicable social rules that surround them, all the way through to disdain for minor royals who dare to prefer theatre to war... (which, with a Patriarch like Phillip is probably the braver decision)...  all this via a pervish voyeurism, particularly if they are lucky enough to have some fresh, human DNA stirred into them and are thus 'attractive'...

So... I respect them to a point... but not as far as worrying about these pics... He looks quite good in them, fairly 'fit' and clearly enjoying himself... he is also clearly 'not a Lizard'... sorry Icke, no zipper down his back... fair play to the girls as well... he's a catch... nobody really comes off badly... except the douche who brought the camera and let the public into a bit of private sexy horseplay. The Douche..

The Royals just come across as a bit more fun... and therefore put off their inevitable binning for a few more years.

3) Questions of Public 'Decency'
Don't make me laugh... The posed mock up that they'd already printed trumps that thoroughly. Wealthy socialites being candid snapped is one thing, getting a 21 year old female intern to get her kit off batters that in the indecent stakes...

If there's a bare 19 year old pontifacating on the day's most intellectual stories on the third page, then the naked man ass on the other pages will do little damage to the moral fibre of the readership... in fact it might strike some necessary balance...
So what is my problem with this move?

Well, this may sound strange, but I thought the adversary more worthy than this... It seems like the move of a weak king, dressed up as a show of strength...

Ok... it's being pitched as a two fingers to Leveson... people in the News Int camp are saying this is the newsman taking back the news from the judiciary... it's bold... it's brave... it's the press rising from the ashes...

But of course it isn't... if they'd published on Wednesday that might be true, but now... too late. You aren't the brave boy who swaggered past teacher early on the last day of school, you're the ninth... and you're muttering 'But he did it first sir' as you display this defiance...

This is so disappointing to me. I like the Sun to know how strong it is... simply because it still fucking is... it is stronger than a gossip blog, or some little website... but it lets then take the flack and then claim that it's leading the charge...

Now... for me, they should have just styled it out... tried taking the moral high ground... say it isn't news anymore... because it isn't... it was on Wednesday... and quite frankly, in the position that all Print Media is in, I wouldn't be trying to emphasise how much braver, faster and more plugged in the online media is...

No... I'd be leaving that sort of bobbins to the anarchic world of the blogger and empasising all the advantages of print... whatever they may be... I just know that it isn't speed or bravery...
If you're admitting that a nerd in their bedroom, in baggy pants with food stains, can best your media empire... well, you start to look like an endangered species, a big lumbering thing... close to death and wheezing...

...and print media isn't there...

Well... not quite yet.

Opinion: All hail our new I.H.S Overlords! (Or how to use Jingoism to get TeamGB behind your wacky idea)

Bloggers choice: Today I had two things to potentially write about on here...

1) a light fluff piece gently mocking the N.H.S 'brand' proposals... based around an image that I find amusing

B) A strongly researched and controversial polemic about providing assisted suicide facilities to the physically healthy, but mentally shattered... this would not be a light read. It would be uncomfortable and heavy, like receiving a mercury enema in a gravity well...
Luckily, number 1 wins... fluff rules the day, it's easier to be flippant than to bother with serious research in this humidity to be honest... but stick around for that other one... it will appear eventually... and it'll be a 'Laff Riot' akin to Leigh Francis doing all of his 'character' at you... in a locked room... forever.

So instead of that I bring you fluff... and Fluff that will only deal in boundless positivity...

...and that might be tricky, because I'm planning a fluff piece about changes to the N.H.S... A subject that usually gets all sides in the political spectrum frothing incoherently... much like the 'pro-life debate' for the U.S, it is as divisive as it is obvious who is in the right.

Today the idea was floated to make the N.H.S a global health brand... a provider to the  world, probably on  the back of that very subtle advert Danny Boyle snuck into that Olympic Shindig... with Brand N.H.S's stock being so high it is no surprise that the world is crying out for merchandise: Bieber fans are throwing away posters of their hero and instead putting up N.H.S issue, 'standardised patient assessment sheets' whilst Lady Gaga was seen wrapping herself in N.H.S issue surgical bandage and saying: "Healthcare... I am a snake... the snake is art and my little monsters are provided free at the point of delivery... woop... I have a new single you know"
A phrase which 'Pop Linguistic' experts theorise may 'have something to do with the N.H.S... perhaps'

But how do you sell this idea back home. You could use 'numbers'... blather a load of statistics: 'if we blah blah in overseas markets blee blah blah we could improve investment in Bibble bibble Blee Blah and...'

Of course everyone in Britain knows that any number issued by an authority figure is likely to be utter nonsense... so... you have to appeal to something foreign and strange... something new to the national psyche, in order to  get slip it under the conscious radar and sneak it around the layer of cynicism that makes up 80% of the national character.
 
You have to appeal to 'National Pride'

Before the Olympics, the only thing Britain was honestly proud of was our self-depracation. Now... well... if Bradley Wiggins had asked for a peasants revolt... well, let's just say Westminster would have a row of head on spikes, the country would be renamed 'Team GB' and we would have our first, for life, genuine 'God-King'... and he would be a cyclist...

...and it is in this spirit that the Government needs to market this latest N.H.S change if they want us to really 'go for it'...

This isn't the old N.H.S, sitting around and waiting for illness to come to it, this is Team G.B.N.H.S and its going to chase down bad health, regardless of which country it's skulking in, catch it and kick it's putrid face off, before planting a Union flag in the glistening raw head flesh and singing a rousing rendition of 'Hey ]ude'...

Eventually we'd have Giant Robot Hospitals roaming the world on arachnid-style legs, firing anti-retroviral drugs into mouths of grateful H.I.V sufferers who weep and wave the new flag of the I.H.S, a clenched fist, clutching a syringe, punching a virus in the throat... however that might look.
On the horizon, a great flotilla of giant 'destroyer class' hospitals would rule the waves, surrounding a territory before bombarding it with sexual health advice pamphlets, prescriptions and quality assured surgical implements.

The commandos of this elite I.H.S could invade sovereign nations, bringing healthy foods and forcing a regime of cardio exercise onto people who are, in all honesty, slightly less appreciative than the H.I.V sufferers were.
But still, under the flag of the Great British N.H.S (Brand) they would be welcomed around the world.

The job, to make you healthy, even if they have to fuck you up to do it...

In fact people would be so joyous and grateful that they would spontaneously throw money at this I.H.S, so it could do that most implausible of tasks of being free at the point of delivery whilst still, somehow providing funding for the coffers back home...

The People of the U.K would love this new, go getting, health service more than ever... We'd cheer it on like an Olympic boxer that had won a gold despite 'only getting into the sport a few years ago'... we too would start buying the Team G.B.N.H.S merchandise... the 'official' catheter, the repeat prescription, the essential medical procedure...

...and it would all be so exciting that we'd probably even never notice that it was no longer 'National' or 'Free'...