Pedantic Semantics

I resurrected a section for the radio, last Saturday, entitled Semantic Pedantic. It usually deals with turns of phrase that annoy me, or words what are get mispelt a lot coz no1 reedz bwks nemo. It has been awhile since any came to my attention and genuinely annoyed me, and I have learnt my lesson of manufacturing annoyance, it changes your mindset so that you are dissecting anything for the potentially annoying nugget, not a pleasant outlook. The lesson is, if you aren't Charlie Brooker, don't try to be.

Nevertheless, last week two phrases entered my world, and their presence affected me in some way.

The first phrase is 'rhyme nor reason', which didn't annoy me, as much as perplex me. For me, reason is a tenet of central importance in the grand scale of everything. For me, the source of so much of the awful that there is in the world stems from unreasonable or illogical attitudes. Any sort of meaningful progress has its roots in the logical and the reasoned, science is the ultimate manifestation of this.

The assumption embedded in this phrase is that rhyme is as persuasive a tool as reason. From my point of view it is saying that if something doesn't make sense, then if you'd like it to hold the same punch, make your argument rhyme. I made a bit of a song and dance about this on Saturday, pointing out that it is a bit ridiculous, but when considering the clout advertising and marketing has, and the penchant that industry has for rhyme, it doesn't seem half as ridiculous. I had come to think that consumers were cannier in their attitudes towards adverts, but I recently overheard someone asking "Which is best, gocompare or moneysupermarket.com?", I have come to doubt this. Both of these money website whateverthehelltheyare have run lengthy television campaigns, to the point where the individual assumed they were the only two worth checking, possibly not even considering that there might be other options. Bah, humbug. Didn't Bill Hicks have something to say to people who worked in advertising?

Okay, so lets move away from preaching about the evils of advertising, although I suppose this may turn out to be the most directly hypocritical blog post I have written.

The next phrase deals with the writing up of comedy acts, which I suppose is a part of advertising, although I would argue it is a more sincere process than mass media advertising I was discussing earlier. For example, when a new comedy is to be aired, they show a clip of the show and tell you when it's on, they tend not to air something completely unrelated and then tag a vague strap line to it. I'm lovin' it, indeed. (This is a hate for another entry). I do foresee a time when comedy will be advertised as such, and when it comes I will look on knowingly and tut.

But for now, even with all the advertising/PR savvy in the world, there is only one way to describe a comedy act/comedian. One lazy, thoughtless phrase that gets tagged on to everyone, which, though this isn't really an accurate measure, typed into google returns over 23,600,000 results. While that may not be reliable evidence as to how widespread this phrase is, it is deliciously ironic.

The phrase is 'unique brand of humour'.

A quick glance over the first few pages of results show that this phrase is attributed to: Katy Brand, Russell Brand, Joe Pasquale, Warren Holstein, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey, Cartoonists, John Cleese, Joel Chasnoff, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Cheney, webcomic XKCD, Andy Kaufman, Roy and HG, Rove McManus, Mick Molloy, Wendy Harmer and George Carlin.

I must admit, of the acts/etc listed above that I am aware of, their styles are quite distinct from each other. Katy, Russell and Jo have presumably made that list because journalists must feel it is compulsory to put the phrase in because their surname is Brand as well, do you get it, brand brand brand brand brand brand brand brand hahahahahahahhahaa. I am off my wits.

Given that that number of acts can be referred to with the same phrase, acts that are genuinely dissimilar to each other, isn't it safe to say that the phrase is fairly useless in practical terms? It is a phrase which is meant to describe an act, inform you in some way of their style, and yet it is so vague and non-descriptive that it can, correctly, describe such wildly different brands of humour.

I would like to propose a moratorium on the phrase, if only to force people to come up with a more meaningful phrase when they are describing a form of comedy.

So having used this blog to complain about advertising and the use of a specific page, I will admit that on the old web page for rhonddaradio, under the section which described the content of the Adam and Dafydd Weekend Antics show, the write-up for us almost certainly claimed that listeners would be subject to our unique brand of comedy. The phrase is not illustrative, which makes it of little use, but in our case it is also, unfortunately, not accurate.

As much as we put in the work and are trying always to do something new and not to tread too much on old ground, we are well aware that our podcasts and sketches are derivative. It is a staple comment from so many of the comedians I have heard interviewed that it takes a number of years to really find your voice comedically, and so while it does make me anxious when we stray into territory that is perhaps someone-esque I am not overly concerned at this point.

Our podcasts almost certainly owe a lot to other podcasts Collings and Herrin, Peacock & Gamble, Precious Little and The Trap in particular, I would say. But it is also the case that the amount of poetry I write increases if I am reading John Hegley, and my attitude tends to be more critical if I am reading Charlie Brooker. Perhaps this is just my propensity of absorbing things, such as the time when I went away on a trip, made a new friend and came home with a lisp.

The phrase 'unique brand of comedy/humour' falls flat at every hurdle, especially when describing The ACRE, as it was on the rhonddaradio website. There are three of us, and while our senses of humour aren't identical, there is certainly a lot of overlap.

It is quite ironic that my complaint about this phrase is, in itself, quite humourless. Not ironic enough to make it funny, however.

I am not as grumpy as this blog probably sounds. Although I desire a New Deluge to come and wash away all from the face of the Earth, resulting in the Death of Everyone.

Also annoyed that I missed 'Everyone Draw Mohammed Day'.

(O?O) <- This may, or may not, be him (it is him).

and I feel like taking off, my mistake, it's the Top Ten.

A disappointing lack of movement in the charts this week means that there are only two new entries to have a mock at. Familiar names about as the new track galumphing into Number Nine is

9 – Sweet Dreams - Beyonce

So here is another track from the equality retarding Beyonk. The noise this track makes is a high level bass-synthaggedon. With a whomping bass loop plugging away behind Beyonk’s signature wailings and vocal flailings this is truly an unpleasant musical experience.

Competing with how unutterably annoying the music is, the lyrics give a truly amazing effort to match the level of its annoying fuckery. There is a line in the song that smacks of a more self-aware element than I would usually associate with Beyonk, where she sings: ‘You could be a sweet dream / or a beautiful nightmare’. I don’t think this line is actually referring to the song itself, or if it is it doesn’t quite reach the level of honesty I would hope for in a prancing piece of post-modern pop. If she was being more honest the first line of the chorus would instead be ‘You could be a sweet dream / With several hundred rewrites and the introduction of actual instruments and a tune etc / or you could remain like you are now / a complete and utter nightmare.’ But Beyonk has a history of ignoring my suggestions, so I very much doubt that those lines will make their way into the track. Not even in a remix or something.

Beyonk must actually be some sort of music masochist for, as we have ascertained, her music is a nightmare, and yet she utters the lines: ‘Either way / I don’t want to wake up from you’. This sort of filth should only get played on BDSMfm.

Another strange line, which this time suggests visions of the apocalypse, which is fitting since the song itself provides the sounds, is: ‘Clouds filled with stars cover your skies / And I hope it rains’. Now in my understanding of this line, the skies in the scene described by Beyonk are hugely overcast, and not only that, the clouds themselves are filled with stars. Now I am going out on a limb and presuming that the meaning of stars that Beyonk is alluding to here is the ones in space, the burning balls of fire in the great dark beyond, rather than the more mundane meaning of ‘celebrities’. Although weirdly if the clouds were full of celebrities and it did rain, maybe we would be spared a lot of vacuous inanity. The other, perhaps more likely option, is that Beyonk is wishing to see huge boulders of flame raining down on the variety of different locales in the world, visiting fiery molten death from above on everyone. Sweet dreams indeed.

Carrying on the theme of quite violent imagery she uses the line: ‘Tattoo your name across my heart’. Now I had to play with, I mean examine, a heart once in a Biology lesson, and while I don’t believe that it was a human heart I still feel that it is representative. It would be very difficult to tattoo something on to a heart, not only because it is quite tough, and not a flat surface, which is what we usually tattoo things on to. Skin. Also, the heart is usually present inside a person’s chest, and so even if the tattooist was talented enough to actually tattoo an image through the ribs, the lungs and onto the heart, which would take some skill I imagine, probably go to Miami Ink or something, the pictogram inked thereupon would be impossible to see. Because it is inside you. That is presuming that the ink placed on the heart doesn’t get directly into your bloodstream, which I don’t think it would straight away because the heart is not really an important organ in terms of the pumping of blood, that’s what I was taught in school anyway. And if you had ink instead of blood pumping through your veins you wouldn’t be able to live properly anymore. Because you’d be a squid. Or dead.

On second thoughts Beyonk, knock yourself out. And then I will tattoo your heart.

The other new entry this week in at ‘Oh, almost!’ Number Two it’s:

2 – Supernova – Mr Hudson ft Kanye West

It’s an effort from the excessively formal Mr Hudson, and the second appearance in the Top Ten, since I began sneering at it, for Kanye West, even though neither song is technically his.

This song is clearly suffering from the synthocalypse that was dreamt up by Beyonk in her sweetest of dreams, as it is filled with synth beds and what sounds like basic Casio pre-set drum loops. To be wholly fair to the track though, it isn’t anywhere near as terror-inducingly “Judgement Day is approaching” in its sound as is Beyonk’s track. It does, however, contain some catastrophic imagery.

The chorus goes: ‘And I feel like taking off / Let me be your supernova’. Overlooking the fact that he has opened a song with the word ‘and’ (lazy and ungrammatical), the line itself doesn’t even make sense. His allusion to ‘taking off’ suggest an aeroplane or a rocket, however the following line ‘let me be your supernova’ doesn’t correspond to this. As a supernova does not ‘take off’, it is an explosion. Wikipedia describes a supernova as:

“a stellar explosion. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months. During this short interval, a supernova can radiate as much energy as the Sun could emit over its life span”.

I would say that if Mr Hudson were indeed to become a supernova he would be endangering the life of every man, beast, plant and woman on the planet. That is either extremely reckless or completely malicious. Also, in the worst of R.L. Stine, be careful what you wish for...

It would be a pity to lose every living thing on the planet, and in all likelihood the actual planet itself, just to witness the death of the mellow hip-hopper Hudson-san, but if left to continuous consideration could actually be worth it.

Speaking of mellow hip-hoppers I would be glad to see the back of, I haven’t really given enough time to Kanye West’s part of the song. My favourite line of Kanye’s in this track is: ‘He’s not you or me / I wanna break up the scene and see you running back to me’. Now I do not applaud the relationship-sabotage that Mr West seems to be suggesting in this line, but I am particularly drawn to its poetic merits, such as the revolutionary decision to take the word “me” and then to later on to rhyme it with the word “me”. Astounding.

Similarly there is a line which includes the phrase ‘tonnes of fun’ which for some reason just doesn’t sit right with me. Having tonnes of fun is something the Chuckle Brothers should be doing, I expect my hip-hoppers to be moody and pretentious, not cheery and Blue Peter.

Perhaps the line I have the most problem with however is the end of the chorus which goes: ‘Before you make the biggest mistake of your life / give me a chaance to get it right’. Now you may have noticed that I have placed two a’s in the word chance. This is because I wanted to opt out of using the phonetic alphabet while still giving an indication of how that word is said. Now I don’t really have a problem with hip-hoppers using received pronunciation when they do a dropping of their lines yeah, and for all I know, and am unwilling to research, Mr Hudson may indeed be a member of the royal family. However, there is no call for Kanye ‘Gay Fish’ West to follow suit. There is no way in the ice rinks of hell that Kanye West says ‘chance’ in the same way as Michael McIntyre. Although if they were to make a show where the two were forced to live each other’s lives for a bit, I would probably watch that.

In summary:

10 – Poppiholla – Chicane

9 – Sweet Dreams – Beyonce

8 – Paparazzi – Lady Gaga

7 – I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho) - Pitbull

6 – When Love Takes Over – David Guetta ft Kelly Rowland

5 – Bulletproof – La Roux

4 - Evacuate the Dancefloor – Cascada

3 – I Gotta Feeling – Black Eyed Peas

2 – Supernova – Mr Hudson ft Kanye West

1 – Beat Again - JLS