Top Eight Worse FUCKING Ukelele FUCKING Breathy-Voiced FUCKING Covers For FUCKING Adverts
I can't think of any more because I don't want my head to explode with rage.
- Dogs Trust - 'I Only Want To Be With You
- Renault Zoe - That's Entertainment
- McDonalds - Rhythm Of The Night
- T-Mobile - Teenage Kicks
- Lloyds Bank - Mad World
- Kia - Ever Fallen In Love
- John Lewis - Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
- Chanel No.5 - You're The One That I Want
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My uke-hate I think came to a peak with an ad from last year. I blamed Lily Allen for the mannered vocal unmanneredness, Mumford & Sons for the fucking ukeleles, David Cameron for the ideological basis for it all, but it was AXA Insurance I blamed for that appaling cover of 'Little Things Mean A Lot" and they will therefore burn for all eternity in the skin-flaying flames of hell, alongside Dave, Lily and The Mumfucks. Artists (esp. Britschool-alumni-style priveliged CatPowerfan-feckers like Ellie Goulding, regardless of whether she's used ukeleles) haven't helped either - seem keen to forge this new nexus between the most revoltingly pally of commerce and the most revolting 'fragile' music. Those voices, you know the ones. Those fucking windswept 'cracked' voices with a deliberate complete lack of oomph. As I said in a review of one of Goulding's dogshit songs:
"What's so horrible at the moment is that the most dangerously influential voices are the weak ones, or rather the faux-weak ones, the ones that impart a horrible tincture of fake fragility to their singing, a prissy, self-aggrandizing 'vulnerability' that's conversational, arrogant and exhibits only the singer's self-pity and monstrous self-regard. Wonky-mouthed mediocrity Ellie Goulding (even that name seems to be permaclad in a floral dress, the acoustic geek - but a pretty geek - amazed at the good audition) is the exemplar of this. 'Fire' would have been a fairly emetic slice of EDM-folk in anyone's hands but with her 'broken' 'breathy' 'natural' tones it attained fresh new levels of hellishness. The only time such voices have ever been tolerable to me is when they're accompanied by a similar sense of brokenness and trauma in the production of the whole record (Lois, Lisa Germano). When, as with this Pudsey-boosting pool of piss (& the equally venal Passenger) they're backed by state-of-the-art 96-track pomposity (again masquerading as finesse) the package is a hateful, ghastly one, a song wherein you can almost hear the Zooey Deschanel rom-com unfolding in the background. This isn't just dreadful music, it's M&S dreadful music. Spurn it as you would a rabid dog."
These songs, these ads, are documents that truly seal the horror of the age.
That make the stomach churn, the gag-reflex kick in, that flick all of your settings to ATTACK KILL. These are documents that make you ashamed not just to be British but ashamed to BE.
But, beyond the ultra-emetic Pepsi Max ads of yore, if we're looking for a single document that really cemented my uke-hate it would have to be"The Girl With The Platform Smile" matchdotfuckingcom advert (someone shoot him, he's the uke player) an ad that would've been so immeasurably improved with a sudden silage/toxic-waste goods train collision, rendering both of the sappy protagonists hideously deformed, writhing in agony & begging for the sweet sweet mercy of a quick death. Why aren't I in advertising?
What's more aggravating is that the Great British Public fucking LOVE these things. Check out youtube comments for all the above songs - I guarantee it's people loving them and wanting full length versions they can BUY and have IN THEIR HOME by CHOICE. We pride ourselves in the UK in being cynical, seeing through things - we're not and we don't. About a decade or so ago this creeping fucking deathmarch of ukeleles and FUCKING WHISTLING started sidling into ads (along with horrible 'poetry') and the Great British Public LAPPED it up, love the idea that advertisers are our friends and corporations are looking out for us. From smoothie bottles with chummy social-media-style messages written on them to multinational banks who pretend they're your best mate to train-toilet signs that try and sound like they're on facebook to the omnipresent fucking TWEENESS of post-millenial culture and nervy chatty conversationalism that's crept into all ad-copy we're being sold our own exploitation & death and we LOVE IT so long as it sounds as if there's a fucking cajon and a fucking emoji involved. I've said it before and I'll say it again - the geeks HAVE inherited the world. Fucking infantilisation in full effect. Were I a proper cultural critic I'd be able to draw properly-evidenced lines between the tweeness/infantilisation of culture and the way that becoming an adult male has now become synonymous with getting tatts and growing a beard, and how if you don't have those things you're looked at as if you're 'not playing properly'. Unfortunately I'm not, so I can't. I just know that this open-mic bleeding-heart culture in music, its willingness to be pimped out by big business, is indicative of everything that's fucking wrong with those in control of UK pop at the moment. The thin filament that keeps me going is that one day I will see them all in hell.
From heaven.