When I Grow Up

Is there anything more depressing than logging on to MSN and seeing 0/67 contacts online? Stop having a real life, people, get on the internet and entertain me! So in the absence of either human contact or anything resembling adventures to share, I'll just have a moan about something instead. Today's topic poses the question... is the Pussycat Dolls' When I Grow Up the single worst song in the history of recorded music?

“Now I've got a confession / When I was young I wanted attention”

That's perfectly natural – its called the Terrible Twos. Most toddlers grow out of it. Its most certainly not endearing to persist through childhood, let alone into adulthood.

“I promised myself that I'd do anything / Anything at all for them to notice me”

Yes, you became strippers. Oh, sorry... burlesque dancers. You take your clothes off for money. This is not an achievement or something to be proud of.

“Now I ain’t complaining, we all wanna be famous / So go ahead and say what you wanna say”

Well since you gave me free reign, OK. You're talentless whores who can't sing whose entire careers are based around almost – but not quite – getting naked. And that's just for starters.

“You don't know what its like to be nameless / -”

Actually I'll just stop you there before we go through the entire song lyric by lyric. Are you seriously suggesting that the majority of your audience doesn't know what it's like to be not-famous? Are you trying to paint some sort of picture of a bleak, horrible world where everyone is famous except you and are asking for sympathy for that fact? I admit we seem to be well on our way with your X Factors and Big Brothers, but until everyone in the western hemisphere has had their 15 minutes (which should be around, ooh... 2016 or so) you seem to be using some sort of backwards moon logic here. Or maybe they're just 'before their time'. But if you were going to travel back in time to a simpler world, before the Oil Wars and before every man, woman and child had been on reality TV, would the song you submit for recording as your own really only be THIS piece of drivel? Surely there will be some pieces of artwork in the future worthy of bringing back with you and claiming as your own genius beyond “When I Grow Up”, or Simon Cowell's got a LOT more to answer for for his assault on our culture than previously thought. And don't even get me started on the finer points of my time travelling 'songwriter' theories – I have my suspicions about Freddie Mercury, for one, but that's another topic for an equally boring day.

"But be careful what you wish for cos you just might get it"

Yes, this is a popular trope throughout our recorded history, but how is it relevant to this scenario that you've laid out for us? You've failed to put forward any sort of downside to receiving the fame and attention that you've apparently craved since birth, so what's the moral of the story? If you want something badly enough to take your clothes off for money, then... you might just get attention after all? While as a straight male I am honour-bound to applaud this example, as a staunch feminist (stop snickering at the back, you!) I can see more than a few minor holes to pick in it. Which I just have.

So yes, in conclusion, a group of strippers attempting to become popstars have failed to add significantly to our musical culture, and have annoyed me in the process. Who could have foreseen that?

Mayday Parade did a pretty cool cover of it though, from one of the 'Punk Goes Pop' albums. It's worth checking out, I suppose.

But still. Grr!

Welcome to my life

My name is David, and for a little while now I've felt that I might have some sort of story to tell.

When you're little, there are certain aspects of your world that are just... indisputable. They make up the fabric of your everyday life, and its impossible to conceive that some people live their lives in a different way. Maybe you go on holiday every year to Spain. Or Blackpool, or Florida, or in a caravan. Maybe you have no dad, a mum and dad, or two dads. A dog, a cat, a budgie, a thousand tiny lizards, but however it is there are just some aspects that you never challenge, they're how you live your life and its hard for your little brain to comprehend the vastness of the diversity out there. Sometimes you get a shock when you go to stay with your friend and they eat macaroni. But we never eat macaroni! The whole way they live their lives, it just... blows your mind. Then once you get older, you realise that there are no rules, that you can live however you want. The whole world opens up in front of you, with a billion paths to choose from, all under your own control. Some people go backpacking across Africa. Some hit the pubs, get to drinking and drugs and having a good time. And to some, all those paths that open up so readily for everyone else stay just out of reach, inconceivable to you, while you sit at your computer for 16 hours a day, make friends with local hedgehogs and talk to your sandwiches to amuse yourself. I'll let you guess what kind of life it is I'm leading.

I'm 23 now, and I've semi-joked for a long time that I've felt like I was having a mid life crisis. For the past decade, I've been standing still. I fell ill with ME when I was 13, developed agoraphobia that I've had to deal with to varying degrees of severity over the years, and pretty much dropped out of society when I had to drop out of school after my exams at 16. With failing health and about a 2% attendance record for my final 6 months I managed to ace the lot of them with straight As across the board, but the effort involved knocked my health back to a place where I've never quite managed to climb out of. So I've set about instead setting up a few cushions and attempting to make my stay here as comfortable as possible while I very slowly try and build myself a life raft to get off the island. Or a ladder to get out of the hole. I forgot which metaphor I was using. Either way, the 'setting up a few metaphorical cushions' tends to provide those around me with endless amusement, as my somewhat stunted teenage rebellion completely bypasses the ability to go out and get drunk and has to settle on ever so slightly minor things like putting on a welsh accent and telling a telemarketer that their call displeases me.

In the grand scheme of things, I dont really know what this will accomplish. In 20 years from now when we're accessing the neural network on our ocular implants, I might stumble across this old archive of what my life was like then and be proud of how far I've come, or reminisce about the good old days before the Oil Wars and how lucky I really was then. Maybe I'll get a few laughs. A few followers, maybe some new friends will find this and approve of the way that I'm attempting to go about things. Maybe I'll touch some poor, lost soul on a deep, spiritual level, showing them how life can keep going on no matter how many paths life blocks off in front of you.

If I touch that one, single soul... then this will all have been a gigantic waste of yours and my time. I'm hoping for a book deal out of this.

Welcome to my life. We'll be taking the scenic route. Enjoy the ride!