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!

Life In A Northern Town

It's the medium brother's birthday on Wednesday, so he's home for some bonus chaos! The bar has been set with his first story about his feuding room-mates – I'm not sure how you're supposed to react when you walk into the kitchen to catch the tail end of an anecdote that ends with “so she bought a paddling pool, but it got filled with beans so she threw a pineapple at her but it missed and broke a window”. Student life in Glasgow, apparently! Next item on the agenda: surviving the grandparents visit for his 'special day'.

So, the pope is about to make his first visit to Britain in almost 30 years, amid a storm of controversy. Meanwhile, Susan Boyle is preparing to perform for him. This is the country that produced Shakespeare and The Beatles, and apparently now the high point of our cultural achievements in 2010 is... some woman that sang on Britain's Got Talent. If only he'd arrived a week early we could have gone the whole hog and stuck him in Ultimate Big Brother. "Day 35, 9:15pm. Chantelle and Brian are in the garden, boasting to Benedict XVI about the footballers they've blown in the toilets at China White."

I had a thought. I have quite a lot of them during the days, but this was a particularly profound one. Imagine there's a girlband. Lets call them.. the Wednesdays. Now, 4 of them are really keen to do a sexy photoshoot in their underwear for FHM, but the 5^th one is shy and doesn't really want to. But the offer was only for the whole band to do it... that's a lot of peer pressure, and something pretty major to end up getting forced into! I'm sure there's some sort of moral to this story, but as usual I'm not entirely sure what it is.

And while we're on the subject! Imagine a pair of identical twins. One is shy, one confident and outgoing. The confident one does a Playboy shoot. Does the shy one get embarrassed that now everyone knows what she looks like naked?

I do realise that this makes me look like some sort of deviant sitting about all day thinking about embarrassed nudey girl scenarios, but its probably still better than what I've actually been doing. Hatching hundreds of Bulbasaur eggs relaxes me, ok?! And I'll be laughing when I see the benefit of my master race of superior genetic plant monsters. In 9 months. When the game I'm doing it in preparation for actually comes out.

Oh and the fact that my horse has failed to materialise on day 16 goes without saying, of course.

Culture Shock

Only a few hours in, and I've got some followers already! I like that. With Facebook (boo) it was just friends, MSN its contacts, but on here I have actual followers. Like Jesus! As it stands I've got 4... but one of them's anonymous! I wonder what this means? Is it someone who just found me on Google and thinks I'm interesting? A friend of a friend who doesn't know me? Even maybe an ex-friend who doesn't want anyone to know they care about the minutae of my life any more? Whoever it is, I'm very curious, I'd like to know what kind of odd circumstances mean you want to follow me, just... not publically.

Of course, it only shows those who are willing to reveal themselves on my front page, so I can just claim I've got a HUNDRED friends, they're just all anonymous and they go to a different school/are from Canada, so you wouldn't know them so don't try and look them up or anything but they're totally real and I'm going to see them next summer.

On the other point, I wonder what kind of people I don't know will stumble across this? Maybe I should try and push myself up the Google rankings by latching onto some pop culture. Twilight! High School Musical! Umm... Hanson?

As I've just unwittingly revealed, one of the side effects (or maybe perks) of my position firmly on the outskirts of society is that the term “doesn't get out much” applies very literally to me. I can usually be expected to be a solid 3 months behind any sort of trend, and case in point recently discovered what a Ke$ha was, putting all those MSN statuses that I thought were shockingly slutty at the time into some sort of context at least. I also have been reliably informed that Rihanna has a bangin' new choon called “Umbrella” that absolutely no-one is sick of yet.

Ella. Ella. Ella.