Oh for a teen idol worth some idolatry

I’ve never held much truck for teen idols. When I was a newly-minted (if not maddened) teen, proper pop music died it’s tragic death and I veered off the path to music that had mostly been released before I was born or I’d never heard before. At the time my peers were idolizing every hip-hop wannabe or anyone who could “rap” despite being a skinny white boy from a good background (really, it was just like Vanilla Ice for the new millennium) or the most manufactured and sickeningly “crowd-pleasing” (read: boring) singers around, thanks to Mr Cowell in his t-shirt and the advent of Idol, X Factor et al – not that they don’t have their merits, I just know that was the time I was supposed to admire the output of these programmes but just couldn’t care. Instead of Eminem and Green Day (which everyone my age had some unthinking admiration for), I didn’t just buck the trend but fucked it right off by getting into Kate Bush and (not sorry) Morrissey. Yes, while all the other kids were trying to, like, be in touch with their emotions, like with the whole “emo” lark of adenoidal complaining (My Chemical Romance); I was having my own little PROPER pity parties to the tunes of Mr Morrissey and yes, I did have a fave to be miz with: because I just hadn’t earned it yet. Baby.

Which brings me to the dearth of “teen idols” today, they being mainly Justin Bieber and One Direction (YUCK!) – has there been any greater musical crimes against humanity since Rebecca Black’s Friday (true story: the best thing to ever come out of that tuneless trust-funded track was me walking down Smith Street, Collingwood, and some guy was singing it at the top of his lungs “IT’S FRIDAY! FRIDAY!” and some kind soul put us all out of our misery by running up and king-hitting our atonal abuser. It could’ve been assault, but then it was Melbourne and so was more likely performance art in the tradition of Barry Humphries hitting his (pretending to be) blind friends with a stick). What I can’t fathom is why so many teenage girls swoon and lust after these fresh-faced and (damn them) clear-skinned pretty boys who in all honesty still probably haven’t fully developed. These are supposed to be teen idols?

See, those guys had actual talent – well, except Ringo – come on, Octopus’s Garden?

At least back in the day the teen idols had talent and were actually fully grown. My own grandmother wagged school to go see and scream at The Beatles when they were in Sydney. My mum swooned over Bruce Springsteen – see, grown up and TALENTED (actually, she’s still got the shits over not going to the concert yet her sister got offered a ticket to go and she wasn’t even a fan)! I passed any age-appropriate teen idol for me by but if anything I would’ve loved to have been around to fully appreciate Marc Bolan or David Bowie in their prime.

(And a quick check by text with Mumsie confirms that she was also into Leif Garrett (cut me a line, Leif!) and “Michael Jackson before he was white” – see? TALENT!)

So what’s the appeal of Bieber and 1D? They’re machine made and processed. Bieber started off looking like the stereotypical lesbian (as said to me by a lesbian, so don’t sue) and the boys from One Direction are just plain old middle-class bores. So much for Janet Street-Porter saying Harry Styles should teach philosophy to get kids learning, I doubt he’d even have the brains for that after being subjected to so much hairspray with that (GUFFAW!) Hugh Grant-esque flop on his head.

Just like that doco a while back about the fans of One Direction, where it was pretty much verified how nuts they are. The girl who allegedly killed her own dog so she could directly tweet the band that her dog died and so deserved a retweet for validation. And what’s with all those girls who fire off hate and invective – including death threats – to any potential female suitor of the boys? It’s not just jealousy, it’s psychopathy. Although I do think it’s interesting how so many of their fans dream of Harry and Liam getting it on in a homoerotic tryst. So it’s wrong to be with any other girl but fine for them to get it on amongst themselves? A small step towards equality? Boom boom.

I’ve recently started tweeting again – @thejoshholley for those who enjoy abusing conservative politicians in 140 characters or less and taking the piss out of ridiculous hashtags – and have been dismayed to find the hashtag “BumpMe1DLastTix” (I’m against it because I could never beg for anything, whether alms or 1D tickets) trending all hours of the day and night. So I used the tag to ask why don’t these girls just buy the tickets themselves and got a reply from a girl stating: “duhh we are poor white girls.”

Now, I identify as a pro-feminist (and yeah that probably seems patronizing but I’ve been given the go-ahead by the best “old-school” feminists around, including the aforementioned lesbian – and clearly, the O.S. type are the best) and so pointed out that perhaps, for a poor white girl, an education might be more worthwhile than screaming at a bunch of fops who’ll never even know they exist. Which of course gave me the adolescent response of “how bout no?”

So I decided to politely and out of genuine curiosity ask why it was OK for the boys to be gay with each other but not have a relationship with any other female. Is it a case of “I can’t have them then nobody else can” or just a petulant example of forbidden fruit?

A nice little chat.

So, I guess that particular fan still had some sort of smarts to know of The Beatles and a sense of humour too.

Twats of Twitter

Since rejoining the Twitter fray I take great joy in taking the piss out of any hashtag trending, the stupider the better. The best was last week when that paparazzo in New York rode his bicycle into Nicole Kidman, which for some unknown reason was treated as a big news story. Once it was trending I of course decided to go in for the kill and declared Kidman to be a “fake” and an annoying actor whose skill is to deny surgery and stare into the middle-distance in boring films (though To Die For and The Hours were FAB!) – cue the old joke about the guy just wanting to park his bicycle somewhere but she turned round the wrong way (and next, Bernard Manning on his mother-in-law). Cue me being called a “bitch” by some Twit Twat who took umbrage to my jibes.

Now, I don’t “feed trolls” and only engage when somebody has tweeted me first, and originally I did think this person was either a) a misguided teenage girl who should know better than to talk to strangers or b) a fat, sad old troll. So I had a bit of fun and traded insults with a somewhat worthy opponent. It’s a shame they stopped before I could ask them if actually were Muslim, because I’d JUST LOVE to know how they can call themselves that whilst enjoying all the trappings of Western materialistic excess.

Yes, wrong I know, but really I had nothing better to do and where else am I going to meet a 15 year-old bisexual boy who possibly may be Muslim and is a starfucker for teen idols (there they are again!) and Hollywood hell?

Tweet away, twits and twats and twunts!

Pop culture & the MSM and an afterthought on Michael Douglas

Why no irreverent study of popular culture in the mainstream Australian media? The best we ever had was the ABC’s Mondo Thingo, presented by the awesome Amanda Keller – from Clive James chatting away about celebrities without his usual loquacious loftiness to the emergence of flashmobs (apparently around since 2004 – I know, right?). It was easy to understand, entertaining and most of all fun. Who else knew little of the thrill of Eurovision or the stereotype-come-to-life of Ebonics until Mondo Thingo?

So what do we have now? Only intentionally serious and unintentionally boring reports on the evening news where the “latest” fads and crazes have already hit the limelight; features in weekend supplements that cater to a female audience that largely doesn’t exist either – yes I’m a male, but the “Yummy Mummy” tag is ridiculous because it implies that mothers have to be soft and stupid – my mum (known as “The Glacial One” – which I love as nickname despite at first deriding it with Paul Keating‘s “All tip and no iceberg” quip) isn’t, and neither are any other mothers I know. At least there’s Fairfax’s The Tribal Mind blog which gets a nice little strap at the end of the opinion pages every Sunday, but it sometimes tends to be more academic than needed.

The only real yet fun, irrelevant but also learned study of popular culture now is of course from blogs and social media. When’s the day going to come when bloggers are readily paid – properly – for what their writing is worth, without having to let an MSM site steal their words for a bit exposure or take advertising? Take the Courier-Mail as an example – they’ll happily publish a glib tweet from a nobody to fill space, but is that nobody getting a quid for it? And not to mention around the edges of the letters page there’s handpicked tweets from “celebrities” – either politicians, athletes nobody knows or cares of or talent-show plebs who rate even less. They’ve even quoted “models”, FFS!

There’s been many blogs and social media users from Australia and around the world that have gained prominence for their take on aspects of modern culture – some have been able to use this success to get books published, like Stuff White People Like and others have inspired television series, like Shit My Dad Says (much like the old schoolyard threat of “My dad could bash your dad”, my Dad could give his a run for his money).

DAD: … and she had all this thick gold rubbish and trinkets hanging off her, like Sammy Davis, Jr. What’s that called?

ME: Bling?

DAD: Ah, yes … “bling”.

So why doesn’t the press directly source (and pay) from blogs, instead of the usual “blogs” hosted on their websites that are nothing more than opinion columns for less pay – Sam de Brito‘s All Men Are Liars, John Birmingham‘s Blunt Instrument – even Katharine Feeney’s Citykat (and what a ripper euphemism that could be with the right dirty mind).

Yes, I’ve only been blogging here for a fortnight as a way to hone my own writing and hopefully use it to get published, a portfolio of sorts, but I’m writing this piece not just for me, but for all the bloggers out there who entertain, provoke and inspire thought: I’ll admit Bob Ellis has pretty much burnt his bridges with nearly every paper in the country before his blog Table Talk, but what about Heathen Scripture? If blogs are now as “free” as media gets (no Rupert Murdoch, or as he’s known in my family, Elliot Carver types looking over shoulders) – then why doesn’t the media start publishing the works of bloggers more often instead of the usual coterie of repetitious middle-class opinion writers – how many columns have you read in the last week that riff on themes of either the same shrill opposition to any government policy without a second thought or about how “happy” (read: boring) family life is?

Hey Courier-Mail, if I have to read yet another column in tomorrow’s edition from a middle-aged fart writing about domesticity, I shall set myself on fire in your office – consider it a scoop. And on the C-M, nothing they’ve done has outraged me more than when the PM gave her awesome fifteen minute defense to the misogynistic attacks of the Opposition in Question Time last year, which set social media on fire and was viewed by millions around the world, a mere three paragraph report buried behind the front pages and even the “celebrity” pages. I think I was actually “unfriended” (the end of any friendship in modern etiquette is via Facebook) by someone who works for them – I’d love to know if it was because they thought I just posted crap (I couldn’t care less) or because I slagged off their editor; another instance of the mainstream media unable to handle the real world?

Wake up and shake up!

PS – I’ve just seen in The Guardian that Michael Douglas’s throat cancer was apparently caused by oral sex. Eew! Who would want Michael Douglas lapping at their laps, despite what the great Big Girl’s Blouse had to say on the subject:

From pleb to sleb.

“A celebrity is a nothing but a nonentity who got lucky,” wrote Kathy Lette (don’t ask – there was nothing else to read and I was desperate). Although looking at most “celebrities” you’d expect the luck to be long gone, drained and not even a few dregs caked on to the bottom of the barrel.

Ten years ago the whole “famous for being famous” thing hit the big-time with Paris Hilton, what with her sex-tape and describing anything she liked with a drawled “That’s hot”. Now we’ve got the Kardashians, and although I could, like everybody else, bag them, most of what I hate about them has been said before by people much smarter than me, so I’ll make it short:  They seem to promote illiteracy – last time one of them came here (I don’t know which, the one that doesn’t look like a bloke) Channel Ten had a news item on this visiting Kardashian that was titled, in the spirit of the Kardashians taking the letter K to levels not seen since the Ku Klux Klan, “KARDASHIAN KAOHS” – see, try to do a Kardashian and they can’t even spell the word “chaos” properly. The only positive thing I get from them is that at least the famous-for-being-famous crew has become a bit more ethnically diverse.

I think the best nonentity though was Kim Duthie, otherwise known as the “St. Kilda Schoolgirl”. What a fun January that was! In 2011, stories appeared of an underage girl attending a training camp in the US with the St Kilda Football Club. And that this girl (who had so far remained unnamed due to her age) had leaked photos of naked footballers arseing about in all their chest-waxed and pube-shaved glory (ugh!). Sure enough, pics were seen of Nick Riewoldt grinning and baring all and Nick Del Santo playing with himself – which prompted the joke about doing a nude calendar of the club, and having Del Santo as “Mr February – because it’s the shortest month.” It then transpired that she was sleeping with a player-manager, Ricky Nixon, and that she was going to have his baby (subsequently debunked when she was hooked up to a lie-detector). And didn’t we all taste a bit of sick in our mouths when we read that over breakfast? That a young girl was banging some fat old walking, talking beer-gut? Best of all was that Duthie was on Twitter and tweeting away without a care in the world, especially for legalities. One night a middle-aged female friend and I, high on Cab Merlot and dope, tweeted Duthie but sadly got no response: “Hey, when you banged Nixon how many times did you orgasm? NONE!” And then we got onto the maestro and puppet-master of slebs for no reason everywhere, Max Markson. “Hey Max Markson, when are you gonna’ get Duthie to kiss ‘n’ tell for a few bob?” Again, no response and after we sobered up and realised how stupid we were, we thought we’d sensibly leave the poor girl alone.

A week later my friend had one of her “cunning plans”, which usually involve something that would cause outrage to simpletons and be hilarious if all goes to plan. “I was driving from Richmond today and I drove past Carey Baptist Grammar”, the biggest private-school in Melbourne, “and Nixon used to teach P.E. there, so I thought why not go there at night and graffiti along the front wall HOUSE OF NIXON and a Pisces symbol? It’s right in the bible-belt and everyone’ll think it’s the sign of the devil!” How could I disagree with this? I took the next tram up to Kew and walked round the entire length of the school, sadly realising that even at night the road was too well-lit and virtually impossible to spray-paint one letter let alone HOUSE OF NIXON and a Pisces symbol before being caught. Oh well, better a cunning stunt then a … Yeah.

And yet after all this, Ricky Nixon still gets in the papers. Abandoning sports management for stand-up comedy (which of course bombed) and proposing marriage to his next pretty young thing in a McDonalds in Moe, of all places (you just know his honeymoon was going to be at the Best Western in Dandenong) – does anyone really give a shit?

As much as a celebrity may only be a nonentity who got lucky, I blame lazy journalists and lazy editors too. If you have the “power”, for want of a better word, to give the luck that can make or break, surely you have a duty of care to use it wisely.