Pop will f**k itself

It's around 70 days to the start of the FIFA World Cup in Sarth Efricor, which usually means it's time to unveil the usual window-dressing crap that benights these sorts of tournaments - the World Cup mascot, the World Cup song, the World Cup matching tie and hankie set. There have been no good songs written for the World Cup in the same way there have been no good songs written for or about football. Apart from the inevitable 'Three Lions' and 'Football's Coming Home', scribed for England tilts at World Cups and the Pom-based Euro 96 tourney respectively, there's two fifths of fuck all. Aside, perhaps, twelve years ago in France, where a young and emerging Ricky Martin bashed out 'The Cup Of Life' for the dubious entertainment of all and sundry. He went on to have a bunch of hits which sounded exactly the same, scored a reasonable career out of it, and finally announced, this morning, ten years after he'd last been relevant, that he'd been totes gay throughout.



This is sad. Not the totes gay bit, that was more, what's the word, completely fucking obvious even for someone with gaydar as average as mine. It's sad that because a bunch of fat oily coke-scented music execs reckoned his gayitude would negatively impact unit-shifting volumes going forward, Ricardo would have to hide in the closet for the duration of his famousness. What fucking year is this again? When did pop music - the sequin-studded home of the likes of Elton John, George Michael, Boy George and Chad Kroeger - suddenly become Homophobes 'R' Us? Fuck's sake, even metal's more understanding than this lot of slop, given how swiftly and devoutly the great Rob Halford from Judas Priest was canonised by the metallurgists of music.

I know people's journeys out of the closets are all different, most are painful and awkward and involve a lot of self-development, it isn't like throwing a light switch, and even afterwards, people aren't always OK with having to be spokespeople, icons, talismans, representatives, whatever. So if Dick Martin himself wasn't comfortable with Dick Martin liking dick in a public forum, that's his call, inevitably. But if it really was down to pressure from record company execs, that's a pretty sad indictment, let alone a massive missed opportunity to slap down exactly this sort of insidious bigotry - a nasty, venal one, based on the pursuit of money trumping that of equality. Yet one we continue to see up and down the pop industry - from George Michael in the 80s to the dude out of Savage Garden who wasn't banging the one out of Hi-5 in the 90s. Not to mention the abuse and vilification post-op transsexual Lady Gaga gets even today from a bigoted and ignorant industry.

In short, pop music hates gay people, and needs to be destroyed.



\m/ \m/

(worth a double metal salute IMO)

The Doctor is OUT.