Rob Fahey on games, media, journalism and politics.
Mostly this weekend, I’ll be at the Frightfest film festival in London - a delightful mash-up of upcoming horror, fantasy, sci-fi and gore flicks, spread over four days. I’ll be updating comments on each film to Twitter - you can follow me here at my Twitter page.
It’s a sad state of affairs, in a sense, but my exposure to popular culture from this side of the planet is extremely limited. I know vastly more about modern music in Japan and Korea than I do about its US and UK equivalents - an attitude cemented recently by my newfound love for hip-hop music, which has focused almost solely on the output of East Asian artists because I find the attitudes and outlook that go hand in hand with western rap and hip-hop absolutely abhorrent, so much so that I can’t really enjoy the music.
As a result of this, and of my general disdain for broadcast mediums, I really haven’t got a clue what’s going on with mainstream music. I don’t watch TV - I don’t even have a TV, and the only one in the house is a set in Nic’s room which is tuned in with a very dodgy set-top aerial for things like The World Cup or The London Bombings. I don’t listen to radio, having had a strong desire to avoid all such things instilled in me by working in an office for about a year and a half where the girls outnumbered the boys and insisted on Radio 1 at least three days a week (no offence to any ladies reading, who no doubt have excellent musical taste - but can’t you just do something about the rest of your gender? They’re letting the side down!).
This whole situation has progressed to the point where essentially my only exposure to what’s new in popular music is through - this is a bit odd, I’ll grant - the Gili Gulu sushi buffet restaurant in Covent Garden. Bear with me. Gili Gulu is about the best all-you-can-eat sushi place in London (and one of the only ones, for that matter), and is a regular place of pilgrimage on hung-over Sundays; the sushi isn’t fantastic, but it’s fresh and tasty, and there’s something innately cleansing about steamed white rice, cold, slithery fish slices and the sharp tang of wasabi on a day when you’ve woken up with a tongue like an over-used sink sponge. They do, however, play MTV on a number of plasma screens - possibly in an attempt to make people eat up and fuck off as quickly as possible.
It’s here that I get to see modern popular music (christ, I sound like someone’s grandad). Normally, this consists of pointing at the screen with a pair of chopsticks and asking “who the fuck is this” around a mouthful of salmon nigiri, but it does mean that once every few weeks I get to find out what other, normal, people are listening to at the moment (the other sources of my musical knowledge are Chris and Tom - they don’t count as normal). Last time out, I was quite pleased with my haul - I discovered that Muse are rather good, and have been happily singing along to Black Holes and Revelations ever since (I suspect that the title track may become a karaoke favourite, a bit of variety which will please my karaoke chums - who normally have to put up with an endless stream of angsty Gackt ballads, gay Arashi boy-pop and shouty Asian Kung-Fu Generation rock-howling), and I also developed quite a taste for Jamelia’s new track, Beware of the Dog, which is based off Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus and is rather good fun. Western hip-hop, as I mentioned, normally turns me off - but Jamelia was quite genuinely funny and rude on Never Mind The Buzzcocks recently, so she’s fine in my book.
My other policy for finding new music to listen to is to ignore people’s FAVOURITE BEST NEW BAND IN THE WORLD EVER recommendations, and only listen to stuff after people have been recommending it for at least a year. That does mean that I was enjoying the Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand about two years after everyone else thought they were good, but who’s fucking keeping score, eh? On the other hand, this method is far from foolproof - it completely failed on one memorable occasion and led to me buying an album of ear-shrivelling shit by The Killers. It’s not the eight quid I mind so much as the half-hour of aural suffering, really. Although I could have bought nearly 23 Twix bars with that eight quid (a method of valuation of all physical goods introduced by my housemate Chris - it falls down a bit when you try to apply it to mortgages or corporate takeovers, although using king-size Twix bars can help), and even though I’d have thrown up after eating them all, it would still have been more enjoyable.
In other news, you should probably go and see Hot Fuzz. I enjoyed it even more than I had been expecting, which is to say, Quite A Lot. Anyone who has ever spent more than a couple of days in a small town (I endured over 18 years of it, personally, although I’ll grant that the first five or so were a bit oblivious - come to think of it, so were the last three, albeit for quite different reasons) will find the last 20 minutes to be the ultimate release of rather a lot of your most cherished fantasies. Some girls two rows ahead of us seemed to think likewise, although worryingly, I think that their fantasies are going to be expressed in slash fanfiction about Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. I guess it takes all sorts.
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