h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't know if this mad obsession with manufactured bands has really taken off in other countries - yet - but in Britain this thing about boybands is just getting silly now. I mean how many group names can you get using a combination of boy and any other words? And its not as if the songs they sing are any different from each other either. They both have the same synthesised snare drum rythum and then a bunch of moody looking twenty-somethings bangin' on about how the girl just left them - or words to that effect. Isn't there somthing we can do to save the world from this insanity before we are completly overwhellmed with boyzone, backstreet boys, bloody awful boys - well maybe not but at least they'd be being truthful - etc etc.

I hope you saw 'Boyz Unlimited' - Channel 4's very funny parody of the whole boy-band phenomenon.

Yes I did. And it seemed painfully close to the truth don't ya think?

I don't want to be mysoginistic here (mainly 'cos I'm not sure how to spell it and other much more Right On PC type reasons as well), but I reckon it's something to do with how (some) young girls are attracted to blokes. It's a competition thing. The more other girls they know who fancy the same bloke (e.g. one of the faceless wonders in a boy band) the more they fancy the guy and try to prove their love to their untouchable object of desire by buying ALL their records, magazines with him on the cover, posters, shrieking the loudest at gigs, etc.
However this means most boy bands thankfully only have a limited shelf-life as it only takes one girl fan in the competitive chain to say something offhand like "Oh I don't fancy him much these days, he's a bit chubby now, I think I prefer Konan Reating from JoyBone and the whole sad stack of cards falls down and there are P45s flying out the record company door at the speed of light.

Maybe the only solution is to have two charts - a "music" chart and an "adolescent fodder" chart.

Exactly. Although classification in this way can soon escalate, some people might not fit into a certain category and lose out, it would make music much more insular and so forth. There could be a rule that anything that appears in Smash Hits or Look-In (if it still exists) cannot call itself serious music and thus should not make up the perceived mainstream of popular music. Maybe the law should be changed so that the majority of people in any group of persons should be able to name at least two members of Led Zep and three of Gomez, should be able to name the composers of Le Sacre du Printemps and the Romeo & Juliet ballet, know what 440Hz means in musical terms, know the placement in order of size of the instruments of the violin family, state the difference between an oboe and a bassoon, know what the instrument is that makes the weird noise on "Good Vibrations, state who the original writer of Knockin' on Heaven's Door was and three other tracks written by the same artist that are usually credited to another by today's youth, give three reasons why heavy metal is shite, be able to describe the relationship between Procul Harum and Barbara Woodhouse and must be able to provide photographic evidence that they have not assumed a false image for the purposes of selling records.

Tough call.

Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones
The one with the specs, the fat one, the other one who can't sing
Stravinsky, Prokofiev
A
Baby violin, Mummy violin, Daddy violin
An oboe sounds whiny and nasal, a bassoon sounds like a night on the curry
Theramin
Bob Dylan
All along the Watchtower, Like A Rolling Stone, Agadoo (Pusb pineapple shake the tree)
It isn't
A salty dog
8 x 10 glossy photo of me giving the finger to boy bands

OK?

Nnnnooo. Heavy metal IS shite, what about the double bass, ALL of gomez can sing apart from the drummer and there are five of them meaning that "the other one" isn't descriptive enough, one has two reeds and the other just one. Get your hair cropped, get a fake tat and fix the strings to your limbs now.

Yeah come on Wiset Fool you must be able to accept by now that heavy metal is shite. 30 million fans of good music can't all be wrong. Mind you having said that the ammount of people that like boy bands would justify thier existence following that very logic. So heavy metal must be good...ahhhhhhh. I think though that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for example I never used to like Punk. I thought it sounded like incomprehensible lyrics grunted out over the same annoying blur of guitars. Then I really listened to it and found that with time I could find it enjoyable and at the same time quite amusing - NOFX mainly - but this still does not justify boy bands because the only reason people like them is - as we have asertained - pier pressure from hormonal thirteen year old girls. And whilst were on the subject why is it that bands always seem to go down hill once they are succesfull ? Even if they haven't changed there style to become succesfull - ie Offspring, Greenday etc.

A lot of good songs are written by people who wish to escape their small town, boredom and alienation.
I imagine it gets harder to come up with alienated existential lyrics that you really mean when you're in a suite at the one of the best hotels in the world after a gig in front of thousands of screaming fans counting your money while models blow cocaine up your arse.
Mind you, it mskes me miserable to think about that, I must write a song...

Entitled "Cocaine B*****y" ?

Or a mournful blues number,
"Piles of money"

What could possibly be more annoying than boy bands? NOTHING!!!
Well, someone mentioned a parody on Boy bands on BBC 4 (I think), but David Letterman (of US late night) fabricated a parody boy band called "Fresh-Step" which also happens to be the name of a brand of Kitty-litter. They even went as far as to have them make an apperance on MTV. http://www.fresh-step.com
There are real video samples of the songs and a video too.
The thing is, they never said anything about them being a fraud. A friend of mine e-mailed Letterman, and got a response from one of the writers(his e-mail was directed toward the validity of the band, and how dumb they were) and the writer told him that the whole thing was a farse, and that they may not even be on again, it was like a one time thing. The sad thing is that they got fan mail...

A little tit-bit of info for Buffalo Chips, there is no BBC4 - BBC radio 4 maybe. Its just me being picky but what the hell.
One thing that has bothered me - and I think it was Mark Lamar who first brought it to my attention - is that James Brown managed to write the uplifting song "I feel good(dur na nur na nur na nur)" having grown up in the deep south of America where a black person could count the days until there next beating on the fingers of one hand, yet Radiohead - don't get me wrong I do like them - came from middle class, middle England - don't hold me to that I'm not sure - and come out with some of the most depressing lyrics you're likley to hear this side of the Thames. Why is this?

They're from Oxford, which is stuck-up and mostly middle-class.
It's amazing how alienated and alone a lazy left eyelid can make one feel. I think it's more to do with Thom Yorke's vhoice. Mhaybe he tried singing happy words bhut felt that the effect of the oh-woe croon whorked better with pseudo-dhepressing stuff.

A good point about voices - sometimes you just have to go with what the muse has given you. A mate of mine saw a Sisters of Mercy gig some (many) years ago, during which they sang the chirpy school-assembly favourite "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands". And apparently the combination of the two did not quite gel.

Now, had they only sung Rolf Harris's "Two Little Boys", that would have been much more fittingly depressing...

Laughing Leonard Cohen must have the most depressing voice.
If he sang the phone book I'd go ex-directory

Oh and BTW and nothing to do with Boy-Bands, Mel C sings Punk...Nooooo!!! Did Steve Jones avoid learning that fourth chord for this?!?

His voice CAN be depressing when he wants it to be, when it fits, but it's funny (and uplifting, I find) when he's being ironic/silly. Have you heard 'the Future' and 'I'm Your Man'? Lots of stuff to mke you smile.
Honest.

His funniest song I think is "Tonight Will Be Fine" which seems full of hope in the chorus,
"Tonight Will Be Fine, Will Be Fine, Will Be Fine..."
*until*
"...for a while"



I think he's great actually and admire his 'golden voice' but I can't imagine him ever being full of the joys of spring.

...could be Tom Waits, who sings wonderfully depressive songs in this drunkard voice of his, and can sing quite funny stuff too!

And well, I DO hate boy groups - and girl groups, and single teenies singing stuff like "baby hit me one more time" too - but they can be useful! If you have to do some gig on a (wedding-eve ie) party, the old cross-dressing and giving the newest latest one hit wonder parody is a piece of cake