The Friday Rant
by Jack Stilgoe
It's grey and cold, so I'm introducing a new Demos institution - the Friday Rant.
Ahem. That new AA ad, yeah? Thousands of high-visiblity keen-as-custard gentlemen advancing over some moor to resuce a baby in an Espace. "You've got a friend", they sing. Problem is, looking for brevity and an assumed audience of Espace drivers cold turkeying from ritalin, they miss out all of the gaps between the words of the song - you know, the bits that make music music rather than just noise.
Now I know not everyone is as pernickety about metre and measure as me. But listening to the soundtrack is like flitting very quickly in and out of a Carole King coma. You get five eighths (or sometimes seven eighths) of the way through a bar before a new one begins. Somewhere, a manchild is sitting in his dressing gown armed with Pro Tools and a Mac, ripping the rhythm out of songs and trying to pretend that they still sound a bit like the original. But once the edit crawls under the allowed thirty seconds, we're left with something that would give Frank Zappa a headache.
The messgae the 'creatives' are after is no more sophisticated than, "Look at us, we're singing. We're singing because we're nice. And you're too stupid to care what we're singing. But we'll be doing this when we come to fix you car. And then we'll stick screwdrivers in your CD player so that all music sounds like this."
Rant over.