FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Pop Critique or Girly Bitching?
Will the controversy surrounding Lily Allen every die down? Every day there seems to be another story about how she said something mildly rude about another pop star or else somebody else in the pop limelight slagged off Lily for whatever reason. The one that caught my eye today was on the EntertainmentWise website, the story headline reading "Lily Allen Gets a Tongue Lashing By Girls Aloud". Here are a couple of insightful comments made by the 'singing' group, Girls Aloud:
How profound. It beggars belief that these are the people who are elevated to goddess status for our children - these are supposed to be the role models the kids look to; the crème de la crème of human existence. I just find it sad that we as a nation continue to believe this about not just the bitchy little girls in this manufactured pop group but about so many other equally dull individuals who have found themselves been shot to fame. They themselves don't even seem to be aware that they're not actually anything special - just being used by the corporate media machine to make lots of money for the fat-cats who run the record labels and distribution companies.
I don't like to name drop but I vaguely know - or used to vaguely know - Kimberley from Girls Aloud (the first quote cited above being the product of her loose tongue) and I honestly fail to understand why I'm reading what she has to say about some singer or other in the national and international press. Not in a blog like this one but in 'respectable' news sources. Kimberley can sing a bit, granted. But, she's just some young girl who went to stage school as a child (Stage84 in Bradford, to be precise - this is where I worked as a rehearsal pianist in the late 90's), no doubt forced into it by her parents, got pedaled by that agency to various other greedy organisations in the industry then eventually tarted up and sold as a sex symbol in front of millions on our television screens each day. Are we REALLY interested in seeing her remarks about Lily Allen (or anything else for that matter) in our national press? If we want to read various rants about random people we go to the blogs - at least they're genuine and sometimes have something relatively interesting to say!
"Her first single was really good. It seemed she was really different - a female, but I don't know anymore. I don't really like her as a person."
"Lily was saying she liked me because I was moody and not that pretty. I really appreciated her when she first came out - she was a breath of fresh air. But now I think fuck her."
How profound. It beggars belief that these are the people who are elevated to goddess status for our children - these are supposed to be the role models the kids look to; the crème de la crème of human existence. I just find it sad that we as a nation continue to believe this about not just the bitchy little girls in this manufactured pop group but about so many other equally dull individuals who have found themselves been shot to fame. They themselves don't even seem to be aware that they're not actually anything special - just being used by the corporate media machine to make lots of money for the fat-cats who run the record labels and distribution companies.
I don't like to name drop but I vaguely know - or used to vaguely know - Kimberley from Girls Aloud (the first quote cited above being the product of her loose tongue) and I honestly fail to understand why I'm reading what she has to say about some singer or other in the national and international press. Not in a blog like this one but in 'respectable' news sources. Kimberley can sing a bit, granted. But, she's just some young girl who went to stage school as a child (Stage84 in Bradford, to be precise - this is where I worked as a rehearsal pianist in the late 90's), no doubt forced into it by her parents, got pedaled by that agency to various other greedy organisations in the industry then eventually tarted up and sold as a sex symbol in front of millions on our television screens each day. Are we REALLY interested in seeing her remarks about Lily Allen (or anything else for that matter) in our national press? If we want to read various rants about random people we go to the blogs - at least they're genuine and sometimes have something relatively interesting to say!
