Not much has changed since the last blog

Music these days is a constant source of frustration to me. It just seems to me as if no effort goes into the production of songs anymore. Take this lyrical creation by the once omnipresent Busted.

“I’ve been to the year 3000, not much has changed, but they lived underwater.
And your great, great, great granddaughter is pretty fine.”

Ignoring the grammatical horrorshow that is the writer’s inability to decide if the whole thing has happened in the past, future, or present tense, and looking at the factual data makes for puzzling reading.

Apparently not much has changed in the future. Not beyond the realms of possibility. Has life really changed so much between 1000 and 2000? We all live in houses and work, the rest are just improvements. In the future however, they live underwater. Stop and think about for a second. They exist in a whole new environment, a realm where up to now, humans can’t breathe in. A world, in which it took millions of years of evolution to create fishes that could breathe out of water. Yet now the singer from Busted would have us believe that humans will be able to make the evolutionary switch to living underwater, in a period of just 1,000 years. On top of that, he states that’s not a big deal, nothing special, "not much has changed." I would suggest that’s a pretty enormous change, something that really won’t happen. It might be pretty fun to think about, but it simply won’t take place; like the banning of all boy bands like Busted.

He also saw, presumably underwater, the audience’s great, great, great, granddaughter. That’s 5 generations on from now, over 1,000 years. That means each baby is born when the parent is 200 years old. 200. Years. Old. That’s Des O’Conner territory. Imagine being a teenager with a 200 year old parent. You score your first ever goal at football and look to the side, swollen with pride, desperate for your father’s adulation, only to see a rotting corpse. Busted and their contemporaries McNuggets, just aren't thinking these things through.

In their defence, crap whilst their songs may be, at least, they’re their crap. The second day of the Bingley music festival introduced me to Professor Green, although he prefers to be called Pro Green. It struck me as a little strange that somebody would go to all the effort of changing their name, only to then have to tell people to change it still further. A bit like changing from John to Arthur, only to tell people ‘actually, it’s Reginald.’

Either way I spent an hour on a sunny Sunday listening to the Pr G, as I think he’s going to be next week. The first two songs that were played I thought I recognised. I held Shazam up on my iPod, and it came up with I Need You Tonight by INXS. No mention of Doctor Blue. The next song was somebody else’s and so was the next after that. Through his entire 40 minute set Colonel Mustard played 9 songs, of those, 5 came up on Shazam as being songs by other artists. He was basically playing a song carefully written by somebody else, and talking over it. I can do that, in fact I do sometimes and my Girlfriend shouts at me.

The set was just other people’s hard work being exploited, and all this by a man referred to as The British Eminem by the NME.

That’s part of the problem; he’s British. He didn’t grow up in America, or indeed live there at any stage, yet he introduced a song by saying I’m gonna tell you about my streets, the bad streets of Clapton. They might not be the best place to grow up, but Clapton is hardly Compton.
In 2005 Compton suffered 75 murders in a population of 90,000, more than one a week in an area the size of Huddersfield.

In contrast, this year there has been 90 murders in the whole of London. London that is home to 8,000,000 people.

Is it so surprising that young people continue to look towards to America to provide their hip-hop needs when British rappers like Professor Green aren’t original, just poor versions of people like Eminem.

Maybe it’ll all be different in the year 3,000, after all it’s hard to rap underwater.