Before the internet there were newspapers and at some point in the dim and distant past newspaper sellers would stand in the street, in all weathers, crying READ ALL ABOUT IT….Then they would yell out the headline KENNEDY SHOT DEAD, QUEEN NOT HAPPY, BRITAIN TO JOIN EUROPE, VIETNAM WAR OVER…
Today only old folks get their news from the papers, us youngsters get news on line. I´ve long stopped reading news on line and neither do I listen to it on the radio or watch it on the telly because it´s all doom and gloom these days. In fact the news has always been depressing but what makes today´s news so unpalatable is that it´s so badly written. Today´s journalists can´t right (x) can´t rite (x) can´t Wright (x)…I mean they can´t WRITE. And few actually write news but just nick it from Twitter or from some other source and re hash it.
So, I´ve decided to start writing my own news. In fact I have been writing my own news for some time on Facebook but I stopped because nobody read my articles because they were too long. I wrote an article called Catalonia in 11,000 words for my followers in England and only three people liked it but I´m not sure if they bothered to read it. If I´d put it on Twitter millions could have read it and would have learnt something. I would have written SOME CATALANS WANT INDEPENDENCE AND SOME DON´T. THE REASONS ARE COMPLEX. THE KING IS NOT AMUSED. That would have been re-Tweeted a million times and could have influenced the situation, bringing it to the attention to the outside world and today the issue of Catalonia may have been done and dusted and the various political leaders from Catalonia and the rest of Spain could have banged elbows and moved onto a different topic.
So clearly I´m not out to change the world nor am I out to change your opinions. In fact in these articles I´ll be posting they´ll be about fairly benign issues, no politics, no sex, no religion. The first one which follows below is perhaps the most controversial for my slaughtering of Spain´s great musical art form reggaeton (not sure if that´s how to spell it, but I doubt the people who make the music can read and write, let alone spell) Ed Sheeran will also get a rough ride from me, so, if you´re a Sheeran fan, log off now because you need to work on your listening, rather than reading skills.
My first article is about something I care about deeply and know about in depth: Music
…….THEN PLAY ON
I´m passionate about music. The theme tune to Andy Pandy is my first memory of music. I loathed the woman´s screechy voice and Andy Pandy´s silly dancing and pathetic friends and at three years old longed to say “Mom, turn this off” The fact that the first music I remember is a tune I hated speaks volumes. I did n t hate music I hated this particular piece of music so I´ve spent my life searching for good music and protesting against bad music.
Miles Davis said “There are two types of music: Good music and bad music” It might sound snobbish for me to say I know the ingredients that make up good music and bad music but few would doubt that McDonald´s food is rubbish and Michelin Star eateries serve up sublime food. It´s all down to the ingredients. MacDonald´s food is processed, genetically modified and loaded with salt, sugar and fat whilst Michelin food is the highest quality, locally sourced, often organic ingredients. And it´s not just the ingredients it´s also the presentation and the raison d´etre. MacDonalds restaurants are brightly lit, tackily furnished, noisy places staffed by the desperate, you don´t flip burgers at MacDonald´s to further your career prospects. McDonald´s exists to provide a very handsome profit to a few wealthy individuals. Michelin Restaurants are more than just food, they are dining experiences, from the beauty or originality of the dining room, the presentation of the dishes, the passion with which staff work from the kitchen to the front of house, from the cleaner to the head chef. You work at a Michelin Restaurant to one day open your own Michelin Restaurant. Some cooks and waiters are happy to work for nothing more than a free meal a day. But even the humble family run neighbourhood restaurant works at that level. What runs restaurants is passion.
Likewise, what drives good music is passion. Real musicians don´t make music to make money, they make music to be alive. Bruce Springsteen is rolling in it and could have retired thirty years ago but by his own admission he makes music to beat the blues: Believe it or not he suffers deep depression and it´s only through music that he can get through. I could write about jazz, flamenco, electronic, rap, folk, experimental, pop, classical but I´ve chosen Springsteen because everyone knows him. It´s Michelin starred music: Recipe: Guts, passion, soul, musicianship, melody, rhythm, humour, dynamics, songs and lyrics of joy, hope and inspiration. The other music that we all know lately is that abhorrent aberration called “reggaeton”. The raison d´etre BIG BIG BUCKS for the Social Mediaocrity: Apple, Spot, You, Insta, Face, Sony BMG, BIG BUCKS for the artists known as feat., and free Charlie (farlopa) for the artists: Recipe: Just like MacDonalds, every burger contains the same amount of salt, fat and sugar, it keeps you satisfied for a few moments then you feel hungry again and wneh the sugar and fat hits your brain, you get depressed. No wonder teenage suicide is at an all time high in the US with all those kids sitting in the drive ins chomping MacDonalds Super Size, listening to Yanky Bunny, before driving the car off the dock, into the sea, or walking into the shopping Mall and mowing down shoppers. INGREDIENTS: The same electronically generated plodding monotonous rhythm backing up singers spewing out foul mouthed hate against young women. The melody is always in minor key which is the key of sadness yetWhen you watch the tacky videos that accompany these songs you´ll see the singers sitting in top of the range sports cars or surrounded by bikini clad women, but they´re scowling at the camera with a face like a month full of wet Sundays, trying to dance like an epileptic retard on Ketamine. The melody reflects this state of despair, it´s always in minor key. I don´t get it, being an English teacher I don´t drive a sports car and I´m not surrounded by bikini clad babes but if I were I´d be jumping for joy, and I´d probably pull out a guitar and sing some Rumba Catalana or Bossa Nova. That is why reggaeton music grates so much with me. A minor key backing a lyric about violence and abuse of women. In culinary terms, Salmon with Banana salsa. The flavour enhancement: Cocaine.
I don´t eat at Michelin Restaurants, who does? I´ve been to one. Unforgettable, like a Springsteen show. I´ve been to McDonalds loads of times. It´s cheap. When you´ve got no money you´ve got no choice. But I don´t listen to bad music because there is a choice. Have you ever seen a basket full of shopping sitting there left unattended in the middle of the supermarket. That´s me. The moment Mercadona subject me to Yankee Bunny feat. Big Mommy I´m out the door. On the other hand, as Shakespeare might have said “If music be the food of love, shop on“. I bought my first and only suit from Next in Manchester. It was the second suit I tried on the first one being in another shop from which I fled after Level 42 (an awful jazz funk group in the 80´s) hit the stereo. I bought the second suit I tried from Next because Van Morrison had hit the stereo. It´s irrational, I know. I met a very nice girl when I was 21 called Rachel. It was all going fine until she took me for a drive and played Bon Jovi´s “I will Love you Always” on repeat on the journey back to my folks house after a night out. “Goodbye Rachel”.
So what music DO I like? Watch this space.
GRAFTERS, THINKERS, INFLUENCERS AND EGOMANIACS
Where do I start? I googled “nurse” and these are the sorts of images that came up. Maybe some nurses applied to study nursing after seeing this publicity campaign poster – what a job, handsome patients (no old folks, no fatties, drunkards, car crash victims) and teamwork guaranteed. One thing is for sure these might not be stereotypical health workers and the patient may not look like most of those lying on hospital floors or waiting in corridors for lack of beds, but nurses are grafters and at this juncture King and Queen grafters. I got thinking about this word “grafter” because I´m forever hearing about influencers and thinkers these days and influencers and thinkers might work hard but they are not grafters. A grafter grafts and to graft is to do real work, dirty work, work that most don´t want to do, peanuts work. Influencers. Not surprisingly my spell check signals a misspelling of the word. Until recently influence was a verb and influential was an adjective. Jose Ortega y Gasset as we all know was an influential writer back in the days of yore. I´m not sure he was known as a thinker at that time but his every word and phrase was poured over. Time was when in order to win an argument one would say “Como dijo Ortega y Gasset….” (Of course we did n´t say that in Britain, nobody knows him, but perhaps we would go “As Oscar Wilde said...” Today there are loads of Ortega y Gasset clones. Some of my crowd go “As Noam Chomsky said...” then there are people who hang out in techy crowds who go “As Elton Musk says…” I believe Musk is an inventor, electric cars or something, but his personae pops up with annoying regularity here there and everywhere and forgive my ignorance, or yours even, why is an inventor so regularly quoted on every matter under the sun from gluten issues to wild hedgehog preservation? It´s because he´s managed to work out how to use Twitter to his advantage and that advantage is hard- nosed egoism – The man is an egomaniac and just as with Ortega y Gasset his every word is poured over and someone somewhere will say “As Elton Musk said...” in order to win points in a bar room argument. Oddly enough he is not an influencer though clearly a lot of people take him seriously. She who is an influencer, in fact the world´s second after Paris Hilton (whatever happened to her?) is Kim Carshadagan. Nobody wuld go “As Kim Cardashagadan said….” because she speaks through and with her bottom and not through her botox lips. Millions of young women today look like rich old women with their copycat bum implants, wigs and cow lips. I´v e no idea if she has a high IQ or not, but if Carshadagan said “Everyone must don face masks” I think her fans would be IMMENSELEY let down, I mean why spend all that money on botox-y cow lips and porcelain teeth if you´re going to cover up your mug with a surgical mask? I picked up El Pais at the weekend and there was a special supplement with fifty of the world´s greatest thinkers expounding on their hopes and fears for a post CV19 future. There were scientists, politicians, sociologists, economists, engineers and I´m sure they had all written something interesting but are you folks, just as I am, getting a bit satiated with all of these clever people opining about everything? Ted Talks started it off: Loud, arm swinging, stomping power point wielding usually American egomaniacs packaged as thinkers: IN THE NEXT 10 MINUTES I AM GOING TO TELL YOURSELF SOMETHING SO RADICAL IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER. I AM sure that you´ll agree with me, half of these so called thinkers state the bleeding obvious, don´t they? When you finish you´re like “Yea, I knew that, and I´v e just wasted ten minutes listening to this big head telling me something I already knew when I could have been practising mindful breathing”. Spanish/ Danish rocker Cristina Rosenvinge was included in this list of 50 thinkers. You can just imagine her horror when she picks up that Sunday supplement and sees they´ve turned a rock star into an pseudo intellectual thinker cum influencer when all she was doing was answering the question “Cristina, how do you see the future for struggling rock stars like yourself ? ” They´v e turned her into the new Ramoncin (For younger readers, Ramoncin was a mediocre Spanish movida rockstar who had the gift of the gab who jumped at the chance of becoming a proto- influencer/ thinker, after his song writing pen had dried up. He was on telly every night in the 90´s giving his opinion about everything under the sun) Rosevinge would so much have loved to have been Bob Dylan. Dylan falls into all four categories: Grafter (He does 200 gigs a year and he´s nearly 75), influencer (He got a whole generation of folk musicians to switch from acoustic to electric guitars) egomaniac (just listen to his latest song where he compares himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, William Blake and Beethoven) but first and foremost Dylan is the thinker´s thinker (after Ortega y Gasset) Back in the 60´s he was asked at a press conference “Mr. Dylan, they say you are the voice of a generation, so what message of hope can you offer to the youth of today?” to which he replied “Ahh man, what a bullshit question, I´m just a song and dance man, nothing else”
LOCKED DOWN IN LOCKDOWN
The whole world is in LOCKDOWN except Spain. Disappointingly the term lockdown has not caught on here in Spain. I say disappointingly because we seem to use English words all the time here when there are perfectly good Spanish words with the same meaning. In the sports department of El Corte Inglés they replaced the bizarre Spanish term footing with running and jogging. When I asked what the difference between running and jogging was the shop assistant admitted she did n´t know. If I had my way I would replace all three words with pieando or maybe joggeando. And if I really had my way I´d be the head of foreign loan words at the Spanish Royal Academy.
I guess the term lockdown hasn´t caught on because neither Pedro Sanchez nor Pablo Iglesias feel confident with their English. Can you imagine if Ana Botella was Prime Minister:
La Plaza Mayor está en lockdown casi completo. Solo se permite la entrada a la plaza para la compra de coffee with milk
We could in fact say that Madrid is closed lock, stock and barrel
There are few idioms, nouns, verbs which contain the word lock.
TASK: Match the expressions with the appropriate definition:
| EXPRESSION | DEFINITIONS |
| – lock in – lock em up and throw away the key – lock up – under lock and key – lock out – padlock | – a small portable lock – in prison – life imprisonment – When you can´t get in because you´ve left your key in the house – It´s what some pubs do in Britain, after the official closing time some customers are invited to stay behind and no one else can come in. – A small storage space, like a garaje. |
MUSIC MEMORIES
Musical memories, sort of chronologically listed. Record player, front room, November, winter in front of the fire with my twin brother, seven years old listening to the first record we bought, Rod Stewart, Maggie May. Viva España, of all things, the Swedish version released believe it or not before Manolo Escobar´s patriotic remake. The singer was called Sylvia. Absurd lyrics, but catchy. Listening to it on holiday in Blackpool when only posh people could afford to go to Spain. Genesis. Got into them via my scoutmaster. We used to go camping and in winter
we´d stay in an old hut with the scout leader. A big fat man with a beard who used to give us cigarettes and Guinness. Never laid a finger on us, fortunately, with all the horrible things we read these days about kiddie fiddlers, we´d play cards for money while listening to Genesis and Monty Python records in front of a log fire. Strange chap but heart of gold.
Punk rock. Listening to the first playing of the Sex Pistols first record in my grandmother´s kitchen on her old radio. Gigs. The Clash in my hometown Wolverhampton, front row, I touched Joe Strummer´s foot and I remember looking up to see an arc of spit flying above my head. In those days spitting at your favourite group was the in thing.
Heavy rock. Iron Maiden, the Scorpions, Judas Priest. I touched the guitarist from UFO´s foot too, sadly another Coronavirus victim. Weird, both Strummer and the UFO chap died tragically. Was it anything to do with my touching their feet? Do I have the Tutankhamun touch? I also touched the feet of Iron Maiden´s singer and guitar player. Had I better warn them? But in hindsight, with my sophisticated musical tastes today, it was all a bit silly: Long haired men in tight shiny trousers screaming about dragons and maidens and other men in tight shiny trousers singing sexist songs with titles like Hot and Ready, Come and Get it, Slide it In, singing those songs to an audience exclusively made up of spotty sweaty teenage boys headbanging to interminable guitar solos whilst in the disco next door an almost exclusively girl audience save a couple of black guys were dancing around their handbags to 70´s disco music and never the twain should ever meet.
And then I went to university with several boxes of heavy rock records and jazz
LP s. My brother, who´d gone to university the previous year burst into my room with his friends and raided my LP box NOT COOL!! they said as they pulled out each one. I went straight down the record shop and sold the lot, keeping me in food for the next six months. Manchester, early eighties was The Hacienda Club, The Smiths, Nick Cave, Happy Monday´s, U2 (Yes , U Dos, who were not so big then. I remember Bono with that flag he waves at his gig crying Raise the flag, raise it high and someone stole the flag, and stole his pretentious thunder.
Glastonbury, the greatest music festival, without Glastonbury there is no Benicassim, Mad Cool, etc etc. I went five or six times. Losing tents, losing my brother, literally, for three days (pre mobile phones), rain, mud, sunburn, old hippies, anarchists, clowns, punks, awful food, drugs, warm beer, The Cure, The Smiths, Van Morrison, The Waterboys, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Manic Street Preachers, Nick Cave, jazz bands, folk bands, funk bands, The Pyramid Stage and loads of tiny little stages with tiny little unheard of bands playing.
Moving to Spain and me going into a record shop on my first day here and uttering my first words in Spanish Quiero flamenco. They sold me a cassette of Cameron de la Isla. Es el rey de flamenco they said. I listened to it. What a racket, one of the greatest guitarists ever backing a bearded hippy screaming out of tune about “camisas” “lunas” and “gitanas”. I did n´ t get it. Awful. Listened to it every day for about six months until I finally did get it. And when I could finally understand Spanish:
Me: Who´s your favourite flamenco singer?
Typical Spaniard: Cameron
What do you think of El Agujetas?
Who´s that?
Me: What music do you like?
Typical Spaniard: Well, Creedence, Dire Straits, Queen, and U2 of course!
What about The Smiths?
Who?
That´s when I realised how different were the Spanish to the English. U2. To the Spanish, legends, to British music lovers the height of uncool.
I was often told by someone who had been to London “Great place, so vibrant, Camden, the Thames….but the foods awful” to which I replied “Spain, great place, such variety, Sagrada Familia, The Alhambra, Plaza Santa Ana….but the music´s awful”
You´re a U2 fan? You aren´t a music lover then, no matter, I promise you that if
you´re into astro physics, or playing paddle, or the history of kings and queens, or sewing or Netflix, things I know little about, I will gladly read until the very end and hopefully enjoy reading about what you´re into and hopefully learn something and certainly help you with your English, and
that´s a promise!
RingRingEnglish 