'Garni du Jour' Again

That Ain't The Music, They're Just The Lyrics

Here's good ole David Dale, frustrated by contemporary pop music's total inability to come up with a sophisticated lyric that tickles David Dale's fancy. The headline says 'the day the music died' but really, his complaint is about the poor abstraction and bad taste in the lyrics; and really can one blame him?

Australia's top-selling singles of the past 10 years (and typical lyrics)
❏ Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO (sold more than 800,000 copies): ''I'm runnin' through these hos like Drano, I got that devilish flow, no halo.''
❏ Somebody That I Used To Know, Gotye (700,000+): ''No, you didn't have to stoop so low, have your friends collect your records and then change your number.''
❏ Sexy and I Know It, LMFAO (600,000+): ''We headed to the bar, baby don't be nervous; no shoes, no shirt and I still get serviced.''
❏ Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen (550,000+): ''You took your time with the call, I took no time with the fall; you gave me nothin' at all, but still you're in my way.''
❏ Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5 (550,000+): ''You say I'm a kid, my ego is big; I don't give a shit and it goes like this.''

Admittedly, those lyrics look pretty bad. But if the group is called 'LFMAO' then maybe it's not quite right to be expecting lyrics of any depth or meaning. Or maybe the apparent banality is implicit to the times in which we find ourselves living? In which case, should we be surprised?

Still, the whole article brought me to think about the real death of music, and I have to say it is these reality TV singing contest shows like X Factor' and 'The Voice'. For the love of god, if there is one place music is being killed, it's on these TV shows where people who have no insight into the songs they're singing are judged on rather subjective, obscure, arcane performance points while session musicians pump out 2minute abridged versions of classic songs.

No, really, they're terrible, and they have nothing to do with the qualia that makes music good. It's freaking glorified Karaoke put to the service of TV stations and advertisers, dressed up as music, with semi-pro singers fronting for the execrable business. So if David Dale really wants to take a hatchet to the death of music that he liked, well, he can have a go at these awful shows, one of which produced Adele (to whom he gives a free pass). No, Mr. Dale, it's worse than that.

Once upon a time, there was rock music, and it had a shot at being something tat could really communicate something important. Then, the cultural mainstream bought into it and the record labels sold the artists down the river, ever in the search of wider profits. And to this end it was all about packaging and looks and style; not writing and performing - As Frank Zappa called it, the 'Garni de Jour' phenomenon. You slap a piece of burnt meat between two bits of bread, and it's a burger. You add a tired piece of parsley next to it, and that's 'Garni du Jour' - and somehow this dried bit of parsley is meant to make the whole dining experience better.

Frank Zappa also made the observation that people also hate music, but love the packaging. People say they like music, but what they really like is the 'Garni du Jour'; and if the mass market is saying that the music business is crazy to focus on the segment of the market that -*gasp*- is actually interested in music being music for the sake of music.

That's how music died - when the music business decided the 'Garni du Jour' was much more important than the quality of the meat in between the bread making up the burgers they were peddling. Similarly, all these reality TV singing contest shows are all judging on the 'Garni du Jour' elements of each of these singer's 'marketability'. If they win, they can go on to sing the incredibly insightful lyrics David Dale so detests. It's not about the music, it's not even about the lyrics. Truth be told, it's all about all those *stupid* performance notes handed out by the likes of Simon Cowell and the rest of those 'judges'.

Laws Of Australian Cinematics

David Dale's View

David Dale regales us with his three laws of Cinematics:

The First Law of Cinematics: To predict the success of a big budget movie in Australia, multiply its first week's takings by three. The nation's favourite flick this year, The Dark Knight, made $15.9 million in its first week, and ended up with a total of $45.6 million (putting it close to the all-time chart-toppers Titanic with $58m, Shrek 2 with $50m and Return of the King with $49m). TDK sold more than 4 million tickets because it lived up to its hype, just like Kung Fu Panda, which earned $8.3 million in the first week and went on to total $26 million, or Wall-E (from $5.8m to $17.8m).
There were exceptions to the first law this year. Mamma Mia! went from $8.1m to an amazing $31.5m and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull went from $12.3m to a mere $29.5m. They are covered by ...
The Second Law of Cinematics: To tell if a movie will stay hot, examine the dropoff in its second week's takings. If it falls by more than a third, word of mouth must be bad (and the ultimate total, as with Indy, will be less than three times the first week). If it falls by less than a third, w.o.m. will propel it to glorious heights (as with Mamma Mia!). It's ominous news for the teen vampire flick Twilight that its second weekend box office was down 54 per cent on its first weekend.
Now here's a spooky detail: the takings of Australia fell by 33 per cent from week 1 to week 2, and by 32 per cent from week 2 to week 3.

There is thus no way to tell if it will top the $29 million earned by Baz Luhrmann's last epic, Moulin Rouge. We might seek a clue in ...

The Third Law of Cinematics: Australian films never make more than $3 million (Happy Feet and Australia don't count because they are international movies). To put it another way, there are only 300,000 cinemagoers in this country who regard the term "Australian-made" as an incentive.
The most awarded local flick this year was The Black Balloon. It made $2.1 million. The most awarded local flick last year was Romulus My Father, which made $2.6 million. Some people theorise that Australian movies fail because they lack budgets. There may be another issue. Could it be that they fail because they lack story?

Need we say more?

David Dale Is My Hero

Staying In Touch (With Trivia, With Style)

Growing up in 80s, the most fun part of the SMH was the backpage of the main section where David Dale held court with his 'Stay in Touch' column. The SiT column covered bizarre news snippets from around the world - the sort of weird-ass news that comes in the AP 'Oddly Enough' wire. It most probably was the AP Oddly Enough wire to which he had access and we were not to know it back then, but all the same, David Dale made the silly parts of the world and its affairs a must-read everyday.

When I reflect on it further, the tone of this blog might find its roots in the tone of SiT columns of the 1980s, in which case David Dale would be my spiritual father of journalism. Sometime during the time I dropped out of Med School, he left the Herald to go edit The Bulletin where he was criticised for bringing his style of whimsy to a 'serious' publication. I never bothered to read The Bulletin under his editor-ship which goes to show any artist or journo performs as a function of his/her context.

Anyway, today I noticed I clicked on 2 articles by the said David Dale and enjoyed them both so I thought I'd link them here.

The first is his observation about Nathan Rees.

In just eight weeks as NSW Premier, he has said two gloriously unpredictable things: that his favourite book is Paradise Lost, published in 1667 by the puritan poet John Milton, and that if you think you are in love, then you are in love (said last week when discussing traffic).

That's two more surprises than Morris Iemma gave us in three years as premier (unless you count his resignation). It is starting to look as if we might have an interesting person running the state and, in my book, that's much better than having a competent one.

If we're honest, we elect politicians to entertain us. Canberra and Macquarie Street are soap operas, sometimes overlapping with crime thrillers and screwball comedies. The public service can do the grunt work. The job of politicians is to engage our emotions and inspire our imaginations.

State politics throws up too few eccentrics. The finest in the past 20 years was the mercurial Jeff Kennett in Victoria, who revealed only after he retired that he suffered from depression.

In NSW, Bob Carr never felt the need to justify his preference for Roman history over football. I ran into him once on a bus that was taking people round Sydney's museums. He said he was late for his official duty of launching the museum tour because he'd been watching a TV documentary that proved it was not Nero who set fire to Rome but Christian terrorists trying to bring down the empire. Carr couldn't stop talking about it.

Nathan Rees's fascination with Milton ranks with that. Paradise Lost tells the story of Lucifer's attempt to organise a revolution by the angels in heaven and overthrow the dictatorship of God. God wins and banishes Lucifer and his freedom fighters to the underworld.

Milton clearly had sympathy for the devil. Lucifer is the most interesting character in the narrative. The illustrator William Blake said Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it" - which may reveal something about Rees's continuing relationships with some Labor powerbrokers.

Quotes we should expect to hear soon in Rees speeches: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n" and "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heav'n of hell, or a hell of heav'n". Sounds a lot like NSW to me.

Eccentricity is underrated as an incentive for voters. Gough Whitlam was the first of the Great Unpredictables, because his brain overflowed with ideas that didn't fit within standard political rhetoric. His divagation on the pronunciation of the word kilometer ("The versifiers among you have always used pentameters and tetrameters, and you've got a pretty fair diameter and perimeter yourself") makes Rees look positively pedestrian.

The bounding joviality in his writing is infectious and it actually threw me back to my teenager revelry just reading it. I don't know what to make of Nathan Rees as of yet, but I'm already positively disposed towards him as a result of reading this article. It may be the case that David Dale has made the unpalatable, palatable; but there is much to be said for a column that can persuade on the strength of its wit, and this is the essence of David Dale - he's one witty bastard.

The second is a regular column of his current column, 'The Tribal Mind'.

Australia's top-selling DVDs (first week of October): 1 Supernatural Season 3; 2 Horton Hears A Who; 3 AFL Premiers 2008 Hawthorn; 4 Two And A Half Men Season 4; 5 Heroes Season 2 Digipack Box Set; 6 Two And A Half Men Season 3; 7 Heroes Season 2 Slimcase; 8 Two And A Half Men Season 1; 9 Beverly Hills 90210 Season 5; 10 Happy Feet.

Only two of the 10 are movies. One is a sports documentary. The rest are TV shows. And therein lies the mystery: why are three of the 10 best sellers based on a TV show which Channel Nine is already showing for five hours a week, two of them from a show Channel Seven is showing for an hour a week and one from a show Channel Ten is showing for an hour a week?

This is my speculation: it's because there is no longer any trust between viewers and TV stations. The fans of Two And A Half Men, Heroes or Supernatural are thinking: "Yes, they may be showing it now, but any minute they'll cancel it, move it to late at night without telling me, play it out of order or interrupt the sequence with old episodes. The only way to be sure of seeing it in the correct order, when I want to, is to buy every possible DVD. And then I'll never need to watch TV again."

Of course, no blockbuster movies were released around the time that chart was compiled. The top 10 a month from now will no doubt include Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Sex And The City, and Indiana Jones And The KIngdom Of The Crystal Skull. But if my thesis about the breakdown of trust is correct, the remaining six next month will still be TV shows.

Interesting how he never pulls punches. One has to admire a guy with much spine and I suspect the one thing about David Dale is that he;s not short of spine. I like that. A couple of years ago, he made the astute observation that not even the top grossing Australian films at the Box Office were making a profit, and promptly got rebukes, but he's been right all along.

Anyway, I thought I'd fly that out there, just because it hit me today, just how much I still get a kick out of reading his columns after all this time.