BOY BANDS

As you might guess, the e-mails I get tend to be a bit repetitive. Having sifted through the marriage proposals and assorted bleatings, one question crops up quite a lot: “But Tanya, what music do you like?….you must like some music!”. No, dear readers, I do not: otherwise this page would be called I HATE MUSIC EXCEPT THE GOOD BITS. Surely I can’t mean it, though? Tsk tsk – such out-of-date thinking. Nobody but Weller or Sting cares about sincerity nowadays. We’re all postmodernists in the twenty-first century, as our old friend Momus would be quick to inform you. What’s that? You’ve never heard of Momus? God! Where have you been living for the last fifteen years – Earth??

But this doesn’t stop people having a guess at the music I secretly like. And a lot of them mention boy bands.

Do I like boy bands? Let me just check. Do I have pubic hair? Yes. There we are, I don’t like boy bands. Obviously I don’t, for goodness’ sake, nobody does except accountants and sad gonks who think Abs or Rich Five would risk statutory rape charges in order to marry them. Sorry girls, the Jerry Lee Lewis era is over for good. And come to think of it, who would want to marry a grown man who calls themselves Abs – my dear, if you must name yourself after part of your body I think Arse would be rather more suitable. Though at least Abs is some kind of approximation of a word, unlike H from Steps.

No, boy bands are wretched. So why don’t I slag them off? Because if there’s one thing worse than boy bands, it’s fuckers who complain about them. Boy bands are disposable – nobody’s pretending otherwise, least of all the frazzled moppets themselves. In other words, any given boy band is going to sod off soon enough without any help from me: picking on them individually would first off wear out my CTRL, C and V keys (and come to think of it the U,N and T keys would be in trouble too), and secondly would be like picking on an individual mosquito or bee. And the boy band fans are plainly too young to know better, whereas the idiots who buy indie music (all of which is just as bad) are often of drinking age and therefore responsible for their actions. You see?

And any band who writes a song admitting that their mother is their biggest fan is too pitiful to bother with, anyhow. Yeah, Brian and ‘AJ’ (two letters! I’m impressed!), I’ll bet the Monsoon Bassoon’s biggest fans are their Mums, too, and do you ever stop for a moment to wonder why that is?