Trance-tipping is a sport analogous to cow tipping. You stealthily sneak up to some mong head dancing to a couple of bleeps and a sample of a squealing constipated man, and then up-end the fool on to the sand. They continue to writhe like some upside-down tortoise for hours until the music and drugs go away. I made the music go away. (Trance-DJ-Tiping being the pinnacle of the game).
As much as I was enjoying ruining their single brain-celled fun, it was clear that with only thirteen days to go, I needed to get a move on. So train it was, and as the beautiful and music free countryside whizzed by I reflected on my recent adventures. Perhaps my attempt to go around the world (and to the moon and back) in eighty days was proving nothing, except there were lots of crap records about lots of nice parts of the world. I certainly learned that music can ruin even the most remote of areas, Goa being a perfect example. And that often people take the names of otherwise perfectly nice countries in vain.
INDIA.ARIE
Ah, just what the world was waiting for. Another drippy soul singer. Newsweek called Indie Arie, when she emerged from the depths of identikit club sings the “new neo-soulstress”: a phrase which not only misunderstands the use of the prefix neo, but also has no value judgment tied to it whatsoever. She sings soul. Soul is rubbish. She is rubbish.
She didn’t hedge her bets with her first album, Acoustic Soul, which was a collection of dull as dishwater soul records played – wait for it – acoustically. Indeed in her first single she repeats her own name over and over again, just in case we were to forget who was making such a dull racket. She of course won lots of Grammy’s, which might as well be called Granny’s for the relevance tot he actual music scene they hold. A few lazy solipsistic beats and a woman with a voice like your mum reading you a bedtime story (but more soporific) does not a cutting edge make.
But wait. What is that? In her name. A full stop. Surely she was not born with a punctuation mark as a middle name. No India dot Arie’s one claim to be even vaguely modern is the appropriation of some sort of radical punctuation as her middle initial. Its like her name is an e-mail address. Except she doesn’t give us the rest of the address : India.Arie@rubbishandboringrecords.com. I suppose that would tip the wink.
By the way. Her new single is called “I Am Not My Hair”. Spotted! Your hair is at least talented.