Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

We should have seen it coming when this occasional series started: that megalomaniac twat Bono will do all he can to monopolise it. I have resisted taking the bait, but the man known to the Irish tax authorities as Loopholin” Paul Hewson and to his immediate family as That Fecking Prat would not let up. And here the man called Bono Vox (which surely is an unprintable Gaelic insult) features for the second time on Twattery in Pop.

Peace Heil: Bono and friend

All was quiet on New Year”s Day. While you and I were nursing a hang-over or the draining effect of staying up till almost 2am, That Fecking Prat was hatching his column for the New York Times, a newspaper evidently so clueless about the cutting edge, it makes The Watchtower seem like a leading innovator of hip culture. The Bad News of TFP”s irrelevance and rank twattery evidently have not filtered upwards into the lofty editorial offices of the NYT. There a people who think that Bimbo is doing marvellous work for Africa (which he is not, as explained in the first article on TFP”s Twattery), and there are people “” usually the same socially detached goons “” who think that Bobo and his combo are musically pertinent. The same kind of twits who think the ghastly Annie Lennox is relevant.

My friend Evan alerted me to the kind of prose that Bongo writes for the New York Times. Consider this garbled excrement of pretentious wankery from a year ago: “I”m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year”s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season”s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.” The twatmeister continues in familiar greasy-haired, orange-shaded vein. Certainly no  ghostwriter here; Twatto certainly wrote this all by himself “” and no sub-editor had the courage to rework it”¦or perhaps the subs cheerfully left the text as was in a bid to expose Bonzo as a literary troll, for the benefit of those who, mystifyingly, had no idea.

This year Bingo proceeded from being the poet laureate of Dublin (the city he tax-rapes for the crack of it) and Frank Sinatra”s best pal (oh yes, he told us all about the painting “Francis” Albert Sinatra gave him) in 2009 to claiming his rightful place as the world”s principal prophet by raising ten things that, according to Him, must change in the new decade. First up: sexier American cars, obviously. Not cars that emit fewer noxious gasses, though that would be nice, but just sexier cars. The banal cunt! In fairness, he later describes himself as a “mild green”, because if he were any more committed to the environment, Dubya wouldn”t play with him anymore. And we all would call him a hypocrite for a thousand more reasons than we already have.

Then we come to the point were Banko blames ISPs for the supposed crisis of “illegal downloading”. The solution, apparently, is to force ISPs to spy on the Internet activities of their customers, and presumably collaborate in their prosecution. “[W]e know from America”s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China”s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it”s perfectly possible to track content.” So it”s a Multimedia Patriot Act he wants? Nice to know that Beano holds people who download media in much the same esteem as he does child pornographers.

Of course, Blotto won”t admit that illegal downloading pisses him off because people who avail themselves of the opportunity to sample U2″s rotten albums from the Internet are unlikely to buy them on the principle of caveat emptor. No, it”s never about Bozo. He is just looking out, like Big Brother, for the small guy with the guitar “” again speaking on behalf of people who never gave him a mandate to articulate their concerns. “A decade”s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators “” in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can”t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us “” and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.” Steady on, old fruit. People would still need to pay the ISP to access e-mail, bank on the Internet, read the New York Times and surf for free porn (featuring consenting adults). In other words, the ISP “” moneysuckers all the same “” would show similar profits as they do even if nobody ever downloaded music or videos.

Bozo declares war on ISPs

Of course, piracy is a problem. I hold no brief for sites that exist to make profit from leaked albums. But the downloading culture is not necessarily a problem. Certainly, the MP3 revolution has created new business model options that are preferable to the record companies” ritual exploitation of most musicians. Internet exposure “” managed or not “” provides artists with exposure not only to new audiences, but also to those whose job it is to scout for music for TV shows and advertisements. For many young, fledgling songwriters, being featured on Grey”s Anatomy or in a Jeep ad is lucrative in terms of licensing fees and exposure. Strangling the downloading culture and killing the blogs will do nothing to help the people on whose behalf Blippo claims to speak. There is a reason why my in-box is full with unsolicited MP3 tracks by artists who hope to create a buzz on the Internet. Techdirt states the case very well. The comments make for interesting reading as well.

I wouldn”t wish to inconvenience Blimpo by having him harangue your ISP and mine, so this post”s music has been selected randomly, with the song titles communicating absolutely nothing relating to the preceding discussion.

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“¢ Robert Mitchum – Mama Looka Boo Boo (Shut Your Mouth-Go Away).mp3
“¢ The Smiths – Bigmouth Strikes Again.mp3
“¢ Blk Sonshine – I Won’t Talk.mp3
“¢ Gram Parsons – Big Mouth Blues.mp3
“¢ Elliot Smith – I Better Be Quiet Now.mp3
“¢ Jet – Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.mp3
“¢ Julian Cope – World Shut Your Mouth.mp3
“¢ Fall Out Boy – I’ve Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth.mp3

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