Music Taste: Cracked!

About a month ago when i was listening to the radio on the way into work i had a revelation. One of the biggest of my life, one that was so large and traumatic i nearly swerved off the M4 when it came to me. I beat myself up for a good 10 minuets for not realising it before.

I worked out why I like the music I like!

Now i know that to some of you have closed this screen and wondering why i am wasting my time writing about this. But you people will not understand how much of an issue this problem has caused in my life.

For years i have been teased, no, more ridiculed for my peculiar tastes in music and my inability to stick to a prefer genre of music has caused many arguments confrontations. But what I found today is that i am not a fan of one specific genre of music. Instead I am a fan of a style and that style is Lyracism.

I don’t know if there is a professional name for this but basically I am a fan of Lyrics. It explains everything, why i don’t like most manufactured pop (or plop), why i love underground bands who write music not to sell records but to tell a story or emote a feeling. It even explains why some times I find myself liking a rap or Hip Hop song which in some peoples eyes should just never happen!

I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon or if i’m just really slow on the up take, but I have no shame in admitting I got a bit excited about it.

Its because of this new found understanding of my love of Music that i would not like to spread this pearl of wisdom with you, please listen to Parachutes and Lifeboats by Rue Royale. I promise if you are a fan of lyracism then you will enjoy this song a lot!

Why Football?

So i have not been able to blog in a while and randomly the weirdest thing happend to me, someone actually requested that I write a blog, they even gave me an amazing topic that they wanted to know my opinions on, it was elegant, evil and brilliant and I am currently lucky to have a lot of material on the subject. So this, is for you...

This blog is about a sport that in my youth i was fascinated by as many young boys (and some girls) are, it is a multi billion pound business, with over 210,867 registered English teams; it has more followers than most major religions and it is our nations most popular sport, I am of course talking about Football.

But why is this sport, of all the ones our great nation partakes in, the one which people are completely obsessed by?

In my opinion football on the whole is played by a bunch of overpaid premaddonnas who feign death when the weight of an arm is placed on their shoulder and then marraculously jump back up when it is time to take a free kick as well as Players who run into the box with no intention of trying to score, but instead run into the nearest deffender and try his hardest to make it look like he was more fucked up by tripping over someone's foot than he would be by getting in a fight down an alley in Manchester! Why are these people loved so much? Why when there are reems of other more suitbale idols and rolemodels do people choose to respect and love pig faced Football players than say Churchill for instance. The truth, i dont know, I dont think anyone knows but i do know that if someone works it out, I probably wont want to know the answer!

One of my main issues with Footballers in general is that they get paid to much! I know this is the most obvious of gripes against footballers but it is always the one that sticks out in my mind. In the time that it has taken me to write this blog, a Premiership footballer could have earned more than i do in a month, in a day earn more than a nurse does in a year and in a week will earn more than a high ranking MD will in a year. For what? For running round a field essentially. This still to this day blows my mind. The thing that makes me most upset about the increase in purchasing and paying for these so called Football Stars is who has to fund these stupid wages and transfer fees, that would be the loyal fans who are conned into purchasing the new strip at £50 a shirt or buying season tickets which for some teams can reach close to £750! I dont think i can think of any other sport that respect its fans less? Can you?

As I stated earlier, when I was younger I was gripped by football, I guess in part this came from wanting to fit in but also because i did enjoy playing. I still do enjoy playing football with my friends from time to time, but there is nothing I look forward to less than the thought of sitting down for 90 minuets to watch a group of small specks chase around after an even smaller white speck on a green background whilst occasionally someone manages to get the small white pigs bladder into the back of that net thing. As i grew up i started to get bored of football and wanted to start playing and getting interested in other sports. The first one that I came across was rugby. Now i had to admit when i was younger, the idea of playing rugby did not grab me straight away, but when I started playing I loved it and if it was not for certain injuries i guarantee i would still be playing now. The game is a lot more energetic, a lot more exciting and a lot more honest. A quote I heard along time ago which has really stuck in my mind explains that... 

"Football, is the gentlmans game played by Hooligans and that Rugby is the hooligans game, played by gentlemen."

Hooligans, a word that is brought up far to much in football conversations and a problem that ruins the game and a reason why i look at all Football fans with a degree of pitty but also with a sense of checking i still have my wallet whilst simultaneousness looking for the nearest usable exit! The whole idea of going to 'war' over something as tribal as who wins a football match is just beyond me, its the same with religious wars which although are not as common still happen in this modern world even with the advent of scienctists and their pesky evidence! Maybe i am just jealous that i do not believe in things enough to go to war over, i just don't know! But what i do know is that football fans are an embarrassment to their teams and is it only me who notices that the people doing all the fighting are the teams who consistently perform badly? I would not mind but this behaviour is then transferred to our national team and gets in the news when people travel to other nations when we 'play' there. This disgraces our nation and makes people on the continent think we are all beer swilling, football chanting wankers, when we most certainly are not. Talk about the few ruining it for the many!

Another thing which annoys me more about football than Hooligans is the opposite of the what some would call ultimate dedicated fan, this is the Non dedicated fans who support a team even though they have no relation to the team, may have never visited the town and sometimes not even visited the country! This was reinforced for me by a trip i took to Singapore recently, here i was greeted by a taxi driver wearing a Manchester United Football top, served at a bar by a gentleman wearing a Arsenal top and even went for a drink in a Chelsea sports bar! This kind of non commitment drives me insane, i can kind of understand people whos fathers supported a team, but its the people who support the team that is winning the most at the moment that drives me insane! I prefer the system they have in Ireland. In Ireland every member of a local community will turn up to watch a Gaelic Football match and no one would ever think of supporting another counties team! They have deep rivalries but never to they turn to violence and until recently a player could only play for the team where he grew up or where he had moved to and lived for a certain number of years. I know all football fans are not like this, i have some friends who support truly terrible teams, but a large majority of football fans would not even be able to point to their supposed favourite team on a map!

WAG culture makes me sick...

The final statement i would like to make on football is not to do with the sport or fans directly, it is mainly aimed at the media, the bosses of the BBC and Sky Sports who constantly show the most mundane sport in the world on our screens the whole time, no other sport is given this much prestige or coverage. When i was younger, one of my favourite programs was a program called Transworld Sports, this program would show a round up of basically every sport in the world, it did include football, but this was not its main aim. I used to love this program mainly as it introduced me to a number of sports which i had never heard of and probably would not of had it not been for this program. I think we need more programs like this so that people can get introduced to more sports and we can end this countries reliance on football as a 'National' sport.

Then maybe, just maybe we can avoid humiliating defeats like the one just encountered by the England team to the Germans! When was the last time the England Rugby team lost to the Germans? The England Rugby team have been in two consecutive world cup finals and even won one of them, there was a bit of news coverage but nothing compared to what a momentous occasion it should have been made into! We also have a golfer named Justin Rose who is hotly tipped to win this Weeks Open in Scotland, we had an Englishman win the USA Open but still nothing is said about this sport which we are currently excelling in as everyone is to transfixed on Football!

Come on people lets sort this out, lets concentrate on other sports, pay our footballers less and support our local teams! Then maybe footballers and their teams will have to work for our attention as opposed to having it at the drop of a hat ready to exploit you for profit.

Nostalgia Is Like Heroin for Old People

I can still remember the first time I ever spotted a mistake in a film. It was a massive spot at the beginning of ‘Jurassic Park’. At first there was the sheer disbelief and then after the third or fourth rewind, the unbridled joy that could only come from something this huge. This massive blockbuster film had made a mistake and better still I had managed to spot it!

After this first spot i started to notice more and more in films, films that I'd maybe seen before and never noticed and even new block busters that I went to see, I still found mistakes and it still made me happy. I visited websites where people discussed mistakes from different films, I even posted a few on there myself! It was here that I found out that they even employ people to combat this problem for individual films! But still they let John McClain walk into a room wearing a white t-shirt and leave wearing a beige one!

But recently I've started to change, every time I spotted one of these mistakes in a film, my initial feeling originally was excitement and amazement, now its disdain!

And its not just film mistakes, I have noticed this with a lot of things recently, I have started to become an angry person, I am only 22 for gods sake but every day i find things that annoy me now that i used to love. This includes stupid NOW compilations, Capital FM, Children's TV, Books with massive writing, my mother, balloons and even most sweets!

I think i have realised why this is... I have grown up and I love it!

Most people think of getting old as this terrible terrible thing that happens, whereas i look forward to it every day! When i was 14 i wanted to be 16 when i was 16, i wanted to be 18 and when i was 18, i could not wait until i was 21 and it is continuing now...
Why i hear you ask, well think about it, i know its an old saying but most things get better with age, Including me, every day i learn more, I understand things better. I grow in age height maturity and knowledge every day. This works for other things as well, technology improves every day, new exciting music is released every day, Its all just great!

Nostalgia is a terrible thing, its like heroin for old people, they walk around slapping their wrists, trying to find another vein saying things like “Things were so much better in the old days!”
Its not true! Look at everything that you do on a daily basis now, the Internet; owning a car; colour/HD/3D television; mobile phones; facebook and digital cameras, they are all modern inventions that have made our lives simpler and more enjoyable. Anyone who says things were better in the old days is just wrong!

If you take one thing from reading this blog today then please take this...

You've got to move on, you cant keep sitting round thinking of how good your life is at the moment or was 10 years ago, because every moment you sit there thinking about your past you are missing out on the now. You've got to try new things, i know its cliched but you have to do something new every day, do something every day that scares you.

That is how i live my life... live in the now... not in the past!

So go on, turn off your computer, step outside and try and learn to ride your bike with no hands, especially if you have never done it before, i bet it will scare you, but that's the point!

Who am I going to vote for?

Why I am not going to Vote Today

A lot of people, more so than usual this year, have been asking me who I am going to vote for in the general election. I also can not believe why people get so irate and upset when i tell them that I'm not going to vote this year.

They always ask me "why" and "ohh thats so bad", but why is it so bad that I don't want to vote. People came up with stupid ridiculous arguments such as "It is your right to vote and you should use it" but unlike some other countries such as Australia it is also my right not to vote and I choose to use that right instead!

I know this is not an amazing source, but Jason Manford tweeted earlier today a website where you could work how much your vote was actually worth compared to where you live. It was fasinating to look at and i will post a link at the bottom of this Post. Apparently because the town where I live is so Conservatively biased (they have been voted in the last three terms) my vote for any opposition would count for 0.182 of a vote, that's 18% of a full vote, that's less than one quarter! How stupid is that, apparently the average UK voter has 1.39 times more voting power than I do! This all comes down to where I live as it is not a marginal constituency. But I agree this is not a very good reason not to vote, you should use your vote (if you want to) no matter how small, even if it is basically nothing (like mine), but this is not the main reason why i am not going to vote today.

I consider myself a fairly well educated person who has an all be it vague knowledge of British Politics, and I hate that because I don't want to vote people lump me in the same bracket as the lazy wankers who cant be bothered to get up and vote or the uneducated masses who wouldnt know a ballot paper from their left elbow, and i resent this. If I don't like any of the parties running or what they stand for or even the leaders of those parties as individuals why should I be forced to vote for one of them, why should i essentially give them my support? A vote is a singular entity, its a 100% mark, you cant give one line of your x to Labour and another to BNP, you have to give the whole x to one party, which implies that you agree with them outright and disagree with what all the other parties have to say! This I feel is not right and I don't want to give my whole vote to one party as I, for one, do not agree with the whole of any parties manifesto at all!

In a  perfect world... I would go and vote and select the 'none of the above' box and put my x right in the middle of it!

In fact I have decided to keep people happy I am going to go to the poling station tonight sign in, get my paper and just scribble all over it as I feel this should make a small point, 0.182 of a whole point!

--------------------------------------------------

As a sub note.... To all you people who are saying I can not complain about politics for 5 years, if the party you voted for wins and makes a bad decision, I will not listen to your complaints and moans either, because remember, because you voted them in! I voted for no one, which means I can moan as much as I like!

Am I A Music Snob?

A question which has been posed to me many by my friend’s and has not really troubled me until now is...

‘Am I a Music Snob?’

Am I a Music Snob? Well firstly I will start by admitting with no hesitations, that music, quite simply, is my life. If I am doing anything, no matter how mundane no matter how important I will have music playing. In the morning I get woken up by my Radio Alarm clock, when I’m driving to work I have a CD on, when I’m at work I’m on Spotify/Last.fm/YouTube , when I drive home Its a CD, even as I write this blog I’m sitting on a plane 32,000ft up, yet I’m still watching Michael Jackson’s ‘This Is It’ on the TV, anyway, you get the picture.

But where has my love of music come from and why did it begin? This is something I have never actually thought about until I decided on the title for this post; why am I so into music?

My parents don’t like music, there not at all musical. In fact they almost despise it, my mum is always telling me to turn it off and was always discouraging me at a younger age saying that if I knew my French verbs as well as I knew lyrics to songs I would be fluent. My dad was not much better, he has the most terrible taste in music and is without a shadow of a doubt the most tone deaf person I know. My dad did tell me this one story though that gave me some hope, he was actually at a gig that Brian May was quoted as saying was Queens first proper gig; my jaw dropped in astonishment, I could not believe what I had heard! Only to have my dad moments later bring me crashing back to earth by following this news with “Ye, but I didn’t think they were that good...”

So I definitely did not get my fascination in music from my parents...

After thinking long and hard about this I have come to my own conclusion that my music obsession started when I started physically playing and writing songs. Don’t get me wrong I have always been into music, but I think this was the turning point when my love turned into pure obsession.

I had my first guitar lesson when I was 8 years old at Primary School with my guitar teacher Mr Cook and was forced to learn boring Hymns and camp fire songs; I soon lost interest in the instrument as most 8 year olds do until I arrived at secondary school. It was here that playing guitar became cool again, so I asked for a new guitar for my 13^th Birthday and went to the Local music shop to pick it up, I know a lot of people will not be surprised by this next statement but it was bright purple and was in the shape of a Gibson SG. It was the first of many!

It was here I started to the learn the guitar for real, I didn’t want to have lessons and so decided I would teach myself learning only songs that I wanted to learn, which at the time consisted of mainly Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with some Metallica and Hendrix for a little variety. It was here that my passion for music started to grow more and more. The more I learnt the more I appreciated the music and how it was made and  formed, the subtle twists and fiddly bits as I call them which sometimes you might miss if you are not physically trying to recreate the music.

Soon after this part of my life had started and was still growing (along with my guitar collection) another part of my musical fascination started to take over, Live Music! This is where music is at its pinnacle, the stage, where songs are recreated live in front of your eyes , where songs are changed and lights are synced and emotions are so closely linked with the music that a song you’ve heard a thousand times can still cause the hairs to raise on the back of your neck. For the audience as well as the artist! In my eyes there is nothing better in this world than going to a gig.

My first gig experience, my gig virginity you could say, was lost to a band called Incubus supported by Brand New at Wembley arena, I was 14 years old and I have never looked back, travelling far and wide all across the country to visit small random pubs and clubs to massive thousand seat venues to see my favourite artists play. I could fill a whole gig post with amazing gigs and moments from them, but I will resist this time...

But why do people decide to call me a music snob?

I think that one of the main reasons is that people see my taste in music as peculiar. It is what others might call it non conformist. As readers of this blog will soon learn I am not one to follow the crowd with anything and with music this is especially true, and I think that because of this people think I purposely avoid ‘Big’ supposedly ‘Popular’ bands which is simply not true. I just don't love something just because other people do.

Some of my favourite music bands are massive multi platinum record contract holding musicians, just look at my previous paragraph where I list the artists I was trying to learn as a young guitarist. Red Hot Chili Peppers, with 13+ studio albums and a massive record contract with EMI I would hardly call them an Indie band!

Do I try and avoid popular bands? No, I listen to them with the same ears and head I listen to all bands with, but when I hear them and I don’t like them, that’s my taste!

The main thing that annoys me is I can tell straight away with Bands and people like that is that they don't care! Do you think that Cheryl Cole cares about what she is singing or what chord is played in her songs, all she cares about is how many handbags she can buy with the amount of Albums she sells. Do you think Victoria Beckham stays late into the night at the recording studio because she has lost track of what time it is and is having so much fun recording her song she doesn’t want to leave, I don’t think so! She is just another face on front of a giant corporate music machine! I realise that all the examples I gave were women, but this is not true, I think of many male artists who fit this description as well!

Another reason people think I am a music snob is because I stop loving bands when they become popular, this again is simply not true. In fact a number of my favourite bands are ‘popular’ I do just enjoy more non commercial music. Pop music is called so from the word popular, so pop music infers that most people will like it, I do not like pop so by definition I do not like the same music that a lot of other people like, it does not mean that I do not like music just because a lot of other people like it!

I guess another reason that I get called a music snob is because I ramble to people about music so when I find people who only enjoy music which is essentially forced down their throats, essentially, music from crap American Dramas, the Radio and X Factor it annoys me greatly! I just want them to get their own taste as opposed to following everyone else like a sheep, and help make these uninterested, lazy and truly terrible 'music' artists as famous as they are!

I realise that this is a massive ramble and includes a lot of parts that need further discussion, but it was in my head and I wanted to get it all down. Please feel free to comment as it is now time for you to decide…

Am I a music snob?

It has to start somewhere...

Well...

"Here goes nothing!"

My first blog... 

As I sit here and wonder what on earth should I write about, I begin to think firstly what the hell has taken me so long. Why has it taken me so long to start bloging, what stoped me in the first place and why, why on earth have I decided to start now!

Well I guess it all begins when 'bloging' became a Verb, a doing word, the act of creating a website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. (Thank you 'Define:' by Google) I always looked at it (along with many other people) as a way of nerdy individuals with no friends making themselves feel important by telling everyone what they thought, and I for one didn't even start off by reading blogs let alone writing my own!

So why the change of heart? This is a good question. I think it is mainly down to the change in the perception of 'bloggers'. With the introduction of websites such as blogger.com it has become alot easier for people to get into bloging, (like me) and with the ever increasing popularity of some people due to their blogs, the idea of bloging has changed a lot and it is because of this that I decided to give it a go.

So here it is... My blog, a place where I can write my thoughts down and keep a record of them for all to read.

I am going to try and keep it as organised as possible and have specific pages for certain topics and of course will welcome all comments on anything that I write on.

So please read on and enjoy...