Maybe I'm taking X Factor too seriously
MASSACRED, murdered, slaughtered. These are the words we use when our favourite songs are covered by artists who we feel don't give them the treatment they deserve.
I found myself doing it last year when I heard Alexandra Burke's version of the Leonard Cohen classic Hallelujah.
Is nothing sacred?
No. In the age of the iPod, the 'mash-up' and X Factor, nothing is. Songs come at us in circumstances often wildly at odds with their original context.
So I'll have to go with the flow. I should be glad that classic songs like Hallelujah are reaching a new audience. And who am I to say that that audience is too dazzled by Simon Cowell's circus act to appreciate the subtleties of the music?
And yet ...
The highest complement the X Factor judges seem to pass is, 'you really made that song your own.'
But I'd prefer to see a bit more deference to the spirit of the original, or at least an understanding of what the songs are about.
When performing the U2 song One the other week, Rachel Adedeji sang: "Did you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?
"Did I ask too much? More than a lot? You gave me nothing. Now that's all I've got."
Amid these lines, she turned to the camera and gave us a coquettish wink.
It's easy to forget that, for all his excesses and egotism, Bono of U2 is capable of writing sublime love songs that contain oceans of despair as well as hope.
One is about what separates us as well as what unites us. And if the song's emotional upheavals leave us feeling ultimately uplifted, it's a happy ending that is all the more valuable for being hard-won.
It's as sombrely profound as songwriting gets.
You don't wink while you're singing it.
While I can accept that music will move on, I'm not quite ready for the prospect of songs becoming divorced from their lyrical content.
So what am I doing watching X Factor?
Good question.
Well, my wife likes it - in small doses.
"Let's just watch the start," she said last Saturday. "I just want to see what Cheryl Cole's wearing."
Ah. So maybe I'm taking X Factor too seriously.
* Recently I took issue with male writers such as John Updike being wrongly accused of 'misogyny'.
Well, here's another example.
While deploring Katie Price's literary bestsellerdom, Martin Amis made some disparaging remarks about what he saw as the model's grotesque physical transformation into 'bags of silicone'.
The misogyny police of the blogsphere duly read him his rights.
I'm far from sure that pointing out how ludicrous Katie Price's cosmetic surgery has made her look amounts to misogyny. It could even be something like its opposite.
And I share Amis's suspicion that the fact that Katie Price is outselling thousands of decent writers bodes ill for our culture at large.
He was also accused of snobbery. But one man's snobbery is another's discernment.
As the author himself put it: "Snobbery has to start somewhere and if you can't be snobbish about Katie Price you are dead, you've gone."
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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