This Is Shit!

Just had a proper listen to the new Michael Jackson single – I heard snippets this morning when GMTV reported about it being delivered in a metal suitcase by four twats in sunglasses – and it’s depressingly average. There’s no surprise there – it is a good couple of decades since Jacko released anything worthwhile, after all, but the clue is in the title; when artists start appropriating their songtitles to underline their own brilliance, they may as well be signing a confession that their career is on a downhill slope. ‘This Is It’ – in my best KITT from Knight Rider voice -is a dreary pallid-pop blandfest, Michael. And let’s face it, with Sony sitting on a warehouse full of unreleased archives, it’s looking like ‘This Isn’t It, In Fact It’s Only The Start Of The Post-Corpse Cash-In’, which, I’ll admit, isn’t as catchy a title.

History (should that be HIStory?) is littered with artists desperate to neon-light their importance with an egocentrically-infused song or album title. Jacko himself has previous here – in 2001, his tenth, and final, album attempted to disguise its over-produced r’n’b crudness by claiming it ‘Invincible’ where ‘Fallible’ rang truer. Dreadlocked American pioneers of turd Korn had the same problem a year later when they inexplicably allowed Linkin Park to become better than them – no mean feat considering Chester Bennington, a man whose name is more suited to a vintage armchair than a rock star, and his rabble of angsty-airheads sounded like a Garbage Pail Faith No More – and tried to cover up this fatal error by calling their next album ‘Untouchables’. In one sense, this title works, because in the same way droopy shit is untouchable, so was their record. NATCH!

Not as blatant but almost as misguided, The Stone Roses spent about 400 years recording the follow-up to their legendary debut and decided to ramp up the already feverish expectation by declaring it ‘The Second Coming’, implying, y’know, that they were, y’know, messianic. Bit of classic over-egging for an album that’s good, not great and definitely not divine – anyway, even if it was, it was a second coming too bloody late, but that didn’t stop shy and understated frontman Ian Brown going on to call his singles compilation ‘The Greatest’. Which it isn’t. It isn’t even in the Top 100 greatest, but there you go. Fellow big-headed northerner, albeit with a massively bigger nose, Richard Ashcroft is a great one for the assuming (didn’t he ever hear that rubbish phrase “don’t assume, cos you make an ass out of u and me? Oh…”) title too, declaring two songs in on The Verve’s second album ‘This Is Music’, presumably implying that everything else isn’t in the process, and trying to impress upon the nation his godlike status by calling their third album ‘Urban Hymns’. Annoyingly, though, both of those are really good. Assuming your music is what the general public is crying out for is just as worse as labelling yourself ‘Invincible’ or ‘Untouchable’ – something The Enemy probably realise after ‘Music For The People’ was met with the general sound of EH? ‘Music For (Some Of) The People (Who Are Still Listening To By-Numbers Indie)’, EH? Confusingly, the band The Music had a song called ‘The People’. But ‘Music For The People’ and The Music and The People are unconnected, apart from everything in that sentence not being very good.

There is a right way of bigging yourself up with an album title, but you have to be a bit smarter about it – The Strokes, for example, missing a question mark off their debut, ‘Is This It’, and making it a definitive “Yes! This Is It” was cool, whilst Faith No More’s trademark subtlety was used to great effect on the mystically-titled ‘Album Of The Year’. I should finish by offering up MAD PROPS to Limp Bizkit, the worst band in the history of recorded music, for calling the album where they went really, really bad ‘Results May Vary’, for vary they did – the Durst with the worst managing to turn what looked like becoming an irritably successful career into one that bombed overnight. Now that’s the sort of results varying that just doesn’t happen often enough…