Boom!

Twelve (TWELVE!) years after Spinning Around, Kylie has slipped into another pair of very short shorts for 'Timebomb':

Kylie makes me very, very happy.

Advent Anthems

Darlings.

This is our first Advent Anthem, to warm your cockles. Or whatever. It's perfect if you're very shy. Or very outgoing.
This month, we're dedicated, no matter how drunk we might be (and we may be at the pub as we speak), to delivering your Advent Anthem each day.

To begin our Advent Adventure, here is your favourite (who just released an American-friendly Thanksgiving album) and ours.

What's that coming over the hill?

(Trigger warning)

When I first saw the (leaked, probably unfinished) video for Kanye West’s ‘Monster’, I felt a bit sick. Then I thought, Kanye is an asshole. Everyone knows he’s an asshole. And the concept for the video is not that original. Basically, monsters have jumped the shark.

After School Videos

You know, today's been a sad day. Andy Murray was knocked out of Wimbledon. Ghana's football wasn't good enough to beat Uruguay. Paris Hilton was detained for smoking pot at the World Cup. I had to fish a lot of my possessions, including a ton of work, out of a bin filled with maggots in true I'm-a-celebrity style without the consolation of meeting Ant & Dec.

So, naturally, to feel better, my thoughts turned to the beautiful D'Angelo and his gorgeous 'Untitled'; my favourite after-school-video of all time:


It was also Kelly Brook's favourite video back when she was a VJ in 2000. She would get all misty eyed when she played it, and can you blame her?

Of course the video was very 'controversial', and ended D'Angelo's mainstream career even as it started it. Never mind. We can keep watching (bearing in mind some excellent questions about masculinity, sexual objectification, race, and whether the, em, 'climactic' gestures are real?) and feel cheered.

How does it feel?

I’m a free bitch, baby!

‘I am here to proclaim your liberation,’ she told us. A preacher for the night, a high priestess who couldn’t imagine any other death than one that took place in the sanctuary of the stage, a messiah sacrificing herself for our love. ‘Some say I’m an irreligious woman,’ she cried over Alejandro, ‘but tonight, let’s go to church, London!’

Such was Lady Gaga’s charisma that, right up in the gods of the O2 arena, when she lay down on the stage as if it was a psychiatrist’s couch and explained that she was nothing – nothing – without the love of her fans, that our love had spoilt her for a relationship with anyone else, I felt like I was the only one there. When she sang, ‘I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me’, the curious inversion of the dynamics of watcher/watched felt oddly intimate (and less manipulative than you might think).*

She hates money and plastic surgery and the fact that she loves alcohol-dependent men like her father. She loves difference. Again and again she told us to be free – free to be freaks and geeks, gay, straight or bisexual, to do what we wanted and to tell those who say we aren’t good enough, ‘Fuck you!’

She lay on her piano upside down, conducting her band and playing the piano with her stiletto. This lady is talented. Her voice is enormous. Her clothes are huge. She told us that she also has a very big penis. And her breasts actually shoot fireworks.

She was Dorothy, Tinkerbell, the Pied Piper, Mary. She was a monster-slayer who wanted us to kill our own demons. She was the Mommy to her ‘little monsters’. She very consciously sees herself (at least when she’s performing) through the eyes of her fans. It’s the love/applause of others that brings her to life. Christ or Tinkerbell?

Be free, she said. Be in the moment (we were told off for photographing her - ‘I’ll be back again!’ - a command to experience the present I wish had been emphasised when I went to mass at St Peter’s). This is no Madonna crucifying herself in the ultimate act of self-reference. Lady GaGa is something else altogether. ‘I promise I’ll be kind’, she sang to me. In the end, I believed her.


*Her tweets from the MEN Arena tonight, responding to a fan’s complaint that people weren’t being let into the venue with coke cans in their hair, are very cute. Sounds like she gave the arena staff a bollocking for being mean to her babies...

After-School Videos

When I was a teenager, when I got home from school I would make myself a cup of tea, pour myself an enormous bowl of Cornflakes and settle down to watch MTV Select (which boasts such alumnae as Cat Deeley, Donna Air, Lisa Snowdon, Kelly Brook, Edith Bowman, Richard Blackwood ['member him?!]...) until dinnertime.

Videos ruled my life then much as now (forget about homework), and the on-demand nature of Youtube and current cable programming doesn't have the same charm as waiting through an hour of Donna Air chuntering on and on to callers while you're waiting for the latest Britney single to finally come on.

Anyway, After-School Videos will be an occasional, totally self-interested blast of nostalgia for no other reason than I love nineties pop.

So here is Texas, 'In Demand':



Crap song, but ALAN RICKMAN! Doing the TANGO!

Look at Sharleen's face - never has a woman been so happy. And what is she doing to him with her knee?

Amazing.

(And note the 'twist' at the end - you see what they did there? You see? Clever.)

A Brave New Girl

I started thinking about perfection this week when a friend noticed that I say ‘Perfect!’ a lot [seriously you have no idea - Ramping]. ‘That would be perfect!’ ‘You’re perfect – thank you’, ‘It’s been a perfect day’, ‘Having coffee with her was perfect’, and so on, ad nauseam (apparently).

"Bless God and bless the gays!"

Plenty has been written this week about Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’, a ‘homoerotic rampage of capitalistic ultra-violence’ . From the Tarantino, Meyer and Thelma and Louise references, to the ‘Baby One More Time’-esque dance routine, to Gaga’s crotch, the video – on its way to being the most watched video ever, beyond even MJ’s ‘Thriller’ - has been analysed to death (smelling suspiciously of rat poison).

If church was like this they wouldn't have to worry about falling attendance

A link to the marvellous Popjustice to start us off...