The Brits are always awful, so much so that they exist in a place beyond criticism, so obvious are the failings. Just the sight of the award winners applauding themselves is enough to make me reach for the bucket. So all this goes largely without being said and one passes over it without comment, just an elongated sigh. But one category attracted my attention this year: ‘Song of the year’.
Now, the Brits are reliable judges of awful songs: retrospective title winners include Frankie’s Relax and Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up and Phil Collins’s – yes, Phil Collins – Another Day in Paradise. So the antenna is finely tuned to the meretricious, the banal, the imbecilic. But at least those aforementioned songs were, actually, songs – terrible may they each have been.
This year’s winner, Rein Me In, performed by North Shields’s cut-price Springsteen, Sam Fender, and the new MOR soul queen, Olivia Dean, lacked everything that makes a song a song. The melody revolved for the most part around three notes and – stretched to five for what passes for a chorus – and staggered on for five minutes stuck in its mindless furrow. It told no story, possessed no wit – in short, it had nothing about it that might catch in your memory.
Songwriting has become so otiose, I suppose, that this generation of pop stars has forgotten how to do it. Beside Sam Fender, Noel Gallagher seemed to be Gershwin, Lerner and Lowe, and Cole Porter rolled into one. And then you remember Fender is one of the better songwriters of the present era………oh temps, etc.
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