12 September 2007 - "Talk About Double Standards!"

Blog inspired by my lovely friendling, Lois.

Recently, I was flopping around in my friend’s house and we were watching the music channel. When the song Beautiful Girl by Sean Kingston came on, we immediately squealed in protest, but my other friend, Shellby, was adamant that we listen to the song. So we did.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this song, the lyrics to the chorus go like this:

You’re way too beautiful girl
That’s why it’ll never work
You’ll have me suicidal, suicidal
When you say it’s over
Damn all these beautiful girls
They only wanna do your dirt
They’ll have you suicidal, suicidal
When they say it’s over

For the full lyrics, click here.

If those lyrics were sung by a rock band, such as Taking Back Sunday or Hawthorne Heights, then they would be considered as ‘emo‘. However, because those lyrics are put to a hip hop beat, nobody blinks an eye. I consider these lyrics to be far more emo than any of the lyrics the bands I listen to write, and yet my bands are the ones that get falsely labelled.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the emo stereotype wanting to hurt yourself/commit suicide and always having an unrequinted love? So then why do tangoed townies take great delight in singing this song and then turning around and having the cheek to call me emo?

Now that’s what I call double standards!

28 August 2007 - "Dear Joe…"

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Yesterday, don’t ask me how, I ended up at a metal concert in Virgin Megastore. I didn’t know what was going on when I entered the store but as I stood looking at the wide selection of amazingly misplaced CDs (Bowling For Soup in the metal section, I ask you, how is that possible?), surge after surge of smelly men with beards, pre-pubescent teens sporting Iron Maiden t-shirts and scary suicide girls with an unbelievable amount of piercings, swarmed past me. At first I thought that these bizarre throngs of freaks alternative people had simply been plotting to blow up Manchester or committing mass thievery but as crowd after crowd brushed past me, I decided to look for myself.

I followed them down a staircase where a woman immediately whipped a yellow band on my wrist and I continued down the stairs. I was met by the people who had swept past me, except there were more of them down there, more than one would expect in a music shop anyway. I pushed myself to the front of the hairy mob and saw a stage. Minutes later a woman appeared on the stage and announced that a band named ‘Evile’ were about to do us the honour of playing for us.

When the band climbed on stage, what seemed like only seconds later, the lead singer, hairy and scary, screamed ‘YEEEEEEAH! We are Evile!’ and the band kicked into their first ’song’. Some of the more hardcore members of the crowd started off a circle pit, from which I promptly stepped away.

I listened to the band intently. The music, and when I say music, I mean garbage, was surely a disgrace to the metal, if not to the whole genre of rock. It was at this point that I wondered how it is possible that any Average Joe could pick up a guitar, misuse a few chords and scream out a cheesy line and have people adore him. I find it thoroughly disgusting that some labels will actually sign this crap and inflict such amazingly bad music on the world.

So this blog goes out to you, Joe. Don’t pick up that guitar, don’t start screaming cheese and certainly don’t start listening to Evile!

21 May 2007 - "When I Think Of Him, It Makes Me Sick"

As I may or may not have mentioned before, I went to see a band called Funeral For A Friend on Friday with my friends Lois and Karl.

I’d only heard a few of their older songs as I didn’t like the new album; all the songs are about freakin’ water. Seriously! But they did sing one of my favourite songs, History. I’ve liked that song for ages and it was amazing to hear it sung live. The band made a pretty big deal out of the song. During the chorus the band made the whole audience stick two fingers up in the air to go with the lyrics ‘Raise your fingers for one last sorrow’.

At the start of the concert we were quite close to the front. We couldn’t get in a row so me and Karl stood with Lois in front of us. When the second support band came on, we started pushing Lois into the beefy men in front of her and started off a circle pit (where the crowd clears a circle and runs into each other). These random boys tried pushing Karl into it, so we moved away from the pit; Lois was already long lost. When we found her at the end of the concert her hair was wild and she looked absolutely knackered. She had stayed in the pit all concert and threw up everywhere. The lovely people in the pit carried on pushing her whilst she was vomiting everywhere, how nice!

We’re going to see Hit The Lights in October. They’re an amazing band, so if you haven’t heard them before, they’re worth checking out.

In English, we’ve been designing and writing our own magazine. I made the front cover for it. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out:

Have I missed anything out? Any suggestions? They’re thoroughly welcomed.
More site updates coming soon. Don’t forget to check out the ‘Post a Secret’ and ‘Submit Your Photography’ pages!