This Is This

Reader’s voice: “You know, I like him better when he’s funny.”

I have this friend (female, mid-fifties, you know the type) who doesn’t like John Major. She looks down on him and thinks he’s generally what she calls “not a good sort”.

This isn’t because he was the Chancellor who gave us the Poll Tax, or the Prime Minister who took us into a costly war with Operation Desert Storm. She doesn’t like him because he had an affair.

Now affairs are bad. I have friends I no longer speak to partly because they have had affairs, but this is because I rate my friends as people and I hold a mean grudge. John Major, however, is a public figure so his indescretions have nothing to do with my opinion of his work running the country. Even if I had any views, they wouldn’t matter a lot to him.

I asked a friend who also went to Live8 who he thought the best bands were. I said I was blown away by The Who, but he wrote them off on account of Pete Townsend downloading something I can’t write here because the searches I get are wierd enough already.

It’s bollocks though. Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall is a great album. What? It is. It’s the first album I ever bought. So what if he sleeps in a glove and wears a diamond-encrusted monkey on his oxygen tent? That’s a great fucking album. But there are people that don’t like his body of work because they don’t like the work of his body. Allegedly.

Whatever did or didn’t happen didn’t even indirectly influence the album. Why shouldn’t you appreciate someone’s work or achievements when not everything they have done outside of their field has been above board?

Sure, if Osama Bin Laden was making great bluegrass records in his cave, I’d probably choose not buy them (although the reverb on the banjo would be interesting, cause they can sound a tad dry), but that’s because he’d be getting my money, which is different. But would my opinions of the work be changed if he and the Opium Hill Heroins belted out a great version of Foggy Mountain Breakdown? Not a jot. I hear he also builds good roads.

A friend of mine doesn’t like Wagner because Hitler loved the stuff. Another friend doesn’t like Newcastle United because they have those fans who paint stripes on their bellies and take their shirts off when it snows.

Where does it end?

It’s like saying: “The Beatles?! Pah! They made that Sergeant Pepper’s which was influenced by Pet Sounds, the result of Dennis Wilson’s fascination, some might say obsession, with the Wall of Sound production style created by Phil Spector, who was arrested on suspicion of shooting a lady in his house. Don’t talk to me about Paul McsoddingCartney.”

or

Me: “We’re taking the kids to Spain next summer.”

Know It All: “Really? Well. Let me tell you a little something about Mr Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of your precious jet engine. He tried to ban hot drinks throughout Europe. In the 1950’s he saw them as a threat to the productivity of this great nation. Think about that next time you’re sipping coffee at 35,000 feet. That’s why I drive everywhere, because he was such a sicko.”

Get a life. It’s not just for Christmas.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 9:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.