Indeed and jobs as salvation

That Indeed advert. 

The portrayal of jobseekers as lost and desperate, the choral faux-gospel music saying "rise up", the woman crying in stunned disbelief that she was finally accepted at some miserable hellhole job that almost definitely doesn't deserve her or her skills and will only serve to keep her fed and warm until she can claw her way out of that pit and into a new one---it all communicates one thing. Work as salvation. Not just work. Acceptance by a corporate gatekeeper. Definitely corporate, because no one gets a job down the road from Indeed. Indeed is jobs at desks or jobs that pretend they're at desks but are actually at cashiers. Hoping that some recruitment HR doofus will decide you're dynamic enough to work there, when we (millennials) know that anyone can do anything at an Indeed-desk-job if they know how to google. 

Getting Away With It

 Why is Ed Sheeran so big?

I hate to come off like one of those people who pay attention to lyrics like they're the most important thing in a song, or that Rihanna's Work is insipid due to it's repeated use of the title. It's not. It is a song for dancing to. The lyrics fulfil the purpose. A frequent victim of men-who-like-lyrics is Beyoncé's Run The World, which again, fulfils it's purpose. By the end of the song, you know who runs the world. 

Now let's look at Ed. Why are Ed Sheeran's lyrics so crap? 

Why do they say she's in the Class A team? Because she does class A drugs. Duh. But what does that mean? Does she frequently pity the fool that tries to stop her using drugs? Is she a master of disguise? Is she a hardened veteran? What has the A Team element, a crack squad of vigilantes, got to do with it at all? She might as well be a Class A Road, on a one way trip to an early death, or a Class AC, because aircon is cold and meth is also called ice. Apparently. 

Perhaps wisely, Ed never elaborates on the title line. Maybe it's just something stupid his peer group said and therefore he's only reporting it. It's not his fault a bunch of teenagers are idiots with crap wordplay. 

So, then, who is to blame for Lego House? He says he'll pick up the pieces and build a Lego house and then they can knock it down again. Leaving aside that he is singing about a fragile relationship prone to implosion and that the use of sturdy, robust and colourful Lego is not the best metaphor, he again is not arsed about elaborating on it. He has his title line, and that's enough. Job done. The rest of the song has lyrics interchangeable with any of his others about broken relationships. Not even a mention at the end that his Lego house is now standing strong without her. Not even that! It's half a thought. Not even a last verse from her point of view. Perhaps he's unable to imagine such a thing. 

This might seem unfair, picking on two of his older songs, so, fine, how about his latest? Visiting Hours. Again, we have our title line, and little else. I get it -- someone has died and he'd like to speak to them again. That's it. There's nothing further. You could compare that to Tears In Heaven, which is not only the same concept but already took it further; would the deceased even remember me? What use is an afterlife if the people you live don't even know you when you get there? Visiting Hours, on the other hand, is a mere postcard, a Facebook comment, from the living to the dead. That's it. Not even "visiting hours wouldn't be enough". Not even "I hope my loved ones can visit me when I am dead, too", not even a rumination on what happens if the living keep aging and growing but the deceased stays the same. Nothing. Just "lots has changed, mate." 

This would all be forgivable if the melody was any cop, but it's not. The opening lines are soulfully warbled, as if still searching for the hook, and the chorus rises and falls almost exactly like Candle in the Wind's mid-chorus, followed by some attempts at interest with a chromatic melody line, before having a go at a Ryan Adam's style linger at the end. It's ultimately a half finished Sam Smith song, a lesser Tom Odell work, even weaker than a subpar toss-off by James Bay. 

All three of them must be utterly baffled by his continued dominance and nearly billion quid in the bank. I don't fault anyone for liking this stuff but if Lewis Capaldi isn't a billionaire in a decades time then I'll have to believe the whole thing is rigged. 

It's extraordinary the level of laziness he gets away with, when even the first Taylor Swift album has both melodic pop songs and lyrics that offer something to the listener. She was about 17 then. Her first album written entirely by herself, Speak Now, has the staggering Dear John, a song Ed could never write on a billion years. Even a simple song like Mine is more sophisticated than anything he's ever written, purely because the last chorus is sung from the boyfriends point of view, confirming her feelings that she has expressed through the rest of the song. Ed would just repeat the same chorus, if he has one. Visiting Hours proves that sometimes he doesn't even have that.

The only time I can forgive his lyrics are in his dance songs. Sing, and now Bad Habits, both offer more than his ballads. Maybe he should try writing a Beyoncé song. 

The definitive artistic statement of 2021

You can hear it when the chorus hits.

It’s not often that you can hear a singer smiling while singing, but you can hear it in the "Taylor’s Version" of Love Story. The song has come home.

For those not on the frontline, 2020 was largely about turning inward. That could be reassessing what’s important (“why am I commuting two hours a day just to use my laptop in a different building?”), or reassessing what’s not important (“trousers”).

For Taylor Swift, country megastar and planet-eating pop-Galactus, it was to pursue a new musical direction while simultaneously dragging her beginnings into the future with her. It was about navel-gazing to the point of releasing two albums within six months of each other. New year, new pandemic, new you -- she used the time to release something that reflected where she was now musically, a break with the previous pure pop of 2019’s Lover. 

This might, then, seem like a weird time to release your first albums all over again. Most artists would look at their beginnings, especially if they’ve moved entirely out of the genre they started in, with a sense of cringe. But not Swift. She chose to wrap both ends of her career inside a big cardigan and pull them together like the siblings they are.

She chose to record the definitive artistic statement of 2021.

The audacity of following through with it, based purely on principle and 'fuck you'. What once seemed an impossible Goliath to defeat is now slain, like returning to your hometown with superpowers and showing everyone who's boss. The decision to keep the same players as the original. The decision to ever so-slightly turn up the country elements, but otherwise leave it the same.

It's not a remake, it's the song, again, a twin, free from the clutches of an evil money-grubbing bastard. You can hear that in her voice as the chorus takes off, flying away from the grasping claws of Scooter Braun and whichever private equity scumbag he's sold her masters to now. It's off, up, and away, out of here, into its rightful place with its writer and creator and the band playing on it. It's free.

The song feels light under their fingers. A decade of playing it has made it second nature, but the act of re-recording it has awakened that killer instinct, powering home a version of the song like a seasoned pro showing you how it's done. It's muscular, lean, light, forceful, match-fit.

She clearly doesn’t need the money. Both 2020 releases went to number one and sold a million copies each. Her house has a Wikipedia page. And besides -- the royalties would continue to flow in regardless of which faceless private equity firm owned the masters. 

This was about something else, something more important than money. It was about control, about the self, about what you're willing to put with.

This was about bringing something back to where it rightfully belonged, taking something sullied by business and making it pure again.

Bringing it home, again.

Non-Explodey

Jeff Bezos's trip to space has generated a surprising amount of pieces on his safety or lack thereof whilst journeying to the stars. As if space travel is dangerous.

It'll be fine, though, right? 

Take the first fact of this little adventure. A billionaire, going into space. Rich men trying to defy God is a pretty common thread for disaster films, but space travel is no longer seen by God as much of a slight (since we've done it a bit and there hasn't been at least a directly identifiable line of smiting). So this one is fine. It's not like, I dunno, Icarus, or anything. 

Secondly, the name of the ship is New Shepherd. Sounds good, normal, non-explodey. 

His brother is going with him. Which makes it extra safe. Like JFK Jr and Carolyn taking Lauren along for a light aircraft flight. 

Fourthly, and perhaps the most un-worrying of all, is the inclusion of an auction winner in the crew. The chance of a lifetime! Literally?

And then, to cap off how perfectly safe and smooth this will all be: the presence of Wally Funk, a trained astronaut who never got the chance to go into space, but finally will at the narratively handy age of 83. 

If anything, this crew is made up of such unremarkable people that I can't even imagine how the biopic will play out. Who would they even focus on? The billionaire who climbed too high? The mysterious auction winner who turned out to be evil? The hapless, Billy Carter-esque brother? The 83 year old Space Cowboy?

The answer: none of them. Because this trip is so boring and safe and absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. 

Isles of wonder

 I remember watching it go out live.

We had planned to move but this cemented it. It was like a ripcord being pulled. 

I remember my wife, then girlfriend, crying, as we watched it at some ungodly hour. 

I can't remember which bit finished her off. Was it the NHS beds? Kenneth Branagh watching the satanic mills shoot up out of the countryside? James Bond?

It all sounds a bit silly on paper, but even now it moves me to tears. Even the BBCs opening bit, flying down the Thames, is magic.

It's a sincere outpouring of love for a country. 

A beacon.

I might go watch it now.

A distant ship

 You ever hear a lyric that sounds like a whole world?

"A distant ship smoke on the horizon".

It sort of comes out of nowhere in Comfortably Numb. There's no other mention of ships, horizons, seafaring. Maybe it links to the "waves" in the next line -- It's purely a metaphor for some trouble or pain now being distant and no longer relevant except for it very slowly washing up on your shores -- but I also love the way it causes a mental image to flash in front of your eyes.

There is no pain, you are receding. Ok. More medical stuff. And then -- a distant ship smoke on the horizon. Look. You can see it, right now, a little ship, way off, barely perceptible, with a small plume of black smoke drifting away from it into the darkening blue skies above an impossibly huge, a comfortingly huge, ocean. It bobs around on the currents, detached from whatever turmoil is going on back on land. 

I sometimes wonder if it's referring to a painting the protagonist saw in a doctors office as a child. After the waves line he leads into a half-remembered memory of an illness as a child. A fever. A fleeting glimpse. The painting burning into his memory forever through the formative and traumatic trip to the emergency room. 

You can imagine that image, the painting, the ship, returning to his fevered mind as an adult. He lies back and goes into a Proustian stupor, instead of a biscuit (was there more to Proust than the biscuit?) it's the numbness of narcotics. They, obviously remind him of being an ill child (or just a child, The Wall seems to be entirely about adults dealing with childhood trauma), and that's where the painting of the calm, soothing ship appears in his mind and he slips back into the haze.

Instructions

 I can't read instructions. 

I don't mean I can't read them. I understand what the words mean. I can make out the letters. 

It's just when I try to act on them, comprehend them, I somehow mess it all up. It's not a "I can't do anything right!" kind of thing either. I just go into a sort of blindspot situation. 

I tear into packaging all wrong. I once opened an M&S sandwich from the side and wiggled it out sideways. I can open cereal boxes but the little freshness tab at the top is a luxury I have yet to experience, with mine forever a torn up mess.

 I remember when I first learnt to drive I'd see signs with "Shoulder Closed" appearing in the distance and I'd panic. Shoulder closed! Oh no! And I'd grip the wheel and look around and keep driving and then the sign would disappear and I'd wipe my brow, phew, managed to slip myself out of that tight spot. Years later I discovered the sign was simply telling me I could not pull over here. 

The first time I did a home Covid test, I read the instructions about ten times -- and still fucked it up. The more logical I try to be, the more of Occam's razor I try to apply, the more likely I am to completely misunderstand an instruction and do something completely insane instead. 

Ironically, I have a graduate diploma in instructions. Technical writing, it's called. I studied instructions for a year. I had to critique bad ones, and later on, write my own. I have no idea how I passed this. 

What's even more ironic is that I did it before I finished my undergraduate degree. I thought I'd finished it, but once I completed the diploma I discovered I had another year to go. I had, simply, not done the electives. I had elected not to do them.

And so, in a neat little circle, we come back to my inability to read instructions. I'm just man who might be still in the middle of higher education, opening sandwiches from the wrong end, worried about closed shoulders that he didn't need to use anyway.