Features

Magnetic Man, The Vaccines, Swedish House Mafia, Tinie Tempah, Everything Everything - Guitar Music? No Fucking Way!

Alex Yau 21/02/2011

So if you've been looking at your TV screens lately, you'll have noticed an advert for BBC Radio One, which creates a virtual dystopia where floods of purple plague our eye sockets like a 1984 dystopian version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

A digital Zane Lowe (as if a real one wasn't enough) is our tyrannous overseer forcing packages of musical snacks into masses of cake holes like no tomorrow, and what is the soundtrack to this novel masterpiece? It is Nero, the equivalent of Jedward attempting to recreate the Prodigy. This might as well be our future as this highlights what BBC Radio One's music agenda is.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for electronic music but when it gets shoved down your brain as much as a prisoner being bombarded with screens playing Kerry Katona Iceland adverts in attempt to institutionally correct him, it does get a bit tedious. It seems that what they love playing mid evenings include: A) Swedish House Mafia's One, ironically being the only one track that every casual listener seems to know, where after hearing it so many times in a club, you want to lure it to a toll booth and bombard it with bullets. B) Magnetic Man >who seem to be dubstep's very own version of Stock, Aitken and Waterman or C) Dubstep, dubstep and dubstep, which (as you probably know already) contains all the intense shattering bass qualities of a pogo stick.

If you think the night slots are bad, just wait till you get a load of the daytime slots. It's a world filled with the Black Eyed Peas, David Guetta and Tinie Tempah. It's a world with fake tan, Paris Hilton sipping cocktails besides you on an island whilst David Gray is the DJ. Sounds fucking terrible right?

This isn't a distance away from our own world though. Take a look at the BBC's top 40 single chart and there isn't even a single guitar band there. Sure there's Noah and the Whale but do they really constitute what a guitar band? If this chart is what someone on suicide watch sees as their world, then pass me that noose.

But what comes as more of a shock, is the title given to The Vaccines by the BBC. What's that? It's that they're the band to “revive guitar music.” Have I been living under a rock? Is my name really Alejandro and have I been stuck in a mine starving of oxygen? Because I didn't really know guitar music disappeared in the first place.

Perhaps they're right? Maybe guitar music is dead. I attended the recent NME tour in Manchester and it's safe to say that the biggest crowd was not for the Vaccines or Everything Everything. It was for Magnetic Man. It was a crowd of swarming shirtless pre teen drunk from too much WKD who weirdly and irritatingly enough, sounded like the voices of Jedward, amplified by a thousand times as a ruthless dictator forces you to listen to them.

We perhaps won't see an upsurge of guitar music on the BBC anytime soon which is a shame. They have admitted that they won't be placing the limelight on guitar music for some time now. They're the quivering country afraid of Wikileaks, and if you piss them off, be prepared to face a shit load of rape allegations.