Vampire Friday

Last night for the sake of doing something new and different I spent Friday night sitting at home watching telly with the aul pair. Well not really. I sat in the room while they watched telly and made use of the ample bandwidth to download stuff while occasionally raising my head to pour scorn over the cast of Coronation street or Pat Kenny. Unfortunately in my own house out in Inverin we still don't have the internet as we have only been in communication with Eircom for about a month or so and common sense when dealing with obstacles isn't exactly their forte.

We also only have two stationsin my own house, RTE 1 and 2. This is quite strange as we are only a few kilometres from TG4, but for some reason we can't pick it up, however I generally reckon we have two stations too many. My parents on the other hand have satellite television and hundreds of stations but mostly just watch the Irish terrestrial stations. So while they were catching up on the goings on in Emmerdale and Coronation street I decided to get a bit hip and download some contemporary music. I first downloaded the Fleet Foxes, which is probably the best Neil Young album I've ever heard that isn't actually a Neil Young album. I then decided to get to the bottom of the whole Vampire weekend thing. You see I have had a bader meinhof phenomenon with Vampire weekend for a while now. In case you don't know what a bader meinhof phenomenon is, it doesn't have anything to do with the Red Army Faction but is when you hear of something for the first time and hear about it repeatedly afterwards. A classic example of the bader meinhof phenomenon is the bader meinhof phenomenon, until I heard the name for it I hadn't realised it existed, now I go through at least one a week.

I first heard of Vampire Weekend (although I had heard a couple of the tunes before) in a terrible free music magazine called Analogue, which I found on Fiona's kitchen table, although she didn't know whose it was. Analogue is home of some of the worst writing I have ever had the misfortune to read and mostly consists of pretentious wankers writing about pretentious wankers. You know the sort of article where writers gush over a boring indie band that has only been around for six months and attempt to sing their praises whole sounding intellectual? It is full of those articles. Well anyhow in reading this article I found out that they were a bunch of well off white boys who went to Columbia University and made music which, apparently, was influenced by African music. Some people were giving them a lot of stick for this and accusing them of exploiting Africa and being contrived and so on and so forth. Next I heard that Peter Gabriel was to cover one of their songs as he was mentioned in it and was to collaborate with Hot Chip on this project. Then I went to see The Wrestler (which is a fucking amazing film and everybody should go see it) and in it Randy's daughter had a Vampire Weekend poster up on her wall. So what the hell, I downloaded the album.

I won't say I was disappointed, it's actually quite a good album, but it isn't at all fucking African! What is all this hype about them exploiting African music about? It was a comparable experience to when I was sixteen and heard about an evil satanic band called Marilyn Manson that would get anybody who listened to them damned to hell. I went out and bought the album and my hands trembled as I placed it in the CD player. I suspected that I was about to sell my soul to Satan in exchange for hearing the most rocking album ever. By the end of the first song I had come to a realisation, 'This is shit! This isn't worth going to hell for! It's not even that evil!' So Vampire Weekend are to African Music what Marilyn Manson are to Satan, no fucking relation or at best very distant cousins. I can sort of see how some of it could be regarded as African influenced, but no more so than Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel and they were doing this shit twenty years ago. It is an Indie rock band who own one or two compilations of 'World' music and harp on about it interviews to seem cooler than they actually are. In fact they probably created all this controversy themselves in order to sell more records. Well tough shit to them because I illegally downloaded their album. Although I think it is a decent enough album but I haven't listened to it much yet.

However on the whole Vampire Weekend/The Wrestler connection there is more than meets the eye. In doing a little research on them I found that the founder of a website called stuffwhitepeoplelike.com called them 'the whitest band'. I checked out the website and was in knots. It pretty much just satirizes middle class, liberal, white Americans but does it in a very witty way. White people it seems like Hummus, frisbee games, facebook and amongst others, pea coats. In The Wrestler Randy buys his daughter a pea coat (which his stripper friend helps him pick) so I guess she is one of those particular breed of white people that stuffwhitepeoplelike.com targets, I am also assuming that the people parodied and the people reading the website are one and the same group of people.

Having felt I had spent enough time getting in touch with things I wasn't familiar with I decided to have a look and see if I could get my hands on the first episode of the second series of Flight of the Conchords, it just aired last week in the US. Low and behold there it was on mininova. I downloaded and watched it and what can I say, the lads have done it again. Absolute fucking genius. I had to be honest been a little worried that the second series wouldn't be on a par with the first but it easily matches it and in points even surpasses it. Bizarrely enough the first song is an operatic number sung by Murray. It seems that while the characters of Brett and Germaine in the series are as poor as ever, in real life the lads have managed to secure a bigger budget for this series. I am positively salivating a the thought of the next eleven episodes.

I pulled my headphones out of the laptop as the show ended just in time to see David Bellamy come on to the Late Late Show. Bet you haven't heard of him in a while? Not seen on our screens since the mid nineties it seems that David B is now a denier of climate change, which nowadays is sort of on a par with being a holocaust denier in terms of what it will do for your public image. He claims to be one of thirty four thousand scientists who now believe that the whole thing is nothing more than a scam that has been used as a way of increasing taxes. Some things he said I do agree with. Climate change is being used as a way of increasing taxes and selling carbon credits is on a par with the indulgences charged by the church in the middle ages. But there was a lot of what he said that I found hard to swallow. He claims to be a victim of a conspiracy that chased him off the airwaves because of his views on climate change. However he was last employed by the BBC in 1994 but he only began denying climate change in 2004, in the Daily Mail of all places. Before that he had been vocal in his views on the damage carbon emissions were doing.

He had however stood in the 1997 British general elections on behalf of the Referendum Party, a fringe party and this had done tremendous damage to his career. For years he had been saying it was this action which had got him booted off the telly (despite the fact he hadn't been with the BBC for three years before the election). He went on to write other articles about climate change using figures which were proved to be false. When he was fired from the boards of two charities he had been involved with for years he then attempted to withdraw his claims but when this failed to have him reinstated he went back to denying that mankind were having an effect on the climate. It seems that David Bellamy is to Botany what David Icke is to snooker. Pat Kenny however failed to raise any of these points with Bellamy and indeed failed to ask him any probing questions of any sort. It was an absolute disgrace. Five minutes of googling would have revealed all sorts of holes in Bellamy's claims but nobody it seems bothered to do even the most minuscule amount of research. RTE it seems fucked up in fine style yet again. Here's an idea, fire Pat Kenny and hire twenty competent people instead of one dull, conservative stick wearing make up who gets paid nearly a million Euro a year.