ShitBrit

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was going to suggest that there's something uniquely shitbrit about notshit grime chart hits like 'Oi!' In that you couldn't imagine something so budget sounding chartin in the US. But then I remembered Snap music.

But certainly The Streets is one of those critically acclaimed artists that balances on the precipice of being totally shit. (Some will say he IS shit ofc, and probably imminently, on here.)

Compare and contrast the shitness of earnest drippy British indie and the shitness of earnest growly American grungers.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
oh, also, Underworld.

Does anyone actually enjoy them though? I know how to make our takes on house/techno great, put a Welsh Jarvis Cocker on the piss over our records to mumble all over them and take a huge crapola. And people moan about ninj mikey's brother on a helter skelter rave tape!

Mind you, the few occasions they didn't make vocal tracks they were acceptable.
Weirdly I was having a gander at Discogs trying to figure out if I had met* some members of Boys Wonder (of the comedy eyebrows that @blissblogger posted at the top of the thread).

Turns out that one of Boys Wonder was later in Underworld. Another was previously in Haircut 100. And a third was in Crass band Lack of Knowledge. So that is quite a surprising juxtaposition of music scenes maybe. Also a splendid waste of talent.

-----------

*Inconclusive about whether or not I met them. Some people with the same hair came to the opening night of Hackney Anarchy Week in 1996 at Chats Palace. I was on the door. Alternative TV were headlining, which is a group that the Boy Wonder in the Crass band was also in. This was quite a lot later than Boys Wonder were active though? Would they have maintained the haircuts for that long?

Bit of a poignant night for me now. It was a launch event for Rob Dellar's punk fiction anthology, Gobbing Pogoging and Gratuitous Bad Language. He was one of the other organisers of the event. He was blind drunk and writes very kindly about me encouraging him into a taxi in his autobiography Splitting In Two: Mad Pride and Punk Rock Oblivion. Rob died in 2016.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
nd that aesthetic judgements aside, that the music itself is so bleak, all about dealing with shit and trying to be hopeful. very boozy music too. goes well with lager. a lot of kitchen sink lyrics as well. totally anti-abstraction. capturing everyday things and emotions. its a boring conservative musical form but still something to think about.

[

Ah now you've managed to get me interested in this music against all odds! The sentiment of "We'll Live and Die In These Towns" is pretty fucking bleak.

It reminds me of the kitchen sink realist movies of the '60s. And of course Arctic Monkeys take that line from Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night Sunday Morning as their album title - "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not"

You could imagine another group of this type taking the other famous Seaton line - "What I'm out for is a good time - all the rest is propaganda!" - and doing something with it songtitle wise or in a lyric.

That "anti-abstraction" comment is particularly interesting - Mark Fisher would say that it's this inability to move to the level of abstraction (structural analysis) and the staying mired within the concrete and empirical mundane, is precisely why this kind of realism is pre-political.

I have a soft spot for it - and also think, "it's a start, at least"
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
Morbidly fascinated with the grebo bands, proper provincial shitness for people who know they don't deserve any better.
Music you can smell:

Grebo is a rich seam. I have had the misfortune of seeing Gaye Bykers live. And they were probably the stand out entertainment in that whole bunch.

There’s loads of mediocre music and then there’s the vast plain of the middlebrow. To qualify as Shitbrit, I think there has to be this extra level of imposture and fecklessness - a “getting away with it” quality. Can’t be arsed to work up a basic level of competence

So for instance you might hate Underworld or Fatboy Slim - or in a different area Housemartins - or in another area Manic Street Preachers. But there is a basic level of competence in execution. The product, misconceived or appalling for other reasons though it might be, is well made. It functions. (With Manics they shade into Shitbrit on account of the awful lyrics but musically it’s put together, ah, effectively)

So a lot of Madchester or Brit pop is lame or unimaginative or gauche or naff but there is a basic musical solidity that just about passes muster

The High or Mock Turtles or Cast - its failings are not those of execution, it’s on the level of inspiration.

Whereas Sleeper - it fails on the level of execution as well (certainly vocally).
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Inspiration with them ended with the name which is a good one that captured the zeitgeist and has that nice echo of Sex Pistols "flowers in the dustbin" . The records though are piss poor.

I did like "Weekender" - for the theme and the echoes ("Friday on My Mind", Quadrophrenia, etc) and for the short film accompanying it.
Noooo! I loved them so much: thought they were a unique mix of slack-jawed Manc spaceout and technically adept rollicking rock (with guitar solos and piano no less!) Apparently their album was produced too cleanly for their liking and they quit the game in a huff or something.
 

bassbeyondreason

Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
CHERRY RED doc wearing stupid Bronx hat and shorts combo sidewinding Carter shirt over PWEI long-sleeve stripey-tights pony-owning horse raced drippy please hit me Mazola-haired spotty-sack-of-subservience-girlfriend-having invade your local and share your shallowest thoughts play the juke for two hours worth of shit sit there mouthing the lyrics looking at the door trying to blend call brown ale “Newky Brown” drink it out of plastic glasses pissed on two put ‘Glory Box’ on to show how hip you are sit near to me and with every word of your cretinous jabber make me wanna rip your face off vegetarians apart from fish keep the spliff for too long hold it in too short blow it straight out and dribble a duck’s arse all over the roach then giggle for half an hour and fall asleep as it burns off in your hand watching Blue Velvet/Wild At Heart/Blues Brothers/Angel Heart/lost Boys/WITHNAIL AND F***ING I/Rocky Horror Picture Show/Betty Blue/whatever f***ing stude movie that irritates the f*** out of all decent sane people skipping onto the dancefloor for the Poppies lean over into their mates faces and shout the words so everybody knows you know them hug everybody you meet like you haven’t seen them for five years even when they’ve just come back from a piss NME reading MM when you like the cover do the sailor’s hornpipe to The Levellers have a zany “Quotes Board” in your communal kitchen sneer at townies ruin every pub you set foot in for nine months a year phone daddy for an extra grand and fax through your skidmarked shreddies Red Witch drinking talk in cinemas as loud as possible laugh at all the most annoying moments think the people in Dogs In Space are cool and not the wretched sticks of shit they are Dennis Leary Fantasy Football Red Dwarf Newman Baddiel laughing secret Jasper Carrott admiring clog up the aisles in supermarkets individually levelling coffee granules Daddy’s working-class he owns British Steel Louise Wener wanking over Blockbusters theme tune dancing Lamacq/Whiley listening tie chequered shirt round your waist goatee-beard attempting waiting for your balls to drop say pants when annoyed Terry Pratchett reading Vic’n’Bob quoting stupid dense thick crass sottish doltish dumb imbecilic dim idiotic asinine fatuous inane gormless banal snide mindless brainless daft backsliding pig c*** bastard scab insect bitch shiteating monkeyspunk gorging faced arseheaded sweaty ring-pierced f***ing SCUM. Yeah, I’m talking to YOU, MOTHERF***ER!!!

Oh, you’ll love it

 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
CHERRY RED doc wearing stupid Bronx hat and shorts combo sidewinding Carter shirt over PWEI long-sleeve stripey-tights pony-owning horse raced drippy please hit me Mazola-haired spotty-sack-of-subservience-girlfriend-having invade your local and share your shallowest thoughts play the juke for two hours worth of shit sit there mouthing the lyrics looking at the door trying to blend call brown ale “Newky Brown” drink it out of plastic glasses pissed on two put ‘Glory Box’ on to show how hip you are sit near to me and with every word of your cretinous jabber make me wanna rip your face off vegetarians apart from fish keep the spliff for too long hold it in too short blow it straight out and dribble a duck’s arse all over the roach then giggle for half an hour and fall asleep as it burns off in your hand watching Blue Velvet/Wild At Heart/Blues Brothers/Angel Heart/lost Boys/WITHNAIL AND F***ING I/Rocky Horror Picture Show/Betty Blue/whatever f***ing stude movie that irritates the f*** out of all decent sane people skipping onto the dancefloor for the Poppies lean over into their mates faces and shout the words so everybody knows you know them hug everybody you meet like you haven’t seen them for five years even when they’ve just come back from a piss NME reading MM when you like the cover do the sailor’s hornpipe to The Levellers have a zany “Quotes Board” in your communal kitchen sneer at townies ruin every pub you set foot in for nine months a year phone daddy for an extra grand and fax through your skidmarked shreddies Red Witch drinking talk in cinemas as loud as possible laugh at all the most annoying moments think the people in Dogs In Space are cool and not the wretched sticks of shit they are Dennis Leary Fantasy Football Red Dwarf Newman Baddiel laughing secret Jasper Carrott admiring clog up the aisles in supermarkets individually levelling coffee granules Daddy’s working-class he owns British Steel Louise Wener wanking over Blockbusters theme tune dancing Lamacq/Whiley listening tie chequered shirt round your waist goatee-beard attempting waiting for your balls to drop say pants when annoyed Terry Pratchett reading Vic’n’Bob quoting stupid dense thick crass sottish doltish dumb imbecilic dim idiotic asinine fatuous inane gormless banal snide mindless brainless daft backsliding pig c*** bastard scab insect bitch shiteating monkeyspunk gorging faced arseheaded sweaty ring-pierced f***ing SCUM. Yeah, I’m talking to YOU, MOTHERF***ER!!!

Oh, you’ll love it

Lyrics to Born Slippy?
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
"CHERRY RED doc wearing stupid Bronx hat and shorts combo sidewinding Carter shirt over PWEI long-sleeve stripey-tights.... monkeyspunk gorging faced arseheaded sweaty ring-pierced f***ing SCUM. Yeah, I’m talking to YOU, MOTHERF***ER!!! Oh, you’ll love it"

Neil Kulkarni?
 

john eden

male pale and stale

this crops up in the latest edition of the Chart Music podcast (based on a 1990 episode of TOTP). Obviously terrible but it did sound like the most 1990 thing in the whole episode
An eerie inevitability about that cover in retrospect. A last gasp of the Beatles being psychedelic before Oasis and identikit “lads” show up?
 

william_kent

Well-known member
"CHERRY RED doc wearing stupid Bronx hat and shorts combo sidewinding Carter shirt over PWEI long-sleeve stripey-tights.... monkeyspunk gorging faced arseheaded sweaty ring-pierced f***ing SCUM. Yeah, I’m talking to YOU, MOTHERF***ER!!! Oh, you’ll love it"

Neil Kulkarni?

whoever it was, they missed out the fucking bicycle hanging on the flat wall like it was some objet d'art
 
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