More than Mr Nice Guy
The music industry is full of undiscerning people, who are always keen to favour what is new and shiny over true talent. The fact that you can name all four Spice Girls strongly suggests this. Those who refuse to play ball with the marketing machine risk limiting their audience to those who like to seek out music, rather than those who let music find them, via repeated airplay on MTV. However good a band is, if they can't make tabloid headlines, they won't sell out Wembley Arena. Neil Finn, former lead singer with Crowded House, has been forced to accept this....
Features: Oxford at War ?
Suitably inebriated we began a search for a College to hate and attack. Being on the periphery of University territory there were no immediate neighbours to make the focus of lifelong animosity and loathing. Working on the now-disproved theory that College pretentiousness increased the closer you got to Carfax, we eventually came across a suitable target which incidentally, also happened to be one of the nearest. Our decision was cemented through the meeting of a suitably annoying Psychologist and the fact the College bar was full of copies of the FT and served Castlemaine XXXX. It was of course Freshers' week, and looking back, why we engaged in such dubious activity is unclear except for the fact that College rivalry is as much a part of Oxford University life as Sub-Fusc, and slagging off the tradiotional rival College as much a part of being a Fresher as matriculation....
Features: Got to be so Macho
For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has not, to say the things he truly feels..." sang the recently deceased Frank Sinatra in his "sing pissed" hit My Way. In among these cliched folds of Americanese is a rather strange little truth, yet one so few blokes realise. A man has very little, if he hasn't a clue about himself. Yet despite what all the best women's magazines say, most blokes don't have much of a clue or interest in what's actually going on in their heads. Unlike the female method of getting in touch with their sexuality, the male method is much more of a hands on task. But still we see this increasingly dull trend towards the Blairoid man: sensitive, thoughtful, in touch with himself and a touch camp with everyone else. The greatest attribute any man needs to become a male model is to look like a woman. It's cool to be camp, moronic and prehistoric to show a soupcon of machismo. And all this new pseudo-psychological home counselling, has this helped the aggressive male ego, the potentially violent jealousy streaks and the animal tension that exists between two men in any one room? Nah, not really; it's just moved the goal posts. A bloke is a bloke, even if he knows he should behave more maturely (ie as a woman does). The problem is not that a man does not know himself. It's that blokes are easily threatened. A bloke is the male human animal. In order to keep his territory, he has to mark it out with any bloke he meets, fighting off any intruders, even if unlike the cat, he doesn't spray it with hormone-enriched urine....