Login / RegisterDear Payback Time...
You make the music section replace Katie Holmes as Tom Cruise's beard, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt and two CDs off the Straight's Top 50. Here's this week's winning whinge.
Dear Payback Time: We think Adrian Mack's review of Keane was as complacent as he accused the band's music of being. He thought he'd sound terribly clever if he threw around 10-cent phrases like "anodyne, BMW rock" to compensate for his thinly veiled contempt for the music this band plays. Disrespectfully, Mack said the concert highlights included the lead singer's shirt coming untucked and the drummer "twatting" himself in the head with a drumstick. Tom Chaplin is more than a "note-perfect" singer-it's his fucking incredible voice that evokes the collective swooning Mack so perfectly described. We surmised that it must be quite challenging to hear anything other than the beat of 4/4 time when Mack's head is implanted so far up his cornhole. We wondered if perhaps he's a tad jealous that Keane will be getting way more "twatting" than he will see in his lifetime. And by the way, that was some very hot British pudding up there on the stage that night-the kind so stiff you could stick a spoon upright in it.
Adrian Mack replies: Dear Andre and Cheryl-It took two of you to write this, then you criticize me for my "perfectly described" appraisal of Keane's music. Um... Thank you? That aside, the opportunity to pull my head out of my cornhole has long passed. I can barely remember the night, but your complaints have touched me and here's what I propose: in the future, I will no longer pull my punches when I'm required to sit through a concert that reflects the implacable erosion of popular music by market forces and the calculated celebration of a band that-oh, my memory seems to be coming back-was embarrassed and conciliatory about its own lack of material. If it pleases you, I'll drop the "thinly veiled contempt" in favour of the payload of hatred I'm really busting to unleash on horseshit such as Keane. As for a relative dearth of twattage in my life, trust me, your letter contained enough twattage to keep me going for a long time, while your weird desire to stick an upright spoon into Tom Chaplin is something you should really keep to yourselves.
Andre and Cheryl continue the crap-splatteringly ignorant tradition of refusing to let us know which two CDs they'd like. You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by sending an e-mail to payback@straight.com.
