Excuse Me Sir, Is this Your Child...?

Actually, no. That child has no legal parent / guardian. That child belongs to no one and is born of no one. It is the child that has witnessed the rise and fall of nations and empires, all the while calculating with mechanical precision its triumphant return. You don’t even know what you’re dealing with do you? That is no ordinary child. It’s the BACK IN BUSINESS BABY!

That’s right, after months and months of sheer negligence, I’ve realised that sooner or later social services are going to be on my back wanting to know why my bloggish brainchild is wriggling around on the floor in a pile of its own shit, smoking thirty a day and living off bits of peanut it’s picked out of the carpet. My only excuse is that babies are quite hard work and I’m quite a lazy person.

For those of you reaching for the phone in self-important outrage, calm down and read the last paragraph again. Done? That’s right, I was talking about my creative output, silly. I don’t have any children. Not living ones anyway. Just bloggish ones!

All in all, I’m feeling bigger, better and more hygienic than ever. You probably don’t care about the last bit too much, on account of you being tucked safely behind that glass screen that is my prison. Once I get out though, those initial reactions of ‘What the hell just dragged itself kicking and screaming from the monitor in a slurry of broken glass???’ will be counterbalanced by the realisation that ‘That is a fine smelling aftershave.’ Unfortunately that just makes the process all the more painful.

Digression aside for the moment, I’d like to announce my final descent into mainstream music. I’ve held out for a long time, locking myself in R&B-proof rooms, humming rock ballads to myself over and over again until my hair turns black and I start naturally sprouting nose-rings. It’s about as much good as thinking about dry land in an attempt to escape a sinking ship. Wishful thinking doesn’t work. Especially not when every radio station is pumping saltwater into your veins on a twenty-four hour basis. Resistance is futile. You might as well just give up and hope that the boat hasn’t gone down next to a sewage pipe or a nuclear waste dump. Or 50 Cent.

To cut a long story short I’ve been listening to B.O.B. To cut a long story short but be a bit more specific, I’ve been listening to Airplanes (or Aeroplanes if we’re being pedantic) with Paramore’s Haley Williams. It’s one of those songs that gets played continuously for a couple of weeks before being forcibly erased from public consciousness like a drunken night out you’d rather not remember. During those couple of weeks, lots and lots of people became very depressed. Relationships failed, businesses crashed headlong into the earth, and a small child found out that Santa isn’t real. (That’s right brats, he’s really called St. Nicholas!) It was all the bad feeling of a unwanted erection and an uncomfortably hot day mixed into one. Of course it could be a coincidence. It could be that Haley Williams is perfectly innocent and genuinely isn’t trying to take over the world by turning all radio listeners into glum blobs of disinterested paste. Or it could be... she is!

Let’s think about it for a second. The song revolves around a single image of a person desperately wishing for something, later revealed as a desire to return to more innocent and complete state of being. Back before things sucked. Except she can’t wish for any of this because in order to do so she needs some sort of rare atmospheric phenomenon (already a dubious object of faith) and there aren’t any going on at the moment so she’s going to have to kid herself into thinking that a Boeing 747 can do the same job. First off though, she’s got to ask permission from some unseen dictator of what can and can’t be wished upon. She could be talking to Bobby Ray. Hell, she could even be asking you, the listener! What are you going to do? Let Haley Williams delude herself into thinking she can return to some idyllic life of wanton bliss, back before she actually had to work for her piles and piles of money? Then what, you’re going to watch as the dream fails to manifest itself, gradually replaced by the realisation that all those ‘better times’ never really happened? Watch as the days turn into months and the months turn into years and she realises in one cold moment that she’s wasted her life away chasing a unachievable fantasy? Are you? No, you’re not. You’re going to turn around and say: ‘You can’t wish on that plane. It doesn’t even look like a shooting star. It looks like a plane.’

In all, the song is bursting at the seams with nostalgia, even as it exposes the feeling as inherently fallacious. Airplanes Part Two even features Eminem reminding everyone that you can’t achieve success by crossing your fingers and waiting for a miracle. Apparently you’ve just got to take a few risks and be completely fucked up to begin with. Sound advice if ever there was some. But who is Eminem to criticise childhood nostalgia when he’s responsible for half of that nostalgia in the first place? All that’s missing is a cameo from Buzz Lightyear and we’ll have anyone under the age of twenty-five in tears. The lyrics will just be ‘YOUR CHILDHOOD IS A LIE AND IT ISN’T COMING BACK,’ over and over again.

So really it isn’t any wonder that everyone was so depressed when the song first got so big. Thankfully there was an upside. Nostalgia gets old pretty quickly and once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can get nostalgic about just about anything except being nostalgic, which is probably why the song’s popularity dropped substantially and nobody really cared.

See y’all next week.