I'm (not) worth a million in prizes...

Brrr, it's awfy cold in here. Jeepers, posts on this blog are as rare as Accies home wins versus Hibs. Oh, guess that's my cue, then...

Watched the Mercury Music Prize coverage on Beeb Two last week. Not a great selection this year, it has to be said. Or any other bloody year for that matter. Still, I do like that La Roux elpee - it has taken a bit of a caning for being a putative reprise of yon early eighties synthtastic business such as Yazoo and the Human League but it sounds to the big man here much more like the classic burbly, bleepy, beauty of Yamaha AY-8192 8-bit chip music goodness as made by the sainted Follin, Whittaker and Jochen Hippo Hippel...

Anyways, I digress. I hate the fucking Mercury Music Prize. What offends me here about that, the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys and any other cringe-making, toe-curling luvvie jolly up is the notion of snooty wanker powered, panel-based prize giving in general. I don't mean the kind of thing for sportsmen, or folk who have earned a direct reward for some quantifiable achievement like winning a grand prix or the British Open or the friggin' Derby or summat. No, what I mean is the back-slapping horseshit served up by judging panels of industry "experts" who get to tell us what we should think about who was the best director, what was the best movie, what was the best album and who has the nicest tits. (shurely shome mishtake - ed)

Who the fuck are these people ? And what gives them the brass balls to think that they have any more insight into the picking of random winners in arbitrary categories than the great unwashed who actually buy (erm...) all the shit ? It wouldn't be quite as bad if the winning selection was based on straight, unbiased opinion. The reality is that practically every award in popular culture is pre-filtered through an ugly stew of favouritism, trend pandering, and a billion sundry hidden agendas...

The choice of Mercury winner this year was emblematic, a heady cocktail of insipid, coffee table hip-hop destined to soundtrack a million white, thirty-something, middle class lives for one year only until consigned to the landfill with all the previous year's detritus. Nae harm to the lassie herself, mind, it's not her fault, it's the corporate suits deciding that it's her turn to get the golden finger (erm...) while the rest get the shaft. Bah, ball-less, soulless, suckers of Satan's cock each and every last fucking one of them.

Anyhoo, here's some "nice" music that won't be winning any Mercury Music prize this or any other year. Yes, I know it sounds like a scalded cat lurching violently across a hideously scratched BBC Radiophonic Workshop elpee, but I like that kind of thing, alright ?