Parklife
Russell Brand's venture into politics seems to have been stopped in its tracks by an unexpected source - 'Parklife' - the famous song and video from the 90s by the group Blur in which an tiresome 'blowhard', in the shape of Phil Daniels, is prevented from boring the rest of the world to death with his irritating cod philosophy and views on how to succeed in life.
Now I quite admire Russell Brand's passion, quick wit and humour - all I would say is that he should resist the temptation to go completely bonkers by suggesting that the 9/11 attack on America was anything other than a vile atrocity committed by religious extremists and Islamist terrorists.
The joke’s on him, but I keep my Brand loyalty
By Hugo Rifkind - The Times
The scorning of the comedian who likes to pontificate shouldn’t shut down politics as a subject for satire
Russell Brand has been rudely awakened by the dustmen. Only ten days ago, he was Britain’s foremost messianic political seer, and seemingly unstoppable. Criticisms, bad reviews, outright ridicule and even Evan Davis wielding graphs on Newsnight didn’t so much bounce off him as soak in, only making him stronger, as nuclear weapons did with Godzilla. Abruptly, though, he’s been dealt a mortal blow by a single word. Parklife.
For the slightly old or very young, this may need some explaining. Parklife, you see, is the 1994 song by Blur, which features Phil Daniels, of Quadrophenia fame, saying stuff. “Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as . . .” he begins, sounding, in retrospect, quite incredibly Russell Brand-ish. And suddenly, whenever Brand posts on the internet, or pretty much says anything in that loquacious, Fagin-goes-to-a-spelling-bee manner of his, hordes of people are chorusing “Parklife!” in response. Just like Damon and the boys do with Daniels, in the song.
I think it might have ruined him. Genuinely. How could any orator come back from that? “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world . . . Parklife!” “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they . . . Parklife!” Mahatma Gandhi would be sobbing into his dhoti. Jesus Christ himself might have decided the meek could lump it. In a way, there’s a populist beauty to it. The great hive mind of the internet will always find a way to neutralise an irritant. You might think of it as an oyster, smothering a piece of grit with a pearl.
Why, though, should this hive mind have found Brand an irritant at all? That’s the big question here. Politically savvy, ceaselessly ironic, faintly nihilistic, forever fuming at the closed loop of our politics; these people should be his core. Why the hostility? I suppose a Marxist might see it as an example of false consciousness, with the misled proletariat reinforcing ossified institutional structures that work to their own disadvantage. (Parklife.) But I don’t think so. I think it’s just a mass intolerance for guff.
Controversialist that I am, I’m not particularly anti-Brand. He has his flaws, obviously, and chief among them is the razor-sharp charge that the American columnist Peggy Noonan once levelled at Sarah Palin, that “she wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough”. But Brand is, for all that, quite thoughtful. Many years ago, as an MTV presenter and still a drug addict, he made a documentary about the BNP’s youth wing. It is funny, but clever; charitable in understanding, but unstinting in conviction, too. Look it up on YouTube. It’s brilliant.
Most of all, I approve of the very existence of Brand, because he sets my thoughts a-brewing. Yes, he talks balls, but it is new balls, and not much in this world of ours is new at all. And thus, beautiful as it may be, I worry a bit about this “Parklife!” stuff. Because, what I really hope isn’t going on is that people just saw a jumped-up funnyman and wanted him to get back in his box.
Recently quite a lot of Britain’s comedy world has been clambering out of its box. This fortnight, on the fringes of mirthful light entertainment, and in a manner perhaps too cliquey for most to have noticed, a slightly masturbatory drama has been unfolding. First, a stand-up comedian called Andrew Lawrence wrote a blog in which he noted (not unreasonably) that there was a lazy ubiquity to comedians attacking Ukip on panel shows, but also (unreasonably) hit out at the “ethnic comedians and women-posing-as-comedians” he felt such shows disproportionately feature.
In the mêlée that followed, various other comedians — Frankie Boyle, Stewart Lee, Ava Vidal — wrote newspaper columns in which they defended ridiculing Ukip on the fair basis (I simplify) that it is a party both nasty and ludicrous. Along the way Nigel Farage also wrote a column sort of saying the opposite, but it was only in The Independent and Farage doesn’t get on Mock t he Week, so nobody noticed.
Comedians are clever and funny people (by definition, really) and they tend to write beautifully too. Yet there was a glaring sort of ritualism to all of this. Or, to put it another way, I could not help but notice that for all the wit of their prose (excluding yours, Nigel, sorry) none of the above were really saying anything new. Leaving the box, yes, but not to any great purpose. And, with the spectre of Russell Brand hovering high in my mind, I found myself wondering why not.
They can be vexing, the politics of comedians. If there is a corner of hell where some MPs spend an eternity telling their own jokes at you (and I think I got drunk in it once, at a party conference in Blackpool), then I’ve occasionally wondered if there might not be another one in which some comedians, with no attempt at humour whatsoever, perpetually appear on Question Time.
Certainly there are plenty of fantastic comedians who are first and foremost political animals, crafting their acts to vent the fury within. I often sense, though, that there are others who rather do the opposite. They start with the jokes, and extrapolate the politics backwards. And I think that’s why, when the less thoughtful among them emerge from the box in which comedy normally lives, they can end up sounding so surprisingly priggish. It’s because they’re going hell for leather to justify a world view that they’ve forgotten they adopted only to raise a laugh.
Some might feel that this is an apt description of Russell Brand too, but I’d say not. This is a comedian who has not so much burst from his box as kicked his way into another one. And however much rubbish he spouts, this I can only admire. There are two ways, after all, that you end up with an insular political world that talks only to itself. One is if it lets nobody in. The other is if nobody knocks.
I would rather, I am pretty sure, have a comedy that knew its place less, rather than more; that didn’t just circle and snipe, being against this, or against somebody else who was against that, but which shouted its way into the conversation properly, and risked being laughed at, as well as with. So by all means, is my point, let us shout “Parklife!” at Brand because everything he says is bilge. Except . . . if we’re laughing because he’s the one saying it, then the joke really ought to be on us.
The scorning of the comedian who likes to pontificate shouldn’t shut down politics as a subject for satire
Russell Brand has been rudely awakened by the dustmen. Only ten days ago, he was Britain’s foremost messianic political seer, and seemingly unstoppable. Criticisms, bad reviews, outright ridicule and even Evan Davis wielding graphs on Newsnight didn’t so much bounce off him as soak in, only making him stronger, as nuclear weapons did with Godzilla. Abruptly, though, he’s been dealt a mortal blow by a single word. Parklife.
For the slightly old or very young, this may need some explaining. Parklife, you see, is the 1994 song by Blur, which features Phil Daniels, of Quadrophenia fame, saying stuff. “Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as . . .” he begins, sounding, in retrospect, quite incredibly Russell Brand-ish. And suddenly, whenever Brand posts on the internet, or pretty much says anything in that loquacious, Fagin-goes-to-a-spelling-bee manner of his, hordes of people are chorusing “Parklife!” in response. Just like Damon and the boys do with Daniels, in the song.
I think it might have ruined him. Genuinely. How could any orator come back from that? “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world . . . Parklife!” “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they . . . Parklife!” Mahatma Gandhi would be sobbing into his dhoti. Jesus Christ himself might have decided the meek could lump it. In a way, there’s a populist beauty to it. The great hive mind of the internet will always find a way to neutralise an irritant. You might think of it as an oyster, smothering a piece of grit with a pearl.
Why, though, should this hive mind have found Brand an irritant at all? That’s the big question here. Politically savvy, ceaselessly ironic, faintly nihilistic, forever fuming at the closed loop of our politics; these people should be his core. Why the hostility? I suppose a Marxist might see it as an example of false consciousness, with the misled proletariat reinforcing ossified institutional structures that work to their own disadvantage. (Parklife.) But I don’t think so. I think it’s just a mass intolerance for guff.
Controversialist that I am, I’m not particularly anti-Brand. He has his flaws, obviously, and chief among them is the razor-sharp charge that the American columnist Peggy Noonan once levelled at Sarah Palin, that “she wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough”. But Brand is, for all that, quite thoughtful. Many years ago, as an MTV presenter and still a drug addict, he made a documentary about the BNP’s youth wing. It is funny, but clever; charitable in understanding, but unstinting in conviction, too. Look it up on YouTube. It’s brilliant.
Most of all, I approve of the very existence of Brand, because he sets my thoughts a-brewing. Yes, he talks balls, but it is new balls, and not much in this world of ours is new at all. And thus, beautiful as it may be, I worry a bit about this “Parklife!” stuff. Because, what I really hope isn’t going on is that people just saw a jumped-up funnyman and wanted him to get back in his box.
Recently quite a lot of Britain’s comedy world has been clambering out of its box. This fortnight, on the fringes of mirthful light entertainment, and in a manner perhaps too cliquey for most to have noticed, a slightly masturbatory drama has been unfolding. First, a stand-up comedian called Andrew Lawrence wrote a blog in which he noted (not unreasonably) that there was a lazy ubiquity to comedians attacking Ukip on panel shows, but also (unreasonably) hit out at the “ethnic comedians and women-posing-as-comedians” he felt such shows disproportionately feature.
In the mêlée that followed, various other comedians — Frankie Boyle, Stewart Lee, Ava Vidal — wrote newspaper columns in which they defended ridiculing Ukip on the fair basis (I simplify) that it is a party both nasty and ludicrous. Along the way Nigel Farage also wrote a column sort of saying the opposite, but it was only in The Independent and Farage doesn’t get on Mock t he Week, so nobody noticed.
Comedians are clever and funny people (by definition, really) and they tend to write beautifully too. Yet there was a glaring sort of ritualism to all of this. Or, to put it another way, I could not help but notice that for all the wit of their prose (excluding yours, Nigel, sorry) none of the above were really saying anything new. Leaving the box, yes, but not to any great purpose. And, with the spectre of Russell Brand hovering high in my mind, I found myself wondering why not.
They can be vexing, the politics of comedians. If there is a corner of hell where some MPs spend an eternity telling their own jokes at you (and I think I got drunk in it once, at a party conference in Blackpool), then I’ve occasionally wondered if there might not be another one in which some comedians, with no attempt at humour whatsoever, perpetually appear on Question Time.
Certainly there are plenty of fantastic comedians who are first and foremost political animals, crafting their acts to vent the fury within. I often sense, though, that there are others who rather do the opposite. They start with the jokes, and extrapolate the politics backwards. And I think that’s why, when the less thoughtful among them emerge from the box in which comedy normally lives, they can end up sounding so surprisingly priggish. It’s because they’re going hell for leather to justify a world view that they’ve forgotten they adopted only to raise a laugh.
Some might feel that this is an apt description of Russell Brand too, but I’d say not. This is a comedian who has not so much burst from his box as kicked his way into another one. And however much rubbish he spouts, this I can only admire. There are two ways, after all, that you end up with an insular political world that talks only to itself. One is if it lets nobody in. The other is if nobody knocks.
I would rather, I am pretty sure, have a comedy that knew its place less, rather than more; that didn’t just circle and snipe, being against this, or against somebody else who was against that, but which shouted its way into the conversation properly, and risked being laughed at, as well as with. So by all means, is my point, let us shout “Parklife!” at Brand because everything he says is bilge. Except . . . if we’re laughing because he’s the one saying it, then the joke really ought to be on us.
