Regular readers will know I’m no fan of Damien Rice. I find his songs to be twee and tedious and tuneless. His mournful acoustic twaddlings irritate the life out me but I realised that instead of obsessing and fictionalising his untimely death, I would be best served by simply not listening to the cunt.
Avoidance is a good thing, yet this very morning who am I faced with in my Irish Times? Only this man waffling about the state of the country. I’m not quite sure how to sum up the article. I would suggest that if you took his very worst song, reproduced it on a casiotone keyboard, with 41 Damien Rice voices harmonising it Enya style, with a drum track by Phil Collins and a comedy rap over the top by David ‘Wikivandal’ McSavage, it wouldn’t even come close to how shit it is.
Some example:
When I walk around Dublin, I can’t help but think that at least when the English conquered us they built some decent houses.
Good old Barratt’s Homes. Thankfully back in the day they were Georgian and Victorian and not redbricked semi-Ds with egg-shell thin walls. I mean, seriously.
My greatest surprise, when visiting the refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border, was …
*vomit*
Did I mention I do lot of great work for charidee mate, but don’t like to talk about it? And then this:
In politics, we get stuck on old-fashioned male-dominated habits and could benefit greatly by including female qualities into our approach. Mothers represent nurturing and patience and I’d like to see more of this in politics and in all aspects of Irish life.
Surely in an enlightened society there is no such thing as male and female qualities, just human ones? It’s just mothers that represent nurturing and patience, is it? That’s news to me.
Here we are in 2010, in the midst of what is being called a “recession”.
Erm, it’s being called that because that it was it is. ‘Here we are driving along the road in what is being called a “car”‘.
He makes some suggestions about how we can make things better. They’re the usual ones from a drippy hippy point of view. Let’s focus on green energy and undo our reliance on oil. Sounds good, but if it was that fucking simple wouldn’t everyone be doing it by now? Then you read about research in the Guardian which confirms what I’ve long suspected, that the Greeners are so smug about their own greenosity they’ll cheat and steal more than normal people. I bet Damien Rice cheats at video games too. Like if his mate is coming around for a Pro Evo Soccer tournament he’ll edit all his players to give them 99 in all their skills, even goalkeeping, and make sure his opponents team are nobbled by giving them a purple down arrow for their form.
As for the ‘riddle’ at the start – he claims to have shared it with numerous friends and strangers (the idea of Damien Rice randomly bombarding passers-by with this as they mind their own fucking business is enraging, I have to admit), with only one 16 year old getting it. What can you say? Clearly all of his friends are fucking retarded and he’s had the misfortune of encountering one grotesquely stupid person after another.
But then birds of a feather, and all that …