callum house

Tag: music

  • Funko Popstar

    I, for one, welcome pop-sensation Taylor Swift back into the culture. After a gruelling 18 months without our gracious all-American patriot, she’s returning to your phone, your office, your car, your dinner table and your bed – at long last. We can only hope, with the help of AI tech, we can start to see Taylor in our dreams soon.

    2025 has been an uneventful year, other than 60,000 dead Palestinians, human rights injustices in Sudan, the never-ending woke Ukraine war, record-breaking temperatures, the rise of fascism in the West, the leader of the free world on the brink of declaring martial law in the United States of America to distract from allegations of rampant paedophilia within all facets of the elite and the general decline in quality of life across the board, the 25th year of this century is proving to be one that we’re all bound to forget come Christmas. How grateful we are to Taylor, for putting 2025 on the map with her new album ‘Life of a Showgirl’.

    This is her 12th studio album (discounting the 187 versions of her other studio works), and by the sounds of it, it may the least mediocre yet, with early reviews asking, ‘Has she dropped the Bon Iver bit yet?’. How excited we all are!

    In classic Swift fashion, she turned her fans into rabid Q-Anon moms, with teasers, clues and hints at what’s to come. In a genius PR move, Eagle-eyed ‘Swifties’ saw references to the number ‘12’ as early as last year, seeing that Taylor used 12,000 tonnes of carbon emissions in 2024, in what can only be described as an epic marketing stunt.

    Taylor is announcing ‘Life of a Showgirl’ on the New Heights podcast – a show run by two disabled brothers, both victims of CTE, who play or played sports in America. To think that people complain about her political in-action, when the biggest announcement of her career is being made on a show run by the mentally disadvantaged – her contemporaries stunned into silence.*

    Now, Taylor is by no means perfect. Who is? Take for instance, her terrible music.

    The humanity she demonstrates in her lyricism some are calling ‘bad’ or ‘lazy’. The worms saying this have clearly never been so depressed that they slept in and showed up late to their high school English class one time.

    Her wit that so-called ‘people’ call cringe or off-putting have never walked in the shoes of a well-off Aryan teenager in Pennsylvania.

    The apathy she demonstrates to political injustice, with the exception of faux girl-power she cynically built her career off. Oh, how quickly we forget her endorsement of a little lady called Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hang on, did I say cynically? I meant to say expertly. That’s my fault, I never learned how to use the backspace key so that’s going to have to stay. Sorry.

    In conclusion, Taylor is only human, like Stalin or Jesus. Sure, a gulag here, a plague there. But have you considered the literacy rates?

    *Editor’s note: I just discovered that Taylor is also dating one of these, for want of a better and less offensive term ‘retards’. Good for her!

  • I Haven’t Got a Stitch to Wear

    May 2022

    I’m wearing a Radiohead  t-shirt today.

    I’ve had it for about 5 years, worn it to see them live, worn it to impress strangers, worn it to bed as the cotton is nice and soft.

    I thought that maybe I should stop wearing it after the band made a stand and broke the cultural apartheid in Occupied Palestine, because it went against my staunch political beliefs I hold to feel morally superior to the plebeians. But I still wear it. I like the band. In Rainbows and Ok Computer had more influence on my life than most pieces of art, why shouldn’t I wear my shirt?

    If I pin my ‘Palestinian Lives Matter’ badge, (that I got after donating to the man running the Socialist Appeal stand in the High Street; aren’t I good?), to the shirt, does it cancel out the bad? Or is that just licking your finger and wiping the scratch left from an Arab child’s pebble on your American-made tank? I think a fresh paint job may be in order.

    However, in this hyper-reactionary, overly-sensitive, snowflake-offended, daily-mandatory-pronoun-inspection world there’s one band t-shirt like no other. A shirt that strikes the fear of God into the hearts of, not only, the metropolitan liberal elite, the ‘le bacon is epic’ Redditors, the old school 80s homophobes, but above all of these, the fan itself.

    The Smiths: Meat is Murder.

    Morrissey was my hero. In Year 8 I had to write a piece for a competition on who I thought was the most important person in history. I picked Morrissey (I was beaten by a girl who wrote about Emily Davison. Morrissey could jump in front of a horse, but I struggle to imagine Davison making an album as good as Viva Hate). I cared for that man, like countless Smiths fanatics. And then he went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like the Chinese are a “sub-species”.

    Now, it’s impossible to see a piece of Smiths iconography without seeing the fat, racist, xenophobic demon that lives inside the body of our once true King. At least when it comes to wearing a Radiohead t-shirt people just think you’re a virgin, and not a racist virgin.

    Remember that elevator scene from (500) Days of Summer? That one you fawned over during your Tumblr phase, cringed at during your Twitter days, but feel somewhat indifferent towards now that you’re a twenty-something alcoholic? That scene simply could not happen today.

    Conventionally attractive white girl gets into an elevator and hears conventionally attractive white boy listening to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and strikes up a conversation saying she likes The Smiths. I take issue with this scene in a few ways.

    1. Had the writer of this film ever seen a Smiths fan in real life? They’re either ugly, smelly, bearded mansplainers in their 40s, overweight white rockabilly women, or oddly toned Mexican men.
    2. Why was he listening to There Is A Light…, when he could be listening to Rubber Ring?
    3. The most important of all: why on earth would you admit to liking The Smiths?

    When I wear my Smiths t-shirt, I genuinely hope those around me think I’m a poser who has no idea that the design is even an album cover. I’d rather be Kendall Jenner in Slayer merch than David Duke in a hood. All I can hope is that the Pakistani sweat shop worker became curious stitching the tee and listened to Meat is Murder. I imagine they appreciated the production value compared to their earlier output, it’s hard not to.

    So why do I insist on still wearing my Smiths t-shirt? Well, I still love the music, I still love Marr and I, sort of, still love Morrissey. Only slightly less than I used to, my love.