extracted from "Totally Shuffled: A Year of Lisening to Music on a Broken iPod"
October 9th
Muse-Uprising-The
Resistance
Twaddle.
October 9th
Muse-Uprising-
The Resistance
It’s going to be difficult to limit
myself to 500 words about Muse, but as can be seen from the initial stab at it
maybe the Zen approach of less being more would be the best way of tackling
them.
Alternatively, I could just go through a thesaurus and come up with 500
words that encapsulate my intense loathing of this band. There must be at least
500 words associated with twaddle, bollocks, nonsense, pompous-I could go on
really for another 496 without having to refer to old Roget’s mighty tome.
It would be helpful if I went through a
bit of a back story regarding my (short) connection with Muse. I had, thankfully,
managed to avoid them for a long time.
I’d obviously heard of them, but never heard them. I can’t remember
through making any conscious decision to not dabble my toes into the cess-pit
that is their entire discography. That is a bit odd, because generally I’d pay some
sort of interest into most things that are up and coming music-wise.
I must
have read some reviews of them in the music magazines, but if it had been
something completely slating them, then I’d have probably had my interest
piqued and, in a perverse way, I think I would have tried to hear them; just to
see what all the fuss was about. But there was nothing-they barely registered
with me. It was only when I got tickets for the Glastonbury Festival in 2010,
and found out they were headlining the Pyramid Stage, that I thought I should
really try to get to know some of their songs. (I was also surprised that they
were that big a draw-in hindsight, I am not just surprised, but totally baffled).
However, all that explains why this “song” appears on the iPod. If I could
actually sync the damn thing and get it and the rest of Muse’s dreadful caterwauling
consigned to a recycle bin, never to cause me emotional pain again, I surely
would. That would mean losing the rest of the stuff on the iPod and I wouldn’t
want that to happen. On the other hand, and weighing one thing against the
other, it mightn’t be too poor a deal. If I could find a way of retrieving
everything apart from Muse, it would be one of the proudest things I could ever
do.
So, I got this album and a couple of
others by them on the iPod, and I did really try to like them in the week
preceding Glastonbury. I drove up and down the motorway to work with this
weedy, proggy, sub-Queen/Rush dribbling out of the speakers and I just didn’t
get it.
Why were they so popular?
It left me confused. I couldn’t see anything
at all, not one little thing, that accounted for their success. Personally, it
just left me totally cold. But even looking at it analytically with the benefit
of someone who must have listened to a whole heap of music over the years,
there was nothing there at all.
There were no killer hooks, no melodies,
nothing to connect with. It wasn’t as if it was wildly experimental either, and
I that I didn’t understand it; it was all formulaic and bombastic. I think I
have fairly wide-ranging tastes and I’m prepared to give most music a go-I’ll
even sit down and watch the X Factor- but this was utter rubbish.
I made the mistake of giving Muse the
benefit of the doubt right up to three songs into their set at Glastonbury. Of
all the gigs I’ve ever been to, this was by far and away the worst. By a
country mile. There was so joy, no humour, no excitement or passion.
Nothing.
Probably the longest twenty minutes in my life.
I walked away and went to see
the Pet Shop Boys-and they were everything that Muse were (and are) not and so
much the better for it.
Three cheers for Neil Tennant!
Get/see/read the rest of "Totally Shuffled" here;
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