I Suppose You Had to Be There...

I’m preparing a speech for the not too distant future, when destiny finally grants me my wish for revenge. What I’ve penned so far:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I plead guilty to the cold-blooded murder of Mark McCabe. I dismembered him, flayed him, and removed his still-beating heart. He died in agony at my hands. I squeezed his liver into pate, though the gaps of my fingers. However, ladies and gentlemen, I stand here with a clear conscience and with no regret in my heart. McCabe committed a heinous crime against humanity. Such was the gravity and monstrousness of his crime that I could no longer allow him to reside among the peoples of the Earth. He should have known better; he should have held back and done nothing. I refer, of course, to his abominable creation, Manic 2000. When the crime took place, I was too young and weak to take action. The mobs that followed him and bought his accursed CD seemed too strong and overwhelming. It was a parochial affair, really, and it (fortunately) didn’t escape the confines of this island. If I was older, I could have fled to another country and forgotten about it. How wonderful it would have been to known that the majority of the world didn’t suffer as I suffered. And I did suffer.”

Too much, you say? Oh, ye of short memory! Try watching the video without flinching. You may well have participated in the crime, but you cannot justify saving this man’s life.

I mean, look at him; he’s a so goofy looking and he’s spouting tired phrases from Ye Auld Book o’ Rayver Incantations in what appears to be a pseudo English accent. Even the most parochial DJs of school hall discos would cringe at such painful lines as “put your hands in the air… like you just don’t care” or “Oggy, oggy, oggy! Oi, oi, oi!”. This stuff was dire ten years ago, never mind now, and despite being a teenager, I knew well of how pathetic it was. It was all-invasive though. Emigration wasn’t a real option for me at the time, and I just had to suffer the tune of what now sounds like a circa 2005 ringtone.

What the hell was up with that accent anyway? I don’t understand how someone expects to be considered cool by impersonating the accent of another country. It makes him look like a small-timer, someone easily dazzled by cosmopolitanism. Anyone who has ever listened to a 2FM DJ (which McCabe once was) understands what I mean. They’re all like an overly pally uncle who thinks he needs to relate to your generation, and throws out a few Americanisms to show he’s still hip. This mystifies further – who has ever been impressed by someone pretending to be American? I doubt Americans do; they often ridicule such people in their films and TV shows. But this is something these DJs aspire to, as if they want to look like someone who was bowled over by an episode of Friends.

Anyway, the best explanation for Maniac 2000 is that McCabe wanted to make a song that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but rave, hoping he would be immortalised in the curriculum of every sound engineering course, as a typical example of the genre. I’m pretty sure I could reproduce the song on an unsophisticated piece of software now, and I bet virtually all the lyrics would be available to me to place along the bars of the archaic rave sounds. Except that truly bizarre declaration in the middle of the ‘song’: “Life: it has no meaning!” He seems so sure and happy about it. I wonder if he’ll still be so happy and sure, when I slip my knife into his gullet and repeat the words back to him.

So, after four minutes of painfully cringeworthy lyrics, which are below the talents of a 12 year old (That’s only referring to the lyrics I understand – the song proceeds mostly like drug-induced blabbering.), we get “come with me to the place to be.” The song ends. The place to be is a post-Maniac 2000 world, where McCabe is a one-hit wonder who is largely forgotten. If destiny doesn’t grant me the opportunity to take revenge, I can always console myself in the knowledge that McCabe’s greatest hour was with a song he has largely disowned. What was cool (even though it never really was) has now passed into what is dated and pathetic. McCabe tells us he’s embarrassed by the ‘song’, as he is still trying to chase a reputation of being hip and contemporary. Some people never learn.