How unoriginal

Do you find that popular music doesn't seem to be going anywhere new? The same goes for high-street fashion too.

I was pondering recently when reading through all the usual banal "best of" lists from the past ten years and I got thinking, how much originality is there these days? Every decade before the "noughties" (I hate that phrase, almost as much as I hate the phrase "big freeze" or the word "guestimate") had its own distinct style. For example you can instantly recognise something from the 60's, 70's or 80's but I just don't see the 00's being that original and distinct, particularly with fashion.

Most fashion these days is just an utterly shameless rip-off from previous generations. At the moment the popular styles are some weird mixture of 60's, 70's and 80's all rolled into one. Now I'm not saying there's no merit in the fashions of those eras, I love a lot of 60's men's fashion, but surely you want to create your own identity? Where there isn't any merit is in worshiping bygone fashions with that awful post-modern irony that has become symptomatic in the past five years.

I understand the notion that fashion goes in cycles but come on, have some fucking originality and a mind of your own. To me re-hashing old styles and adding some irony to it stinks of being lazy and pretentious. Of course me being the massive hypocrite that I am, I buy into this and I enjoy quite a few bits of male fashion at the moment; the skinny jeans, the Chelsea boots and so on, but then I've always loved older fashions so I don't know whether that's me buying into a trend or me just going with what I've always liked.

The same goes for popular music really. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm generally not a fan of anything popular. Not out of some elitist snobbery but because, well, as a rule if it's hugely popular it tends to be fucking shite unless it's something that has gotten success with integrity, step up Pink Floyd as an example.

It's now dying on its arse but look at all this jingly-jangly Indie we've had over the past 10 years. How much of that has a scrap of originality to it? Fifty percent of it is just a total rip-off of The Smiths and the other half is a rip-off of Sigur Ros. I know that it's always hard to be truly original and inventive but how can you take yourself seriously as a musician knowing that your music has no integrity or originality? Sure you can decide to play to a particular style of music but don't just shamelessly rip-off the most popular band in that genre. Of course marketing ass-truffles like Simon Cowell (I don't credit him with being anything to do with music because quite frankly he knows nothing about it. He knows everything about marketing) don't care about that, they care about the money and will snap up any souless shite in order to sell records so you're always going to get one band making it popular with a particular style and then hundreds of bandwagon jumpers wanting their 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that even the band that starts the bandwagon doesn't have any originality these days, so it just becomes a wave of uninspiring rip-off acts.

Oh how I fucking hate post-modernism.