5 Reasons Why... Gaga could do with a couple of months aboard the good ship Calm The Fuck Down.

1.       The whole ‘Isn’t Gaga a bit mad’ thing is wearing thin. Being slightly crackers was Gaga’s USP (see: the Kermit coat; arriving at the Grammys in an egg; having prosthetic horns sculpted onto herself), but now it all seems a bit forced and contrived. Frankly, she pales in comparison to the very genuine mental instability of ex-Corrs guitarist Jim Corr, who now splits his time between sailing and attempting to convince anyone who’ll listen of the veracity of any number of conspiracy theories. You name it, Jim believes it: that 9/11 was an inside job, that “Edwin Poots The Northern Irish Sickness Minister wants to chemically lobotomise the citizens of NI and dramatically increase cancer and sterility rates by adding Sodium Fluoride to the water supply”, that the government is artificially inflating the price of Freddos. Possibly it was the strain of having to be the ugly, boring one in the Corrs who got the piss ripped out of him on SM:TV every week which pushed him over the edge.

2.       The album artwork for Born This Way. “OK guys, I’ve got a vision for what the new album cover’s going to look like.” That’s great Gaga, shoot. “So it’s a black background...” Yep, good, black. Sleek, sophisticated, modern, understated. “...and there’s this motorbike...” Brilliant! Rock ‘n’ roll! Rebellion! This is going to be amazing! “...and then in the middle of the handlebars, we badly Photoshop a picture of my face.” Er... right. We’ll sort that out. “Oh, and can you make the actual title of the album look like something from the front of a straight-to-DVD sci-fi release? Cheers.”

3.       She might then have the time to have some ideas of her own. Picking up tidbits, magpie-like, from other artists is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody does it. Elvis Costello nicked his look wholesale from Buddy Holly. Paul McCartney took his head-wobbling ‘ooooh’s from Little Richard. Likewise, the little nods to Vogue-era Madonna were fun at the start, but just rewriting ‘Hey Jude’ (see ‘You & I’) and stealing Annie Lennox’s idea of dressing up as a man who looks a bit like Elvis simply will not do.

4.       Encroaching jazz-fusion horror. I doubt anyone who saw Gaga at Radio 1’s Big Weekend last year was thinking, “I’m bloody sick of ‘Bad Romance’, I hope she only does about 90 seconds of it and then wastes half an hour doing Nat King Cole covers clumsily customised to be about the royal wedding.”

5.       As this is the last print column, here are some other people I hate. Fred Durst; Phil Collins (divorced his wife by fax); Pitbull; Flo Rida; The Voice’s Danny O’Don’t-Know-Who-You-Are-Pal; Olly Murs; The Script; Mumford & Sons; The Courteeners; Viva Brother; Liam Gallagher; Jim Morrison; Frank Turner. And finally, if I ever get the chance, I swear I’ll kick David Guetta so hard in the groin that his cock and balls resemble the blade of a tiny shovel and two mini cheddars.

5 Reasons Why... if Jessie J doesn't just cut it out right now we're going to have words.

1.       Oversinging to the point that she sounds like she’s been harpooned. While Jessie J obviously has pipes, I think we can all agree that the best use of them is not to take one syllable, grasp it by the hair, drag it across broken glass and smash its face into a bare brick wall until it breaks down, weeping for mercy.

2.       THE VOICE. There are a great many things wrong with The Voice –tedious emphasis on ‘authenticity’, will.i.am, disdain for ‘gimmicks’ (except for MASSIVE SPINNING CHAIRS) – but Jessie J is probably the most irritating. I’m willing to forgive her using the word “fantabalusive”. I kept my mouth shut when she got that hideous purple dip-dye. However, I cannot sit idly by and let her mouth along to whatever song is being sung while waggling her fingers and winding her neck roundabout. That she feels the need to gurn along is indicative of this seismically awful belm’s attention-seeking mentality.#

3.       She’s a patronising bellend. After breaking her foot last summer, Jessie J told everyone that she had “a different respect for people who don’t have legs”. Not content with patting amputees on the head, she decided to pat herself on the back. She continued: “Just after I broke my foot, I was in my living room and I put on Beyoncé’s ‘Save The Hero’, like, 'If I'm not around, who saves the hero?' And it made me realise, like, I need someone now. You give so much as an artist, you give, you give, you give.” On this evidence she’s so self-absorbed I suspect she’s made of seven or eight different types of sponge. As if this weren’t enough, her response to the riots last summer was to tweet that she was “off to the studio. If I can’t help physically. I’m going to write about it.” Admittedly, she had a broken foot, but surely she could at least strap a broom to the front of a mobility scooter. If riot clean-up duty was good enough Ricky Wilson from Kaiser Chiefs, then by Jove it’s good enough for her.

4.       Laserlight, a.k.a. the point at which Guetta reached the bottom of the barrel. It’s not a compliment when David Guetta ropes you into something, since his recruitment approach seems to be ringing everyone in the phone book. It’s even less of a compliment when the track itself sounds like he cobbled it together at half past five on a Friday afternoon while desperate to shoot off early for a pint.

5.       She’s not nearly as cool as she thinks she is. Jumpsuits have been shown, time and again, and to be unacceptable fashion pieces outside of a gymnasium. If they don’t work even on properly cool practitioners like Grace Jones and Anthea Turner, there’s no hope for Jessie J. It’s a sad indictment of her cool levels that she makes will.i.am look like James Bond. That’s will.i.am, the man who said, “I don’t have tactics; I got Tic-Tacs, ‘cos I stay fresh. Holla.” Holla indeed, will.i.am. Now hit her with a lead pipe and I’ll give you a fiver.

5 Reasons Why... Robbie leaving Take That again is a national tragedy.

1.       Without him, they are a charisma black hole. We all saw Gary’s innate tediousness on X Factor. Howard Donald gives Ed Sheeran a run for his money in the bore stakes, which is saying something since Sheeran’s head looks like it’s being crushed by the sheer weight of his dullitude and his eyes appear to be attempting to crawl off opposite sides of his face and leap onto someone more interesting. Robbie once managed to reduce a friend of mine to tears simply appearing on Top of the Pops and doing that thing where he spins the microphone round in one hand. Jason of Orange couldn’t do that. He’d drop it and then write an apologetic note to the sound guy saying sorry for not treating his equipment with respect.

2.       Robbie’s mini-set was the best bit of their gigs last year. It takes something extraordinary to upstage a 60 foot tall robot called Om and the sight of Jason Orange riding a unicycle, but introducing Robbie back into the band by giving him 15 minutes in which to stick a rocket under proceedings and tremble the knees of tens of thousands of mums was a masterstroke. If there’s a better five-song set than ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Rock DJ’, ‘Come Undone’, ‘Feel’ and ‘Angels’, I’ll eat my hat (it’s a hat made of nachos so I will quite happily be proven wrong here).

3.       Staying with ‘the lads’ might stop him making more of his own albums. Since Escapology, his career’s been an unmitigated stink-fest. Rudebox sounds very much like the work of a man who at roughly the same time went crackers, grew a massive beard (sure sign of madness and loneliness – see below) and decided to hunt UFOs.

4.       Progress wasn’t half bad. By some distance Take That’s best album since the glory days, Progress was a thumping, techno-flavoured addition to the Take That oeuvre, and in ‘The Flood’ boasts both a fantastic, soaring lead single and probably the best rowing-based video in pop history. It was a gauntlet thrown down to all the young bucks threatening to knock them off their perch, and one which has yet to be picked up, though I’m not sure Niall from One Direction has the upper body strength to pick up anything heavier than a tea towel.

5.       Nobody wants to see Gary get all fat and beardy again. Gary’s from my home town, and while in his post-solo-career-failure twilight zone, he moved back into his mum’s house for a bit. In an attempt to go incognito, he grew a massive beard and started wearing jogging bottoms. A friend of my brother’s saw him in the pub having a steak dinner, stood up and shouted, “IT’S GARY BARLOW!” at him. Gary looked up at him sadly, down at his bloated stomach, then back down at his steak. Don’t let this happen to him again. Just give £5 a month to Barlow Relief and help bribe Robbie back into the gang. You can make a difference.

5 Reasons Why... Pixie Lott can bore off.

1.       She has no discernible personality whatsoever. Judging by her interviews, she has absolutely no opinions on anything at all. If you touched her, she would feel like a dense mist. Breathe the mist in and you’ll smell that disinfectant they use in hospitals. She’s essentially the Qui-Gon Jinn of pop.

2.       The video for ‘Kiss the Stars’. Lott’s latest single is a very poor show, even leaving aside for a moment the ropey eurotrance synths and, in “Put the plug in the socket give me all your power”, its inclusion of quite the least appealing sexual innuendo in pop since 50 Cent asked us to lick his lollipop. The CGI budget appears to have been about thirty quid, most of which was spent on sandwiches; the heavily polygon’d dancers have wandered straight out of FIFA 97, and there are close-ups which make her look like she’s falling backwards through a time vortex from a mid-70s episode of Doctor Who. Most horrifyingly of all, she has her hair in a high ponytail which makes her look exactly like X Factor reject Katy Brucknall, the one with a voice that could bend a girder at fifty paces and a quite alarming Messiah complex. I thought I’d expunged her, but back she comes, rolling into my brain strapped to a flaming Catherine wheel. Cheers Pixie.

3.       Her Twitter feed is both boring and infuriating. Many pop stars have names for their Twitter followers: Marina has her Diamonds; Cher Lloyd has Brats; Sir Alan Sugar has his Sugar-tits. Pixie Lott has, in the most excruciating, cutesy, funky-primary-school-teacher way, her ‘Crazy Cats’. This kind of sickening infantilism was meant to have been purged from the charts when the Tweenies’ second album bombed (sources close to the band reported tensions in the studio due to musical differences between Milo and Fizz). I did think Lott was quite cool before I started following her, but the amount of pictures of fried breakfasts she tweets have rather ruined her mystique.

4.       She stole VV Brown’s career. Lott launched herself – and I say ‘launched’ in the same sense that during sieges in the Middle Ages, dead cows and horses would be launched into enemy camps in order to spread disease and weaken them for attack – at roughly the same time as the extremely lovely VV Brown. Brown was armed with ‘Shark in the Water’, named the best single of 2009 at the 5 Reasons Why... Awards (known internationally as the FRYs). Lott had a cracking set of pins. Poptown wasn’t big enough for the both of them (literally – VV Brown is about 6 foot 3). Lott went on to the top 10 and a starring role in Fred: the Movie, the main joke of which is that the main character is slightly sped up and screams a lot. VV Brown modelled for Marks & Spencer. Poor old VV.

5.       She won’t return my calls. :’(

5 Reasons Why... Nicola is the best Girl Aloud by roughly a billion miles.

1. Well it’s not Kimberley or Nadine, is it. No, it isn’t. Not while Nadine worked with Boyz II Men on a cover of ‘Back for Good’ which was deemed not good enough for an album which limped into the charts at number 114. Not while Kimberley’s Wikipedia page features this sentence: “In May 2011, Kimberley Walsh was named as the new face of Right Guard’s Xtreme Dry Range”. Poor Kimberley. That’s possibly the saddest sentence I’ve ever read, and I’ve read Watership Down.

2. Or Sarah Harding. I have no idea what she’s been doing since the end of the group’s last tour, but if she’s anything like me she’ll have been sitting watching Pointless all day in her pants, checking on the later career of ex-Burnley superstar Graham Branch (the Scouse Rivaldo is now coaching West Kirby Panthers, if you were wondering) and pottering round Morrison’s trying to fathom what the difference between ketchup and catsup is (still no idea). These are all activities which have done precisely nothing for the advancement of pop. If she’s not going to bother being a pop star, less deserving sorts will capitalise. Nobody wants Mike Posner getting his foot in the door. SORT IT OUT, HARDING.

3. Or Saint Cheryl, the patron saint of kicking toilet attendants in the face. Wor Cheryl has a fairly extensive rap sheet: allegedly racially motivated assault, two very dodgy albums and her insistence on employing Will.I.Am, thereby encouraging him to think he has something to offer humanity, are heinous to put it mildly. Add to that the charge of making Ashley Cole think that another human being could be capable of loving him, and you’ll understand why she should be run out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob.

4. Nicola is ace... Cinderella’s Eyes is a great album, a riot of different influences which pings and fizzes all over the pop spectrum. That ‘Beat of My Drum’ didn’t spend three months at number one is a pop travesty on a par with Dane Bowers and Victoria Beckham’s ‘Out Of Your Mind’. Apart from her assorted qualities, the fact that the professional cretin and walking anti-obesity campaign Chris Moyles called her a “sour-faced old cow” is reason enough to root for her.

5. ...against all the odds. She is from Runcorn, a town I know all too well. If you’ve never been, ensure this description is the closest you ever come to it: numerous biological studies have suggested that the locals are genetically closer to reptiles than humans. The only amenities in town are the bingo hall and the theatre, where everyone goes to watch endless repeats of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and talk about the good old days when Ralf Little would occasionally visit the bingo hall. Her career isn’t just a victory for pop; it’s a victory for the human spirit in the face of the most unfortunate circumstances.

5 Reasons Why... Example is a tedious bollock.

1.       He lacks any ambition whatsoever. In an interview, Example has pledged to keep making the dismal vaguely-ravey-but-without-the-poppers pop which is festering around the top 40 currently. The following quote made me deeply morose for a good week or so: “I have a formula now. Some people try to be too creative and too artistic.” O Icarus! Fly not too close to the sun, lest your waxen wings melt and you find yourself ditched head-first into the HMV bargain bin. He continues: “The people want uplifting rave music, so I think, why not simply five the people what they want?” Because, to quote Super Hans, ‘people’ like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust ‘people’.

2.       He’s a Jack-of-some-trades, master of being a knob. He describes his career trajectory in his Twitter bio as “Started off singing. Then rapping. Now back to singing. But still rap occasionally.” Upon waking from the stupor this enthralling account has put us in, we can examine exactly how true this is. Does lethargically murmuring the same two or three notes count as singing? No. His rapping “skills” are making Biggy Smalls spin in his grave, and when you consider how fat he was that’s going to have some serious seismological consequences.

3.       He would make an appalling boyfriend. In another peach of an interview, Example outlines his idea of a ‘good date’. He would take the unfortunate lady to Pizza Express, as "if I go [there] I'm guaranteed to get asked for maybe 20 pictures. There's a good chance she'll want to sleep with you after that." Even if this sleazing gets you going, ladies, don’t expect him to lavish you with gifts.  “I'm good with rhyming words”, he says without any apparent sense of irony, “so I don't have to buy that many gifts; I'll just write a poem.” Very noble. And how long do you spend on these masterworks, Mr. Example? “Maybe a minute,” he says. Form a queue, girls! You’re worth a minute of his time! Maybe!

4.       He’s a total Nan kid. Nan kids don’t necessarily have to hang around with their Nan too much; there are multiple criteria for spotting one. Look at his boring Lego-man haircut. From this we can deduce much. He can’t stand having different sections of his meal touch each other, and covers the whole thing in ketchup, no matter what it is. He says “For flip’s sake!” instead of swearing properly. He can’t throw or catch. He ties his jacket round his waist when he gets too warm. He thinks that he’ll go to jail because someone smoked one joint at the only party he’s ever been to. He wears running shoes rather than shoes or trainers. He uses carrier bags to lug his belongings around. Get rid of him.

5.       Here is one of his poems I found in a bin. “Oh [insert name of girl] I love you, / Yeah I really do, it’s true, / But I think your greatest feature, / Is the way you’ll settle for an 8 inch margherita.”

5 Reasons Why... Prince would run rings round Michael Jackson even if the latter weren’t a corpse.

1.       Prince has a higher concentration of aceness per cm². At 157 centimetres (or 5 feet two inches, if that’s how you choose to live your life), Prince is a renowned short-arse, whereas Jackson was a comparatively colossal 5 foot 11. With 22 songs rated Very Good Indeed by the 5 Reasons Why Music Database, Jackson manages a creditable score of 7.5 tunes/cm². However, Prince’s 20 Very Good Indeed songs scores him 7.85 tunes/cm². This is mathematical fact. Some say the 5 Reasons Why Music Database makes no sense at all, but to those people I say, “WELL IF YOU’RE SO CLEVER THEN MAKE YOUR OWN BLOODY DATABASE RANKING SYSTEM,” while flicking V-signs and blowing raspberries at them.

2.       Prince out-absurds Jackson without breaking sweat. Jackson may have thought he was the king of odd, but Prince defeated him at every turn. In London in 1998, he dressed as an old man so he could go to the pub unharassed, wandered around Hyde Park for a bit then got taken to McDonald’s by some fans. It was also claimed that Prince tried to establish mind control over Jackson’s monkey Bubbles in order to make the chimp attack him. Even Jackson at his most crackers – aptly illustrated by the flotation of a 10 metre-tall statue of himself down the Thames – is bested by Prince changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Jackson always seemed to be trying so hard to be otherworldly; Prince trounced him without trying.

3.       Jackson might as well have died in 1991. Bad stands as Jackson’s last decent album. From then on, it was a litany of ever more disappointing efforts and false-starts, his career sputtering to a turgid close with the posthumous Michael, which featured Akon and Lenny Kravitz. I need say no more. Prince has managed at least 2 good albums since then. There was also one which was really quite bad, but since it was given away free with the Daily Mail it was at least inflicted on people who deserved it.

4.       Prince’s effigy is not propped awkwardly outside Craven Cottage. When your artistic legacy is reduced to a mannequin outside Fulham F.C., as Jackson’s has, you have surely done something terribly wrong. Everyone knows Fulham fans are massive nerds. Their team play at a cottage, for crying out loud. I’m amazed the club shop hasn’t been turned into a National Trust tearoom. The statue’s not even historically accurate: the clothes are early-80s, the hair early-90s and the nose mid-00s. It looks like a cheap action figurine blown up to grotesque size. Understandably, many Fulham fans are peeved; earlier this season the statue was subject to a frenzied attack led by an enraged fan armed with bottles of mustard from a nearby hot dog stand.

5.       The thought of playing the O₂ didn’t kill Prince. He powered through his 21 consecutive nights there in 2007. While a trial might have found Dr Conrad Murray guilty of Jackson’s manslaughter, the court of 5 Reasons Why convicts Jackson of being a lazy sod and dying on purpose to get out of his 50 dates.

5 Reasons Why... whoever suggested the Stone Roses' reunion is a floppy-brained chump.

1.       Ian Brown. Even with The Greatest Rhythm Section In Rock Music™ back together, the Roses will sound terrible. This is because Ian Brown will be honking his way over the top of everything like a depressed goose. Some will say, “But Ian Brown never could sing, that’s irrelevant”. These people are fools. His youthful cool disguised his complete lack of any other useful attributes, but he vapourised that at Reading ’96, the Roses’ last live performance. He was so out of tune that he sounded like he had been recently bereaved and was wailing at a loved one’s graveside. Now, he’s a creaking heritage act: the pop equivalent of Bruce Forsyth’s abysmal jokes on Strictly Come Dancing.

2.       There will be endless discussion of the Roses’ “legacy”. Actually, what is their legacy? Half an hour of excellent music, granted. However, is it worth the terrible human cost? Anyone who has been to Manchester in the last twenty years will recognise the poor wretches: usually called Gaz, Baz or Dwaz, they swagger around in Inspiral Carpets t-shirts, living permanently in 1991, describing turgid pub rock bands as “proper rock ‘n’ roll” and bankrolling the Courteeners’ feeble existence. Ian Brown is directly responsible for the emergence of lad culture. As such, libraries will place his biography next to those of Stalin and Mao in the ‘History’s Greatest Monsters’ section.

3.       MORONS ABOUND. Come with me, reader, to the wild and confusing world of the YouTube comments section. TriGGlety1974 seems to represent everything that’s wrong with the worst kind of Roses fans. He says, “UK has gone black, its gone rap, its gone urban, its gone geek, its gone computers. White boy guitar music needs to fill the charts again.” Now imagine this statement being made by a forty-year-old mouth-breather wearing a fishing hat. You may note that you have unconsciously started setting items around you on fire. Don’t worry, that is a normal reaction to this level of idiocy. The emergency services will be very sympathetic.

4.       Mani will tell the anecdote about how he stole a tractor again. Did you think about the consequences of your actions, Mani? That farmer was struggling to get by. His cows were giving sour milk. His egg yields had plummeted. In a last throw of the dice, he had spent £30,000 on a swanky new tractor in the hope of saving the farm which had been in his family for six generations, only for some gurning, pot-addled scally to nick it. He rang his bank manager, who told him that he was on the brink of bankruptcy. The farmer sighed, walked outside, turned on his threshing machine, and jumped in. OH HAHAHAHA YEAH REALLY FUNNY STORY MANI.

5.       Steps’ reunion will overshadow it. As we’ve established, the Roses have 30 minutes of excellent music. Yet, they will play for about two hours longer (or at least you’d hope so if you paid £55 to be there). Steps have exactly 42.3 minutes of greatness, and Lee will probably throttle H onstage. Thus, mathematics finally proves itself useful to humanity.

5 Reasons Why... Bruno Mars has ruined everything for everyone.

1.       Reminding everyone that Jack Johnson continues to exist. Mars’s appropriation of Johnson’s twee, syncopated sound calls to mind a surfer dude trying to impress girls round a beach campfire by strumming ‘Wonderful Tonight’ while topless. If the mental image of that opportunistic berk stealing your girlfriend by playing ‘Just the Way You Are’ and rippling his abs doesn’t make you want to kick Mars in his ill-deserved balls, then you probably are that opportunistic berk.

2.       He would lie to your face and feel no guilt. Mars’s glassy, pacifying smile is the smile of an experienced conman, grinning encouragingly as he explains how his pyramid scheme is a chance you can’t afford to miss. It is the smile of an adulterer explaining away those late nights and suspect stains to his adoring wife while his kids play behind them. It is the smile a deranged killer would wear as he slid a knife between your ribs.

3.       The video for ‘The Lazy Song’. When a song contains the line, “Throw my hand in my pants/’Cause no-one’s gonna tell me I can’t”, and the phrase, “really nice sex”, it’s probably best to write it off as a bad job, put it in the bottom of a drawer full of other bad things and then throw that drawer into a disused quarry. What you should not do is release it as a single, then compound the wrongness with a video which includes dancers wearing monkey masks. This kind of self-consciously ‘wacky’ nonsense suggests Mars is the kind of man who would laugh uproariously at “You don’t have to be mad to work here...BUT IT HELPS!!!!” signs. Later, a man whom I can only assume Mars keeps as some sort of pet wanders in and mucks about. One gets the impression Mars is taking advantage of this poor man’s diminished mental capacity. The effect is deeply troubling and depressing.

4.       His hats. Hats in pop have a long and divisive history. The good include the Specials’ trilbies, Noddy Holder’s mirrored top hat and Pet Shop Boys’ stripey cones. The bad include the new Razorlight bass player’s enormous floppy brown affair which makes him look like Worzel Gummidge. The god-awful include the kind of brimless straw things perpetrated by Olly Murs and Mars. WHAT IS THE POINT OF A HAT WHICH DOESN’T EVEN KEEP THE SUN OUT OF YOUR EYES. THAT IS SURELY A HAT’S RAISON D’ETRE. What makes his be-hatted nature even more unforgivable is that he has a genuinely amazing pompadour quiff. Unconfirmed reports suggest government plans are being drawn up to reassign it to more deserving and grateful celebrities. The shortlist includes Neil Tennant, Matt Lucas, Greg Wallace, and Lulu.

5.       Giving girls unrealistic expectations of boys’ levels of devotion. It’s hard enough trying to get a girlfriend without downright liars like Mars spouting nonsense about taking grenades for them. Although on the up-side if Mars ever was in a combat situation, he’d explosively disembowel himself almost immediately, saving me the bother.

Hello pal.

This is the Five Reasons Why... music blog. It exists to point out why various pop stars are great/stupid in an easily digestible format. In future, there might be diagrams to illustrate things further which might be "fun". 


Overall, this blog aims to put the 'laughter' back into 'slaughtering pop stars for their follies and misdemeanours and praising them in a similarly disproportionate fashion'.