Simon Cowell Thinks You're An Idiot

Simon Cowell does not like you. Simon Cowell does not care about you. He does not care about you as a person. Simon Cowell does not want to make your life better. He does not want to make you think, grow, rejoice or change in anyway.

Simon Cowell thinks you are stupid.
Simon Cowell thinks you are weak.
Simon Cowell thinks you are easily pleased.
Simon Cowell thinks you have no taste.
Simon Cowell thinks you have low expectations.
Simon Cowell thinks you don't have a brain in your head or a soul in your chest.
Simon Cowell thinks you have the memory span of a goldfish.

To Simon Cowell you are not a person.

Simon Cowell only cares about your money. Via the whole X Factor brand, every year, Simon Cowell and his massive gang of producers spend all of their time and energy working out how to get as much money as they can out of your pockets as possible.

Every year, a dozen or so vaguely "talented" people are trotted out onto our TV screens on Saturday nights for live performances for eight weeks or so. On their way there, they are hyped up everywhere - radio, TV, posters, magazines, newspapers - so that you are fully aware, fully prepped and informed for their arrival. All of it is an attempt to draw you in, to make you feel as if you have to be involved in this, you have to be informed, you have to have a say in how it all pans out.

PLEASE think about it. How many X Factor contestants from the live shows can you remember? Half a dozen at most. Nearly EVERY X Factor contestant is painfully, heartbreakingly AVERAGE. There are a million and one backing singers, musical theatre performers, cruise ship entertainers and more, all around the world, who can sing just as well and probably better than the dull, mediocre zombies who are slapped in Topshop gear week after week and shoved into your face. And because they're so average, and Simon Cowell KNOWS that they are average, what does he do?

He puts on the biggest, most absurdly over the top stage shows he can afford. He advertises them everywhere he can. He underscores every moment of the contestants backstories with Take That hits to tug at your heart strings. Why?

Because all he wants is your money. And Simon Cowell think that you are so stupid, so weak minded, so uninspired, that you will be willing to watch, pay to watch a dozen painfully average, unoriginal, uninspiring, uniteresting individuals "perform" a narrow group of pop songs every week just because he's battered you round the head with flashing lights and media coverage.

Simon Cowell thinks that you don't deserve good music. That's why he insists on putting on a TV program that has produced a tiny amount of sub-average pop "stars". That's why he gets his contestants to perform covers of songs that are ALREADY in the charts so that you then go and buy those songs which are put out by record labels which he has shares in.

Simon Cowell doesn't want you to start thinking independently about the music you listen to. He doesn't want you to develop your own tastes which could stray away from the charts and his own label. He wants to numb all of your musical tastes so that you only end up recognising and listening to the songs and "artists" that he puts out. He doesn't care about making music that can stir your soul, make your overjoyed, make you really dance like your feet are on fire, make you leap and jump around like you don't care because you're so happy, make you roll down your car windows and belt your voice out with your friends because that song on the radio is so awesome. Simon Cowell doesn't care about any of that. He wants to control you, and what you like and what you buy. Most of them time, when a person votes for someone on the X Factor, it's not really their choice. It's not them controlling the program. It's Simon Cowell and his whole empire controlling them.

Simon Cowell thinks you're so stupid that he's changed the name Matt Cardle's dire cover of Bify Clyro's "Many of Horror" to "When We Collide", so that the title matches the chorus. Because that's what the kind of uninspired, reproduced, cheap pop songs that he puts out do. He didn't think you were clever enough to handle a song that had a title that wasn't related to the first few words of the chorus. He thinks you are that stupid. To him you are a big, throbbing wallet which he just wants to take money from. His view of you is no better than a mugger's, a con artists, or any other devious little criminal you can name. To him you are a big, fat cow that he's doped up to the eyes with tranquillisers, and he's viciously and deviously squeezing your tired, weary and bruised udders.



People who slag off the X Factor nowadays are normally fobbed off as indie/rock/metal/whatever snobs, and called old misery guts who just can't switch off and enjoy some pop music. But this shouldn't be what pop music is like. Pop music shouldn't be something that treats you stupidly. "Pop" comes from "popular" - music of the people. But it's not popular if it's not really chosen by the people. It isn't. It's chosen for you by a bunch of greedy, selfish businessmen who want to batter you down and make you submit to their own selfish plans. Plans which involve creating "music" that is easy to replicate, control, reproduce, digest and cover in cheap gloss. "Music" that disappears within weeks and leaves no real imprint on your life - just an empty space in your wallet.

Please, don't give Simon Cowell the satisfaction this year. Don't buy Matt Cardle's appalling, soulless cover. He'll vanish overnight, and next year some other talentless bloke or blokette will find themself in the same position. Don't let Simon Cowell and his money grabbing empire get the better of you. That really is what it will be and I'm not exaggerating. Simon Cowell wants to make you a dumb little zombie who is entertained by whatever he decides you will be entertained by. Because he wants your money.

I don't vastly care if you join one of the various "Get such and such to Christmas #1" campaigns. Just don't let Simon Cowell con you out of your money. Because that's what the whole thing is.

A filthy con.

A Return To Blogging, Some Shared Music and a Rant About Money!

So. A New Decade. A glittering frontier lays before us. Some would say.
Apologies for my lengthy blogging absence. I had an intensely busy December and then an intensely relaxed holiday.

I had planned to do some specifically "end of year blogs" but sadly never got round to them. Your loss I suppose... ahem. Anyway, I planned to do a big one about my favourite songs of the decade. Intead, I compiled quite a comprehensive Spotify playlist which is...

HERE!

http://open.spotify.com/user/rhysydeesy/playlist/6gpedY8BnOCVH8SnWZmGiB

Please listen and feedback to me, here or on Facebook, Twitter, whatever medium you deign appropriate for this stellar new decade we now find ourselves in. Those songs are my personal favourites, pretty much in descending order. The nearer the top, the more rigid the order. Enjoy! If you don't in some degree then there's definitely somehting wrong with you.

Anyway, I was given a suitable kick to write another blog after reading this page:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8438824.stm

One Billion US Dollars earned across the world in merely a few weeks. The human race has ventured out in unprecedented cinematic numbers and poured money into seeing this film. Now, I have yet to see it, and would really like to, I knew about it long before the general public's brouhaha (what a word. And yes, that was a self elevating, perhaps slightly pretentious cultural claim back there). So I haven't any problems with the film, I hear there are some allusions to Christ coming down to Earth as a man, which is always good- you can't escape Jesus in heroes! (See this blog - http://folkpunkgazesblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/knights-in-shining-spandex.html - and also, Part Two of the most recent Doctor Who Christmas special!)

But. $1billion. It's an absurd amount of money. One of those amounts of money which, unless you were a government or a total, TOTAL moron, you couldn't possibly spend all of. In the perception of your average 21st century Western citizen, it's an unassailable amount of money.

What could that money do?

SO MUCH!

SO
SO
MUCH!

It could take a massive chunk out of world debt.

Build homes for millions. Give facilities, clean water, schools, medical care to MILLIONS.

I'm not attacking the film industry as such, but pointing out the readiness with which we'll part with ten quid (which is pretty much the cost of a ticket seeing as it's marketted as almost a necessity that you watch Avatar and many other films at the moment in 3D- an truly devious exploitative ploy by the film industry. I mean what's the fuss with 3D all of a sudden? It adds nothing. I remember 3D as a short fad when I was about 6-10, marketted for such cinematic epics as Sky-Kids 3D)
Tangent over.
How ready are you to part with upwards of £7.50 to see a film?
Very.
That's evident. The whole planet near enough has demonstrated how ready it is.

But how ready are you to part with that amount for a good cause? A charity? A tramp? Heck, even a busker?
Scarcely ready at all, I would say, for most of us. Myself heartily included. In our often selfish and microscopic minds, £7.50 to a charity, collection tin, or busker seems like FAR too much. It's almost ridiculous for us young people to consider dropping that much change into a collection box. A couple of quid or whateveer jingles in your pocket is standard isn't it?

Well it shouldn't be the standard. In your heart, ask yourself, how ready are you to spare your money- whether it be hard earned or your avenue to a good night out- for someone else? I don't want to sound like an Oxfam advert, asking for "just two pounds a month" etc. I want you to think about yourself- your heart, your motives- so that you can think about others, who are as unfathomably needy and James Cameron is now unfathomably wealthy.

We live in an age where selfishness, "treating yourself" CONSTANTLY (hardly a treat then) and self celebration are all on the rise. We're in a world where we're always encouraged to glorify ourselves. That's shown very clearly in this horribly man-glorifying spectacle - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8439618.stm.

So think. Are you selfish with your money? How ready are you to part with £7.50 for someone else, rather than for your own enjoyment? We're a tenth of the way through the 21st cenutury and roughly 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. And yet in just a few weeks, one film rakes in $1 billion from us.
This decade should be fun.