HOWL
I
I saw the greatest minds of
my generation
co-opted to write back-end
coding for the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through
line upon line of proprietary algorithms
then hauled before Congress and
told to explain themselves
Which of course they could
not.
Alexa: sell my data to the
Russians.
I sometimes wonder if any
moment in human history
can ever, or will ever be as
great
as that scene in Problem
Child 2
when Junior pisses in the
lemonade
and his obnoxious adult
neighbour drinks it.
Consider the conceptual
brilliance in an act of comedy so sublime:
a 10-year-old child urinating
into a glass pitcher
and handing it to the adult
who has previously insulted him;
while we, the audience, all
know that it’s actually a jugful of piss.
He chugs it down merrily,
smacking his lips at the end
and uttering the masterful
one-word synopsis:
“Tangy”.
What is the point of even going on
when the greatest artistic
endeavour in human history
has already been achieved.
I ask myself this daily while
contemplating life here on earth.
I once had a dream
that the lovely Hollywood
actress Anne Hathaway was my wife.
In this dream, we would awake each morning
and she would proceed to sit on
my face and disco dance.
It was a glorious dream
Vivid and stimulating
So you can only imagine how
upset I was
to awake and find
my actual wife lying beside
me instead.
Extremely upsetting,
and not at all how I wanted
to start my weekend.
I saw a piece of graffiti once
written on the cubicle wall
of a public toilet.
It said, in plaintive text
without punctuation:
“What is love
Baby don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me
No more” – Haddaway, 1993.
That struck me as curiously
profound
for some reason.
On the subject of love, I
sometimes play a fun game
in which I substitute the
word ‘love’ in any given song title
for the word ‘muff’.
It brings me endless
amusement
giggling at the likes of
How Deep Is Your Muff
Make You Feel My Muff
Muff is a Battlefield
Need Your Muff So Bad
Muff in an Elevator
Can You Feel the Muff
Tonight
Bizarre Muff Triangle
and Can’t Get Enough of
Your Muff, Babe.
It is a childish game
Infantile, even
But it brings me comfort in
this world of pain.
Try it yourself sometime
and you too may know what
true spiritual fulfilment feels like.
II
Did you ever stop to consider how,
prior to the release of the
most recent Rambo movie,
The fifth in the franchise
That this would be, quite
literally,
Rambo Number 5.
A little bit of violence, all night long
A little bit of slaughter, in the sun
A little bit of massacre,
here I am
A little bit of gore makes me your man.
Aaaaaight.
As it turns out, the series
denouement was basically just
a really nasty version of Home
Alone set on a ranch,
though I certainly enjoyed
myself.
But to think, all this could
have been easily avoided
John Rambo’s 40-year orgy of
destruction across multiple continents and American states
If they’d just given him what
he asked for at the start of First Blood
and served him breakfast when
he wandered into town.
All this needless bloodshed, for want of a bacon sandwich.
It truly
beggars belief.
Can you imagine what it would
be like if the Go Compare Man was your Dad.
How would that conversation go at school during Show & Tell, I wonder
“And what about you, Timmy?
What does your Daddy do?”
“My father is Gio Comparo
He puts on a silly moustache and acts like a cunt on national television
Nobody likes him, least of all me;
My mother exists in a perpetual
state of loathing, embarrassment and shame
No longer able to show her
face in polite society for fear of violent recrimination
Now flush my head down the toilet, o willing tormentor
It is no less than I deserve
For being the son of a
national disgrace.”
The only thing worse is those
fucking meerkats
Aleksandr and Sergei
Twatting about in their
oligarch’s mansion
Doing the two-handed hoover
to MC Hammer.
What must it be like
to be one of those people
who collects limited edition
soft toys of the awful furry bastards
and their insufferable rodent
offspring?
Are they proud
to be someone
who goes onto comparethemarket.com
and enters into a commercial
dialogue with a price comparison search engine
simply for the purposes of
obtaining
a Sleepy Oleg toy.
These people must exist somewhere
There are millions of them
out there in the world
And yet I have never met one.
A bit like George Michael fans.
Speaking, though, of MC Hammer
I once bought a doll of him
from a knick-knack shopfront
in Singapore
for the princely sum of $10.
That’s £6.10 translated into
British currency
at the time of writing,
though obviously subject
to future market
fluctuations.
I’m sure you think that I am joking, but I can assure I am not -
Look, I have it here in this
orange carrier bag.
Behold the wonder of MC
Hammer in moulded plastic form
The craftsmanship is quite
exquisite
Right down to the sparkling
baggy Hammerpants.
Spare a thought for the
artist formerly known as Stanley Kirk Burrell
A man who once had everything:
Gold-plated toilet seat
Saturday-morning animated kids’ TV series
and, most importantly:
pumps and a bump.
Jamie Foxx got an Oscar for Ray
But where oh where was Romany
Malco’s award
for his scintillating
portrayal in the lead role
of the made-for-television
biopic Too Legit: The MC Hammer Story.
Again, I’m not making this up, I can assure you -
I own it on DVD.
Look, here it is.
Foxx gets all the plaudits
while Malco goes home
empty-handed from pretty much every awards show going.
I ask you,
a bit like Lemar off of Fame
Academy in that silly song of his,
where is the justice.
III
Why is it
that every fucking idiot you ever
went to High School with
insists on having three
children.
Not content with just one, or two,
they must continue their spree of aimless procreation
and shat out a third
just to make sure their appalling
gene-pool lives on in the collective consciousness.
As if the world weren’t
over-populated and headed for catastrophe enough already
They marry into their own
kind
The sort of women who cry at Ed
Sheeran and the John Lewis Christmas advert
I am so glad these people
find each other
So the rest of us don’t have
to.
Three, is the magic number
They give their progeny
Playstations 5s
Down another four-pack of
Stella with the lads
Then go back to being idiots
And we wonder why
The world is so fucked.
What will the aliens say
when they land on our
abandoned planet
centuries after the Climate
Emergency has washed us all away.
“Were they kind people?”, they will ask;
“Were they wise people?”
“Behold”, they exclaim as
they consult the historical record;
Behold, the Sistine Chapel
The collective works of
Swedish pop duo Roxette
And that bit in Marc Cohn’s Walking
in Memphis when he sings:
“Tell me, are you a Christian, child?
I said: Ma’am, I am tonight”.
Or will they say:
Behold, Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger
A record so mind-meltingly, staggeringly awful in its sheer obnoxiousness
As to attain a sort of zen
perfection.
They were capable of so much
But they spuffed it all on Celebrity
Love Island, fast fashion and Business Studies textbooks
How will we explain to them
the enduring popularity of Spandau
Ballet
as evidenced in footage of full-time
accountants in dreadful hats having it large at a festival
to the risible strains of Gold
on Spandau Ballet’s
much-hyped 2010 reunion tour.
Tony Hadley! I am with you
in the pseudo-ironic 1980s Romo
revival
Tony Hadley! I am with you
in occasional news reports of
your latest solo offering
I am with you
in that god-awful chord which
follows the chorus in True
For if this is the sound of
your soul
It is truly akin to Donald
Duck farting in the bathtub
Hadley be playing on the
jukebox;
Worldwide, brute force, and
full of money
Worldwide, brute force, and
full of money
Tony Hadley, I am with you
For your inevitable appearance
in the I’m a Celebrity jungle
alongside coat-hanger-faced
90s songbird Sophie Ellis-Bextor
and no doubt also Keith from
Boyzone.
I am with you, you floppy-haired
fucking git
I have no choice, since the great British public
simply refuses to let you die
I am with you, Tony Hadley
As your simpering fucking
aspirational yuppie yacht-rock
Reverberates in perpetuity at
the end of time.
I am with you
in countless landfills full
of discarded Funko Pops
I am with you
for the 59-thousandth retrospective documentary about the making of Back to
the Future
I am with you
for the announcement of
LadBaby’s 537th consecutive Christmas #1
I am with you
as Salt Bae infiltrates NORAD
and brings about the end of
the world
by pushing the nuclear button
live on Instagram.
The ultimate viral moment:
Don’t forget to Like, Comment
and Subscribe
as nuclear fire
rains from the heavens.
For that is how humanity ends:
Not with a bang, but with a TikTok
3000-plus years of human
history
selfie’d into oblivion
for 10 seconds of internet fame.
I picture a dystopian future
in which literally every fucker has a podcast.
We’re basically already
halfway there.
C.C. January 2023
