Review:

on 2012-04-04 CharlesMartel Said:

If there was one positive to take from my musical hiatus, it was that I missed the baggy scene altogether. For those not in the know, baggy was broadly contemporaneous with grunge in the States and shared the same poor taste in fashion. The Happy Mondays were probably the leading light of the baggy scene which had its roots, perhaps unsurprisingly, up north in the old industrial cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

And there, frankly, it should have stayed. But no, Factory records decided that, with New Order their sole profitable signing, the world needed a new band and a new sound, and inflicted this on the rest of us. Surely one look at Shaun Ryder should have convinced them that this was going to be a bad idea. Ryder and his mates are outstanding examples of what Marx dismissively called the lumpenproletariat, that class of society that even the egalitarian Communists wrote off. So what happens when you put a group of them and their, dare I say, culture, into the limelight? The answer is epitomised by the career and music of the Happy Mondays.

Northern nineties lumpenproletariat culture largely consisted of stealing Nike trainers to wear - the sole acceptable footwear; drinking vast quantities of cheap tinny lager; and consuming whatever drugs you can get your hands on, be it heroin or lighter fuel. This all came together on the dance floor where the music which best fitted this so called scene was a kind of erratic dance music where the main purpose seemed to be to identify who could make the closest approximation to a lemur trying to walk on a spacehopper. After a night of that the object was to have a chili kebab, throw up over the pavement and then either pick a fight with some other random piss head or take some equally paralytic and ugly girl to a public toilet and try to overcome brewer's droop long enough to get her pregnant.

Welcome to the world of the Happy Mondays. Music for ugly people - people with pudding bowl haircuts, bad teeth and body odour.

This album is horrible. And Shaun Ryder on the inside cover is at his ugliest (except for his appearance now where the ravages of that lifestyle have taken their toll). There should really be no excuse for putting out an album this bad, but all too frequently, there is. It is called pandering to the lowest common denominator, to those with a low IQ and a diet which consists of chips with everything. I really don't know why I possess this for it embarrases me in ways which embarrass me to think of them - I am normally a liberal and tolerant person, but this album brings out my latent prejudices about sub-working class, white, urban lifestyles, welfare scroungers , petty criminals and shysters whose only job has ever been signing on at the unemployment office. Urgh!
Rating: 1/10