Nothing is real

AA Gill in the Sunday Times defines the Noughties as the age of the amateur:

“Reality” grew to mean a particular type of closely choreographed and edited ultra-reality — a hyperventilating, tearful, exhibitionist spectacle initially hailed as the democratisation of television. Or, alternatively, as the lunatics taking over the asylum.

Not going out like that

In the absence of any defining fashion trends for the Noughties, many frock fans simply turned their attention to what celebrities were wearing. Some observers, like the Go Fug Yourself blog, were even-handed: they castigated slebs for their crasser decisions, but were also generous to those who got it right. They were also careful to explain to those of us who don’t know Gucci from Pucci *why* some sartorial choices are just plain wrong. Others, as exemplified by this MSN article on the worst dressed stars of the decade, simply pointed and laughed. As did Lucy Jones of the Telegraph, although she was nominally applauding her subjects, which is even funnier.

Wishful thinking

Madison magazine (Australia) asked me to scratch my chin in the direction of Noughties pop culture. (Scroll down a bit; I’m between Politics and Fashion.)

Bum rap

And as the Observer Music Monthly just fails to make it to the next decade, they dub Beyoncé the artist of the current one (although the readers don’t seem to share the enthusiasm). That said, she has introduced an excellent new word to the Noughties lexicon:

One f***ing thing after another

Back to those lists, I’m afraid: Stuart Evers suggests 50 books of the Noughties; Skylar Jordan does the songs; Liz Frost’s favoured beauty products; and from Car magazine, the weirdest vehicles.

At least Q magazine does things a little differently. For a start, it avoids the awkwardness that many still feel about the word ‘Noughties’ by claiming that it’s offering up lists of the Artists and Albums ‘of the Century’. Which is accurate as far as it goes, but only postpones the agony for another 10 years, at which point presumably they’ll have to make a call on ‘Teens’ versus ‘Tens’.

Moreover, they get a bit Zeitgeisty by presenting the Top 100 not as a poll, but as the individual choices of ‘noted folk’, which is really a euphemism for ‘celebrities’. So we discover that KT Tunstall likes the Flaming Lips and Dizzee Rascal favours Young Jeezy, which is fair enough; but do we really need to know the choon preferences of Stringer Bell, the Master or Spongebob Squarepants? OK, I’ll give them the last one. He likes Oasis, by the way. Bless.

PS: Paul Morley doesn’t like those lists. Or does he?

Not so simple Simon

The nice people at Crimson books sent me an image of the cover for The Noughties book before it was printed, but only the front. It wasn’t until I was holding the real thing in my hands that I saw Simon Cowell decorating it. Initially, I thought it was a slightly camp, self-consciously ironic decision - but then, almost immediately, I realised that no, Cowell really is one of the most important people of the past decade, up there with Bush and Osama and all the rest. Marina Hyde says it better than I could:

Simon Cowell has created a system in which all possible outcomes benefit him. It is a sort of anti-chaos theory: a system wherein even vast differences in initial conditions have no real effect on the outcome. The system allows for them. You could run a million different variations of the show through a Los Alamos computer the size of a barn, and the end result would always be the same: Cowell wins. In the anti-chaos of The X Factor, a tsunami of votes for a rogue act would lead to the most butterfly-like of variations in his final scenario – the difference of about 37 pence in earnings of tens of millions. The house always wins. In fact, as a business model, it makes Las Vegas look bleeding-hearted.

Marty and Katie

Noughties culture might best be summed up by this; Martin Amis vs Katie ‘Jordan’ Price:

“She has no waist, no arse ... an interesting face ... but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone.”

And on roughly the same theme, at my other blog, I finally pinpoint the film that encapsulates the decade.

Lil communication

In Chapter Eight of The Noughties, I suggested that Lily Allen, above any other musician, was able to encapsulate the decade, both with the multi-platform nature of her rise to fame, and the uneasy combination of rampant consumerism and creeping paranoia that permeates her 2008 hit ‘The Fear’.

But now she claims to have moved on, giving up MySpace, Twitter, even YouTube. “I’ve thrown away my laptop,” she says. “I haven’t got a Blackberry and I listen to records. It’s amazing.”

Records, eh? I remember them. The question is, has she stepped back to the analogue Nineties; or simply defined a new agenda for the Teens?

Fatal fame

Raymond Tallis in The Times, tearing into the cult of celebrity (see Chapter Four of The Noughties):

The centuries of prattle, of air time and screen time, the miles of column inches are a sickening misuse of the gift of life, of health and adequate nutrition, of freedom from oppression, of the access we now have to the world of knowledge and the arts.

Old media fail

And after the #trafigura excitement, the Twitterati flex their muscles once again, this time against luckless hack Jan Moir. What I find intriguing is the suggestion in the last paragraph of her hastily concocted apology that she was the victim of “a heavily orchestrated internet campaign”. Yet another journalist who doesn’t understand the massive shift in media power that’s occurred in the Noughties. No single entity was orchestrating it. There was no conspiracy. It was hundreds of ordinary people who took objection to the snide, prurient tone of her article; and, more importantly, who had the means to communicate that objection.

2009 is surely the Year of Twitter.

I am, I said

The quintessential Noughties art project, with its connotations of permanent surveillance and fleeting celebrity, has to be Antony Gormley’s One & Other, in which he encouraged members of the public to occupy the empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. As it comes to its end, critic Jonathan Jones is unimpressed:

If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices heard, even stand on a plinth, but where no one can hear what they’re saying.

Who’s afraid of microblogging?

Twitter is one of the big technology stories of the Noughties, and part of its success has been down to its celebrity adopters, such as Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher. But now the news that Elizabeth Taylor has announced her imminent heart surgery in 140 characters or fewer adds a special kind of stardust to the microblogging site.