Pop goes the election: Green party compose outdated boyband parody
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Version 0 of 1. There was a brief and beautiful moment, a week or so ago, when it looked like the 2015 general election might mercifully pass without getting itself mixed up with pop music. No party seemed to have adopted an old hit as its election theme song, no party leader had favoured the nation with the contents of a personal iTunes playlist in an attempt to grab the vote of anyone moronic enough to vote for someone who likes the same music as them. But since then we’ve had David Cameron giving us the benefit of his incisive rock criticism – he’s apparently a fan of US alt-rockers War On Drugs, summarising their complex appeal to Attitude magazine with the words “they’re a band” and “they’re good” – and the Mail On Sunday’s depiction of his wife Samantha as a devotee of something it described as “trendy ‘indie’ groups”: the more waspish observer might note she’s got a lot in common with many members of “trendy ‘indie’ groups” these days, in that she went to public school and her father is a baronet. Now the Green party have weighed in with a party election broadcast styled on a boyband video, the gag being that Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all members of the same exclusively male group. Alas, it isn’t the slice of brilliantly biting political satire it fancies itself to be: it’s less Chris Morris and more the closing number from an episode of The Two Ronnies. One problem is that the people impersonating the party leaders don’t remotely resemble the party leaders they’re impersonating - clearly finding a normal human being that looks as peculiar as Farage or Miliband was a challenge too far for casting. The other is that the boyband sound they’re purporting to satirise isn’t how boybands sound these days. Nor, for that matter, do boyband videos look much like the Green party’s idea of what a boyband video looks like: it’s ultimately a parody of Boyzone or Westlife, a pretty dated musical target on which to fix your sights in 2015. It might have seemed a little sharper if it had played on the notion that each member of a boyband has a distinctive, well-worn character: Miliband as the doe-eyed earnest one, Farage as the cheeky, unpredictable “dangerous” one given to interview gaffes, Clegg as the weirdly nondescript one who no one has as their favourite, Cameron as the one who, outside of his devoted fanbase, fills most right-thinking observers with an insatiable desire to slap him etc. Instead, it’ll have to settle for not being as awful as it might have been – it’s perhaps worth pausing for a moment and imagining just how shrivellingly, agonisingly awful a party political broadcast that parodies a boyband video might have been – while leaving the onlooker with the feeling of being faintly, ineffably embarrassed, which seems to be the inevitable result of politicians getting mixed up in pop music. |