Writerings

Every Christmas for the last few years, LadBaby have got the UK Christmas Number One single. I’ve always thought I get irrationally angry at this. But now, with the half a year’s separation from that annual event, I’ve come to my senses. It is perfectly rational to dislike this occurrence. Here is a rambling essay on why.

I think some of my annoyance comes from the fact that people aren’t buying it because they like the music. They’re buying it in spite of any musical quality. Surely this destroys the sanctity of the charts. As an analyst and lover of data this annoys me.

I like the chart as a historical record of our times. What were we listening to at what point of time. Along with the box office number one and the price of common household objects, they form the holy trinity of the ‘it’s been how long?’ stat. When an underdog team wins away at a big Premier League club, a commentator will invariably pull out a stat along these lines: “The last time Gurtwater Town won at Historic-Stadium-soon-to-be-named-after-a-state-owned-oil-company, The Beatles were number 1 with Help, legendary manager Mike Bassett had yet to be born and the price of a dildo was just 5 guineas”

Obviously it is for charity, which gives you carte blanche to make a fool of yourself on British TV. Definitely not for their own publicity, no, definitely not. That’s why outside of the 1-month window you hear so much about them

Also, what does it say about current late-stage capitalism that the mechanism by which some people are fed is through some other people adding a digital rendering of ‘music’ to a digital list. With all the way that revenue from streaming is cut and sliced before it gets to the artist, this can’t be efficient, the magic word that gives economists a boner. Imagine explaining this to a bunch of cavemen (and cavewoman, and caveboys and Cavegirl, the early 2000s CBBC programme that was responsible for my first boners). “Grog, you only get to eat if Knog chooses to listen to Crog singing enough times that he hears enough yoghurt adverts”.  

Still, I like to have my own small petty act of registering my disgust by donating to a rival food bank. One of the smaller ones who haven’t registered an away win at the Trussell Trust since the classic movie, Pirates of the Caribbean (Deep Throat/Austin Powers:Spy who Shagged me) was top of the box office.

Thank you for indulging this rant. I don’t expect it to have any effect. But I give it two years (assuming they try again, which let’s face it they will) before the wider public actively turns on them. I doubt there is anything in their past that the gutter press will drag up (not after this many years anyway), and I can’t imagine they are bright enough for a Hannah Ingram-Moore style swindle, so I guess it will come from them putting their foot in it. Probably an ill-thought out tweet extolling the benefits of austerity from a Caribbean holiday.

P.S. I did some proper research for this post. As in I read their Wikipedia page. It turns out their second child’s middle name is “Notts” because LadBaby is a big Nottingham Forest fan. Now, I’m not a Forest fan, but even I know that their fans dislike being referred to as Notts (as it more correctly refers to their rivals Notts County). Apparently the correct abbreviation (and therefore the child’s name) should be Nottm.