Dave Shaw took a walk last night on what passes for the wild side these days among middle aged geezers like him and him. But Kelly Osbourne, whom he apparently shared the party with, is hardly wild side. She was on Top of the Pops with dad Ozzy last week, singing a potential Christmas Number One Dad/Daughter Duet for gawds sakes. It was very sweet and all, but not exactly biting heads off bats stuff like Ozzy used to do. So I'm told. The real wild child of the Osbourne family is the mysterious Other Daughter who refuses to be on television. How weird is that?
Jonathan Ross also interviewed Ozzy and Kelly on his show last week, and compared Ozzy to the Queen Mother. Quite right. I think the link is that they both have (had in the QM's case) a public reputation for total honesty. Quite how genuine that was with the QM I don't know, but with Ozzy it seems very real. For example, the other night on The Osbournes, Ozzy was in a state about his wife's colon cancer and was being consoled by this Guru character, who was blabbering away in that special language that Gurus use which you can't remember a single word of because it makes extremely little sense, and I was thinking: "What the fuck's that all about?" One microsecond later, Ozzy says: "What the fuck's that all about?" How can I not love the man?
Such magic moments as that aside, the appeal of the Osbournes is that despite all the swearing and adolescent whingeing and moaning, and Oz's very evident history of drug abuse resulting in slurred syllables, they are, underneath all the underclass modernisms, a totally trad family. They love each other. And that mum, how about her? She stays at home, and looks after everybody. No separate career for her. Her only job type job is taking care of about two thirds of Ozzy's job.
What we are witnessing here is the ossification, not to say Ozzyfication, of rock and roll, in the same way that jazz based pop music finally arrived at its terminus in the nineteen fifties, just before rock blew its lid off. It started off being belted out by dodgy negroes in drug sodden brothels, and ended up being sung by Tony Bennet in a cardigan on some TV Christmas special. Now rock and roll has reached the same situation.
It's inevitable. You can't stop this kind of thing happening.
The proof that the rock and role era is ending is that it is more and more making its peace with the stuff it used to hate. Rod Stewart has an Xmas album out now of pre-rock tunes, full of witty, perfectly rhyming lyrics like they stopped writing in 1952. The latest pop babes routinely cover tunes that were written before they were born, and the air is thick with the sound of different generations getting along fine with each other.
Time for another inter-generation war? Is there some other rough musical beast slouching towards Bethlehem? Maybe there already has been, but by definition I hate it and have been ignoring it. (Dance, hip hop, etc.) But what if the Tony Bennet/Beatles discontinuity was a one-off? What if pop music just dribbles on for ever, getting nicer and nicer, more and more like Abba every year, and the rock and roll explosion of Devil Music never happens again? Maybe the next big row will be with a new generation that doesn't like any pop music at all, and prefers to spend all its time getting post-graduate degrees in nanotechnology, or some such freakery.
Not that pop music will necessarily be crap, any more than Mahler is, even though he was using a musical instrument pretty much perfected the best part of a century earlier. Sting's latest tune, for example, another male/female duet, sounded to me musically really good on Top of the Pops, despite the ghastly more-American-than-the-Americans accent that Sting sings in and the overwrought manner of the woman he was duetting with. I'd love to hear that one covered by a batch of kids from the reality TV pop idol fame game circuit.
By the way, talking of the Devil's Music, Ross Noble on Room 101 identified Christian Rock as something that should be wiped out for the challenge to everything properly indecent that it is. Is there anything more nauseating than a bunch of vicars imitating the Beatles? Well, yes, lots of things, but it is nauseating.
As you can tell, I spent the night in, in front of the telly.
