Glastonbury Festival is the closest England comes to staging a Nuremberg Rally pretending to be an orgy. Or is it the other way around?
Currently underway, Glastonbury has attracted tens of thousands of retarded children of all ages between 15 and 80. They’ve pitched their tents on a vast lawn, producing a credible set for a film about the plight of the homeless.
They then jam-pack into various arenas, some of them seating 35,000, to see music. That’s the verb they used when talking to Sky interviewers, who happily adopted the same lingo. “Which music have you come to see?”
Now, music used to be listened to, but no longer. Now it’s seen, or rather obscene. One thing I can say for that crowd: they are honest.
For the cacophony they come to see and, presumably see to come, has no musical element whatsoever. Like a Nuremberg Rally, it’s a grandiose show of cult worship, albeit somewhat more chaotic, more obviously erotic, and more dependent on the recent advances in pharmacology.
All one can hear is incoherent, electronically enhanced din, with the lyrics and the ‘musical’ noise equally unintelligible and lacking rhyme or reason. The show has nothing to do with anything that can even remotely pass for music one listens to, and everything to do with a pagan rite stopping just short of human sacrifice.
One interviewee explained that it’s possible to have a fab time at Glastonbury even without seeing any music, and again he gets top marks for honesty. I don’t know about fab time, but one can have plenty of fun, especially after scoring some decent stuff.
However, if one does get inside those arenas, there is indeed plenty to see. Half-naked women clad in de rigueur S&M gear go through acrobatic gyrations, some of them clearly designed to provide visual evidence that they haven’t yet transitioned to men.
One such S&M acrobat, the Anglo-Albanian singer Dua Lipa, combined her contortions with a political message. She waved a Palestinian flag that read “Glasto for Palestine”, and used it as an enhancer of her vocalism.
As is common with music seen rather than heard, the young lady kept bellowing her eardrum-shattering words drowned in the kind of noise one has to be high as a kite to be able to listen to… I mean see. Amazingly, most of the public knew the words and, when invited to do so, happily scraped themselves off the ceiling and screamed along.
Rock band Idles also demanded such audience participation, and thousands of throats obligingly echoed their scream of “Sieg heil!!!”… sorry, wrong pageantry. The actual chant was “F*** the king!!!”, which was difficult to mistake for a pledge of allegiance to the country and her civilisation.
The crowd was then treated to the spectacle of a blow-up boat surfing around to register pro-immigration protest. This suggests that neither the band nor its crazed audience will be likely to vote for the Reform Party in the upcoming elections.
Yet, as if to dispel all doubts about their voting intentions, the band belted out an anti-Farage song. Just like similar events at Nuremberg, circa 1935, the visual elements of a pagan rite formed a synergistic relationship with a political message.
Then came the turn of Charlotte Church, whose loose scarlet dress didn’t hide the lamentable failure of her diet regimen. Charlotte was at her ebullient best, greeting the crowd with an affectionate intro: “Hiya babes – lots of love from Wales my darlings.”
She then explained to the mob made up of screaming humanoids with bulging veins in their necks that it’s they who should really do her job: “I sort of want to give you the mic today… there’s so much untapped singing potential in you guys which we’re going to explore.”
Explore the untapped singing potential she did, by donning a keffiyeh and leading the drug-addled crowd in a rousing rendition of “Free free Palestine, free free Palestine, free free Palestine, free Palestine.” Since repetition, as we know, is the mother of all learning, there was no need to vary the lyrics.
The Sky segment focused on another performance, by the group called the Sugarbabes. The performers emphasised their more pendulous attractions by jumping up and down on stage and inviting the crowd to scream along to Freak Like Me. I don’t know the lyrics of that song, but the title betokens a heightened self-awareness, which is such a rare commodity nowadays.
The political significance of Glastonbury didn’t escape Gurinder Chadha, the director of the film Bend It Like Beckham. In a BBC interview she praised the festival for bringing people together.
That herding function is important, explained the director, “especially when we have this s*** 14 years of Tories who have totally taken the heart out of the country and squeezed it. F***ed us all over.”
Upholding BBC’s much vaunted standards of impartiality, the presenter Anita Rani agreed wholeheartedly: “It’s what we need…”
Allow me to complete the sentence for her: “… to annihilate what little is left of British culture, civilisation, decency and taste.” Don’t mention it, Anita. Happy to be of help.
I’ve said it before and, sad to say, must say it again, that what you describe here makes me happy (but certainly not pleased) to be well into my nineties. Very little in the state of the nation makes me want to go on living. Alas!
My first thought while reading this was of Bing Crosby (as Father Chuck O’Malley in Going My Way) advising an aspiring singer to keep the hand motions to a minimum and to put more emotion into her singing. A modern rewrite would have him advising her to lose the skirt and blazer altogether and to rip some holes in her shirt.
It’s human nature to want to be found attractive by others, but where is the indignation that these singers have to resort to visual sexualization to top the charts? The #MeToo movement has missed an entire (and lucrative) establishment.