Damon Albarn's Here To Teach You How To Be A Five-Star Shit Talker

It’s not an easy time to talk shit about famous musicians. Even if you are one. Where once such tempests in teapots were siloed in arts sections if not rock magazines (multiple weeklies in the UK!), the nature of social media means you don’t have to pay for the honor to read what some snotty writer or singer has to say about an established act, licking a stamp and waiting for morning to let them know you disapprove, hoping they'll publish your outrage. You no longer have to see an offending clip on TV and settle for shaking your fist in futility. Today, you just have to care enough to follow a site (or know someone who does), and the information will be thrown into the same endless info-trough where you learn about the collapse of democracy, cute animals, debates on the definition of genocide, and which acquaintance just got fucked over by Delta Airlines. In return, you can violently express your immediate reaction before you've even finished shitting. In this context (which also involves music “feeling” more “free” than ever before), pop star rivalries seem completely asinine, and loudly announcing you don’t like an artist feels like gratuitous pique, if not anti-social cruelty. Especially if you’ve got a brand, personal or otherwise, you’re trying to sell as well. Fans were always sensitive, and a bad album was always a minor crime compared to human rights violations by individuals & states. But today we have a culture where everyone powerful and not (and bot) is talking about all things important and inane at the same time in the same place. How could this not become a chaotic shit-show where one feels punished for daring to exist, let alone having opinions you want to express?

So it’s a little heartwarming to see Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, a storied veteran of shit-talking, pull off such an expert effort in 2023. Note I called him a veteran and not an expert. Not quite two years ago, Albarn had to apologize for blithely suggesting Taylor Swift wasn’t a real singer-songwriter because of her use of collaborators. It was an ignorant and absurd thing for him to say, obviously so if you know who Graham Coxon, Danger Mouse (the producer, not the cartoon) or Simon Tong is. Damon was always a bit of a try-hard on this front back in the '90s, Lou Reed to the Gallagher Brothers’ Andy Warhol in terms of being adored for endlessly quotable, self-enamored bitchiness. Albarn clearly wanted more love than Oasis, and got less for it, eventually settling for an impressive multi-generational fanbase and decades of acclaim for consistent and varied craft, but never earning a loudly worshipped and instantly recognizable forehead.

All that aside, I’m giving Albarn's new quotes about the Rolling Stones to Les Inrockuptibles five stars. Headlines will mangle their beauty, people will still scoff at this eternally scoffable preen machine, but what follows is a master class in how to frame your shit-talking about an easy target as righteous and considered, rather than vain and gauche, even if the next thing you see online unveils a new wrinkle to man’s inhumanity against man, or what inalienable right we're one corrupt power-coddler away from losing. It’s that good. Bracketed comments mine.

Pepe Le Print: On a different note, 2023 is also the year of the Rolling Stones comeback with a new album…

The guy who yells “Parklife!”: This really annoyed me. Because my family lives in Hackney and the way they showed up at the Hackney Empire venue really pissed me off. [Lead with the personal connection! Good!] They’ve never did a thing in Hackney, they’ve never played there, never contributed to anything. They just showed up. It’s all nonsense. [Way to establish moral perspective and your sense of responsibility as a fellow rock star!] And I listened to their new song and watched this horrible music video showing them at different stages of their lives on billboards. And this young woman objectified. What the hell is this? There’s something completely disconnected. [Ok, that’s a complete tangent, but you’ve gotten away with it by noting they drew first blood on mum & da!]

Writer who knows they’ve struck gold: Can you see yourself there, 80 years old, on billboards capitalizing on your past glory? [Points to the interviewer for leading rather than challenging, which wouldn’t have been a hard thing to do considering Blur headlined European festivals this year, climaxing shows with almost 30 year old ballads. Though Damon has already said he's restless to move on, the smoothie.]

The guy who yells “Woo hoo!”: There’s no chance and I’ll tell you why. [Now that is one DRAMATIC build-up.] I did all sorts of things, whereas they’ve never been anything other than the Rolling Stones. [Now you’ve got the old farts’ attention. Mick and Keef will both be livid you forgot their solo careers! Those wonderful Tom Waits collaborations! That eternally staggering piece of shit with Will.I.Am! SuperHeavy!] I love the idea of devoting your life to one thing, in search of the sublime. [Have you ever seen a more poignant, poetic backpedal that actually serves as a wind-up?] But the truth is, they’ve became worse. [A hit!] Worse at persisting to stay themselves. [A very palpable hit!] That’s something I don’t understand. [Game.] Making exactly the same music but not that good. [Set, though “exactly” is holding a lot of weight and I barely remember The Ballad Of Darren.] There must be no joy in doing something like this. [Match.]

“Sure,” you’re thinking. “Damon Albarn can still shoot fish in barrel if he considers his words carefully enough. But what about pro-am jackasses who like to write and rate albums like us? Who will save us from stans? From shallow, misunderstanding stans?” It’s true. We don’t have it so easy. If they discover your blog, they’ll mock your lack of stature. If you’re writing for the shell of a once-hallowed media brand, they’ll mock the brand and/or suggest you be removed from it. But we can still learn some things from this.

1. Pick your targets wisely. Have a strong sense of how you (or your site) are “punching up.” Unless you want to be some kind of deluded “equal opportunity puncher,” in which case, ew. Albarn apologized to Swift for a reason. He knows that road is a mug’s game.
2. If you want to rip shit, first establish how your subject drew first blood. Did you spend money? Did you have respectable expectations? Do they refer to your home town? All good things to lead with.
3. You can concern troll a little (how much time do you think Damon “when I sing falsetto, that’s the Japanese girl” Albarn really spends worrying about “objectification”?). But it’s better to feign a certain cluelessness about why you’re witnessing what you’re witnessing, rather than to assert sinister motivations. This way, fans can spend energy pedantically explaining, or pretending they're not mad, rather than furiously denying the accusation.
4. If you have to note that you’re better than your target, be infinitely more descriptive about how they could be just as respectable as you.
5. End with disappointment rather than contempt. Warhol knew how to say “oh, Lou…” but Reed was incapable of saying “oh, Andy…” Thankfully, he discovered tai chi before Twitter was invented.
   

Honestly, I’m so grateful for this display that I’m actually going to listen to The Ballad of Darren again before I finish my year-end listicle prep. Well done, 2D. Well done.