It's time. To face. The MUSIC!
I've been watching The X Factor every Saturday night for a few weeks now and I have come to a conclusion. What we're facing is definitely not 'the music', but more like what you might face if you picked up a moss-covered rock in a haunted wood and then forced yourself to let the woodlice crawl all over your hand for an hour, all the while trying to enjoy your Saturday night curry.
The poor old hopefuls always get a lot of stick so I won't go on about that. We all know what we think. Sometimes we laugh for a few seconds at the singing, but then stop when it becomes apparent that the singer is mentally ill. Sometimes they will have nice voices and we’ll cry at how they overcame such adversities as say, ‘coming from Fife’ (their words not mine) and round and round we go again week after week until Christmas. However it’s apparent, at X Factor time more than ever, that such a premium is placed on having 'talent' and being famous that it has now actually turned our young people into jittering lunatics and sent our existing lunatics completely and irretrievably over the edge. It isn’t fair. It's just not FAIR Gary Barlow. We need a reality check from reality TV and pronto.
But what actually is talent? Is it something you're born with? Or are you in the Malcolm Gladwell Outliers club and think that it's something you can develop on your own if you try hard enough? (As long as you're not born in August obviously, you youngsters are clearly stuffed right from the start).
These days, recognised talent (in the media at least) seems to be all about entertainment. Can you dance? Can you sing? Can you act? Not much glamour or recognition is handed out to the other job sectors. There’s no Administration Factor - It’s time. To face. The HOLEPUNCH! No Engineer Idol or Britain’s Got Social Workers. No. Young people today, in the main, want to be in the entertainment industry and they want to be famous and that’s that.
Why is it that some people *pictures the divine Beyonce rising above the X Factor railings in a cloud of sparkling rain* seem to have an other-worldly twinkle in their eye whereas others are doomed to a life spent making cardboard boxes in a factory? *Aside* Cardboard Box Factory Worker is my idea of the world’s worst job – no offence if this is your job but seriously come ON, get a better job. If you’re set on being a factory worker, at least make something else? The box is just the vessel! It epitomises emptiness and confronts you by forcing you to imagine all the other jobs out there where people have to fill the boxes with interesting things. Dreary. Plus, who makes the boxes for the boxes in the factory? A worse job even still! Is this an existential problem that drives box makers mad as they punch, fold and pack? Or is it unlikely that a box maker would even ask this type of question? I bet Beyonce would have asked it on her first day at the factory. ‘Beyonce, here are your safety goggles and do you have any questions before you get started?’, ‘Well actually yes, who is it that makes these boxes? They’re boxilicious!’ But anyway, I digress.
Analysis shows that to be successful (or at least to appear talented), you have to have put in 10, 000 hours of graft. TEN THOUSAND HOURS of doing the same thing over and over. You’d have to be as focussed as a bloody box maker! Then when you’re finally ready to show off what you can do, it will appear as though you have magical powers, when in fact you’ve practised your socks off and probably bored yourself rigid.
The lesson to be learned, as early as possible, seems to be that you get nothing for free and if you want to be successful, you’re going to have to put in some bloody effort. The sooner you work that out, the better. Unfortunately for most of us however, while our parents were reading us The Hungry Caterpillar and our infant brains marvelled at how that hole went right through the book, (right through it!? Amazing stuff and oh the possibilities!), Michael Jackson’s father (the horrifying Joe) was lashing his sons with an extension cord and screaming into their terrified faces, ‘dance! Sing BETTER and MORE!!’ While we were sliding down the stairs in our sleeping bags with our stupid and talentless peers, Beyonce and Kelly were putting together Destiny’s Child. ‘Did you have a nice time at Beyonce’s birthday?’, ‘Oh yes thanks, we organised ourselves into a girl group and worked on some harmonies’.
Really it’s no wonder that when delusional, residential home out-patients rock up to the X Factor, tears streaming down their faces and with tragic tales of shattered dreams and jobs in factories, Barlow shifts uncomfortably in his seat and then sends them on their way proclaiming, ‘you are never, ever going to boot camp’. Barlow had to graft and he’s just not having it.
But is there anything we can do about our collective lack of talent? Is it too late? Are we doomed to spend our lives at our desks and never know how it feels to sell out the O2 in 10 minutes? Sadly, it seems that this may be so. All there is to cling to is the hope that it’s not too late to get a part on Eastenders as an old person. Just look how long Jim Branning waited for that break! And even when he lost his marbles and his dodgy eye started rolling in his head, they just wrote it into the show! Brilliant.
Perhaps all we can do is try to be as good as possible at the thing we’re already doing. Even Beyonce must need a flat pack box sometimes and when she does, who is she going to call? YOU that’s who. Feel better? Yeah, me neither.
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