Totally gay for Scouting For Girls

The apparent theft of Scouting For Girls' official Twitter site has had one unforeseen consequence that raises serious questions about the role of social media and pop music.

Here's what happened. For several hours yesterday, the official Twitter feed on scoutingforgirls.com displayed some remarkably odd tweets:

- working on some more shit tunes.

- Oops... turns out Elvis IS dead. Let us know of factual innacuracies in our other songs and we'll write (irritating) corrected versions.

- Robbie WIlliams showed that anyone can rap well. We'e thinking of giving it a bash for our next single. Rap-a-rap-rap! Word!

- she' so loverlee UH! she's so loverlee YEAH! she's so loverlee HAHA-HAHA! #ThatsHowWillSmithDoesIt

- just off to the toilet. One of us is going for a wee - the other 2 are going poo-poos. See if you can guess who!

- time UP! the one in the hat went for the wee, whatever his name is.

- just to let you know, Danny Dyer will be the warm up DJ for our next tour. pwopa nawtee!

A quick, um, scout of the internet shows @SFGOfficial being pimped by the funk-dribbling piano fops for some time, but it seems they never got round to registering the Twitter account.

And so a wag by the name of Chappers took up the name and started tweeting as Scouting For Girls. The tweets fed automatically to the group's website. They were funny. A (very) small segment of pop history was made.

Chappers, a web-head and occasional DJ based quite near me in Stockport, was quick to offer the account back to the group's management. They grumpily referred the matter to Sony, while the band themselves seemed to take it on the chin.

The 'Girls said on their own Twitter account: "Thank you to everyone who complained when out twitter account got hacked into! Just seen it. Quite funny - fairplay!"  Although it should be pointed out, the account wasn't hacked and was simply the result of a slip in web design by their record company.

All very well and fluffy. No harm done. Everyone had a giggle at the expense of an awful band. Except this whole fandango has had a much more dire consequence that anyone had imagined. This will have repercussions way beyond what happened over five hours yesterday.
 
It means I am now following Scouting For Girls on Twitter.
 
The moment Chappers handed SFGOfficial back to the band's management, I suddenly found myself as an official fanboy of Scouting For Girls.
 
I have never followed an awful band on Twitter. 7,000 tweets and two years into my Twitter career, and this has ruined me. I am following Scouting For Girls.

This fact cannot be denied.

I've had to buy into the 'Girls. I am their follower, after all. I've bought t-shirts. I've bought all the singles. I've listened to far too much Ben Folds Five. I am now TGFSFG: Totally Gay For Scouting For Girls.

It has left me in a world of Topman jackets, sensible fonts and Jamiroquai posters. I now like to hear the lyrics in a pop song. A good melody. I don't even like Aphex Twin any more. I mean, it's just noise, isn't it?

Everything's changing, as Keane would say. Chappers is pop music's evil nemesis, while I am a brain-dead fanboy. The whole balance of music has tilted, and all because Scouting For Girls had the indecency to be crap in the first place.

After all, if they didn't make the kind of music that is probably liked by Liberal Democrats, this whole saga would never have happened. Yeah. You heard. Liberal Democrats.

Harrumph. Scouting For bloody Girls. Happy now?

Chosen Words: R is for Rhythm

Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Natter in the comments section on my previous post leads me nicely to a slightly important element of electronic music: rhythm.

Rhythm in music is probably the one thing that separates modern generations from those that lived through the age of the whinging crooner and all that screechy violin stuff they call "classical".

You can tell rhythm has become more popular from a simple statistic: there were more hit singles with 'rhythm' in the title in the 1990s than there had been in the entire history of chart music. The same is true for the words 'sexy', 'fat' and 'roland' (probably).

Drum machines helped bring repetitive beats to the forefront of modern music. A notable drum machine is the Rhythm Ace, which was distributed by Bentley pianos. The combination of Bentley and Rhythm Ace gave rise to an influential big beat collective called Midfield General. No. Fatboy Slim. Wait. Um... Chemical Brothers? I forget.

The Roland TR-808 was a crappy sounding drum machine that rose, Cinderella style, to claim an affectionate place in pumpkin-- er-- music history. Its fake, electronic sounds were as similar to real drums as Scouting For Girls are to real music.

The rise of the drum machine and the endless thirst for rhythm has lead to a two-word phrase that strikes fear in the heart of any responsible music fan: "more cowbell". You see? The 1994 Criminal Justice Bill was right after all.

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.