ARE you fond of certain musical acts but know you’d be horribly out of place in their actual audience? Here are some you have slight reservations about listening to.
Kneecap
Tracks like Get Your Brits Out suggest Belfast rappers Kneecap are not big fans of the British, ie. you. However it seems they’re using ‘Brits’ to mean ‘British influence’, which is strange but at least they’ve noticed we did actually leave in 2007. You may still feel uneasy about enjoying songs about underclass woes, substance abuse and tensions with the police, but if gangster rap has taught us anything, it’s that getting a vicarious thrill from urban deprivation is fine.
Sabrina Carpenter
Bad luck if you’re a heterosexual male over 25 who likes Sabrina’s brand of lightweight pop, because you will be viewed with suspicion. Which is unfair, and totally wrongheaded. It’s Sabrina’s younger fans who shouldn’t be watching her miming blowjobs – most blokes are already fairly familiar with them. And it’s not like it will encourage you to experiment with giving them to guys you know.
Digga D
Digga D is the UK’s most successful drill artist in chart terms, but if you like his stuff there’s a strong chance you’ll feel excluded from his audience. Not because drill only appeals to a young black male demographic, but because it seems to only appeal to other drill artists with a similar love of stabbing and misogyny. Of which there is a lot. It’s probably best to enjoy Digga on headphones.
Charli XCX
Charli’s album Brat has broad appeal, but after the media’s obsession with ‘Brat Summer’ last year there’s a risk of looking as if you’re desperately trying to be ‘down with the kids’. To be authentically Brat you need to be a fairly young woman with a love of clubbing and poor impulse control. If you’re too old – let’s say 38 – you can try being pissed on white wine all the time and never saying ‘no’ to an inadvisable relationship, but it’s going to be hard work if what you truly crave is quiet nights in browsing Rightmove.
NWA
You’re aware of the phenomenon of white suburban teenagers being massive consumers of gangster rap, so as a concerned liberal you may worry you’re committing cultural appropriation too. Also you feel a bit hypocritical because you broadly support the police, and you’re all too aware of the NWA-loving middle-class dad in the Adam Buxton sketch. But before you feel too bad about all this, consider that Straight Outta Compton wouldn’t have gone triple-platinum without whiteys like you, and you’ve seen the extremely mediocre Ghosts of Mars so Ice Cube owes you for sitting through that.
T’Pau and other nostalgia acts
Some 80s and 90s acts, like The Human League, deserve a revival for musical reasons. But some of the reunion tours popular at the moment feel more like a desperate trip down memory lane in a futile search for your lost youth. Step forward T’Pau, Bananarama, Blue, etc. So while your friends might be thrilled at the prospect of seeing Steps again, you may justifiably be wondering why you’d want to relive being 13. Spots, maths lessons, extreme susceptibility to peer-group pressure – yeah, great times.
The Macc Lads
They were pretty obviously a parody of dickhead regional lads, but many of their songs function perfectly well as actual hate speech toward women, gay people, ‘Argies’ and others. As such many fans were, and presumably still are, yobs who may wish to enhance their enjoyment of tracks like Now He’s A Poof by kicking your head in. Plus it’s hard to enjoy politically incorrect humour when you’re wondering what percentage of the audience do actually have the same views as the National Front.
