GCSEs: Should you just f**k them off and hang out with your mates?

12th May 2023

GCSE exams begin on Monday, but should you revise or not bother because a worthless bit of paper won’t determine your life? Here 16-year-old rebel Ryan Whittaker gives his advice.

Employers don’t care anyway

You think your boss will be impressed because you’ve got a piece of paper with a number on? Dream on. Out in the real world, which I know about because my brother’s 19 and works at Pizza Magic, nobody gives a shit. They care about real stuff, like having access to a car and no criminal convictions.

Nobody successful has GCSEs

Lord Sugar. Sir Richard Branson. Stormzy. Professor Stephen Hawking. What have they got in common? Huge British successes, and not a GCSE among them. Because getting passing grades gives you such a false sense of achievement that you let real opportunity slip away. It actually holds you back.

None of it’s worth learning

Cell mitosis? Themes in Of Mice And Men? Quadratic graphs? F**k off. No way are you ever going to need to know any of that shite. What’s the point of learning it just to forget it when you could be learning real survival skills out on the streets of Bury St Edmunds?

You’ll never be this young again

Back in like times of yore, a 16-year-old would be married, at war or king. He wouldn’t be sitting around drawing a revision timetable with his mum bringing him smoothies. He’d be out living life. For example, tonight we’re going for a Maccy Ds then hanging out in B&Q car park.

You can always retake them

Even if you decide you want GSCEs for whatever reason – I’m cool not getting into 60 grand of student debt, but if you do – then there are retakes next year. By then we’ll all be 17 anyway so the wild times will be over and most of us will be settled down. I’ll probably be married.

I’ve got some weed in

My brother delivered to this guy and could smell the weed so strong so he asked him for a deal and I’ve got half of it because he owed me for borrowing my bike. You could revise all weekend but this sweet-ass green will all be gone by then. It’s only geography. Everyone’s seen mountains and shit. F**k it off.

Seven great songs for delusional white teenagers on the bus

12th May 2023

ARE you 14 and desperately want to be ‘urban’ and ‘street’ despite living in the sticks? Here are some excellent tracks to listen to with your crew on the bus to Knutsford.

Heat – 50 Cent

No trip to the local park to share a two-litre bottle of Strongbow is complete without some Fiddy. A lot of his songs are fairly interchangeable, and this one ticks most of the boxes: ‘I’ll ride by and blow ya brains out’, ‘I done made myself a millionaire’, and so on. You too intend to get rich or die tryin’ but your mum keeps making you do your GCSE coursework instead of busting sick rhymes.

Bring Ya Whole Crew – DMX

Like DMX, you have a crew, so he’s required listening for tips on dealing with beefs in the hood. ‘I got blood on my hands and there’s no remorse/ And got blood on my dick cause I f**ked a corpse’, raps DMX surprisingly cheerfully. You’re not sure he really did f**k a corpse, but even DMX must have had the odd dry spell, and you can certainly relate to not getting your leg over.

Chi Chi Man – TOK

A lot of Jamaican dancehall is basically gangsta reggae, which is great, but it’s quite homophobic and the girls in your class don’t like that. If you want to stand any chance of fingering Lianne Rogers don’t play her this track about burning gay men, and particularly not Dr Evil’s hilariously fearful hit Batty Boy Stay Far From We. (Sample lyric: ‘Adam was made for Eve/ He was not made for Steve/ No ifs, no buts, no maybes/ Dicks and butts will make no babies.’)

Kim – Eminem

Marshall Mathers is an inspiration to every aspiring rapper like yourself. However you’re currently having difficulty writing your own lyrics about violently murdering your girlfriend, possibly due to never having had a girlfriend. You could easily fill several double albums with songs about wanking, though.

Straight outta Compton – NWA

An oldie but the lyrics are excellent. As well carrying out what sounds like dozens of murders, which somehow he was never charged with, Ice Cube warns potential enemies he will ‘cook ‘em in a pot like gumbo’, and there’s nothing more terrifying than being turned into seafood stew. Sadly you live in a leafy commuter town in Cheshire, not a crime-ridden Californian slum with a sky-high murder rate, but you can dream.

Paper Planes – MIA

You love this track, which is totally gangsta, with female rapper MIA in a hoodie singing ‘All I wanna do is take your money’ to the sound of gunshots. Annoyingly, it’s actually about singer Maya Arulpragasam’s difficulty overcoming immigrant stereotypes when applying for a US work visa, but it’s still great to listen to while smoking a pathetically tiny blim of dope behind Asda while nervously watching out for ‘the Feds’.

Thug Life – Tupac

Admittedly you’re not as immersed in street crime as Tupac (RIP) with his entanglements in various shootings and his untimely death, but you do play your music without headphones on the bus which is probably illegal, so you feel a bond. You definitely want a ‘thug life’ tattoo, but your mum would go f**king ballistic. Still, Tupac probably had the same problem.