As reported yesterday I arrived home to three shiny new albums. Thom Yorke's The Eraser, Malcolm Middleton's Into The Woods and Hope Of The States' Left. Here would follow my attempt to persuade you to buy them all, but I've only listened to one of them through more than once, so I can't with any real authority try to persuade you. So instead of that, here is a brief note about Scottish people and swearing.
You see, what I've observed so far from the Malcolm Middleton album so far is that it's very very good, but he does swear and awful lot on it. And not just mild explicatives either, full on "never mind my own grandmother, I wouldn't say that to anyone" swear words. But, you don't really notice it. When English people swear it generally sounds quite forceful, they wouldn't normally say anything like that but they want to offend in this case and so they're using it. It's not a nice thing to hear. When Americans swear it sounds much more normal but it still manages to be offensive. I imagine this is because with Americans offensive and acting normal are tied together. Irish and Australians manage to swear and not be offensive but only because their dialects seem to understand the swear words as semantically meaningless and so therefore they're only used as filler words or as a word that can describe anything1. In Scottish though, the meaning of the word is kept, but the offensiveness is not felt personally. I don't know what it is about the Scottish accent or dialect, but somehow when someone swears using it they also seem to imply that you shouldn't be getting your panties in a twist over what are just a few words.
I'm not encouraging the use of swear words but it'd certainly be an interesting experiment to see someone rate the offensiveness of swear words by the accent of the person who said them. This may sound like the least practically useful study ever, but actually uses for this abound. An example: Instead of bleeping out words of songs or TV shows they could just dub them over with a Scottish person saying the words. Imagine watching Trisha with the unhappy participants jumping into Scottish every few words.
ftn1. Technically these sorts of words are known as Speech Disfluencies and Metasyntactic variables respectively. God bless, Wikipedia.
The problem with swearing on the i******t is that everyone automatically fills in the blanks and so reads it as if you are a******y swearing. Which j**t seems to d****t the purpose of it
mark's a g*y
h*h h*h h*h
I'm so i******e
What do you think of The Eraser? I aggree with Mark Lawson, that it's a bit pants.
Having listened to it three times now I'll make some early comments; It's really really good. I think. Harrowdown Hill and The Eraser are fantastic songs and as a whole the album does seem to really fit together. It's very very obscure but that's Thom Yorke for you, it was never going to be to everyone's taste.
I also aggree with what Lawson said, that Radiohead would like it, but almost everyone else would think it rubbish.
I think if you believe that Kid A was a good direction to go after OK Computer then you're going to like The Eraser. If you think that The Bends is their best album then you probably won't. But then if you think The Bends is their best album you can take some solace in the fact that Thom Yorke is probably getting the crazy electronic glitchiness out of his system a bit so we can expect a bit less 'interestingness' in Radiohead's new stuff. Not sure that's a good thing really, but it's Radiohead, they know what they're doing.
I like the Bends... never mind, I'll keep trying.
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martin
I dont f*****g swear that often, and when I do, no one b****y notices. However, what are your thoughts on swearing on the internet, what with it being a level playing field in the world of dialects!
B*****ks!