Killing two turds with one stone

Now there isn't much that Vlad and I agree on, but there are two things which have exercised our combined ire recently.

1) The existence of Avatar fans.

I don't mean people who saw the film and thought it was okay, who were impressed by the effects but not much else. I mean the hardcore fanbase which has sprung up in the last couple of months and is spreading on the internet like bubonic plague. Unsympathetic souls have christened them "Avatards".

First of all, this review explains why the film is overrated, dull and manipulative.

Yet it's just the sort of thing that seems to suck people in. Using a highly scientific method of measuring internet opinion, I typed "avatar is shit" into Google. It got 24 million hits. If I type "avatar is awesome", it gets twice as many. That can't be right.

There are Avatar forums devoted to dealing with post-Avatar depression - for people who are depressed, I should add, not because they just paid good money to put on some silly glasses and be bored for two hours, but because after being sucked into Cameron's cliched and preachy utopian fairytale they find themselves unable to deal with the imperfections of the real world.

And while the film has its share of normal fans, there are some who regard it as a life-changing experience, a call to arms for social and political revolution. It's basically provoked a crude form of environmental activism for people with short attention spans and a penchant for blue faces.

Personally I don't see how the derivative "alien" culture of the Na'vi (another pet hate: arbitrary use of apostrophes in alien or fantasy names) can inspire anyone but the most feeble minded. Honestly. It's a hokey mush of noble savage clichés and a language that any skilled linguist could bash out over a weekend.

Worst of all, now my toes curl in embarrassment every time I hear someone use the phrase "I see you". Thanks, Cameron. You've spawned another generation of confused sci-fi nerds whose idea of personal fulfilment is to waste their time learning to live a pretend culture and language, as though Star Trek didn't already fulfil that need. Tolkien, as a professional philologist, constructed his fantasy languages for his own half-secret personal enjoyment. He never expected that anyone would take the trouble to learn them.

2) U2, especially Bono

Vlad has already covered Bono's latest insult to humanity, i.e. his continued existence. U2's 2009 tour helped the band reap over $100m last year and involved perhaps the largest physical expression of arrogance ever made by any rock band, including U2.

Compensating for something, Bono?

One would think that a band which was able to impress people with its musical skill wouldn't need to resort to stuff like this. What's Bono going to do next, rebuild the Pyramid of Cheops on the banks of the Liffey as his burial tomb?

I gladly concede that U2 has had some good moments. Sunday Bloody Sunday is a decent protest song, and I think With Or Without You is a beautiful ballad. But they've produced no more than you'd expect for a band which has lasted three times longer than Napoleon's empire and produced a dozen more full-length albums than he managed. As the saying goes, you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it's gonna stick.

The best you can say about them is that they haven't got any worse in the last thirty years, but that's mostly because they haven't developed at all. There's a simple test. Listen to their 1980 debut album Boy, and then listen to 2009's No Line On The Horizon, and try to identify any meaningful progression apart from the increased pretension of the title. The same echoey guitar riffs, the same warbling vocals, the same vacuous lyrics.

Being unable to expand into new creative areas in all that time, apart from regular forays into whatever they judged to be cool at the time (pacifism and Americana in the 80s, techno in the 90s, themselves in the 2000s), must be indicative of a serious lack of talent. But then U2 has always been mostly about impressing people. They are like the golden boy who is a little too eager to prove himself to his parents because he knows, deep down, that he isn't really all that golden.

For an example of a band which has developed ten times as much as U2 in half the time, you could do worse than listen to the back catalogue of Wilco. Jeff Tweedy doesn't need massive robot crabs to impress people.