Licence to bore: failing to Bond with classic social media
What do you mean ‘you weren’t expecting me’? I booked!
Boo hoo me. I never get invited to the right parties.
That is, I do get invitations to events. I’m not a complete Johnny No-Mates, at least not yet. But they’re not the type of parties I was hoping to be invited to.
The latest invite turned up this morning: another “festival of street culture” at which I can “embrace graffiti art, rap music and street food”. What’s the point of a festival for that? If I want to see vandalised public buildings, get accosted by incoherent shouty men waving their arms about, and gag on acrid yellow smoke billowing from dozens of converted camper vans selling various forms of rat brûlé, I could literally just step into the street right now.
I may as well be invited to a gallery of public toilet scribblings, a tautologous festival of bad French pop music, or an interactive exhibition of software apps that crash before you get a chance to Save. How else could anyone possibly discover these cultural gems? Other than by going to a public toilet, turning on the radio in France and using your PC, that is?
In the meantime, I still await my invitation to join BlueSky Social. And I live on the wrong side of the Channel for a Threads permit. Nobody wants me at the fun parties, it seems.
What I am looking for, of course, is an escape route from Twi… I mean ‘X’. The fall-off of Reads, Likes and Shares on that platform mirrors the exodus of users, and so I would like very much to find an alternative. I can’t use Facebook because it is sacrosanct – for mates and mates-of-mates only – while LinkedIn has grown into a grotesque ouroboros of self-gratifying irrelevance. Browsing LinkedIn posts is no different from flipping through hundreds of job application covering letters, one after the other, ad nauseum. Now you know why Human Resources staff are so dead-eyed: all your wanky statements of motivation have driven them to self-lobotomise.
Don’t get me wrong about Twi… I mean X (let’s just call it ‘TwiX’): I think an app “that does everything” is a good idea. I’m all for it. Good on you, Elon.
While you’re at it, let’s have flying cars, a cure for all illness and an end to all wars. I’m all for those too. Ooh, how about time-travel, perpetual motion engines and rain clouds on Arakis? Come on, TwiX should be able to handle it – it does everything.
Everything except decent social media, it seems. So I thought I’d try and see if some of my old logins still work on other social channels that I haven’t looked at for years. First stop, Reddit.
Actually Reddit is as far as I got. I was surprised that it looks exactly the same as it did the last time I signed in which was probably around 2010. In fact, it looks as if it hasn’t changed since 1993, which is impressive since it didn’t launch until 2005. I’ve seen better user interfaces for command-line bulletin boards viewed through an offline reader developed by 16-year-olds on a GCSE school project. Worse, Reddit appears to be just billions of people asking each other incisive questions such as “Which shoelace do you tie up first?”
Daedalus suggested to me on TwiX that I should add more subreddits to make it more relevant, such as r/Montpellier or r/BandesDessinees. I gave it a go but it doesn’t work: adding r/FemmesAPoilAvecDesGrosSeins doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
Hang on, here’s another discussion. “Hit songs that should have been Bond themes”.
I mean, really, what a load of nonsense these Reddit discussions are. I’d barely given the topic a thought… given that so many actual theme songs to James Bond films are awful enough as it is. Sure, everyone goes on about Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever but I don’t see much cheerleading for Sheena Easton’s For Your Eyes Only, nor do I hear people hum the theme from Moonraker as they go about their business.
Part of the problem is that a good song is down to 10% melody and lyrics, 90% performance. Goldfinger is not a great song, you know. It’s not exactly your first choice for a singalong on a long car journey, is it? And its lyrics are especially poor, as if written by a pubescent teen. ‘Goldfingerrr, Such a cold fingerrr’… And what about Diamonds Are Forever which features such poetic gems as ‘Hold it up and then caress it | Touch it, stroke it and undress it…’ ?
No, it comes down to how they are performed: the singer, the beefy orchestration, the production, the mix. Just imagine the theme from Goldfinger had been sung by Leonard Coen instead of Shirley Bassey, or the crazy dual-speed theme from Live and Let Die had been performed by Timmy Mallett on a ukulele.
Worse, those Reddit discussions about songs that should have been Bond themes are a disappointment. What you actually get, as you probably guessed, is a lot of people claiming that one or another slow-song-at-the-disco tends to sound to them a bit like a Bond theme. Basically these are people who hear their favourite drippy song and immediately get visions of six babes in the nip, floundering around a floor-lit swimming pool at midnight. Reading their posts, I could almost smell the Clearasil.
The only suggestion on Reddit that made me tilt my head back and forth was Kiss From A Rose performed by Seal. Edit out the first 20 seconds, which sound like incidental music taken from a hitherto unpublished Rod, Jane and Freddy folk-rock-opera for preschoolers, and play the rest back, trying to imagine a camera drop from the denouement of an exciting introductory action sequence, melting into this romantic opening, and used as a refrain at the closing credits too. The middle eight at around 2:45 could do with punching out too, but still, the rest remains a possibility.
The daftest suggestion was by someone insisting that Robbie Williams’ Millennium sounds just like a Bond theme, failing to notice that this is precisely because it samples the prominent string-section riff from John Barry’s 1967 theme to You Only Live Twice (originally sung by Nancy Sinatra). I imagine the Reddit poster may also have failed to register the significance of Robbie’s dinner suit, an Aston Martin DB5 and a Thunderball jetpack piss-take in the video. Just like in a Bond movie! What a coincidence!
If we’re just picking our favourite Bond themes, I’d go for Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name which follows the violent opening scene of 2006’s Casino Royale. It’s an oddly tuneless, dreary and untidy song but it’s worth enduring it for the final 25 seconds when the classic Bond theme chord progression (finally!) kicks in and Chris (finally!) lets rip with his real voice. Hairs on the back of my neck raise every time.
The best song that was played within a Bond film but wasn’t its main theme song (and jolly well ought to have been) is Dusty Springfield singing Bert Bacharach and Hal David’s The Look of Love in the 1967 Casino Royale.
I would also add a category entitled ‘They picked the wrong song’ and apply it to Garbage’s theme to The World Is Not Enough, a song every bit as desperate as the god-awful film itself. I even watched it on TV this week just to be sure. It’s fucking terrible. Pierce Brosnan even delivers two identical and utterly charmless sexual puns on the female lead’s name ‘Christmas’ in the final couple of minutes.
If you are familiar with Garbage’s back-catalogue, you may agree that Garbage had already recorded an almost identical song years earlier with much better lyrics and a cooler performance without the Broccoli-brand histrionics: Milk.
Harking back to Chris Cornell’s 25 seconds, the best way to sound like a Bond theme is to license that C minor chord progression and stuff it somewhere in the song. Or copy Monty Norman’s twangy guitar riff. Or at the very least give your song a title that hints at a Bond movie. Or do a bit of all three, as Mansun did with The Chad Who Loved Me. I particularly enjoy the production values on this recording, especially when it segues from the faux-romantic Jamesy Bondy instrumental intro into an unexpectedly heavy psychedelic rock vocal section at 1:48 before going epic balls-out Pink Floyd at around 2:40.
I still have to pinch myself to think that I actually lived through Britpop, a period when ephemeral bands such as Mansun existed for real and hearing songs such as this one played on mainstream radio was considered absolutely everyday and normal. Kids, you have no idea. No wonder you’re all so unhappy all the time.
I’ll finish off with a song that sounds like it could have been used for a Bond movie but ended up being used as a theme for something else entirely. Andy Gray and Gary Numan’s For You is a rather basic and a bit dreary melody repeated over and over but pumped up with big production sound and a luscious digital orchestra arrangement. It was used as the theme for a sci-fi TV series called Hunters which, as it was shown only on the SyFy Channel, means that nobody has heard of it. Numan’s vocals tend to grate with some people, so feel free to skip to 2:28 when the almost-convincing synthesised orchestra gently but blatantly slides into the Bond chord sequence for the final chorus.
By now, all these songs are sounding the same right? Just like the Bond films themselves, to be honest. Apart from the parachute thing at the beginning of The Spy Who Loved Me – which segues straight into Carly Simon’s appallingly incongruous country-and-western shitefest Nobody Loves It Better – I struggle to remember which action sequences goes with which film.
Alan, can you help?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. As you can see, this week he learnt there’s nothing of interest to him on Reddit. Where should he try next?
If Elon wanted to be master of an everything app like WeChat, surely it would have been cheaper to license the source code from said app minus the government API instead of buying TwiX and then destroying it? Or he could have licensed the API as well and done a Find and Replace of CCP with NSA. But I guess he’s happy never to see that $44 billion again.
Even if you were to n the right (wrong) side of the channel to be able to access Threads, could you really use it every day without thinking of an apocalyptic Sheffield after a nuclear holocaust? Why even bother with Threads when you can go full-on fediverse and sign up to mastodon. I ditched tw@tter last year and signed up to an instance and haven’t looked back. There may even be an instance especially designed for grumpy middle aged tech tarts with a penchant for double entendres 🤷♂️