John Lydon breaks it down

John Lydon is having a bit of a summer. He's touring with Sex Pistols again and he's getting in as much trouble as possible. I watched him retort to the Kele Okereke affair on 'The One Show' the other day, it was pretty amusing, I'm not sure whether "My grandchildren are Jamaican" is a response to any other question than "Are you a racist?" which is pretty excellent. Today he's in the headlines for calling Amy Winehouse "Aimless" (no doubt about that) and claiming that she's imitating black music and taking drugs to cover up for a lack of talent. To quote NME.com on the subject...

"There's not a single word that means anything. It's not like these songs are deeply moving or inspirational or cultural in any way you could find useful."

Referring to his distrust of artists influenced by jazz, the punk icon said: "I don't like pale imitations and shades of things and I am always wary when people go jazzy because jazz is the best cover up for a lack of talent the world has ever known. It don't wash real with me.

"And the cover up for her which is probably the guilt trip is that she requires vast amounts of drugs to hide the fact that she is fake."

There can be very little argument against what John's saying. I like Amy Winehouse's songs, I can't deny it, I own her last album; I actually own her first album which sucks. But you can just see a room of advisers (label/ management) saying "Okay, she can sing, whatever we've got here we've got a singer. She's out of the Brit School though so there's not much going on in terms of artistry. How are we going to make her credible? Hmmmm...." the answer of course was to rip off a form of music that isn't directly viable to the British public, they've got a nice little white girl doing it, they can afford the best producers and song writers and they can say Radio 2 made her. Genius! It's the same process everybody out of The Brit School goes through when breaking into the pop industry. I actually wish we could go back to the days when Brit School alumni joined embarrassing girl/ boy groups like Blue and Another Level, there was transparency back then. These days you have to keep your guard up in case The Kooks turn out to be trained, or Kate Nash, or Leona Lewis, or Floetry, or The Feeling, or Adele...oh wait...