6 Lessons learned from Tim Minchin

This (much like my last post) is probably going up fairly late (although I do have a legitimate reason this week other than a lack of ideas- but hopefully it wasn’t too blaringly obvious).

Anyway, the excuse this week is that I spent the weekend (including my usual Saturday evening writing/lamenting my lack of social life time-slot) in Norwich, going out, clubbing on Saturday night and seeing Tim Minchin on Sunday evening (usually when I go through the arduous task of attempting to edit my posts), the gig was amazing, and I contemplated doing some sort of review of it, but figured that rigidly adhering to the 6 Lessons format was more important (and more interesting for the 6 billion people who didn’t attend the specific Tim Minchin gig I went to last night).

I’ve also found through my miscellaneous ramblings that I find it fairly difficult to write about something inherently funny without inadvertently pilfering their jokes and ruining them with a lack of comic delivery and timing- its far easier to take a cheap shot at The Daily Mail.

So whilst I would love to regale you with how amazing Tim Minchin was last night (very), perhaps steal some of his jokes, and subsequently rob them of their humour, I will instead be using him as some sort of framing device. Or something a lot like that... 6 Lessons learned from Tim Minchin (complete with videos!)…

1: The Lesson: Socially responsible anthems don’t have to be completely didactic

Learned From: “Canvas Bags”

I’ve never had a particularly comfortable relationship with socially responsible songs (I must have had a bad experience- aside from having to listen to Bob Geldof- in my youth when “Do They Know Its Christmas?” came on one Christmas in the mid-90s), I always find them to have an astonishingly patronising tone, and in order to keep the general message of the song intact trade offs have to be made which causes the song to suffer somewhat.

When I saw Greenday play headline the Reading festival in 2004, they played a lot of material from their (then) upcoming album, American Idiot. In between this they were frequently saying how they were going to vote Bush out of the white house upon their return to America, everyone cheered and 8 weeks later, when the elections were over and American Idiot had been released to commercial and critical success, George W. Bush was still president.

And the album, whilst not saving any children in Africa, was meant to be conveying some sort of message (War is wrong? Suicide is bad? The destructive ‘Punk’ approach vs the ‘Hippie’ love approach?), and although I was glad to see that the world valued more than just simple three minute long pop songs, as far as I concerned, whilst the album was an interesting exercise in making an album based entirely on a theme- which had already been done 30 years before by The Who and Pink Floyd- it lacked any of what made Greenday truly brilliant (namely their simple three minute pop songs).

Tim Minchin originally became widely known for fronting a campaign for canvas bags, with his song, er, “Canvas Bags” but far from being a typical socially responsible replete with preaching tone, it managed to be amusing whilst conveying the message. I now own a canvas bag.

2: The Lesson: How to take criticism in a calm and mature way

Learned From: Song for Phil Daoust

3 years ago, Phil Daoust wrote a really rather scathing 1-star review of Minchin’s set at the Edinburgh festival. This included some fairly personal slights about some reasonably significant aspects of Minchin’s set. Understandably he was hurt by this, and has penned a hilarious song (for Phil Daoust) about forgiveness.

I hope when (and for that matter I hope it’s when rather than if) I have anything notorious enough to be graded with a 5 star rating system- or even a percentage system, I’m not picky- that if I were to get a poor review, I would be able to take criticism in the same way that Minchin does…

3: The Lesson: Its possible to be critical of the perception of what love is, but still be quite romantic

Learned From: “If I didn’t have you”, “You grew on me”,

A couple of months ago I wrote about romantic comedies, and it’s quite possible that I came across more than a little critical of them. Despite really liking them. It’s quite difficult to live in a world where there is a plethora of awful, predictable and far-too-watchable romantic comedies suggest with certainty that there will be some sort of positive resolution. Particularly when half of those marriages would end in divorce. I bet it’s the ones with Hugh Grant in, I reckon when he’s not pleasantly befuddled he’s no longer attractive.

Tim Minchin has a number of songs that are critical of the notion of love at first sight and how it is typically more valued by Hollywood producers than “the creepy uppy kind of love” he discusses in “You grew on me”.

Anyway, I came up with a theory why people are so desperate to believe that this specific brand of love exists. And it’s only slightly misanthropic. People are lazy and pathetic. They want to be able to gain the benefits of being in a relationship (which according to scientific studies, include living longer and being more likely to get employed as well as all of the obvious stuff) without the effort or risk involved in the typical rigmarole associated with clumsily stumbling into a relationship. But perhaps that’s just me.

Obviously it’s a good thing as far as Hollywood’s concerned; they only have an hour and a half to two hours max in which to build up the appearance of a meaningful relationship. It’s just easier to have a couple of lingering shots of smouldering gazes whilst Damien Rice plays in the background.

All spoken like a true cynic, still, it appears that despite Minchin’s similarly critical views of the portrayal of love in films and Mills and Boon novels (if indeed, they can be called that), he’s been in a relationship with the same woman since he was 17. That’s half his life. Which strikes me as pretty romantic really.

4: The Lesson: The distribution of talent in this world isn’t fair

Learned From: Any Tim Minchin song

Not a whole lot to say about this really, as you can probably tell from the videos featured so far (and if you haven’t been watching them as you’ve gone along, and I’ve gone on and on, shame on you, go back and do it now), Tim Minchin is a brilliant pianist, a superb singer, and he can write brilliant, funny and nonetheless, thoroughly intelligent lyrics. It’s just not fair.

Watch the solo in this song, and just the general diversity of his voice.

5: The Lesson: Its hard to get noticed on the Internet

Learned From: “The Youtube Lament”

Something I’ve noticed from the few weeks I’ve been maintaining this blog and generally trying to gain some sort of presence on the Internet is that it’s difficult. The most success I’ve had so far is this article on romantic comedies (done off the back of that first post a couple of months ago), which has managed to gain over 1200 hits.

On the other hand, this video of a kitten, with bad grammar and a blocky face has been on youtube (where there are many videos of kittens for it to compete with) for two days, and has already amassed a view count of 2,000.

But look at its little legs. Aww.

6: The Lesson: The notion of an omnipotent god is a little silly

Learned From: “Storm”

I recently made the leap from agnostic to full blown atheist (and to show true commitment to this decision I changed it on facebook and everything). Agnosticism is a wonderful, comforting position for people to take in the grand religion debate. It is non-committal (my favourite argument was to say that humans couldn’t possibly even begin to contemplate the sheer scale and awesomeness of a god as good as religious types are keen to tell me about), and means that tirades at parties (both religious and anti-religious) are less likely to be directed at you (unless you're the only agnostic at a party full of ravenous atheists).

This was a position I was content to take for many years, until I listened to “Storm”, which details a dinner party where Tim Minchin locks horns with a hippy girl about her support of alternative therapies and eventually goes off on an extended rant taking in many aspects of religion and spirituality.

This led me to give more consideration to my long term, comfortable position, I’ve always found science great, without it we wouldn’t have cures for deadly diseases, we wouldn’t have the ability to experience and immerse ourselves in the staggering beauty and the cultures of the other side of the world, without science, I wouldn’t have electricity to run my xbox on.

Despite this appreciation (and occasionally, even an understanding) of science and all it’d done for me, I was content not to ponder the existence- or lack thereof- of god, homeopathy or Santa.

However, hidden within the comical stanzas and couplets of “Storm” are a number of incisive and, most importantly, rational arguments against not only specific facets of the alternative lifestyle- such as psychics- but also the nature of faith and the terrible fact that these fictitious characters, fabricated beasts and dubious activities ultimately distract us from the beauty of existence itself (and Jungles and fish and grass and Velociraptors, even though they technically no longer exist). It was hard not to take note of such humorously composed and eloquently voiced arguments and not agree.

I’m aware of the irony that being indoctrinated into this set of beliefs by words and nice chord progressions bears a startling resemblance to joining a cult. In fact, whilst sat in the theatre last night, with a thousand people laughing in the simultaneously and singing along together, there were some very definite comparisons that could be drawn between a religious service and the gig.

This wasn’t lost on Minchin himself, who laments the loss of coming together to share music and sing together in a more secular society, and proceeded to lead the audience in singing a song about loving Jesus. It did feel like joining a cult. And now I’m indoctrinating you.