Monday, April 14, 2014

Paolo Nutini doesn't understand mental health issues

There's something interesting about the way Paolo Nutini seems annoyed that people who pay money to hear him play his songs get upset when he doesn't play them that well:

Tracks from his earlier albums, such as Jenny Don't Be Hasty and New Shoes are almost unrecognisable - verging on an all out metal assault.

"We're trying to get people into our atmosphere for this new album. I don't want to be like, 'We, owe people hits and we can't do too many new songs in the set, the idea is to draw them into our headspace which is more challenging.

"In the UK people are coming to shows with more of an expectation, they want to jump around to the old brass lines. In Bournemouth, some bloke shouted out, 'Play the songs properly,' 'cause we've reworked the old tracks. but I've got no desire to go over old ground.

"It feels like starting out again, it's a challenge trying to win people over again."
Given that being a Nutini fan makes you already more likely to be fairly conservative in your tastes, it's both impressive and cruel to suddenly dump Metal Machine Music on their heads, in the gap between Pizza Express and calling the baby sitter to warn them you'll be home an hour early.

But that isn't the reason Nutini has caught our eye this morning. It's this:
Acoustic tracks jostle for space with short sampled musical interludes in the vein of artists like DJ Format, David Holmes or 2ManyDJs.

"It's interesting because I've heard this a few times," he says. "But for me the last album that we made was far more schizophrenic in that sense, we were moving from ska... ish tracks to an accordion and fiddle song to a Dixieland theme."
No, Paolo. Your last album wasn't schizophrenic in any sense at all. You could have called it eclectic, which would merely have been making it sound more exciting than it was; instead, you've managed to add insult to misery.

Here's a hint, from the Guardian style guide:
schizophrenia, schizophrenic
should be used only in a medical context, never to mean in two minds, contradictory, or erratic, which is wrong, as well as offensive to people diagnosed with this illness.
It's 2014, Paolo. Why are people still misusing this word?


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