Why Kate Nash is terrible and Kitty Pryde probably isn't

Of all the creepy skeezballs in music journalism, Everett True has to rank… somewhere in the middle. I mean, he doesn’t write for Complex so he can’t be in the top 10 percentile.

You young cats won’t remember this, but there used to be a standard operating procedure for clowning True: mention his verbal tic of repeatedly reminding people that he once hung out with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love in everything he wrote. However, it’s 2012 now. Kurt Cobain is now a Bob Marley poster. Courtney Love is the kinderwhore Jocky Wilson. So our man has moved on to something different in order to get attention.

True’s main failing always was that he saw himself as the daddy dom of ageplay music criticism. For whatever reasons, he likes it when adult women dress-up and sing like 13-year-old girls. And then he goes and sets up Collapseboard, a music review website that specifically invites young women into his swelling bosom. If I had a beard-and-grooming combo that made me look like I spend a lot of time in the copse at the bottom of Morrison’s car park, I’d probably refrain from issuing come-and-get-me pleas to tweens. But maybe that’s why I’m stuck OKCupiding girls who have Etsy accounts most of my evenings.

But this isn’t about True, this is about the fact that he, and his project, have recently gone to bat for something that few people would in 2012: Kate Nash.

Kate Nash has often attracted a lot of ugly, violent, aggressive hatred and criticism. Good. The 2007 Adam and Joe parodies of her demonstrate why: anyone can write their own Kate Nash song. Just adopt a year 7 reading age, drop some pop culture references and then slap a bit of Feminism 101 at the end of it. Ergo, “Mandy it’s the media/They make my bum feel fat/I have to go binge drinking just so I can deal with that.”

So really, if you’d been paying attention, Nash’s switch to riot grrl to make a truly awful song shouldn’t really be a surprise. It’s not the worst single of the year though, I truly can’t bring myself to write about that but here’s “White Boy Wasted” by Your Favorite Martian. The fact that Nash now looks like an aspiring Bizarre cover model from Leeds circa 2005 perhaps is shocking, though.

Never forget that riot grrl is, along with grime and metal, one of the three entirely worthless musical genres. It took what was shit about punk music (a load of middle class white fucks complaining about how hard their life is) while forgetting what made it passable (occasionally stumbling into a decent chord progression).

Nash’s defensiveness is… weird. Like many a clapped-out former C-list celebrity, they treat Heat Magazine as a kind of lost lover, alternately angry at it for getting bored and desperate for its attention. At the end of the day though, having a poor little white girl Brit School graduate who signed a record deal at 18 want to tell me how hard her life has been is probably the worst thing I can imagine in existence. If she’s doing it in her little babby voice as well, all the worse.

Kate Nash is, at the end of the day, the adult baby of indie. Except instead of defecating into a specially made diaper she does it onto a Tumblr account and onto MP3s.

So, if Kate Nash is terrible because anyone who enjoys her clearly has issues around infantilism, why is Kitty Pryde good? Well…

OK, right, I never “got” Lil B. I think a lot of rap fan movements nowadays are based upon a kind of teenage autism/Pokemon mindset, where you have to get on board as early as possible and collect every single mixtape, MP3, blog post and tweet. I don’t have time for that.

Kitty Pryde is better than Lil B. You want to know why? Ask Spike Milligan. In an interview he once did that I can’t find online (and, therefore, may have actually made up in my head), he explained one of the rules of comedy: if there’s no reason that a sketch shouldn’t be performed by men wearing Groucho glasses and deely-boppers, then it should be.

And it’s the same with rap music. If there’s no reason a song shouldn’t be performed by quirky ginger jailbait, then bring it on.

I mean this is the problem, there’s an assumption that most men review female artists with their dick, and it’s probably fair comment. Back in the day at Stylus we went to great efforts to not treat the amazing Hello Saferide with a kind of “OMG I WISH THIS CUTE QUIRKY SCANDI BROAD WAS MY GIRLFRIEND WE COULD WANDER AROUND BRICK LANE TOGETHER ENJOYING POP-UP TACO STANDS”. And then Pitchfork reviewed her and did exactly that.

I met someone recently who was aware of Sady Doyle’s failed roasting session (more like a parboiling) of me before they were aware of me as an actual person. And so that raised a lot of concerns about the ILB voice. I don’t think we’ve ever been misogynistic per se, just depressingly honest. And I don’t think I’m reviewing Kitty Pryde her out of any awkward Reddit-style jailbait fixation. Plus her friend is cuter anyway.

I like “Orion’s Belt”. I like “Okay Cupid”. I like the EP she put out. I think I can cope with this as music. Kate Nash, on the other hand, just depresses me with her continued existence. I think this might be why England is the worst cultural country ever.