The tail needs to start wagging the dog

"Social mobility is the key to a successful future job market."

"We need to have social mobility to make sure people from lower-class backgrounds can gain promotion and rise through society's ranks more easily."

These are the types of phrases repeated each week by politicians throughout the EU. I wish they would back their words with deeds. The problem, as I see it, is not one to do with class, but more to do with qualification and talent, and that has just as much to do with the kind of values we pass to the younger generation. What do we consider to be more important: the ousting of an incompetent government, or the continuation of a favourite contestant on a TV talent show?

We live in a society that has unprecedented access to education. But we have also allowed a whole generation to become fascinated in the stardom of sports personalities, singers and actors. When I was younger, if I had said to my father I wanted to be a singer, he would have told me to run along and think about getting a *real* job. Nowadays, this seems to be the bar we set, rather than the exception to the career-rule. So many parents seem to try and push their children into modelling, singing or sports, with the goal of becoming famous, and more importantly, rich. When their children fail, the disappointment is so great for the parents that their child has been "rejected". And the children themselves are so utterly traumatised, nothing will be the same again for them.

What an awful thing for any child to suffer. Pushy parents.

Pushy parents are not always required in the age of social mobility. Offspring of famous people are making their own way up the greasy pole without having to do much. Just look at anyone whose name contains Geldof.

Who is to blame here? The media, for allowing TV shows like X-Factor and The Only Way Is Essex to proliferate, but also parents for succumbing to the pressures of their children who want to be accepted by their peers. How many parents take their kids to Paris to view the contents of the Louvre? And how many go to Paris to trace the Da Vinci Code? Or to Disneyland Paris? How many parents take their children to London to view the Cabinet War Rooms, compared to the O2 to see a concert? Giving in to children's mealtime demands (chips instead of broccoli, burger instead of lamb cutlets), has extended itself to education.

Social mobility is a good idea in theory, but in practice, this is no longer viable in the 21st century. In the 1940s and 1950s, my father - who left school very young - was able to negotiate four or five jobs of varying requirements and skills very easily. Admittedly, the Second World War helped in this, as there was a severe shortage of staff, but still, the moral of the story back then was "if you have the talent, we'll hire you", whereas today, it is hard for anyone to come out of school, college or university and walk into the job they trained for. I know some recent Cambridge graduates who, not even finding work in call centres, have turned to gaining further qualifications in a bid to out-qualify their competition. That is fine for those with the money, but the vast majority of people simply cannot afford this luxury.

The problem is now that employers have the world at their feet: they can choose the most highly-qualified candidate, or they can choose a less qualified, but more enthusiastic candidate for the position. They can hire and fire at will, because the market has moved away from hiring permanent members of staff to taking on contractual agents who stay in the job for anything from a week to a couple of years before they are thrown back onto the pile of bodies mounting up outside the Job Centres of the Western world.

All you need to do to get a job these days is:

A. Be the cheapest (less qualified, more enthusiastic)

B. Accept that you might be living with your parents way into your thirties

C. Keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself

D. Accept that very, very few people really do enjoy social mobility, and you are not one of them.

Social mobility is a myth. And it will remain a myth until employers are made to be more ethical. And the chances of that happening are quite remote at the present time, whilst there are such rich pickings, and employees are competing with one another to keep their positions.

Another astonishingly blatant lie dressed up as truth is the ability to change career direction. The days are long past where the system is flexible enough to sustain a change of career path. It is of course not impossible, especially in countries like the UK or the USA, but in Europe, I cannot see a person who trained to be a translator, who has a fascination with plants and flowers, being permitted to go into the horticultural business without three or four years' course first, rather than on-the-spot guidance or apprenticeship like used to happen. And there are very important reasons for this. In my father's day, the proportion of take-home pay was far higher to the amount of household bills and acquisitions. This meant a drop in pay in any subsequent job did not make so much of a difference, so people could go off and do something else without fearing too deep a cut in pay. Nowadays, a weekly food bill alone may cancel out any savings. We need to get back to this basic state, but whilst most people's minds have been fixed on "Panem et Circenses", there is is no way this silent majority will change anything. Especially if people consider owning one or more cars per household as a given and not a luxury.

While the dog is definitely in control of its tail, not many with a wish for self-improvement will have enough support to change the mentality of hundreds of thousands of people who are indifferent to the type of information they pass onto their own children, and the kind of food they feed them.

The world's worst music genre

There are many styles of music that speak to the heart or quicken the soul: the bandoneon-inspired tango, the tubthumping anthems of a metal group, the simplicity of a folk ballad, the bewildering and beguiling sound emanating from an opera singer's lungs or the hair-raising wall of sound provided by a good old-fashioned big band.

But at the same time, there are some godawful melodies out there. Here are my top (or should it be bottom?) five:

5. Rap

The music with the silent "C", as the joke goes. This is comparatively much further down my list than other people might place it because there are nevertheless some redeeming features. Rap as a genre is a two-faced creature: one face is actually quite brilliant. There can be frustration in the voice, meaningful lyrics with a dark side accompanied by an angry backdrop and a desperate air of inability to change the state of the world. French rap is also particularly good. I defy anyone to tell me that it is not.

But there is also a side to this music which makes one want to leave the room and go and listen to a recorded speech by Fidel Castro. It can go one of two ways: firstly there is the semi-old geezer with his baseball cap on at a precariously adventurous angle, or even on back-to-front if they're really looking for the sales, where he sings of a moral issue and is surrounded by a backing group of real singers. He tries to look cool and in turn it just desecrates the whole act. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Daz Sampson and his now legendary Teenage Life!

The second way is simply brutal and not worth writing about.

4. X Marks the Spot

If there is one thing that distinguishes our generation from that of today it is the variety of skills and talent on offer. When I glimpse trailers of X Factor or something similar, I feel like smashing the television. Or at least shouting at it. There can be nothing worse than knowing that a glorified karaoke run by a narcissistic despot from Hertfordshire and his evil assistants is going to define your children's obsessions which they will look back upon wistfully in twenty years, bemoaning the quality of talent on their televisions and comparing it to their own youth. There is a subgenre here - the songwriters. When they go on to have a career, many of these "singers" cannot read or write music, have but a basic understanding of how timing works and can barely hold a note one octave above middle C. The songs produced for them are therefore melodically unadventurous and full of clichés.

Clichés like "baby", "beautiful", "believe", "heart" and "crazy" are just the start. "Get together", "(whatever) through the night", and many others of course started before Simon Cowell was even born. But surely songwriters and lyricists could add their own twist to the songs they write. Oh, of course, they do: the act. Fire, smoke, backing dancers to start with. But you need to have a routine per song, where you rock from side to side or look pleadingly into the spotlights, change costume at least three times per gig and hawk your new product on everything from breakfast talk shows to appearing on primetime spectacles as the interval act. These people also try to get themselves in the papers every day, either by having someone call up a journalist and tell them where they are to be found, or by doing enough stupid stuff to warrant a full-time photographer who parasitically follows the idiot around, in some cases earning as much as the "star".

If you want to know what I mean, then here is the prime example, the alpha male of all that this soulless world showers on its easily-hooked victims. Despite there being talent of sorts, I still think that the music of my youth and that before me was much more imaginative, being totally unreliant on computers and pyrotechnics, routines and clothes changes.


3. Christian Rock

If you ever want a category that sums up everything that is wrong with religion, it is Christian Rock. Trying to be cool by having a live band in your church thumping out melodies generally known as "praise" is seriously wrong and sends a very, very bad message to those you are trying to draw in. As my views on religion are well-documented, it will come as no surprise when I tell you that the paradoxical nature of mixing rock music, the 20th century's gift to the arts, with a belief as outdated and fuddy-duddy as Christianity is a shockingly underhand tactic to try and tell the world "we can keep up with the times!"

No you cannot.

Ditch the political bigotry associated with religion, allow women the right to be full clergy members, stop saying yours is the only true religion and everyone else is wrong, stop preaching doom and gloom to all sinners (usually unmarried parents or smokers) and finally ditch those silly men who preach by shouting out their beliefs as if theirs is the only voice that counts, then maybe, just maybe, you might be permitted to play rock in your church. Even then, I'm still having trouble pairing the two together. How can you sing songs with euphemistic lyrics like "arise", "lift me up", "worship", "fill my cup", and "mercy" in them and still keep a straight face? Sorry, this particular choice should have taken first place, but there are, I believe, two even more abominable genres than this.


2. Café and public space music

To explain this, I need to go into a little more detail: you're sitting with a friend, some family members or a date on a café terrace, the sun is shining and there are about five nationalities of tourist sitting in a radius of ten metres from you. You're having a quiet lunch/dinner, or a decent chat about things, catching up on news, or simply having a family holiday while it's sunny. Then you hear, drifting across the muttering throngs from a café nearby, the distinct sound of an accordeon, a fiddle and sometimes a singer. The songs are well-known to you, but you just don't remember their names. That also annoys you. I'll name some so you can run a search on them: Ochi Chorniye, Cielito Lindo, Under the Bridges of Paris, That's Amore, Oh Du Lieber Augustin, My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean, La Vie En Rose, Beer Barrel Polka, Kalinka and Those Were The Days.

I know people who get great pleasure from the sounds of the accordeon, but there are surely more songs to play than that. Lady Kirsten also plays the accordeon and her repertoire is a hundred times broader than that of a streetside café busker. She can play songs from Sweden, Israel, Spain, Russia, Serbia, Belgium, Scotland, the USA, England, Wales and a lot of other countries.

The other public space I am referring to is the loud speaker found at railway stations, some pub-restaurants and shopping centres. The kind of music I am about to talk about requires me to prepare myself even to mention the name. That's why I paired it up with naff busking. The word is... euhm... (I feel like someone shy trying to explain to head of personnel I have haemorrhoids and need a new chair) is....

I'll do some more explaining first, to build myself up to it. That might help.

You're in the lobby of a three-star hotel in Kidderminster or Krefeld or Córdoba or Kaliningrad...

You're waiting for your spouse/son/daughter/grandma/secret lover, etc...

You're getting upset for no apparent reason...

Then you realise why. It's the utter bastardisation by re-timing (so-called jazzing-up) of songs you used to love, being slowly put through various stages of torture from limb removal to crucifixion via the codling grinder, turning them into musical monsters. The worst time of year for this contemptuous type of sound to reveal its hideous countenance is December and the weeks leading up to Christmas. I once heard Troïka from Prokofiev's magical Lieutenant Kijé Suite being stabbed to death by the sharpened knives of a trumpet player, a riff drummer and a supporting jazz orchestra. That made me cry. Another time, I heard Silent Night being bludgeoned by a group of musicians who made it sound like Mack the Knife. I stood still in disbelief for at least three minutes afterwards and could only speak again when I had had a whole night's sleep.

Big band is good. But not when it has to switch genres in order to make music.

Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Glenn Miller, Joe Loss. All wonderful band leaders in their own right.

Tchaikovsky, Bach, Wagner, Mozart, Prokofiev, Händel. All great composers in their own right.

For the sake of public decency, don't mix the two.


1. Schlager

Utter drivel of the most evil kind. It defiles the entire subject of music and is not even worth the CD it has been burned on. Schlager is the rape of sound. It is the abomination of art, the whore of the radiowaves. There is no devil in Hell who could have thought up Schlager music. It must have been a human as humans are intently much, much more evil than all the demons in the Underworld.

I would define Schlager in several ways: the first, a frilly variety of saccharine sweet ballads sung by women of a certain age or girls who have never seen a male organ, but can hold a guitar whilst being driven along a mountain path on the back of a horse-drawn cart with their friends, Irmtraud, Poldi and Hannes. But it can also be sung by a group of camp, moustachioed Austrians in Mexican sombreros and billowing white shirts carrying musical instruments, pretending they're on their way to Mallorca for a holiday. Or it can be a prodigiously suntanned blond guy who looks 40 but is probably 20 years older than that and wearing a toupée, singing songs of his first love or of his departed girlfriend, gone off with someone new (or should that be young?), whilst he sits at home on a tacky, red geranium-infested Tyrolean balcony with commanding views of the Alps, but oddly featuring regular close-ups of the local village's friendly goat. Let us not forget the blurred camera lens for special watery-eyed effect.

Schlager is Be'elzebub's eardrum. It is blasphemous to even call it music. Schlager is the result of too much incestuousness in the countryside, where generations of farmers' sons have shagged their naïve, uneducated female cousins who think it's a remedy for acne, slipped away from the scene of the act and written a song about marriage, kids, and flowers to atone for their inexplicable desires, which then gets aired on German, Swiss or Austrian local radio and bought by hundreds of thousands of people who know no better.

I think it is a very good thing Schlager music is a post-war thing. Imagine if it had been around before... the events of 1939-1945 would have lasted a lot more briefly. I can see it now - instead of bombing the place to smithereens, we'd have all been terrorised by the sounds of Schlager music and come out with our hands above our heads - "you can switch it off now, we surrender!"

The bus driver who takes me to Luxembourg in the morning likes Schlager music. He is the one I spoke about in a previous article here, who can't smile for love nor money. I believe this to be because he has, for the whole of his life, thought the world was like a Schlager song, and every day that he wakes up realises it isn't. Schlager has turned him into a cantankerous, vindictive and miserable man with little to live for. I just hope he's not at the wheel of his bus when he decides to end it all.