Cheese
The music, not the curdled milk substance. I love proper cheese, and I do maintain that there are few things more decent and civilised in this world than a slice of well-matured Stilton with some walnuts and a glass of port. "Cheese," as a form of music, however, upsets me ever so slightly.

I'm not sure at what stage the British started to enjoy things 'ironically.' It just seems to have crept up on me, and now things which, previously, we would have looked back on and cringed at, because they were so embarrassingly corny by contemporary standards, are revered in a cynical, ironic sort of way simply because they have the excuse of being "cheesy."

"Oh, it's great, it's so cheesy, it's like the stuff my Mum used to dance to," is about the long and the short of it, as far as I can tell. You ran from the room in horror and shame the first time your mum played you her LP of Saturday Night Fever and explained how she used to dance to this at the Disco in her best jumpsuit and mad perm. And yet now you dance to the same songs with no apparent shame, simply because you can dismiss it as "cheesy."

If you ask me, and I realise no one did but that doesn't normally stop me, it all seems horribly smug and slightly hypocritical. Yes, it's still crap pop music, but back in the day, some people enjoyed listening to it. (No, I don't understand how either, but they did.) And all you're really doing is taking the piss out of it, from your smug pedestal of retrospective irony.

It's a bit like that round in Never Mind the Buzzcocks when they bring in some guy from an old one-hit-wonder rock band, stick him amongst a few lookalikes and let the teams take the piss. Fifteen, twenty years ago, that chap probably thought he had a decent shot at being a rock star, and he's reduced to coming on this show so you can snidely giggle at him with the benefit of hindsight and the fact he's put on a few pounds and lost his hair since then.

Because I warn you: it will come full circle. Most of the music you seem to genuinely enjoy nowadays is just as much of an unflushable heap of turd as the crap you now revere as "Classic Cheese." Just wait until your own kids decide that Beyoncé or Lady Gaga is crap and embarrassing and then it's only a few years before the snide, nasty irony of "Cheese" will be yours to suffer.
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 16 Oct 2009, 10:25, 4 replies)

no cheese
saturday night fever soundtrack is anything but cheese!
(phe, Fri 16 Oct 2009, 10:56, closed)

As you might have guessed, I'm not an expert on what actually counts as "cheese,"
I just thought it was safe to assume the Bee Gees would be in that category...
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 16 Oct 2009, 10:58, closed)

nope
saturday night fever is awesome
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Fri 16 Oct 2009, 11:12, closed)

I like to listen to
the sound of 15-year-old cheddar being cut, it's what my Dad used to eat.
(The Oscillating Gibbon is eating curried squid, Fri 16 Oct 2009, 11:13, closed)