Rizzle Kicks, BRIT School Head Boys
Someone told me that Rizzle Kicks are students at the BRIT School of Performing Arts. This strikes me as extremely odd.
The BRIT School is an industry crud-factory that whelps out ‘new talent’, who then get record deals suspiciously quickly, suspiciously win carefully orchestrated ‘Next Big Thing‘ online polls and then suspiciously win BRIT Awards.
This approach might sell records, but it also means we have to put up with the likes of muddy-voiced warbler Adele, the mind-shreddingly annoying Kate Nash and The Singer From The Kooks Who Thinks He’s Cool.
So what in the blue blazes are Rizzle Kicks doing there? Having a great time, I imagine, because they are making music that shows a dazzling depth of actual talent, wit, intelligence and fun. Accordingly, I fear for their future.
Sonically, How Charming?! channels the spirit of The Special‘s Ghost Town, and in attitude, retains a healthy dollop of its suburban alienation too. A multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-styled extravaganza awaits:
Rizzle Kicks // How Charming?!
Wit and likeability are both rare and hard to fake, but How Charming?! has these qualities to spare. It suddenly struck me: Rizzle Kicks occasionally sound like a ‘cool’ Art Brut, complete with witticisms, irony and nerdiness.
And this is what I like. Rizzle Kicks are unusual. This is excellent news for us music fans, but less so for the BRIT School. Such is life.
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Love RIZZLE KICKS – more of this please please please
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I dont think you fully understand the BRIT School. Have you been there? Some of the students go for over four auditions just to get in. It isn’t like the typical ‘turn anyone into a popstar’ school. It takes Britains most talented teens, and helps them become THEMSELVES!
That is all.
Hi Kate – thanks for commenting. And no – I haven’t been there, but you probably knew that already.
I’m all for people becoming themselves, and I’m pleased you think the Brit School helps people do that, even though I’m no fan of the ‘talent’ it produces (Rizzle Kicks aside, natch).
Butbutbut: I don’t like how the Brit School is very closely intertwined with an increasingly desperate music industry. Using your own Brit school to mould your own Brit talent and then giving them a huge leg-up at the very outset with a gong from your own Brit awards – as they did with Adele, Jessie J et el – is cynically tedious at best and rankly nepotistic at worst.
Nurturing talent is important. I’m sure the Brit School performs some sort of function when it comes to guiding aspring teenage performers. But it’s only one way, and not one I think is the be-all-and-end-all it’s made out to be. As far as I recall, none of The Pixies, The Smiths, Public Enemy, etc. honed their craft in a perfroming arts school, and yet still sold zillions of records.
Many of the stars who have come from the Brit School are underwhelmning, average, and – it seems to me – crafted with the intention of selling lots of records above all other considerations.
But that’s what you get if you go to a school funded by the record industry. That’s fine. The record industry needs to sell records for it to exist, and they may as well put money into nuturing the artists that will keep them on their yachts in the Med.
I just wish the whole process was a lot more honest and rewarding for listeners outside of the Daytime Radio One bracket.
Each, of course, to their own.
Joe
[...] when Kate dropped me a message after an old post about the excellent Rizzle Kicks, I hopped over to reply. Here’s a rarity: I’m recommending you read something that I [...]
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