Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Joss Stone - She's Bad

I don't know much about Joss Stone. I think if I initially noticed her at all it's because she was a Devon lass, at least for some of her upbringing, and it's rare for anything famous to come from Devon (apart from the fact that the entire United States could have been said to 'come from' Devon, of course). Anyway, I've never liked the little of her music that I've heard. It reminds me of Charlie Brooker's bewilderment at the winners on Simon Cowell's dreadful cultural vandalism project (I forget its name) - singers who are, in Brooker's words "apparently good". I've never really understood what was ever meant to be good about Joss Stone or any of her ilk. However, there is now apparently supposed to be something bad about her. My attention was caught by this article. In particular it caught my attention because I had seen some list of 2007's most annoying people (or some such thing) on television, and she was amongst them. The gist of the backlash against her seems to be that she went to America and picked up an American accent (plus various assorted American idioms). I find this in some ways curious.



Please allow me to explain. From late 2000 to early 2003 I spent time away from Britain in Taiwan and Japan. I noticed a number of things about Britain when I returned. Obsession with the property ladder. Increased marketing everywhere you turned your eye. And a new wave of Americanisation of the English language. This is nothing new. It has been occurring at least since the Sixties and probably long before then. One small example is the fact that before I went to Taiwan most people in Britain favoured the word 'film' over the word 'movie'. After I got back from Japan the situation was reversed. Ever since the onset of the nineties I have noticed wave after wave of Americanisms. Before we had Seinfeld here no one used the word 'wuss'. Before The Simpsons no one used the word 'butt'. Now these are in common use. Even our grammar has changed. Where once people would have said "I have", they now say "I do" (can't give a good example right now), they tend to use the present perfect tense less often, and so on. The extent of this is such that I picked up a British book of linguistic cliches recently and, flicking through its pages discovered that not only were well over half of the cliches American in origin, but this fact was so taken for granted, or so invisible to the authors, that it was at no point even commented on.

To a certain extent I think this is inevitable. I'm not going to neurotically weed out the Americanisms from my speech patterns. What I find strange is that I seem to be far more aware than those around me of what are Americanisms and what are not. For me to use the word 'movie' would actually take an effort on my part, as if I were deliberately slipping a French word into conversation for effect. This makes me suspect that people are actually watching American films and taking notes and adopting the idioms. I see no other explanation. Why? Because they want to be American. And yet there is a broad public rejection of Joss Stone because she picked up some Americanisms after actually going to America. Americanisation is so general here that I do not believe all former Joss Stone fans were remarkably uninfected. There must be at least a ninety per cent hypocrisy rate there.



It's not merely linguistic hypocrisy, either. Why do the British believe themselves to have any less blood on their hands than the Americans over Iraq, for instance? Who voted the mass-murderer Blair back into Number 10? You - the great, morally superior British public. When you condemn Joss Stone, you protest too much. Increasingly, Britain disgusts me.