Closet intellectuals... Vampire Weekend
"Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?" inquire Vampire Weekend on the track Oxford Comma. Unfortunately, they never answer the question; the song goes on to rhyme "comma" with "dramas" and "Dharamsala" so I suspect that, whatever they're actually singing about (your guess is as good as mine), it's not punctuation. But Oxford Comma is currently the most listened-to song on Last FM, so maybe it will get people thinking about something that seems not to bother anybody but me: why proper spelling and punctuation are apparently optional for some artists.
No, I don't mean Prince (and now millions of others) substituting "2" for "to", or rappers cooking up idiosyncratic spellings like "soulja." This isn't about deliberately putting your own spin on spelling to differentiate yourself from adults and outsiders. I'm talking about genuinely stupid mistakes - the kind pedants like me find truly agonising. Take Oasis: not surprisingly for a band whose leader once claimed to have never read a book, they are experts at mauling written English, with titles like Round Are Way and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. Evidently, Oasis were unassailable back in 1995, and no one in the Creation Records food chain - not the sleeve designer nor the press officer nor Alan McGee - dared tell Noel Gallagher that spelling it Round Are Way was illiterate. Even if they had, he's so defiantly anti-education that he would have accused them of being middle-class ponces. (Remember, his main problem with old rival Damon Albarn was that Albarn was not just Southern but educated.)
Moving along, Elton John thinks Saturday night is "alright" for fighting, the Foo Fighters don't see the point of punctuating the title of their current album, Echoes Silence Patience & Grace, and the Zombies released an album titled Odessey and Oracle (though keyboardist Rod Argent recently admitted that he has spent the last 40 years feeling embarrassed about that). Then you get people who don't know the difference between |your" and "you're", an 80s band who didn't know how to spell Shakespeare, or that apostrophes exist, a glam band who called themselves The Babys... It goes on and on, and makes me yearn to reach into the computer with a red pen and correct every pop misspelling I can get my paws on (and, yes, I am great fun on dates).
It's uncool to get upset about rock stars' crimes against the written language, so nobody ever pulls them up about it. Is that because it's considered unimportant, or because it would be perceived by some, like Gallagher, as classist? A love of proper usage is seen as somehow snobbish. Why? It's just about clarity. A disregard for the nuts and bolts of language isn't confined to any social class.
Really, it's not Gallagher being semi-literate that bothers me. It's the people who release his records. These people are paid to notice these things, while Gallagher gets on with writing lumpen tuneage. These people either don't notice, or think it's un-rock'n'roll to notice. I know some of you will write to say that it ain't how it's spelled but how it sounds that matters, but for nitpicking saddos like me, both are important.
