News | Sunday, 08 February 2009

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Chetcuti should face the music. Not play it.

MATTHEW VELLA hopes Malta’s Eurovision winner is not someone who gives decadence a bad name

Every year I try to write a piece on the Eurovision, but this time I am pre-empting the car crash we will be taking to the former USSR, where I doubt we’ll be making the Moscow girls sing and shout.
As I write yet another invective-filled salvo, I am watching Joseph Chetcuti – the TV presenter – on Euro Showbox (TVM), and I am frightened at the prospect that this man might be chosen as the ambassador of Maltese bad taste to Europe. Surely, we deserve better.
I’m really not one for grudges, which is why I prefer taking an instant dislike to much of what Maltese TV gives us: basically, more strangers to hate. And because the song Kamikaze Lover has got my dander up, now everyone has to pay.
The reason why Chetcuti is strutting his stuff on television with a violin and hoping he will taking us to Eurovision glory, is because too many people, even in this small island, feel they are special and can do no wrong. A slagging off is in order.
Even before Chetcuti starts singing, I am immediately biased on what he’s about to do just because of the sheer arrogance and effrontery in his attempt at Eurovision stardom. It is simply unbelievable.
Chetcuti doesn’t sing, because he cannot. That’s why there are just two stanzas in Kamikaze Lover, in which he sounds like Hal-9000, the robotic navigation system from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The words have been penned by none other than Gerard James Borg: a man who, in a nightmarish twist of events where Liberace returns from the dead to rule the world, would be elected to pen our national anthem. I can’t imagine this song having given Gerard much Shakespearian torment to produce: ‘Kami-kami-kamikaze lover/ movin’ undercover in the night… night… night/ destination… heart… heart… heart/ kami-kami-kamikaze lover/ he will really suffer/ every time… time… time/ motivation… love… love… love.’ Sounds like a paean to a sex-starved suicide bomber.
Musically, Kamikaze is the pits, a song that scrapes the bottom of the barrel with its over-produced violins and Eurotrash synthpop. Chetcuti is to music what Emmy Bezzina is to politics. The sheer audacity of his performance, swanning around the TV studio, making love to his violin, with his serial killer’s stare and lips pursed together like he’s sucking on a gobstopper made of Persil… it just takes the proverbial biscuit.
And then there is J Anvil, with his camp frolicking and vaudevillian lunacy. Not a single coyness in his act, no realisation that when he dances, with his paunch fighting against the tight waistcoast trying to disguise it, he looks inherently wrong. Why does this give me the urge to turn the whole TV studio into a bloody Baghdad bomb scene, Jihadi-style, limbs sprawled over the floor?
Now as you read this, I am sure I have already annoyed a good deal of you, maybe because you think I am being a moron, or maybe because you think I can’t write. Every time somebody points out to me said facts, with none of the respect or courtesy I might otherwise deserve, it strikes me how life-affirming some criticism or negative feedback can be. It keeps you on your feet, keeps you from acting like a tit.
Someone, a good slagging off works, just like a beneficial punch in the face often straightens up idiots. It thickens the skin, keeps us in check, makes us aware that we are being morons and it slows down that natural tendency in the human brain, to make us act like egomaniacal idiots.
Not so those many people clamouring for the Holy Grail of Eurodisco it seems. As I look at this spectacle of our own alienation (and this goes for game shows like Deal Or No Deal with their hapless contestants desperate for their 15 minutes of fame) it occurs to me that what these people need is some humility. We can’t allow ourselves to be led to believe that what we do is important, and that we can do no wrong. Malta is too claustrophobic a place, packed with too many pretentious bivalves who want to be special. We prop ourselves up as a country but we’re only a Mediterranean town of 400,000 quasi-inbreds. Here nobody is a national treasure. We cannot be this special.
Like everything else that takes place on an island, it’s just impossible to run away. TV offerings like Deal Or No Deal or the Eurovision engulf the Maltese psyche. A willing pool of nobodies is there to be drafted to parade for the TV camera, because nobody is told to shut up and go about their lives in the un-special manner it was intended for the 6 billion members of the world.
You see, if there was something to counter-balance the Z-list celebs and their omnipresence on our TV screens, maybe I wouldn’t be writing this. Until we get a slot after the 8 ‘o’ clock news, to slag them off as if it were an announcement from the meteorological department, we should do the job ourselves.

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