Take That Tops Charts, Hope for Human Race Lost

As has been established by Hell Fell in the past, the 1990's were a stinky load of steaming rubbish. But now that I think about it, the embarrasingly titled "noughties" haven't really fared much better have they? I mean, the sixties had the Beatles, the seventies had Star Wars, the eighties had Michael J. Fox and even the god-awful nineties had Radiohead. What comparable genius cultural product does this decade have?

Absolutely nothing is the correct answer. You see, such is the cultural dearth that we live in, we are now relying on shit nineties boy bands for our entertainment. I am, of course, referring to nineties throwback Take That whose recent comeback album "Beautiful World" and single "Patience" are both currently holding the top spots on the UK music charts.

Now you'll probably just know Take That as those losers whose band fell apart after Robbie Williams quit but you might also have heard of them from that time Noel Gallagher called Robbie Williams "the fat dancer from Take That". They are also responsible for inspiring an entire army of bad 90's British boy bands such as East 17, Westlife, Five, Boyzone and Blue and used to repeatedly refer to themselves as "the biggest British band since the Beatles" a claim that can be completely substantiated only if you conveniently forget The Rolling Stones, Cream, Black Sabbath, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo, The Bee Gees, Queen, The Police, Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Def Leppard, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Iron Maiden and The Bay City Rollers.

To sum up: they're shit. But Take That appear to be just the tip of the 90's comeback iceberg with All Saints making a bit of a return recently and Spice Girls and Five allegedly on their way. And as horrifying as this trend is, it also highlights the disturbing fact that our entire culture has just been poached from the 1990's.

For example, anytime you turn on the TV you can guarantee that a repeat of either The Simpsons, Friends or Seinfeld will be playing at any given moment. Even the whole teen emo thing is just a better marketed version of the 90's Goth movement right down to the Barbie backpacks worn as ironic statements. In fact, the only things unqiue to the 2000's is reality TV, jokes about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and Britney's Spears' exposed vagina and all of those things are shit.

I'll be honest, this whole thing scares the shit out of me. And it begs the question: what else will this lazy decade take from the nineties, dust off and pass off as a brand new cutting edge cultural product? Kirk Cameron? The Macarena? Kenny G?

Michael Flatley stricken with mystery illness

Despite being the decade that spawned genius bands The Verve and Radiohead you've gotta admit, the nineties were pretty bloody rubbish weren't they? I spent my entire childhood and most of my adolescence in the 1990's and all I can remember about those ten long years is MC Hammer, Cargo Pants, that Spice Girls movie and Shaquille O'Neal's patented Shaq Attacks. Such was the non-event that was the nineties, when they write history books in hundreds of years they will probably read like this:

"In the eighties the Cold War finally ended when the Berlin wall came down, the liberal idealism of the sixties proved to ultimately fail as the same generation who lauded 'flower power' voted in the staunchly conservative Thatcher and Reagan governments and AIDS was discovered, developing into a worldwide pandemic. In the nineties ummm...John Cleese stopped being funny. And that's about it really."

Yes, the nineties were shit and absolutely no one symbolizes this ethos more than self-proclaimed "Lord of the Dance" Michael Flatley.

Now you'll undoubtedly remember Michael Flatley from that period in the mid nineties when the Riverdance show inexplicably became a huge international sensation and every other person in their thirties and forties suddenly became huge Irish dance fans, naiively failing to realize that they'd jumped aboard the freight train bound for "cliched fad following middle-aged pleb"-ville. Or you remember him as being that knobsack who once famously claimed that he could never go on-stage without getting a bit of a root beforehand from some lucky sheila. Classy. However, if you're my age you'll probably remember Michael Flatley as the inspiration behind such schoolyard slurs as "You're Michael Flatley gaylord of the dance" and other less creative ones as "You're shit. Just like Michael Flatley".

Anyway, Michael Flatley seems to have forgotten that the nineteen nineties actually ended six years ago because he's back in the news with reports that he is in hospital with a 'serious illness' although what said illness is remains a carefully guarded secret. Silly celebrities! When will they learn that claiming a right to privacy and refusing to reveal every little sordid detail of their medical history will only lead to people like me making up stuff to fill in the blanks! So the way I figure it:

Penchant for backstage sex + X = Mystery 'serious illness'.

I'll leave it up to you to work out what X could possibly be. Of couse, appropriately, this would also make Michael Flatley a symbol of that other great 1990's institution: sexually transmitted disease.

In other news, did you know that Michael Flatley is apparently worth 375 million pounds? How did this happen? And more importantly, why am I an advertising copy-writer instead of a weirdly homo-erotic oiled up Irish prancer? Besides the whole jewish lack of rythym thing I mean.