Acid April 2024 #4 - Rephlex's Universal Indicator Series - Red [1992]
The cunt's debut is worse than I thought it'd be.
TR 606
1992
Universal Indicator (Richard D. James / Aphex Twin)
Universal Indicator Red
(EP - 12", 33 ⅓ RPM)
- Series: Universal Indicator - Red
- Genre: Electronic, Acid, Experimental
Herein we find the familiar story of the dowdy, overlooked ne’er-do-well, subject to the daily abuses and humiliations that plague the world’s underclasses, who discovers that they possess an extraordinary, impossible gift that may provide an escape from their shit job and stick-in-the-mud friends and family. It’s Cinderella, it’s Harry Potter, etc. In the case of Paul Potts, Boyle’s spiritual predecessor, he was working a call centre job for Carfone Warehouse. Susan Boyle; find a life away from Tesco clubcards and being verbally abused on the bus by sweaty, Lynx-Africa-ridden teenagers who are all still in awe at the novelty of a frumpy middle-aged tubster who doesn’t wear a drop of makeup or comb one strand of her hair. One nock above a bag lady. And Boyle does look a right mess on that stage. Hedge backwards. The rather gruesome-looking Boyle; ruddiness, vascularity.
It’s opera for people who don’t like opera. In the great pool of operatic singers, Boyle is mere pond-scum dredged to the surface by the cloying net of a faux-sympathetic, faux-earnest public who would have liked to claim to have been part of the ‘Susan Boyle Story’ had she turned out to be anything more than a novelty chartbuster locked up in a cheap studio year-round and only allowed out for the holidays. Boyle is the sort of artist for whom once popular appeal dies out, there’s really nowhere left to go. Her entire career rode on that dumpy housewife fantasy of being swept away into a world of glitz and glam, hair and makeup, besequined ball gowns, record deals, documentaries, TV appearances, tabloid coverage, YouTube videos; but that could only last for so long. Such is the novelty that I am compelled to mention the likes of Mrs. Miller and Florence Foster Jenkins, notwithstanding Boyle’s vocal talent. Unworthy bedfellows? Perhaps, but if the brands of exploitation that haunt Boyle and Miller respectively are not one and the same, then it can surely be admitted that they at least take supper with one another.
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