Cocaine killed the neighbourhood.

Stepping away from global politics you have X-factor. Normally the home of pre-pubesent children and people who have no idea of what music is, the show has finally rocked out and been prone to a cocaine bust. As it is family viewing and no rock and roll should be entered into, the guilty party has been axed from the show and will be replaced with a piece of monotone monotony. 18-year old Frankie Cocozza (Cocozza does cocaine) has been portrayed as a teenage Libertine, filmed drinking with girls and bragging about doing cocaine. The path to excess is paved with X factor ejection and Mr Cocozza has been given the boot to protect the innocent children who tune in looking for a role-model, not a rock star. One  X factor judge is not happy.

Louis Walsh has blamed Gary Barlow for Frankie’s descent into affliction.

“Gary made a mistake. I blame him for it all…..Gary told him not to behave from day one and gave him the free licence to act up from the start. Gary’s responsible…… He said that on camera and now he’s back tracking. Gary never wanted Frankie to behave”

There you have it. No mistaking where the blame lies in this particular grudge match.

Monday Morning is as welcome as a Las Vegan harlot at your Sunday wedding; a dirty remnant of a stag weekend gone haywire after 17 too many tequila chasers who decides to make an appearance to re-enact the hotel room debacle carried out a week earlier. Your imminent bride doesn’t take kindly to proceedings and before you know it you are back snorting cocaine off of Miss America’s double d’s. That, or the Sunday afternoon stroll along a gentle, meandering canal towpath in the countryside quickly melts into a jay-walking marathon on The Shibuya intersection during a traffic-light breakdown as 8 million people try and escape as Godzilla pummels downtown Tokyo to rubble.

The inevitable evaporation of the weekend into the cold reality of a rainy Monday morning; the prospect of spending the next 5 days cocooned in your work chair staring at the whirling numbers and words on a shiny computer screen is something that has faced, and will continue to face, mankind for thousands of years. It’s about time somebody took the blame for the sheer lunacy and downright inconvenience of this most trivial of days.

On January 29th 1979, ground zero of Monday mornings, Brenda Spencer leant out of her window, shot dead 2 people, injured 11 and inspired Bob Geldof to write the above song, immortalising her ‘I don’t like Mondays‘ excuse in the process. Since then the malaise of a finished weekend has dominoed into societal angst. A recent study by the mental health charity Mind has unearthed that during 2009 20% of the workforce claimed they were ill due to Monday morning stress at work, 8% of the population actually left their job owing to stress. The number of prescriptions for anti-depressants stood at 39.1 million for 2009, a quarter of people implicated stress as affecting their relationships and 1 in 4 people actually cried at work due to the stress, mostly/probably/perhaps, brought on by Monday mornings.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7730357/Millions-resign-or-call-in-sick-as-Monday-Blues-bite-in-recession.html)

Stop lamenting the existence of Monday morning, it’s going to happen once every 7 days. And when it does and the Monday blues start to pang, rest assured, we have taken the blame for it.

The closing stages of the 1980′s were famous for the tearing down of The Berlin Wall and Milli Vanilli. That they were both created in Germany is the only similarity that they share. In the 21 years which have passed since the un-masking of the damned, many things have been written, many irrelevant top 100 television countdown  shows about the 1990′s where celebrities who have fallen out of flavour give their inane comments, have been aired; there is even a film in the works about their brazen lies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0965381/). There has not, however, been an admittance of blame.  We are hereby taking the blame for Milli Vanilli, or rather, the fact that they existed for so long (not the end of Cold War segregation in Deutschland, in case you were wondering.)

Formed in Germany in 1988 by Frank Farian, the original lineup of Milli Vanilli featured a group of, what, at the time, were considered highly capable singers. Unfortunately, image and MTV were beginning to dictate what was  what was audibly, visually, and financially viable in music. For the original lineup of Milli Vanilli – who were deemed to have hit the ugly tree one too many times during their descent to Terra Firma – this meant replacement. This came in the form of the more visually appealing Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. They had long hair, nice abs and couldn’t sing a note. Which was fine, at least at the beginning.

For those who don’t know the story of Milli Vanilli – undoubtedly because you are too young – basically they pretended to sing a bunch of songs, palming themselves off as, well,  singers, all the while lip-syncing to a backing track, incidentally performed by the same poor souls with radio faces who had initially made up the band. In the age of Xfactor et al. miming is not seen as such a crime, that they got away with it for so long is a crying advert for musical ineptitude and why we are here.

In the two years that they were pulling the wool over unsuspecting eyes they won a truck-load of awards. During the 1989 American Music Awards they won best new artist in both the pop/rock and the soul/rhythm and blues categories and best song for Girl You Know its True. They won best Internationalal artist at the Juno Awards a year later and went on to win a Grammy award for best new artist that same year.

The Grammy award in 1990 is of particular interest, not only because of its calibre (Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, John Williams, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Ray Charles, Leonard Bernstein and Quincy Jones have all won one), but also due to what happened a year earlier during a live performance for MTV at Lake Compounce Theme Park. As the ‘group’ ‘performed’ (and by performed, we mean lip-synced) their biggest hit, Girl You Know its True, the backing track got caught and continually skipped over the main line of the song. In a brazen attempt to conceal their embarrassment, they continued as if nothing had happened. The crowd went wild. Eventually the skipping CD got they better of them and they ran of stage in a Benny Hill fashion. Nobody battered an eye-lid. Not a word, not a comment, not a murmur, not a peep. What on Earth did they think they had been watching? A year later they won a grammy.

That so many people, including the highest echelons of the music industry, couldn’t recognise that what they were watching wasn’t real is tantamount to treason. We take the blame for Milli Vanilli and for all of the ineptitude that let them mascarade around at the same time real things of importance were happening.

Lets be honest. American football is an anomaly. So is Christine Aguilera. So many things are wrong with this combination of characters that apologising for all of them would be more difficult than explaining the rules of American football to an, as yet to be discovered, Amazonian tribe and then, having explained the rules to their blank, non-comprending faces, getting them to sit down on Superbowl Sunday and enjoy the spectacle.  All four, advert filled, hours of it. So that’s not why we are here today.

That over 100 million people tuned into watch The Green Bay Wolverine Dragon Cubs overrun the Pittsburgh Killer Penguins by 7 thousand points to 4 thousand five hundred and sixty eight is cause enough for concern. Didn’t it begin at 1am? Shouldn’t these people have been sleeping? And whats with tipping orange Gatorade over peoples heads? It’s not funny and seems to be the only actual point of the whole shebang they have going on over there.

If you didn’t know, part of the Superbowl megaadvertisingextravganza is the half time show, where like it or not, some band you hate plays some songs you hate even more whilst gyrating about on a specially designed stage made to look like a pair of sunglasses. Our fault. Sorry. Even worse than this is the annual singing of the national anthem before touchdown at the start of the first quarter eighth 10 minutes.

Now you would have thought that singing your own national anthem wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to a singer. Well, it would appear that the pressure of doing it in front of 7 billion screaming fans got the better of dear Miss Aguilera and she forgot the lines. She didn’t forget the lines when she sang the same national anthem one year earlier during the NBA American basketball finals where she did it twice no-less. So why this time? Well, according to the statement released by her publicist it was because she “got so lost in the moment of the song that I lost my place. I can only hope that everyone could feel my love for this country and that the true spirit of its anthem still came through.” That is not an apology, it is an excuse. We at Taketheblame would like to do what couldn’t be done and apologise.