Welcome to the Beautiful South

by

The Beautiful South

Edit

I was a big fan of The Housemartins. I even thought the 2nd Beautiful South album had potential, and had a couple pretty decent songs on it. I had only heard the 2nd album for a long time. I had always wanted to someday go back and obtain the Beautiful South's first release. I remember, even a friend of mine whose musical taste I could usually trust, had told me that this was a good record.

Well, a decade and a half later I finally bought this thing. And it was horrible. Although Paul Heaton's vocals are wonderful just as always, the tunes just aren't that great, and his lyrics are downright scary here. Whereas on other releases, especially with The Housemartins, Heaton used to sing a lot of about corrupt politics and the fools who follow and believe in corrupt politics, here Heaton seems not only obsessed purely with dysfunctional domestic relationships, but his lyrics even take a decidedly misogynistic tenor. I can totally understand and I get the sarcasm in a guy like Warren Zevon making a single song like "Excitable Boy", but to make an entire album, more or less, full of stuff like that? Ew.

Look, I am a guy who believes that in today's western civilization, there is a lot more MISANDRY than misogyny, and it really is terribly easy to prove that claim. I also don't think that the song "36D", on the 2nd Beautiful South album, was a song Heaton should have been criticized for--it's about time somebody had criticized those runway starlets, those all-body-no-brains model-bimbos.

But the lyrics on this particular release is different: Heaton is obsessed with macabre scenes and tales of wives being battered and murdered, or else abused or abandoned. And it doesn't sound at all like he is writing from a sympathetic point of view; nor is there any discernible social criticism going on. It really just seems like the writer of these songs hates women, plain and simple. True or not, and I hope it wasn't, nevertheless that is the perception these songs exude.