Right now, tens of thousands of older brothers are telling their younger sisters that Natasha Bedingfield (down from number 7 in the UK singles chart* to number 11 yesterday) is “teenybopper crap” and that Green Day (straight in at number 3) are punk kidz keepin’ it real. That Bedingfield bint doesn’t even write her own songs!

Given that Green Day’s songwriting is responsible for the dazzling critique of Bush’s America that is American Idiot

“Don’t wanna be an American idiot.
Don’t want a nation under the new media.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind-fuck America.

“Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow.
For thats enough to argue.

“Well maybe I’m the FAGGOT America. (not fuck-head)
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia.”

we should be grateful that Natasha gets serious professionals in to help her, instead of hamfisted pretenders who compose like they’re on bad cocaine. The Observer says:

“[“American Idiot” is] the kind of sub-Michael Moore rhetoric that looks absolutely appalling on paper—‘sing along to the age of paranoia’—yet which makes an undeniable, juvenile sort of sense when married to a harmless baseball boot of a melody. You’d have to be the most miserable, punk-hating spoilsport to bear them any malice”

That’ll be me then.

Apparently it took four people to write Bedingfield’s sassy I-can’t-write-a-song-about-you song, These Words. The result is up there with Elvis Costello’s Accidents Will Happen and Bernie Taupin( and Elton John)’s Your Song as a paradoxical confession of creative inarticulacy. Plus, you can dance to it. As long as she doesn’t start inhaling the praise and persuades herself that she can write hits on her own, Natasha’s going to go a long long way. Lord, deliver her from “creative freedom”! In ten years time those older brothers will be claiming they could see she her potential right from the beginning—and not just down the front of her dress in some lad mag.

[*You know you’re an old fart when you read that the presenter of the chart show on Radio 1 is called “Wes” and the only musical Wes you can think of is Wes Montgomery.]