I have an awkward relationship with Alexa (other voice-activated systems are available), which you may have guessed from the title.
You wouldn't tell your kids to bark out orders rather than make polite requests, would you? Well, I hope not. Let's just say I struggled with the 'orders' initially. My partner laughed. I got my own back when she 'ordered' Alexa to play chill-out music to help her sleep and was ignored. She could have just asked me to explain the offside rule. Alexa was clearly waiting for the magic word, or as Sarah Cracknell sings in Saint Etienne's Burnt out car, 'A simple good morning or hello would have done.'
Voice-activated requests orders can be useful, especially if you have kids screaming about. 'Play Teletubbies/The Baby Club/Baby Shark, nursery rhymes, etc' tends to work, unless you have undetectable accents, whether in English or from abroad. Then it's either inadvertent robotic snobbiness, plain human rudeness, or a source of satire. You could of course just uninstall everything and return to the likes of flicking switches like we all used to do. In this new age that sort of thinking fucks everything up in the house, especially when our cleaner visits.
As I write, I'm unemployed and when I am not applying for jobs me and my partner have a sort of unofficial upstairs-downstairs agreement. She works in the office and I do the mundane stuff, like cooking, dish washing, feeding the cats, clearing up their litter, etc. Nothing wrong with mundane, though; it makes me lose myself and write something like this. The lengthier the mundanity the better it gets. Suddenly I've become a talking head, a Pet Shop Boys fan, along with others - probably Stuart Maconie and David Walliams - mapping out their career and the ups and downs. 'The problem with Behaviour is that, while a beautiful album, it wasn't the dance album everybody was expecting in 1990. It was probably 10 years too early and sales suffered as a result.' Or 'Disco 2000 by Pulp is one the best songs ever written. Almost like a celebration of failure.'
I've become a sucker for Channel 5's talking-head style nostalgic look back at the charts in the 1980s and 90s, the top 30 singles from each year. More talking heads and interesting tit-bits like both members of 2 Unlimited being angry at their record company for stripping a rap from the verses and a full chorus from both No limits and Get ready for this, leaving just the 'Techno, techno, techno, techno' part from the former in the UK release. On hearing snippets from the original versions, suddenly '2 Untalented' and 'There's no lyrics' pastiches become a tad harsh. Then there are the many singles that were supposedly originals but were actually covers of obscure songs from 1968, or cutting-edge remixers back in 1989 like Coldcut, who had hits with the likes of Lisa Stansfield and Yazz before they became famous, looking like bald grandparents with white beards.
One day, when I started cooking a pasta bake, I decided I needed music to reward the mundanity further, and that's where Alexa is at 'her' best. Admittedly soundtracks are hit and miss; Alexa's claim that 'she' is shuffling songs is a bit iffy and narrow. Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Divine Comedy were largely Greatest Hits, and often played in the same order, while Black Box Recorder and Empire of the Sun were limited to one album and usually the one that I didn't know or the one I considered the weakest.
Then I suggested Saint Etienne, one of the most underrated acts in my lifetime. I've always liked them, especially their Smash The System Best of collection, but sometimes album by album it's a tough listen - or rather the albums in isolation don't do them justice. Someone I know said that Saint Etienne were good but their albums were mediocre because they were padded out with instrumentals, interludes and masturbation with grooves and samples as they were unable to write enough conventional pop songs within a short space of time. John Earls, a music reviewer on Channel 4 teletext (that might be in 'ask your parents' territory), described one Saint Etienne album as being 'the usual singles and filler - but WHAT singles. 7/10'.
But when shuffling Saint Etienne while preparing a pasta bake it all makes sense and my appreciation for them has skyrocketed. One minute I'm dancing like a twat to classic bubblegum pop, the next I'm nodding to raw hip hop, then taking inadvertent time-outs during a cute instrumental or guitar ballad. The only thing that suffers is the pasta bake, which takes twice as long as it should do. Thankfully I usually start making it when neither me or my partner are particularly hungry.
Looks like this week's pasta bake is ready. Alexa, [please] stop.
