:: Mick Hucknall - Poverty

Mick Hucknall

The existence of an entire class of entertainment valued for being ‘so bad it’s good’ is a symptom of the post-modern world that tends to irritate many people. What is not taken into account by detractors is the extent to which the ironic appreciation of abjectly s**t music/movies/books is held simply by necessity – as a survival tactic. An almost flawless example of this phenomenon in action can be seen in my first experience of Poverty, off Mick Hucknall’s Tribute to Bobby album. Bobby is Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, blues and soul singer, and while it’s a complicated business to ascribe legitimacy to one artist over another in their choices of subject matter, the assumption that Hucknall would fail to pull off a track about the working man’s penury and repression by “Uncle Sam” is an absolutely sound one and is painfully vindicated on listening to the track. “Up every morning with the sun / I work all day ‘til the evening comes / Blisters and corns all in my hands / Lord, have mercy on a working man” – the image of Hucknall and his $102 million summoning up some appliqué passion with which to deliver these lyrics is almost physically nauseating. When faced teamed with the sanitised R&B that forms the backing to Hucknall’s pathos for the proletariat, the only option available to me as I suffered at the hands of this track was to shield myself with failsafe irony and weather the storm with detached laughter