As you may know, the release of High School Musical 3 in the US prompted a number of viciously negative reviews from critics. Apparently these reviewers were shocked and sickened that the film didn't focus more on the grim reality of being a boring indie kid.
"This corporate Disney universe is ... free from all the exquisite pain and hopeless boredom that made being a teenager real," said a typical review in the Philadelphia Metro.
Well of course it is. It's a musical. And what teenager in their right mind would pay good money to see their own dull-as-hell, miserable, acned, bullied, sexually frustrated and songless reality authentically replicated on film? Oh, indie kids. Right.
You see, the reviewer's cynicism shares the creeping menace of the indie mentality. Having already destroyed one art form - alternative pop music - Morrissey's grandchildren, the shock troops of self-obsessed and willfully underachieving middle-class miserabilism, are setting out to destroy another, the musical.
They must be stopped. Ask yourself this: Would Oliver! have been a better movie if they'd cut out the dancing and instead given us a realistic portrayal of child prostitution in mid-Victorian England? Would Finding Nemo have been improved by the aquatic hero getting caught, gutted and flash-fried in butter in the first reel? Would The Sound of Music really have benefited had My Favourite Things been replaced by a grittily realistic look at the inside of a Nazi concentration camp?
And yet when it comes to a film about adolescence - probably the most God-awfully miserable period in anybody's life - critics chastise it for being fake and fun?
My own experience of adolescence ran like this: total nerdy crapness rescued by the dementedly joyous, empowering and politicised rollercoaster ride that was punk rock. Which was just like High School Musical 3 except with better songs and more spitting. And then came the New Romantics. Which was even more like High School Musical 3. And then it was all Adam and the Ants and Two Tone and Dexy's Midnight Runners, and that was exactly like High School Musical 3 except with mass unemployment and politics.
And then the Smiths ambled along and everything turned to utter rubbish forever. For the next three decades indie pop was dominated by moping white self-obsessives droning on about how cool it was to be depressed and - by implication - how utterly ghastly it would be to live in a world where everybody was happy and danced all the time and was forever bursting into catchy song.
So here's a choice. Press button A and you flush all miserable, self-flagellating, woe-is-me, apparently-never-heard-any-black-music indie pop into a black hole and out of the universe for ever. Or press button B and you kill Winnie the Pooh. Which button do you press?
