My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): The Yahoo Office Attachments Awards

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One thing I've never understood about certain factions in ROCK is the craving for AWARDS. I thought ROCK was meant to be all about FLIPPING THE BIRD to THE MAN? About carving out whole new ways of thought that THE MAINSTREAM cannot even BEGIN to understand? About being a rock and roll outlaw on the highways of FREAKOUT, riding the HECK EXPRESS to WITH IT CITY? And yet some people get all up in a lather about things like The Brits (doled out by corporate bosses to the DRONES who have earnt them the most money in this fiscal year) or The Ivor Novello Awards (previous recipients: Gary Glitter, Avril Lavigne, Ronan Keating). I would NEVER do that.

And it's not just because I'd never WIN ONE - clearly. Why, one time I even CHEATED LIKE MAD to try and EXPOSE the entire FALLACY! And if THAT'S not the mark of someone who doesn't care about such things, well, I don't know what is.

The award in question was the prestigious glittering Yahoo Office Attachments Award - that's right, IMPRESSIVE. We were in the running because the video for "Hey Hey 16K" had been nominated as Favourite Animation of The Year, and I got myself all excited about the possibility of us WINNING. Oh, er... I mean, I was excited about the prospect of winning and DESTROYING THE VERY CONCEPT of prizes FOR ART. Yes.

We felt we were in with a chance because the award was based on a public vote and, as we know, these are RIPE for the taking. Our campaign began with me mailing our entire mailing list which, at that point, was around 800 people, BEGGING them to vote for us. I don't like to do this usually - these days when I HAPPEN TO MENTION The Festive 50 on my webpage, for instance, I spend HOURS agonising over the phrasing of it in order to a) not directly ask people to vote for us but b) make it clear we'd REALLY LIKE THEM TO - but I reasoned that in this case it was worth it - if we won we could FOREVER MORE call ourselves "the Award Winning MJ Hibbett & The Validators".

Unfortunately we were in competition with a NET BEHEMOTH: Mr Jonti Picking, aka WEEBL. Jonti is one of the INTERWEB ILLUMINATI who secretly control everything that goes on in the GEEKOSPHERE, and he mobilised his MASSIVE mailing list to vote for his "Badger Badger Badger" animation, which was in the same category as us. With one mighty leap they were MILES ahead of us.

Clearly we needed reinforcements and luckily, like The Prussian Army at Waterloo, ANOTHER member of the INTERWEB ILLUMINATI rode to my side - Mr R Manuel, of b3ta. He PLUGGED our bid for victory in b3ta and suddenly things started to even up. Rob even BIGGED IT UP when he appeared on the Tech Spot on Phil Jupitus's 6Music show. That was EXTREMELY exciting, as they played a section of "Hey Hey 16K" to promote it and Phil Jupitus not only appeared to RECOGNISE the song but appeared to be JIGGING ALONG in the background!

Despite all this The Badger Massive were still ahead and even, as time went by, began to draw put more and more space between us. How was this happening, we wondered? Surely, with thousands and thousands of votes in already EVERYONE on his mailing list had voted? It wasn't like the awards themselves were massively subscribed to - the other eight videos in our category only had about 100 votes each - so we could only assume that they were cheating somehow.

And there's only one thing to do in that situation: JOIN IN. One member of The Validators, who I shall not name (suffice to say his name rhymes with a bumpkin's gratitude to a motorcyclist, "Thank'ee, The Sheen") is a MANAGER of IT Professionals, and when he mentioned the situation to them they LEAPT into action and, like a team of Republican Party Officials, set up mighty VOTING MACHINES.

We watched in wonder as the voting drew to a close, as hundreds and hundreds of people came by to voted for us... in a distinctly uniform way. The GRAPHS for us and the badgers grew and grew until the bars for the other videos became mere SPECKS. The Badgers stayed ahead but we hoped for a last minute SPRINT...

And then, suddenly, it all stopped - CLEARLY somebody at Yahoo had worked out what was going on and closed the whole thing down. There was no inquiry, no recriminations, just SILENCE and, that year, NO Yahoo Office Attachments Award For Animation was given. Between us we had DESTROYED the edifice of Prizes For Art, STUNNED The Man into action, and given THE LIE to the whole thing.

And that's really what we wanted to happen all along. Honest.

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