An open letter to Natasha Bedingfield

Dear Natasha

We at DiS have rarely been ones to get particularly riled by what passes for pop music in this day and age – after all, somebody somewhere okayed the release of the Mika album, so the disease has obviously reached a stage where no DiS-administered enema could possibly rid the charts of their most cancerous cells. We have reached a platform of tolerance, of tight-lipped grumbles rather than scream-out-loud protestation at the decay spreading before our ears week in, week out.

But with your new single, ‘I Wanna Have Your Babies’, you have overstepped a mark. You have crossed a proverbial line in the equally proverbial sand that was never yours for trespassing beyond. You have offended us ‘til our maws foam with unprecedented rage. Our blood has curdled to a thickness that not even Blunt could whip up.

This song is more than likely going to breach the top ten of the singles chart this Sunday, April 22; it is, absolutely certainly, already polluting the airwaves with its beyond-banal lyrics about your aging, gradually-failing womb and all the men you fantasise about being impregnated by. Almost every morning we encounter it, sometimes before we’ve been able to shower; this additional, unnecessary dirt does not wash off as easily as the grime accumulated from a day on London’s filthiest streets. It must be burned from the skin with bleach or removed with a pair of wire brushes. Natasha, it stings something awful.

In the past your tiresome, diary-page pondering dressed up as say-it-straight lyricism has been accepted by women with fine collections of This Love 84 and Alone On Valentine’s compilations, or whatever’s doing well in Virgin Express right now; some perfectly sensible, emotionally stable sorts even took a shine to a couple of your songs. Men, even! ‘Unwritten’ was inoffensive enough, although if ‘These Words’ ever pops up on The Hits again we will not be responsible for our actions. The offending box of cables and circuit boards will crumble, and we shall send you the videotaped carnage.

But, we really needn’t fear a humungous repair bill: with all things being relative and comparable, ‘These Words’ is pop music’s Hamlet when lined up against the Kaavya Viswanathan-level shite of your new abortion of a pop single. Did you say it out loud? Yes, over and over and fucking over again. Please stop.

The inane wordplay and peerlessly trite arrangement of ‘I Wanna Have Your Babies’ could be ignored, near enough, if it wasn’t for the double-whammy you’ve delivered. Really, Natasha: this video is unforgivable. You want a baby, we get the message, but it seems you’re not entirely fussy as to who you assault to draw the essential fluids from. There must be at least three men trying to flee your affections here, Natasha. And the end scene? Truly, madly, deeply the most bizarre, surreal, absolutely terrifying thing we have ever seen on mainstream music television. You know when Jared Leto has his arm sawn off at the end of Requiem For A Dream? Your video trumps that with ease. Babies in giant bubbles, running about a giant aircraft hanger full of living, oversized toys? Nightmares is what we’re having for the foreseeable future.

There’s one, there’s one… there’s another one! Yes, Natasha, and not one of them is getting anywhere near you. It’s saddening, yes, and we sympathise – certain DiSsers are also unable to get their hands on what they truly want, although babies and PlayStation 3s aren’t entirely similar – but please, please, stop going on about all the tragedies to befall you in your oh-it-must-be-awful life. Fucking go to Africa and buy a baby. The sound of ITN criticising your decision and your tears at the eventual press conference would truly be music to our ears after this travesty of a track.

Please do go out into the middle of a big, big, big, big ocean in a tiny little boat and have a long, hard think about your work (or back to Vegas, if it's easier). Think about your capabilities as a pop artist, about just how misguided by Yes Men you must be to consider yourself capable of carrying the simplest of notes. We’re not against you really, Natasha – our knives are out for those that switched on the green-light when ‘I Wanna Have Your Babies’ sailed into sight. You’re meant to be a strong role model for young women, able to get by without a man as per your own words past: “I’m not waiting around for a man to save me, I’m happy where I am… I’m single, that’s how I wanna be”. You are not meant to whine on about your desperation for offspring before a pre-teen audience entirely prepared to take your video as an instructional tape on contemporary promiscuity, albeit the sort most practised by the emotionally infirm.

The digestion of your average chick-lit ‘novel’ must be like note-taking at a lecture on the curricular manifestation of quantum mechanical theory in the bottom-rung schools of Eighteenth Century Moscow, delivered by Stephen Fry and Will Self after a dozen tins of Red Bull, to you. We mean you no offence, but this is an abhorrence you cannot return from unscathed; you will wear a veil of pestilence ‘til your days grow dark. We want Daniel back, please.

Yours,
DiS