Don't tell me the sky's the limit if you're a moron

When it comes to wittily-constructed names of musical artists, I suppose I would have to side with will.i.am over Flo Rida. The annoying punctuation is a problem, but at least there's a construction of something from a normal name that makes sense, rather than just chopping a place name in two. And for bonus points, at least he's actually called William. But that's where my admiration of Mr .am has to end, for there are numerous problems with his tenuous grasp of grammar and common sense.


In May 2011 I was asleep, dreaming about driving a car. The dream is a little more exciting than it sounds because I've never had even one driving lesson and my subconscious has so little faith in me that my handling was nigh-on catastrophic as I careened around the roads of northern England. Then the radio came on and I heard a local DJ cut from the "obnoxious pillock" cloth that so many are. After a bit of inane babble he played a song: "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas.

At this point I think just decided enough was enough and that I ought to wake up - a bit like when you get fed up of trying to get a star on Super Mario 64 for fifty times in a row before admitting defeat for the night. This didn't actually help because it turned out that I Gotta Feeling was playing around me anyway. There was a big race event on at the university and they'd roped in an obnoxious pillock of a DJ to warm up the crowd and, yes, play The Black Eyed Peas. So will.i.am and crew had, essentially, managed to invade my subconscious like some sort of Inception team made of shambling drunks at a karaoke bar.

And you know what? That's not even the thing I dislike the most about that song.

I don't like how "gotta" is used as a contraction of "have got a" rather than "have got to". In my mind, the song should be "I Got A Feeling", because "gotta" is used in sentences such as "I gotta go" or "I gotta disarm this bomb" and not "I gotta present for you" or such. Unfortunately, while I was writing this - and I had some stuff going on about Han Solo, there - I visited the OED's website which told me that, yes, "gotta" can be used in the way The Black Eyed Peas used it. So I must admit defeat... for that song.

Because will.i.am, bless his cotton socks, isn't just in my (wholly inconsequential) bad books for that lyric. No, it's time to take a quick detour into his work as a Torch Bearer.

From The Guardian, where the photo is credited to Joe Giddens, LOCOG and the Press Association

I have a few issues with the whole Olympic Torch thing that preceded the fairly impressive London 2012 Olympic Games (a string of words that I hope I can use together without LOCOG's wrath). In fact, I'm annoyed about so many points of the Torch Relay that it might be easier to break out the bullet points:

• Every runner had a different torch, lit by the one that came before it. OK, it's still the "same" flame (kind of like how the Sugababes are still the "same" band or Trigger has been using the "same" broom for so long), but why not just have 100 people carrying one torch throughout Britain? That's much more of a "relay", wouldn't you say? The Olympic relay event, you might notice, involves the passing of a baton - not four people with their own baton.
• People running with the torch were then told they couldn't even keep the torches because they had cost so much to make that they were going to be auctioned off for charity. Again, that whole problem could have been side-stepped with only making one torch.
• Which, incidentally, would also have prevented some people selling torches on eBay, which LOCOG decreed was against the spirit of the Olympics. Unlike, you know, the way that LOCOG was going to sell them off.
• The runners were supposed to be examples of great Britons, the unsung heroes up and down the country who were inspirational. In other words, old folks who were still kicking, kids afflicted by diseases who had powered through, accountants with a penchant for running and so on and so forth. Keith Lemon carried the torch, though, and not even his biggest fans would call him inspirational. He's not even a real man. Inspirational heroes are being mixed with fictional characters under the same banner, and we're supposed to not bat an eyelid. At least, however, Keith Lemon/Leigh Francis is British. will.i.am, who decided to tweet along to his carrying of the torch, cannot even claim that. Why did he carry it? I still don't know.
• The absolute nadir of Olympic Torch horror, though, was reached when the local news - that's Look North on BBC1 for me - interviewed an old woman who was absolutely thrilled by the presence of the torch. I was fine with that, until she started talking about how her family had come to Britain to escape Nazism. Nobody had told this poor old lady that the very tradition of the Olympic flame being carried around stems from the Olympics that were held in Nazi Germany as a demonstration of how great Germans were. For anybody who knew that fact, it was a horrible piece of television to witness.

So after interrupting my dreams and invading the Torch Relay's line of Brits, where is will.i.am going to intrude next?

Well done if you said the planet Mars.

For that lonely red rock is where the singer's new song, "Reach for the Stars", has been premiered, via the astonishing and wonderful Curiosity rover robot of NASA's making. I find it hard not to feel dismayed and disappointed that NASA has been reduced to an interstellar Chris Moyles, especially so shortly after Neil Armstrong's death. According to the news report I linked to, it's the start of a partnership that seems to be helping education. And that's great. But playing will.i.am's new song? You have to be kidding me.

(Of course, what NASA really needs is decent government funding and the sheer zeal of the '60s Space Race, so we can all bask in the absolute wonder that is sending people to land on bits of rock floating through space. Seriously. Think about it, it's truly mind-blowing.)

Taken alone the decision to broadcast the song is pretty dreadful. But it only gets sadder, worse and tragically funny when you consider that the song is so crushingly bad. Forget, if your fragile ears allow, the abysmal auto-tuning of this musical trainwreck and wallow in the lyrics of the damned. Before imploring us to Reach for the Stars - in a manner that, frankly, is nowhere near the majesty of S Club 7 - will.i.am wonders aloud about an idiom.

"Why do they say the sky is the limit, when I've seen them footprints on the moon?"

It would be remiss of me not to mention the grammatical howler of "them footprints", but that's not the worst part. Nor is the barmy suggestion that will.i.am has actually been to the moon and seen the very footprints he now finds himself singing about. No, the central problem here is the lyric as a whole.

"Don't tell me the sky's the limit when there's footprints on the moon" is a phrase I've heard before. It's one of those faux inspirational phrases that pop up as Facebook groups or as fancy pictures on increasingly identikit Tumblr pages, so that people can pretend that they are clever and ever-so-slightly rebellious and independent. But what they, and now will.i.am, are really saying is: I can't understand utter horseshit when it's right in my face.

A fairly standard part of these sort of snappy one-liner motivational lines is a bit of linguistic wordplay. Except in this case it falls to its knees and begs to be put out of its misery. What this phrase will.i.am warbles is trying to say is: "People are telling me there are limits to what can be done, but actually we've got the capacity to go beyond them." Which is a nice sentiment, I'll grant you. But the way it's been executed is awful.

Because, as any child could tell you, "the sky's the limit" is an idiom that people use to mean "there are no limits". The sky is vast, expansive, all around us and from our tiny perspective, there is nothing greater. That's the whole damn point of the saying. It is not a phrase that suggests an actual limitation on you, and there are only a handful of reasons why you would think so:

1. You've never heard it before.
2. You are catastrophically stupid.
3. You are wilfully misunderstanding so you can hoodwink bumbling fools into thinking that you're clever by referencing the moon landings.

I wouldn't bet against any of them being true for the Black Eyed Pea singing about it.