New York London Paris Munich – FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Wed, 06 Dec 2023 13:25:10 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Four Candles https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/12/four-candles https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/12/four-candles#comments Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:34:32 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34592 One thing about the streaming revolution in pop is that it gives us a pretty accurate tracker of the UK’s changing tastes in Christmas songs. Now, by “tastes in Christmas songs” it’s probably fairer to say “what goes on Christmas playlists”: this is the one time of year where you are likely to encounter very specific songs “in the wild”, and it’s hard to say how many of the plays of Christmas songs are people sitting and listening to them. It’s also hard to say how many Christmas playlists are hand-built rather than ‘off-the-shelf’.

But! Whether we choose to hear Bobby Helms and Sia or have them thrust upon us, hear them we do. And what we hear at Christmas is shifting. While trying to get my head around how it’s shifted I came up with this rough model: there are four distinct phases of Christmas music which wax and wane in strength in the UK Christmas charts. Something old, something new, something glam and something Wham.

What are these four Christmases and how is the picture shifting?

OLD CHRISTMAS: This might also be called “American Christmas” – the US christmas canon, spearheaded by Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms, has made huge inroads into the UK Christmas charts. This is purely a cultural import: as Paul O’Brien points out in his excellent chart posts, “Jingle Bell Rock” was never a UK hit at all before 2019. American Christmas movies are probably a driver here – the Home Alone effect.

It’s not that American Christmas hits were unknown in the UK pre-streaming, of course – you’d find Bing, Brenda, Andy Williams and a few Spector tracks (or knock-offs) on most 2CD BEST CHRISTMAS EVER compilations 30 years ago, bulking out Disc 2 alongside some forlorn carols. But they weren’t top billing. The US Christmas canon is very much still on the rise here – I was surprised (and happy!) to hear “Feliz Navidad” in a petrol station the other day, unthinkable even a decade ago.

GLAM CHRISTMAS: The American Christmas classics are pushing the Christmas music of my childhood out of the way. It used to be that Britain and America had two quite different Christmas traditions, and ours involved the men of rock larging it up on TOTP or gurning at frightened schoolkids. This phase of Christmas music broadly runs from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” up to roughly Jona Lewie’s “Stop The Cavalry” and includes Wizzard, Slade, Elton John, Mud, Greg Lake (Greg Lake!!) and “Wonderful Christmastime”.

If you were a British kid in a certain era this stuff IS Christmas music. But its stock has very much fallen – it’s now the least salient of the four Christmases I’m talking about. Proper Binman Christmas Music no longer makes much of a chart dent – “Wonderful Christmastime” held on for a bit and will feature in the charts as we get closer to X-Day, so might a couple of the others, but at the moment of writing nothing from the 1970s is in the Top 40.

WHAM CHRISTMAS: Compare the fortunes of the Slade era Christmas music to their 80s and 90s successors. This actually was what prompted this post – Andrew Hickey on Bluesky wrapped up the 70s and 80s stuff into a bundle, and when he and I were younger they very much were packaged together. But in terms of public fortune there’s a dramatic disjunction between two eras of Christmas – the glam era is dying, the Wham era rules supreme.

This phase runs roughly from Wham!’s “Last Christmas” to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, two Christmas songs which have nothing in common barring the fact they went to No.1 last year and will probably do so again. Also up there is “Fairytale Of New York”, the late Shane MacGowan the holy spirit in the Christmas Trinity. But “Stay Another Day” and Shakey are both performing a lot better than anything from the earlier phase of Christmas songs. (The big loser is Sir Cliff).

Will the era of Wham! and Mariah end like that of Noddy and Roy Wood? Unlikely, or not for a long time – both these tracks were huge US hits too which probably inoculates them against changing fortune. The Pogues’ song may well be a perennial too; Shakey is probably doomed in the longer term.

NEW CHRISTMAS: And finally the most intriguing Christmas – the modern stuff. The signal with modern Christmas songs is confused by things like Amazon exclusives which turn up for a year because they’re front-loaded on Amazon playlists (this got “River” to No.1 a while back). But even so the shape of a modern playlist era canon is becoming clear – the recent songs are performing strongly in the charts so far this Christmas.

You can count Buble in with the oldies if you want, but Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me”, Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath The Tree”, and potentially Sia look to be here for the long haul. (I am a bit surprised Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm” hasn’t caught on more, considering, but give it time). All these are 2010s numbers – there’s a need for fresher material on playlists which didn’t seem to be there in the sales era, and so there does seem to be a real void in Christmas pop between Mariah and the last 10-15 years. Maybe it will be backfilled.

So what’s the broad picture? An Americanisation of Christmas, certainly – there’s an Ed Sheeran song doing OK this year but all the modern big guns are US singers, and the gradual retconning of Christmas Past shows no signs of stopping. And hand in hand with that a decline of the specific UK Christmas canon. Like a lot of peculiar-to-Britain popular culture of my childhood – British home computers, British comics, British TV and films – the British Christmas hits are fading from view, squeezed out of a global market. 

I’m in two minds about that – on the one hand I think making strange and silly little bits of sometimes-commercial art was something we, as a country, did well for a long time, even if they pleased nobody but ourselves. And there’s a genuine sadness when something that people did well, and enjoyed doing well goes away. On the other hand I feel that nostalgia is our national curse, that the present holds a world of joys (British or otherwise), and that the same people who are most nostalgic keep electing governments for whom the idea of leisure, or hobbies, or unprofitable art are anathema. Like the big man says, the Christmas we get we deserve.

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3. Priceless Junk https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/3-priceless-junk https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/3-priceless-junk#comments Sun, 19 Nov 2023 23:58:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34579 (The third part of the 3-part piece about the 1000th Number 1, the charts, and 20 years of writing about them. Part 1. Part 2. See also the pieces on #999 and #1000 on Popular.)

Here’s the thing, though. I still really like pop music.

When I started Popular, I said something stupid. Not “I’m going to write about every No.1”, a normal statement by a sensible individual. But I said something along the lines of, I’m writing this because pop gets better every decade, and my subtext was as this blog will show! Let me remind you that No.1 at the time I said this was “Where Is The Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas, a record I do actually enjoy but not anybody’s pick for a tune on which a Whig Interpretation Of Pop could rest.

But it was the early 00s, and the world of pop and rap and R&B were on multiple highs, full of fresh poses and new ideas, just as exciting as any of the 20th Century ones. The charts felt stuffed with good ideas, jostling along with terrible ones, like the notion the proper form of pop was a gameshow run by a man who didn’t know how trousers worked.

It was a time to be, how might you put it, optimistic about pop. So a project like Popular was a bet that you could tell an interesting version of the story of pop through the story of Number 1s, and in September 2003 that bet felt safe. And like everyone else who ever thought “No more boom and bust!” I said as much out loud, and along came the bust.

A quick digression. The most embarrassing of my inspirations for Popular – in the very general sense of a guy who started a weird personal project and saw it through – was a cartoonist called Dave Sim, who drew a comic about an aardvark for well over 20 years. His version of seeing it through involved revealing political and religious views so batshit that even today’s right wing haven’t embraced him. (This is why he’s embarrassing. I was wearing a T-Shirt with his aardvark guy on my first date with my wife, a year or two before that became the reddest of red flags. Fortunately I had other T-Shirts available which made me look less like a freak, for example The Smiths.)

Anyway, Dave Sim told everyone his aardvark comic was going to last for 300 issues, and astonishingly it became clear that yes, it probably would. But then, approaching issue 200, he revealed that he’d lied – the story would end at 200, in fact was always going to end then. Dave Sim is a guy who believes genuinely terrible things, but that particular bit of audacious trolling I always liked.

But he was trolling – the comic did not stop. You can read – if you like Fitzgerald pastiches, treatises on male bonding, lengthy exegeses of the Torah, and extremely malignant ideas about women – issues 201-300 of Cerebus The Aardvark. They were published. They exist. They are even about an aardvark.

But he also wasn’t trolling. The story he was telling in the first 200 issues did end, and it ended badly.

There are still charts, and there are still number one records, great long lists of them between the second coming of Elvis and the reanimation of The Beatles. Smart researchers have worked hard to make sure that the charts behave in the same sort of way The Charts used to. But in 2005 the story of physical singles is ending; the story of buying individual singles at all will flare briefly then fade itself. Top Of The Pops, the window between The Charts and the world, will end in 2006. Within 5 years the presenter will be disgraced to a degree that comes close to damning a whole era, and means the final edition can never be repeated.

Popular was a way to tell a wider story of pop music in Britain through a narrower story of The Charts, and what reached Number 1 in them. By 2005 the cartilage between those stories has – at best – rubbed painfully thin. So when Elvis got the 1000th Number 1, I did honestly think, well, everyone who’s been telling me the charts are meaningless is right. If I wanted to finish Popular, this would be a good place.

But I have to be honest. If I’d known since 2005 that I’d be ending with Elvis reissues, I’d never have reached the 1970s. Popular is not ending here. Sorry for dicking you around! But this is the right point to ask – what about the story it’s telling? What do those lists of Number 1s represent?

There was something extremely unusual about the 1001st Number One single: it wasn’t by Elvis Presley. The Elvis reissue campaign rumbled on until May 2005, and every one of its singles reached the Top 5 – and in fact we have one more Number 1 to come. But the spell was broken in the fourth week by a different young Southern teenage singer with a strange name. Ciara Princess Wilson doesn’t have 18 Number 1s, just “Goodies”. But her timing is exquisite, a reminder that pop’s story was not over quite yet.

The charts are not the public focus of that story any more, and they never will be again. In truth though, the story of pop doesn’t really have a public focus, which means the charts are no worse a record of it than anything else. Wait, though – does pop even have a story? Is the word even meaningful? These aren’t silly questions. There is, for sure, intense pop-cultural interest in a handful of huge stars, which occasionally even extends beyond economics and amateur sociology and talks about their records. But often, narratives of pop music in the 21st century have focused on how people listen – a succession of platforms from Napster to Spotify. The question of what they’re listening to has slipped down the agenda. Which is infuriating, honestly, because that’s still the juicy stuff.

While I’ve been indulging myself with these posts I’ve also been posting a list of singles on Bluesky. (If you’re reading this in 2033 ask your local AI to make up what Bluesky was). It’s a list of my favourite singles of the 21st Century for a social media challenge called #FearOfMu21c – about a hundred other people are doing the same thing. The point of the challenge is that the stories of pop music that get told and retold, listed and relisted, are 20th Century ones. Elvis refuses to leave the building. 

Popular as a 20th Century project was interesting because it cut across this canon, bundling the ridiculous unavoidably with the sublime, forcing you to reckon with the fact that people wanted both. Popular in the 21st Century is a trickier prospect because it can feel there’s not much of a real canon to cut across. But why isn’t there?

Ever since I started Popular I’ve heard that the charts are irrelevant. This series of posts has been me reckoning with that idea, firming up the strongest version of it I can, and I think it goes like this: The charts were a way of turning individual listening into a communal event. But they only mattered to people because of the systems around them – broadcasters, retailers, record labels – and when those systems failed or fragmented, they stopped being important. “Pop music” goes on, but the charts aren’t telling its story.

That’s as far as I can go – but other people go further. They say the charts fell into decline because music fell into decline. There’s no 21st century canon because 21st century popular music isn’t as good as the old stuff. This version of the story is extremely tempting because it takes something an awful lot of people feel as they get older – I’m personally not getting much out of keeping up with this stuff – and turns it into a response to changes in the world, not a response to changes in yourself. It’s not for me becomes It’s just noise.

The not-for-me people are right and honest – I don’t think you can get to middle age and not feel that sometimes. The it’s just noise people I have less sympathy for, but I’m sure there’s things I’ll be as incurious about before the end. The two groups have one important thing in common, though. They’re not giving up on pop music, they’re just giving up on current pop music.

Very few people stay interested in current pop their whole lives, and there’s no great virtue in those who do. But equally, very few age out of music entirely. You don’t spend 18 weeks buying a set of collectable singles if what those singles represent isn’t somehow meaningful for you. If you were 16 and had your first kiss to “It’s Now Or Never” in 1960, and helped get it to No.1 in 2005, then you’re about to turn 80 – congratulations! I bet you still like the song!

My parents used to roll their eyes at me for spending so much money on music (and role-playing games and comics about aardvarks), because in their eyes I was certain to grow out of it. As it turned out, they were almost the last generation who grew out of anything. But if nobody ages out of old pop music, and if “pop” means what lots of people like, then the 20th Century has always already won. No qualitative judgement required: the old stuff simply has the numbers.

Weirdly, though, the charts is one of the few bits of pop where this isn’t true, not that you’d always know it. “Now And Then” got the most press coverage of a No.1 this year, just like “Running Up That Hill” did last year. But the biggest No.1 of the year was surely “Sprinter”, a track by UK drill artist Central Cee, which was at the top all summer – ten weeks all told, racking up close to half a billion streams just on Spotify, with another 146 million plays on YouTube.

It took me three plays to even like “Sprinter” – if I had to sit down now and write about it, I would do a terrible job. But it’s objectively a huge, year-defining hit among people who are still engaged with current pop. It’s as ‘relevant’ as anything I’ve ever written about on Popular. 

There are 125 news results for “Sprinter” on Google. There are 22,400 news results for “Now And Then”. Relevance is a media choice. The charts still matter when somebody decides they matter.

I’m not naive: I do not think there is a world where Central Cee gets as much press as The Beatles. But I can imagine ones where the ratio isn’t pushing 1:200. And I think there’s a starker truth behind questions of relevance, and canon, and what the charts mean now.

Let’s admit that the charts stopped telling a grand story of pop, if they ever did. And let’s admit that the fact there are more fans of old pop music than the current stuff makes it harder for newer pop to get attention. Why keep paying attention to the charts? Because of this: there may not be a story of 21st century pop music, British and global, but the charts are full of a rainbow of new stories, overlapping and contradicting, sprawling out like side-quests in an open-world videogame.

“Sprinter” is part of one – the rise of British rap, grime and drill to dominate our local charts. Taylor Swift and more locally Ed Sheeran represent another – a tier of seemingly unshiftable pop-superbrands. Swift’s reissue program symbolises yet another – the way women stars have taken undeniable control of their own creativity and careers. African and Asian acts push into the charts on a weekly basis; a flotilla of Barbie No.1s suggest the worlds of Hollywood and pop are closer than any time since the 80s. Every time I flag with Popular, interesting things keep happening and I’m pulled back.

Many of these story strands do have something wider in common: the slow collapse of a demographic hegemony, the decentering of people who look like Elvis, or the Beatles, or Jann Wenner, or frankly me. In so many other artforms you find reactionaries howling at the idea of consciously elevating women’s voices, Black voices, queer voices, African and Asian voices, and so many others, insisting that to do so is a de haut en bas conspiracy by elites. Music has them too, but they’re weaker: in pop that diversification feels like an established fact. (If anything, the bigger fight right now is to remind people that it always was a fact, to excavate the foundations of the old canon and find where the bodies are buried).

And this is why I’m so wary of the idea that the tech, not the music, is the only real story. The logistics, economics, and technology of music are massive concerns – they always were. In fact the pendulum used to swing too far the other way, with the perfume of artistry concealing the stench of exploitation. We now live in an age where the people who run the pipelines by which music reaches us are more powerful than ever, and they need – somehow – scrutiny and accountability. But in the end a pipeline is just a pipeline: what it carries – what people listen to and latch on to – still matters. The reason the Number One was irrelevant in 2005 was because only 20,000 people bought it? Fair enough. The reason the Number One is irrelevant in 2023 when it gets 470 million streams is… because Spotify is a racket? Because TikTok is annoying? Because 99% of over-40s don’t know who Central Cee is?

And so we’re back again to the question – why the charts? Why write about No.1s? Pop music didn’t start with the charts and it won’t end when they finally go. But the charts are still a place where those two stories – the logistical, technological, economic one and the story of people listening to and loving music – meet. That meeting generates a list of songs, and asks us to pretend it’s less arbitrary than it is – but it always was a little arbitrary. The includes some bloody awful music – and that was always a risk too. Good ideas still jostle along with terrible ones: the bad trouser guy finally fucked off, and the sausage roll guy came along instead. The charts, then, are some way beyond imperfect, a series of pieces from dozens of different jigsaws, trying to sucker you into thinking you can see a big picture. But they’re worth thinking about because music is always worth thinking about, and because not much else has any of the pieces at all.

One last question, and one last diversion. Is it worth me thinking about them?

When I was in my early teens I caught a late night film on TV, and it felt like a terrible hallucination. I never saw the start and I’m not even sure I saw the end. Much later I learned that it’s a film called The Swimmer, from 1968, starring Burt Lancaster. Lancaster is a successful man, a golden man, the toast of his neighbourhood. All his friends have pools. He decides to swim home across them. At first his friends cheer his efforts on, but gradually conversations take a darker turn, secrets are revealed. The seasons seem to have changed across an afternoon, the pools are deserted, the swimmer’s own house derelict.

It’s a portrait – not subtle – of successful 60s America cracking up under its skin, of dead leaves and debris clogging up its vents. It was a shocking, baffling film to encounter, out of context. I forgot about it for years, until I started dreaming sometimes about watching it with old friends who I hadn’t seen for decades.

I think of The Swimmer a lot when I think about Popular, a project I started as a lark. From quite early on I would ask myself the question: what’s going to happen when nobody cares? When the nostalgia runs out and you’re staggering from post to post in the dark? There have been times when I’ve felt like that’s happening. There are stretches ahead I don’t know how I’ll handle. It’s going to get worse before it gets better: I am a fifty year old man and I will at some future date be attempting to write with authority about Rizzle Kicks. The water is cold and my towel is damp and everyone’s gone to bed.

But when I finished the “I Got Stung” post yesterday, I thought, fuck me, I did it. One thousand Number Ones. That’s something. Is it worth me writing about the rest? Let’s find out.

(Thanks for reading this, and thanks for reading Popular: I honestly couldn’t have done it without you. Only four hundred and twenty to go. That’s nothing, eh?)

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2. All My Lazy Teenage Boasts Are Now High Precision Ghosts https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/2-all-my-lazy-teenage-boasts-are-now-high-precision-ghosts https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/2-all-my-lazy-teenage-boasts-are-now-high-precision-ghosts#comments Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:40:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34576 (This is Part 2 of a 3 part piece around the 1000th No.1. Part 1 is here but you might also want to read about the 999th Number 1)

Dr Manhattan is on Mars, some time before he leaves our Universe at the end of Watchmen to become a meme. It is 1958. Elvis is at No.1. It is 1969. The Beatles are at No.1. It is 2005. Elvis is at No.1. It is 2023. The Beatles are at No.1. If you’re going to think something as foolish as “Number 1s matter”, surely who has the most No.1s must matter most of all.

At any rate, the charts endure. “Now And Then” is the 1,419th and current No.1, and in fairness to Paul McCartney it took a bit more effort than luring the fans in with collectable anniversary singles. (Anyway, The Beatles had already tried that). The 1,419th No.1 has also sold more than the 1,000th did. Literally, physically, sold more – 38,000 copies to “I Got Stung”’s 30,000. By this metric alone, the tip top pop charts are in rude health. Some of those Beatles singles cost twenty quid, too.

We’ll come back to those physical sales, but 1,000 posts and 20 years into writing Popular it’s probably worth asking – what actually are the charts now, in 2023? They’re a bit like the British monarchy – history furnishes us with a list (“Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee” &c.) but the list is a convenient fiction smoothing over major discontinuities. Charles III is not a king in precisely the sense Charles II was a king. “Now And Then” is not No.1 in precisely the sense “Hello Goodbye” was.

One of those discontinuities is happening in 2005, but it’s hardly the first. For one thing the charts before 1969 were a retcon. The multiverse of charts was replaced with a single consistent timeline, with only stray continuity errors like Dusty Springfield’s “Nothing Has Been Proved” remembering versions of history where the Beatles had different Number Ones. It was only after that that the charts could become The Charts, the thing which hooked kids in and led to some of them doing things like this.

What made The Charts exciting was their movement, their unpredictability, the sense of different audiences mingling and clashing (“who is even buying this?”), the tension of watching your favourites slowly climb, the thrill of seeing them surge, the wonder of hearing something you never had. The Charts in their heyday – the 70s and 80s, according to people who were kids in the 70s and 80s – had an exact, goldilocks level of volatility. Not too fast, not too slow.

The charts in 2023, under the solemn keeping of The Official Charts Company, are… not too different from this. Songs do rise and fall – the age of everything going in at No.1 is long over. Some records stay at No.1 for ages, some last only a precious week. There’s less breadth of audiences represented, but a new factor too: the chaos energy of TikTok will open up holes in time and drop old songs into the Top 40.

But like those king lists, apparent continuity masks wrenching change. The old Charts existed as part of a music business and entertainment ecosystem. A weekly radio and television showcase for the charts, turning an industry list into a public event. A largely nationalised, limited media landscape, guaranteeing those showcases an audience. A purely physical-media singles market, dependent on stores which wanted regular rotation of stock. A measurement system that was selective, partly trust-based and entirely based on buying not listening. An industry culture still firmly in the lunches and hunches era of decision making. The excitement of The Charts was an emergent property of a perfect storm of interlocking factors.

In 2023, that ecosystem barely exists. Top Of The Pops is long gone. There is a weekly chart show on Radio 1, a station whose audience is a third of its 20th century peak in a fragmented media landscape. Physical media is a niche, and the measurement of the charts has swung almost entirely to listeners over buyers. And across the 90s the industry wised up, worked out how to promote single releases to fans and stores, and ensured that the No.1 would be the biggest new release each week.

The charts in 2023 reflect that changed world, but only to a degree. The ecosystem that created a dynamic chart by happy accident has been replaced by a scaffolding of rules and fixes designed to do that on purpose. The charts is an accurate representation of what British people are listening to – except it’s not, exactly, because British people left to themselves listen to the same things over and over again and the chart slows to the point of total inertia. So they downweight plays once a track loses momentum. The charts reflect the most popular singles – except when an LP comes out, and all but the top 3 tracks are artificially excluded, because “singles” doesn’t exactly mean that anymore.

Each of these decisions are good ones! But collectively they reflect a vision of how the charts should work which is nostalgic, based on their 20th century heyday as The Charts, back when they were just exciting enough, back when (whisper it) they mattered. The charts in 2023 is a terrarium, a music industry biome designed to preserve a way of interacting with pop that was once very important to some people. But if the charts had never existed, would anyone bother to invent them now?

Of course, it could be worse. In 2005, it was worse. Physical sales had been slipping fast since the peak of the late 90s CD boom – “Jailhouse Rock” sold a then record-low of 21,000; Ja Rule’s “Wonderful” is, supposedly, the lowest selling UK No.1 ever. It became harder to deny that the Number 1 slot didn’t mean much. (When sales are higher overall, front-loading them in the first week isn’t such a problem – you still need to have some wider popularity to do it). Slipstream No.1s proliferated, reflecting marketers catching up on more genuine crossovers. Any biddable fanbase could secure a string of hits. The audiences for Reality TV shows were magnitudes larger than for any pop act, so TV could overwhelm the charts on a whim. The industry was reluctant to include downloads, where unit prices were even lower, but it was obvious they needed to. The 1000th number one could not have come at a worse time. “Darkness Falls On The Singles Era”, read the Guardian headline announcing “I Got Stung”’s success.

Where did Elvis fit into all this? From the 2002 JXL remix, through this reissue program, to the more recent set of orchestral remakes, the impression I have is that the keepers’ of Elvis’ post-death legacy are desperate to ensure his memory endures, and also desperate to make a lot of money from it. But they’re hamstrung by the fact that the currency of musical legacy tends to be the LP, and Elvis wasn’t really an LPs guy. Once past the luxurious, fascinating, decade-by-decade box sets which firmed up his musical reputation, they’ve had to get creative. And just as in the 50s, creative often means exploitative.

Meanwhile Elvis remained powerful as a cultural figure, a set of myths and hauntings – his death opened the doors on a series of excellent songs about Elvis Presley across the 80s and 90s and beyond. Kate Bush’s 2005 comeback “King Of The Mountain” – one recluse empathising with a legendary other – is a better tribute to Elvis At 70 than a limited edition 10” re-release of “Wooden Heart”.

The Elvis people obviously didn’t see it that way. For them the limited edition releases were beautiful, collectable objects – the Elvis forums at the time were full of tips on how to get particularly scarce ones. The fun was in acquisition: by the end all of them were 99p on eBay, but that wasn’t the point. This is one of two ways the Elvis campaign prefigures pop in 2023: the Franklin-Mint-ification of physical media, particularly vinyls. And it gets to the heart of the question I asked earlier – why did I feel so cheated by this as the 1000th No.1? Because at least Brian McFadden fans were buying a song to listen to – even if loyalty played a big role. At least Band Aid buyers were getting something they hadn’t heard and felt like they were helping someone. “I Got Stung” was aimed purely at people who owned it already – it might as well have been a souvenir thimble.

At the end of the 2005 reissue series an Elvis news site posted a moving tribute.

Some campaign facts:

1. Elvis has sold over 750,000+ singles in 4 months.

2. “One Night” was the UK’s 1000th UK #1

3. Elvis is the only artist to have hit the #1 spot 21 times.

4. No artist has ever had 3 different #1 singles in one month.

5. Elvis has now had more Top 3 singles in a year than other artist.

6. Presley has enjoyed more Top 10 entries than any other artist with 77.

7. The releases generated 28,000 column cm’s of PR with an advertising value of £2.3 million.

8. The PR campaign reached over 32 million consumers in the UK.

This gives a sense of priorities – pure street team pride at their guy’s unbeatable metrics. This is the other very contemporary thing about Elvis in 2005 – the metrics have changed, but anybody familiar with Army, or the Bey-Hive, or Swifties will recognise the tone.

The last two ‘facts’ on the press release are presumably taken raw from some marketing press pack. By 2005 I’d read plenty of those. Later I wrote a few. (Much later I sat on judging panels for marketing awards and recognised this stuff as fluff aimed to sucker people into handing out a prize.) Perhaps this capitalist candour – an advertising value of £2.3 million – was appropriate. The charts began in 1952 as a PR exercise, a wheeze by Percy Dickins to get more people buying the New Musical Express. We’ve come full circle. But it wasn’t why I’d loved the charts. It certainly wasn’t why I was writing about them. So maybe, when I got here, I’d stop. The wind it blows, the wind it blows the door closed.

Popular: The First 1000 Number Ones. It’s got a nice ring to it.

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1. No Bird Can Fly, No Fish Can Swim Until The King Is Born https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/no-bird-can-fly-no-fish-can-swim-until-the-king-is-born https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/no-bird-can-fly-no-fish-can-swim-until-the-king-is-born#comments Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:29:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34572 (This is part 1 of a 3-part piece designed to fit around the 999th and 1000th Popular entries, which will go up on the Popular site.)

Almost my first memory of the charts is of the charts being broken. Broken hearted; collapsed by shock and grief in the Winter of 1980 into a series of Number 1s for John Lennon, first his then-current single, then an old classic rushed back into shops to meet grieving demand, then what would have been his next one.

But also just broken. As I wrote here when we reached those songs, I was 7 and I was annoyed. I wanted – though how did I know what to want? – the Number One to be something that felt new – though how did I know what that felt? I had, already, a sense of what the charts were for, and mourning, which I barely understood even as an abstract, wasn’t it.

It didn’t take the death of John Lennon for me to realise the charts could be gamed. It would have become obvious soon enough. A perfect charts, reflecting what the fans truly liked and listened to, would have been far less exciting, as we found much later when we got close to having one. I would probably not have cared as much about a charts like that.

“The singles people buy each week” is a weird, flawed, proxy for “the music people like”, but it introduced a jolt of crass, commercial democracy into proceedings, a random element where the passions of some fans could triumph and the passions of others could be disrupted. Where a public wake for one of Britain’s finest songwriters could be suddenly interrupted by an army of 9 year olds buying a record for their dear old grannies. The chart was a pony-and-trap whose reins were there for the grabbing.

Which isn’t to say you’d want the charts to be hijacked all the time, any more than you’d want to see a handballed goal in every football match. But the possibility of those things happening sometimes, the bittersweet tang of outrage you might feel when they did, its persistence as a shared memory, these were part of what might get a kid hooked on the charts.

A month or so after John Lennon died, a song reached Number 1 I liked considerably better – a funny man with a foreign accent telling people to shut up. For people a few years older than me, this became a great wickedness, one of those handballed goals – this crap novelty song keeping Ultravox’s “Vienna” from Number 1. The charts were exciting not just because there was a winner, but because that winner was sometimes outrageous. You listened each week not knowing if you’d be hearing a victory march or witnessing a crime scene.

The 999th, 1000th, and 1002nd Number 1s were one or the other. Unless they were both. Unless it didn’t matter at all.

The Elvis reissue campaign of 2005 was timed for the King’s 70th birthday, had he lived. It was also, explicitly, timed to coincide with the 1000th Number 1, and the birthday element was a figleaf for that. At one point the estate planned a weekly release of 30 Elvis singles; in the end, they contented themselves with simply 18. His Number 1 hits, in fact, after an initial release of “All Shook Up”. This came with a presentation box and space for all 18 other records, something for collectors to fill, week on week, like a DeAgostini partwork about horses or racing cars. The free box meant “All Shook Up” was not eligible for the charts. Everything else was.

A lost Popular 10

All 18 releases reached the Top 5. The first, second and fourth reached Number 1. The 1000th Number 1 was “I Got Stung/One Night” by Elvis Presley, the King Of Rock And Roll. In the words of an ancient saying passed down to us from the Time Of Elvis: Ever get the feeling you’ve got stung?

Yes. Yes, actually, I did have that feeling. I was surprised, in fact, by how much I felt stung. But why?

Is it because the records are bad? Hardly. “Jailhouse Rock” is a masterpiece. “I Got Stung” is deceptively casual quality. “One Night” vamps and winks. “It’s Now Or Never” at least makes me fancy an ice cream.

Is it because Elvis – or Elvis’ People, those heirs to Colonel Tom managing the man’s commercial ghost – had somehow cheated? No – there were plenty of precedents. Very old records reached the top of the chart in the late 80s. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a repeat Number 1. Elvis himself had a 00s chart-topper.

Is it because I felt like the 1000th Number One should be something remarkable? I mean, it would have been nice. By the time of the 500th Number 1, I was enough of a follower of The Charts to understand the excitement the Top Of The Pops presenters felt – or pretended to feel – about that idea, but there was no getting around the fact that the actual song was “A Little Peace” by Nicole. No reason for this to turn out better.

Is it because by this point I had committed myself to writing about every No.1 hit? Now we’re getting a little closer, though this specific future chore didn’t bother me. The Popular entries for the 1950s were deliberately hurried, sketchy affairs, written with no research about music I had no background with or feel for. Elvis had suffered more than most for this – why not revisit them properly? If nothing else it was a chance to re-score “Jailhouse Rock”.

Still, doing Popular had made me quixotically invested in the charts. The success of the Elvis campaign hurt, not because the reissues won but because they’d barely had to try. The 1000th Number One sold around 30,000 copies – a risible number, but standard for 2005. The message could hardly have been clearer: this shit doesn’t matter any more. It’s over. Go home.

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#FearOfMu21c #16 – 2021-2023 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-16-2021-2023 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-16-2021-2023#respond Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:05:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34550 The #FearOfMu21c selection struggle reaches its end – two years once again dominated by the pop polls and then bang up to date with the sounds of 2023. These have also been years of gradual personal improvement after 2019-2020 were bin-fires for more than the global reasons. The polls create a little bubble which overlaps with wider narratives of pop – but thinking about these years also bring home the fact that there don’t seem to be many wider narratives around, in the old sense of trends supplanting other trends – the stories told about contemporary pop are often tales of logistics: the platforms by which it reaches us. Is that down to the withering of paid criticism, a broader cultural stasis, a bit of both, or something else entirely?

WET LEG – “Wet Dream”: FIRE UP THE DISCOURSE FURNACE IT’S WET LEG. In fact there’s no need to rehash the many ways people on the internets got Weird About Wet Leg, let us simply note that “Wet Dream”, not “Chaise Longue”, is the better Wet Leg single, cos it takes the silly jokes, post-punk riffs, and repetition and pushes them somewhere odder before snapping back for the big hooks. (Also the Buffalo 66 joke is just better than the Big D joke). YES.

PEGGY GOU – “I Go”: It’s been so great to see Peggy Gou get a proper hit this year! Unfortunately not one as good as “Itgehane” or this, which really hit that sweet spot between a techno groove and a pop hook. YES.

PARQUET COURTS – “Walking At A Downtown Pace”: As much a groove record as “I Go”, especially when the riff comes scudding over the top of the loping rhythm like a stone thrown across a pond. An amazing walkin’ around record for a moment when walkin’ around felt pretty special honestly. NO.

CAROLINE POLACHEK – “Bunny Is A Rider”: Found this one really hypnotic at the time and probably have to downgrade it a bit: it’s good, and interesting, but it also feels like a ciricle of mirrors and I’m not sure there’s anything in the middle. NO.

BAD BOY CHILLER CREW – “Don’t You Worry About Me”: Total nonsense euphoria, like Shaun Ryder making Hixxy and Sharkey records. All Bad Boy Chiller Crew verses are functionally interchangeable, these ones seem to have nothing to do with the addictive chorus, a girl putting down some clubland nuisance offering to ‘help’ her home, which is the real joy here. YES.

GIRL K – “Girl K Is For The People”: Another Maura Johnston recommendation, this is the kind of big-room indie-pop the Go! Team make sometimes, big jangly riffs and cheerleader chants. Another highlight from a year where I went hard for upbeat, optimistic sounds. NO.

Onto 2022 – this is the year the wheels came off my Spotify virtual crate-digging: I overdid it, listening to vast numbers of tracks once, ending up with a 600-strong playlist of things I’d marked as good, most of them not in English, with no real idea where the actual highlights were. I ended up exhausted, awed by how much good music was out there, and completely unable to actually filter it well.

MEGAN THEE STALLION – “Her”: Beyonce’s album drawing on 90s house beats got all the plaudits, but for me Megan’s hip-house single stands up to any of it, the beat rippling and flexing under Megan’s take-no-shit rap. “I eat hate that’s why I ain’t got a waist”. NO.

REMA – “Calm Down”: Heartening to find that I’m still down for absolutely colossal worldwide hits sometimes – “Calm Down”‘s corny afrobeats love song jumped from Europe to the UK, and keeps bobbing around the charts here after a healthy run in the Top 10. Just coming off the cusp of “I’ve played this too much” into the happier “Oh actually this still sounds good” zone. YES.

ECKO BAZZ – “Mmaso”: One of the best labels around right now is Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes, which puts out blood-curdling African hip-hop and dance music: they released probably the best LP of last year, by (deep breath) Lady Aicha & Pisko Crane’s Original Fulu Miziki Of Kinshasa. Rapper Ecko Bazz offers more straightforward pleasures – very fast, very shouty, very enraged rap over industrialised loops. (He reminds me a bit of America’s clipping.) Electrifying. YES.

RIGOBERTA BANDINI – “Ay Mama”: Feminist actress/singer Bandini makes catchy pop with a cutting lyrical edge – in this case (as I understand it!) about the lack of respect given to working/breastfeeding mothers. She performs it in front of a colossal plastic breast, just in case the words are too subtle. Could have been Spain’s Eurovision pick, but they went for some dork. NO.

HARRY STYLES – “As It Was”: Yes yes it was released in 1985. A candyfloss song on a borrowed hook but there’s something so watchable/listenable about Harry Styles as he very carefully navigates the narrowing paths for a male pop star in the 2020s. But also NO.

And finally, 2023. The backlash to my overdoing it last year has been a year where I’ve paid, once again, very little attention to current music. Maybe this is how it’s going to be from now on – phases of deep engagement, then fallow years where things move on and I can catch up later.

JEVON – “007”: The standout from my mid-summer “what’s the best track you’ve heard?” Twitter thread – probably the last useful thing I’ll do on that account. Jevon is a London-based rapper who makes filthy, joyfully queer electro-grime and “007” is the catchiest single of the year. YES.

NIA ARCHIVES – “Off With Ya Headz”: Nia Archives’ drum and bass bangers being back happy memories of the 90s without sounding dated – instead they’re fresh and thrilling, constantly throwing in new and crowd-pleasing ideas – in this case a Yeah Yeah Yeahs interpolation that booted the original off my longlist. YES.

OCTO OCTA – “Let Yourself Go!”: From her new EP, Dreams Of A Dancefloor, and yes, it’s too soon to say if this track, Octo Octa channeling the vibes of Omni Trio into soaring D’n’B, is one of my 50 favourite this century given I’ve only known it a couple of days, but it’s the principle that matters. Never stop listening (even if you take it easy for a bit). NO.

And that’s all – next comes the really hard part, and check my Bluesky account for what makes it into the Top 50 countdown. (Twitter will have the tracks and links but not the commentary.)

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#FearOfMu21c #15 – 2019-2020 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-15-2019-2020 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-15-2019-2020#respond Mon, 25 Sep 2023 17:39:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34547 A bunch of things happened in 2020 but the most consequential (OK, the most consequential FOR ME) is that I started doing pop polls on Twitter. I think I can state at this point that there is nobody better at creating and running track-based Twitter pop polls than me; alas this skill, never broad in its utility, is shortly to be extinct.

The point of the polls wasn’t initially music discovery, but they turned into a surprisingly useful way to deal with one of the big problems of modern music: there’s such a colossal amount of it that you need some kind of framework for exploration. Streaming services offer you their own frameworks, tailored to your listening habits. Even when these work – and if you like smaller artists and eclectic listening you’ll need to put in a lot of legwork to make them useful – they lack the communal, social dimension that’s always been such a part of music fandom.

So a lot of frameworks for music chat and conversation have sprung up around social networks – mostly but not always on Twitter. Listening Parties, Music Challenges, user guides, hashtags, online record clubs, YouTube and Substack influencers… the Peoples Pop Polls took their minor place in this ecosystem. Most of the ’20s entries have featured in them, particularly in the annual end-of-year polls.

First though, it’s 2019!

LIL NAS X – “Old Town Road”: The original, not the remix – Billy Ray Cyrus adds very little and takes away some of the sheer strangeness of this record. Was it a meme? Was it a song? Was it country? Was it hip-hop? Why is it less than 2 minutes long? What the hell is this “TikTok” thing anyway? Later Nas X releases have established who this guy is and what makes him a star, but they don’t have the ‘what?!?’ qualities this does. YES.

MILEY CYRUS – “Slide Away”: Miley’s big move into her current pseudo soft-rock phase, and definitely the most convincing song from it – just a really good, big AOR tune aimed at some doofus who’s wasted her time. The queasy production underlines the exhaustion when it could wreck the song. YES.

POPPY – “I Disagree”: Poppy’s kawaii nu-metal isn’t totally unprecedented (alt-idol groups from Japan like BiS (not that Bis) had been doing similar) but it’s still an extraordinary, disorienting confection of sounds, at its most straightforward here. Really this is one for an albums list though, no one track quite gets the range of what I Disagree is up to. NO.

BUSY SIGNAL – “Balloon”: My introduction to “Balloon” was someone trying to describe it and why it’s great to me on the Christmas pub crawl. A digitised dancehall track about how wonderful it is to see a load of balloons. That’s all, and it’s perfect. YES.

Right – onto 2020

ERIS DREW – “Transcendental Access Point”: Eris Drew and her partner Octo Octa’s house music records and mixes have been a source of absolute joy to me since I discovered them via the latter’s Where Are We Going? LP in 2017. Both remind me of the dance music I first fell in love with back in the late 80s and early 90s, not just on a sonic level but on an idealistic one – they carry the torch for house music as ritual and spiritual practice, a way to imagine a better world. “Transcendental Access Point” has the flickering, sensual keyboards of an early Orb track arranged around a DMT-experience monologue – it was my nomination in our first end-of-year poll. YES.

BOB VYLAN – “We Live Here”: The breakout sensation of that poll was UK punk/rappers Bob Vylan, who went from rolled eyes to dropped jaws in the sub-3-minute time it took to play “We Live Here”, a fusillade of anti-racist fury. YES.

CARDI B & MEGAN THEE STALLION – “WAP”: The gorgeously over-the-top, fluid-drenched video is cover for how starkly minimal this record is – I don’t think any production this raw-sounding hit Number 1 here before. The beat does its job, a prop for two beautifully contrasting MCs to flex their skills. YES.

THE AVALANCHES ft BLOOD ORANGE – “We Will Always Love You“: TikTok and related platforms have been great for encouraging artists to do their idea and get out the way rather than extend a song beyond its useful length. This nugget of depressive inertia uses its sample perfectly, expresses its feeling perfectly, and ends – it’s stuck with me as the record that gets at the essence of that haunted, shut-in year. YES.

JESSIE WARE – “Spotlight”: 2020 was also a strong year for comfort pop which reminded people of happier times – Jessie Ware delivered, her quality control as high as ever: I know exactly what I’m going to get from her and I’m more than happy with that. NO.

GHETTS ft JAYKAE & MOONCHILD SANELLY – “Mozambique”: Ice-veined grime which starts simple then turns into a strange multi-part epic with a star turn from South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly, who cropped up on seemingly dozens of great early-20s singles. NO.

SHYGIRL – “FREAK”: The cover of “Freak” is a body-horror shot of Shygirl’s features on a stretched out piece of skin, like an old Doctor Who monster. It’s a great image for what her music does, sex raps distored by vocal treatments, as darkly entertaining and urgent as their sonics are fucked-up. YES.

KELLY LEE OWENS – “Melt!”: Kind of a stand-in for a lot of electronic stuff I’ve really enjoyed and listened to dozens of time without ever thinking “yes! this individual tune is one of my favourite records!”. Owens’ spooky “Melt!” and lonesome “Bird” come closer than most. NO.

Next, the final instalment – a handful of contenders each from 2021 and 2022 and even a couple of jams from this year.

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#FearOfMu21c #14 – 2016-2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-14-2016-2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-14-2016-2018#respond Sun, 24 Sep 2023 11:21:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34539 2016 is my moment of maximum disconnect with current music – aside from Lemonade I doubt I could even name an LP from that year. It was a tough time personally, too – the market research firm I worked for decided to beta-test an experimental opinion polling division and put me in charge of it, so I immersed myself in first Brexit and then the US election, with the entirely predictable result that well before November 2016 I was back on anti-depressants and on the verge of quitting my job.

But I was also sowing the seeds that got me back into music. For the first time in a decade I went to the EMP Pop Music Conference in Seattle, doing a paper on gaming the charts and connecting and reconnecting with my pop critic people. It was one of the best weekends of my decade and reminded me what I was missing, even if I didn’t act on that for a while.

BEYONCE – “Formation”: The discourse bomb when this dropped blew even my bunker open – Beyonce’s stuff had been pushing hard and forward all decade and the way this drew on so many styles of underground Black and Southern music and turned it into something which pointed a way forward for pop overall – it was astonishing. There are two Beyonce singles I probably enjoy more on my list, though, but if “importance” factors in (and who knows, it might) this has to be part of the conversation. YES.

MAJED EL-ESA – “Hwages”: My first and only entry for the ill-fated Pop World Cup 2018 (an early indicator that I didn’t have the patience to try and get traction for blog based fun on that kind of scale). I was managing Saudi Arabia, as tricky a call in pop as in football, though fortunately in the world of pop games I wasn’t getting any blood money for it. Imagine my delight when I found that filmmaker Majed El-Esa had made this, which sounds like an Arabic take on the Go! Team with a pro-reform video. Still an absolute jam, if not quite top 50 material. NO.

PEANESS – “Seafoam Islands”: One of the happiest reconnections of the year was with music journalism legend Maura Johnston, a friend from the very early days of pop blogging who I’d never lost touch with but hadn’t seen since the 00s – we met up again at Scritti Politti’s awesome Roundhouse gig and then again in Seattle (and most years since!). Maura has an amazing ear for pop and the kind of indie which isn’t made by terrible jerks, and tracks from her yearly playlists stud the remaining years here. Like this! Liverpudlian indiepop by Peaness (stop laughing at the back there) which jangles, swoops, yearns and – the killer advantage – is named after a location in Pokemon. Not sure it’s actually a single tho so NO.

LIZZO – “Good As Hell”: The positivity-hustle aspect of Lizzo grates after a while (particularly if, as alleged, it hides a pretty vicious dark side) but this is the indelible one for me – all her tricks in perfect alignment. She’s such an emblematic late 10s/early 20s star that something had to be on this list. NO.

MAXWELL – “Lake By The Ocean”: Just after I got back from Seattle, Prince died. I first heard BlackSUMMER’SNight on the plane to the 2017 conference the year after, and this song jumped out as the highlight and because it reminded me somewhat of Prince’s ballads, but more earthbound, a melancholy longing for the sublime he achieved so readily. YES.

SACRED PAWS – “Everyday“: My shift back to LP listening (see below) brought a lot of new favourites, none of whom released the singles I’d have wanted them to off their albums. Post-punk/indiepoppers Sacred Paws, for examples, whose Strike A Match is truly charming as a whole but this cut from it wilts a bit in isolation. NO.

On to 2017, and again my listening took a big shift. I decided to listen to a new-to-me LP every day that year, with emphasis on actually new records and as wide a range as possible. It worked fantastically well: dozens of new artists who became firm favourites, a pivot to global and not-in-English pop which revitalised my listening, and a way to ground myself in a crazy year. I also actually learned how to use Spotify, which Spotify doesn’t make easy. The only downside – I was listening to LPs, not singles, and it turns out not many of my eventual favourites came out in that format. Plus it was the patchwork, more than the individual patches, that I loved most. I didn’t quite keep up the LP-a-day pace in 2018-2019 but it was still the dominant way I found new music, so the picks from these years are both skimpy and not really representative of the joys I found.

PARAMORE – “Hard Times”: Music was a lifeline, but on a global and a personal level, 2017 was bad. This song – the first thing I’d ever liked by the band – captured the moment for me: the music a giddy New Pop blast, the lyrics a gritted-teeth affirmation of the will to go on in the face of catastrophe. YES.

BLANCHE – “City Lights”: Belgian’s entry in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, the only actual ESC entrant in my longlist, because it’s a lovely bit of moody Saint Etienne style motorik pop. It came 4th, beaten by a Portuguese entry which is one of my least favourite winners, confirming my generally low opinion of modern Eurovision. NO.

SPOON – “Hot Thoughts”: Spoon’s horniest, itchiest album came out just as anti-depressants dropped a neutron bomb on my libido, but their dry rhythmic contraptions carried enough vicarious heat to make Hot Thoughts my favourite rock LP in ages. NO.

TOVE LO – “disco tits”: TBH the juxtaposition of these makes it pretty obvious my numbed-brain was hunting for the memory of sensation! This is somehow even druggier and nastier than “Stay High”, a horrible chemsex vortex in the great Blackout tradition. NO.

SUNNY SWEENEY – “Pills”: There’s not a lot of country music on the longlist, because I don’t listen to it much, but especially in the 10s there were a bunch of country or Americana songs by women I listened to a lot. My favourite country song of 2017, Angaleena Presley’s world-weary “Wrangled”, wasn’t a single. This, my second-favourite, was – at least I *think* it was. A cover of a Brennen Leigh song, a withering address to a former drug buddy, given a snarkier delivery and a harder beat. NO.

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS – “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back To Leeds”: Probably the jauntiest Mountain Goats song I’ve ever heard – naturally it’s on their Goths LP – and a beautifully arranged piece that’s also a warmly funny meditation on something I think about a lot: your changing, unbreakable, relationship to your hometown and the enthusiasms of your youth. YES.

I’m going to do 2018 too – same deal applies: grim times, great LPs, a few pop songs filtered through.

THE 1975 – “Love It If We Made It”: I respect the ambition of this – Pitchfork’s track of the year (which feels remarkable in a lot of different ways) – an attempt to make a huge eighties-core liberal anguish song amidst the apparent meltdown of the political order people like Matty Healy and me had known. He’s channeling, of all things, Kevin Keegan’s 1995 football rant and turning it into a simple expression of hope against all odds. Impossibly cringe and yet weirdly affecting. NO but partly cos he’s so annoying.

PUSHA T – “If You Know You Know”: My knowledge of the economics of dealing coke is pretty limited but if there’s one thing I can relate to it’s an expert in a particular job having to deal with know-it-all idiots. Very strong “LinkedIn reply” energy from King Push as he lays down the (mostly inscrutable) lore. YES.

CARDI B – “Be Careful”: I quite liked “Bodak Yellow” but this was the track which made me realise Cardi B’s talent – all her force on the verses and then cold-as-ice danger on the chorus. Better to come, though. NO.

SONS OF KEMET – “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman”: Much like the Mercury my longlist has a token jazz record! This is kind of a marker for all the jazz, old and new, I was listening to across these years – as befitted my age, harrumph. Even though this was a single I don’t really think of the scene in ‘singles’ terms, try and keep still to this one though. NO.

KACEY MUSGRAVES – “Slow Burn”: Moving from country into the kind of orchestrated folk-Americana REM dug into on Automatic For The People, and honestly better than anything on that record. Starts off really grounded lyrically, then kind of vagues out as the melody and arrangement goes widescreen, but the music’s so spine tingling it earns that. YES.

JANELLE MONAE – “Make Me Feel”: This is as much a tactical question as a taste one – of everything in today’s post this is the most likely to place high in the #FearOfMu21c. I do like it – I think there’s enough of Monae in the bridge to move it beyond just being a Prince tribute – and it’s obviously The Beloved Pop Song Of 2018 as well as getting deserved props as a bi anthem. But do I like it enough? A YES for now.

ARIANA GRANDE – “No Tears Left To Cry”: Whereas I’ve fallen off hard on Ariana Grande, who’s slipped for me from a great pop star to “best of a bad bunch”. This is still my favourite Grande track, shows off her voice well and the way the big trancey chords push the song forward is interesting to me, but…NO.

Next: I’m gonna take my horse down to 2019, and there’s not much there. But THEN – we’re into the poll era and things get spicy again.

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FearOfMu21c #13 – 2014-2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-13-2014-2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-13-2014-2015#respond Sat, 23 Sep 2023 10:41:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34536 More from the ‘lost years’ – these tunes are pretty much all ones which showed up on End Of Year lists, which were becoming my main point of contact with the contemporary ‘scene’. That’s not to say I didn’t find a place in my heart for them, just that old my avenues of discovery were crumbling and mossed-over. For an exercise like #FearOfMu21c, that’s not a disadvantage – some degree of consensus is an asset so the more normie the picks the better.

TAYLOR SWIFT – “Blank Space”: Hearing this in context of the last few years’ worth of candidates it’s obvious why I like it – she’s taken the big beat/sad girl pop template I’ve been enjoying so much and twisted it to big beat/bad girl, giving it a welcome injection of theatre in the process. “Shake It Off” and “Out Of The Woods” could also make a claim – the 1989 period is the one point I’ve really embraced my inner Swiftie. YES.

ALVVAYS – “Archie, Marry Me”: Does nothing a hundred other indie pop records haven’t done, except I can’t get enough of the lopsided weight of it, the way there’s that miniature pause in “Hey, hey” with the backing thumping in a fraction a beat later than expected, and tilting the whole song charmingly. YES.

FUTURE ISLANDS – “Seasons (Waiting On You)”: The other big Pitchfork fave of the year (we’re still just about in the era where Pitchfork had an identifiable aesthetic) was this marvellously histrionic tune. Something about the way the guy hams it up reminds me of the way Alan Davis draws the Marlon Brando analogue in D.R. & Quinch. How’s that for ultra specific music criticism? NO.

RUN THE JEWELS – “Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)”: I feel like RTJ are going to suffer a bit from vote-splitting – so many great jams and I haven’t even heard their whole catalogue. I went for this grinder, which was also my introduction to them and is absolutely rammed with awesome lines as well as that great the-artist-is-the-sample beat. YES.

MERIDIAN DAN ft BIG H & JME – “German Whip”: Wonderful back to basics grime tune (about Audis I think?) – this getting in the charts was a strong sign the good times were returning to the genre. JME, predictably, steals the show but everybody gets good lines. Never seen no man chasing frisbee. YES.

TOVE LO – “Habits (Stay High)”: The famous remix of the original, which is a bit tell-don’t-show about its life of empty hedonism, whereas this sounds like you’d hope a song with the chorus “stay high all the time” would. YES.

DJ SNAKE ft LIL JON – “Turn Down For What”: Put this on after being reminded of it in the Summer Jams poll but I’m not sure I can deal with Lil Jon yelling at me on a daily basis all Autumn so while it bangs it’s also a NO.

QT – “Hey QT”: The most divisive of all the PC Music bangers, SOPHIE and AG Cook going all out for pop. It was my then 5 year old’s favourite song (tied with “Everything Is Awesome!”) for a couple of weeks so it does, in some sense, work on that level. There’s an extraordinary amount going on in the background here. YES.

JAVIERA MENA – “Otra Era”: Gorgeous washed-out low-key synth pop which only suffers because it feels like we’ve had an entire decade of these polite quasi-bangers since and another 50 of the things get nominated every time we do an end of year poll. Mena still does it better than anyone but my boredom with the sound may tell. YES.

DEJ LOAF – “Try Me”: Early sign that my rap listening for the 10s/20s would be dominated by women MCs. This shimmering, fucked-up sounding track seemed beamed in from space at the time – I couldn’t really work out if I liked it, even. Makes a lot more sense now. NO.

Hmm, that’s a worrying number of YES picks at this stage. Maybe 2015 will improve on things. In the greatest crossover event in history, we’re doing the 2015 on Twitter (or its bleached-bone skeleton) RIGHT NOW, so some of these songs are suffering a little from current exposure – or perhaps are doing EVEN BETTER because of it.

HUDSON MOHAWKE – “Ryderz”: My nomination in said poll! This was in my U50 until I discovered it wasn’t a single – but by the looser streaming-era terms of #FearOfMu21c it IS a single (was released to blogs etc prior to the album). Just as well as I absolutely love this. There’s nothing to it – variations on the theme of a 1973 soul sample – but in a decade of “drops” it has the best drop of all and is probably my single biggest mood-enhancer of the last ten years. YES.

KENDRICK LAMAR – “King Kunta”: My most-listened to 2015 song in 2015 and while I still really like it I’ve come back to it less often, unless forced to by polls. Still great, one of the beats of the decade to be sure but… NO.

RIHANNA – “Bitch Better Have My Money”: Another one competing in the current poll – this is wonderfully abrasive but not the best eligible Rihanna track so it’s going to be a NO. As an aside, the moment I realised things had Changed Forever at Pitchfork was when they did a 7-writer roundtable for this single and then ANOTHER roundtable a few months later for the video.

YEARS AND YEARS – “King”: The big UK hype for the year, which at least got this hands-in-the-air synthpop tune to the top of the charts even if they’re another band where nothing quite matched the debut single. Tremulous voice, pumping keyboards and drums, a combination I will surely never tire of. NO.

ANOHNI – “4 Degrees”: A gothic synthpop black mass for the planet. Not subtle but… these aren’t subtle times. Massive and electrifying, but I can only bear to hear it about once a year which feels like an issue with this particular challenge. NO.

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JAMIE XX – “Gosh”: I so wanted to dislike this cosy callback to pirate radio, the musical equivalent of a lavish Taschen book of warehouse rave flyers but… it’s lovely, dammit. (And I would totally buy that book, obviously) I CAN be snobby enough not to put it in a Top 50 of the century though. NO.

DEMI LOVATO – “Cool For The Summer”: The polls taketh away and they giveth – hearing this one alongside period pieces by the likes of Bieber hurtled it back into contention at least for now, even if the best I can come up with descriptively is “Katy Perry done right”. YES.

The end is nigh… covering 2016-2017 next and things get really arbitrary.

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FearOfMu21c #12 – 2013 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-12-2013 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-12-2013#respond Fri, 22 Sep 2023 08:45:41 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34531 The next few years are my ‘lost’ ones – like a demographic cliche, I turned 40 and began steadily to lose touch with contemporary music, pop or otherwise. By mid-decade I was caring less about current music than at any point since 1997, the summer I gave up on Britpop as a ghastly error and spent a year wolfing down old soul compilations. Back in the mid-00s some contemporary things broke through, some I picked up later – but these are also years I’ve not really revisited since getting back into music in a big way from 2017 on. Here be randomness, in other words.

PET SHOP BOYS – “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct”: A lot of Pet Shop Boys tunes from the 21st century are revisiting past glories one way or another – this one puts a fresh spin on their maximal-camp Very era sound, pumping toytown synths and male voice choirs, allied to a lift from Michael Nyman (himself swiping from Purcell). I love that these old pop stars are willing to sound this absurd. YES.

DANNY BROWN – “Grown Up”: I mentioned to a sceptical friend once I was enjoying a new Danny Brown album – “is he doing the Danny Brown voice?” he replied. So yes, Danny Brown sounds like an aggrieved duck, I love that about him, you may well not. This sounds like almost nothing else he’s done – a one-off track with a 90s golden age rap sound – and immediately became a favourite. YES.

MILEY CYRUS – “We Can’t Stop”: Overshadowed by “Wrecking Ball” and considered somewhat cringe by critics at the time – by the end it was clear Miley was a more interesting proposition than she’d maybe seemed, and “We Can’t Stop” stood out as a great, bittersweet tune about the woozy messiness of partying. NO.

CHARISMA.COM – “HATE”: I heard this J-pop rap tune a few years later, when I complimented a later single on Facebook and someone said just wait until you hear “HATE”. Probably the cutest and catchiest a song called “HATE” can sound without losing the sense that it could shank you without a second thought. Watch out enemy! YES.

PITBULL ft KE$HA: Extremely problematic on a number of levels, the least of which is that it’s Pitbull doing the naffest lumberjack rock this side of Rednex. As incredibly stupid but extremely catchy 10s songs go, though, it smokes anything by Guetta. OK, maybe that’s not saying much. NO.

CHVRCHES – “The Mother We Share”: Loved this at the time, I think diminishing returns set in with CHVRCHES pretty rapidly but this still has a really banging chorus and some very tasty synth sounds. I do think it’s important to have something for consideration which does that backing-vocal “oh oh oh” chanting that was all over pop around this time, even if it all does sound like Red Box. NO.

TEGAN AND SARA – “Closer”: Very much a similar proposition to the CHVRCHES track – nice synths, monster chorus – but it’s funnier and simpler: like Taylor Swift around this time, I think you can tell it’s the work of women who’ve written a ton of stuff and know exactly what they need to do in “making a massive pop song”. YES.

DUKE DUMONT – “Need U (100%)”: I want to say I was glad this deep housey stuff was still being made, but of course people will still be making deep house records when the sun is an ember. I mean, it’s great that such a good example of this stuff was still doing so well. NO.

LAURA MVULA – “Green Garden”: There’s something alluring about all the ingredients here – those heavily chorused backing vox, the way the beat comes in so confidently, that chiming piano riff. The only weak spot for me now is Mvula’s voice, which has that staginess that a lot of Brit-soul has. Even so, really imaginative. NO.

FACTORY FLOOR – “Fall Back”: Kind of an appendix to the long-ass dance tracks, coming from a very different tradition – scary proto-industrial overheated synths. I love this, but I honestly don’t think I could listen to it that often – it’s too intrusive to be properly hypnotic. Which will probably rule it out from a slot in the final 50. NO.

Next I’ll try and cover 2014 and 2015 together, as I have to get this series finished before the actual #FearOfMu21c challenge kicks off on Sunday week!

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Fear Of Mu21c #11 – 2012 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-11-2012 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-11-2012#respond Wed, 20 Sep 2023 17:25:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34527 Free from the grind of having to write about music on the regular, and at the time I’d have said “not a moment too soon”. Pop in 2012 felt directionless, the weakest year I could remember. Naturally now it’s contributed more than any other 2010s year to this list.

CHARLI XCX – “You (Ha Ha Ha)”: Charli XCX was my big new pop love of the decade, right from her first gothy, 80s-soaked synth bangers. Her variety, and her speed of development, was thrilling – this single, putting a venomous kiss-off on top of a glitchy Gold Panda track, was one of many jumps forward she’d keep making. YES.

SKY FERREIRA – “Everything Is Embarrassing”: Blood Orange’s favourite production trick – rigid, echoey drums over a melancholy backing – carries this along but it’s Ferreira’s exhausted but remorseless performance that makes it a classic. Every line is a curse, from “I know you’re trying” on. YES.

A$AP FERG ft A$AP ROCKY – “Shabba”: My actual memories of 2012 are great – secure in a new job and loving it; enjoying the best parts of early fatherhood; holidaying with friends; going to the Olympics. But the songs I’ve taken away from it – or in this case found later – tell a very different story: angry, abrasive, vicious. “Shabba” is a bragging song, Ferg and Rocky switching into patois as they lionise the dancehall singer and try to match him, snarling and swaggering over a whip-crack beat. YES.

ANNA MEREDITH – “Nautilus”: From Scottish composer Anna Meredith’s first EP, mixing minimal classical music and dubstep in ways which got this song forcibly evicted from my office stereo (a unique achievement!) A lot of the time the inside of my head feels a bit like this song. YES.

CHIEF KEEF – “I Don’t Like”: Hi-hats drag back and forth to give extra momentum to this monolithic chunk of teenage bad attitude. Relentless, like his flow is coshing you. YES.

KILLER MIKE – “Reagan”: More extremely heavy rap, the production heaping layers of earth on Ronnie’s grave and legacy, each new verse landing harder, turning the beat more into a maleficent drone. YES.

SOLANGE – “Losing You”: Another Blood Orange production, another break-up, this one a lot kindlier, sadder, more forgiving than Sky Ferreira’s black hole of exhaustion. Which means I like it less, but it’s great to hear it again. NO.

JESSIE WARE – “Wildest Moments”: Yes, it’s another song on the sad lady + echoey drum loop tip, I apparently could not get enough of this stuff. Ware is easily a good enough singer to imbue this with real character and feeling even when you can see all the tricks coming bars off. NO.

MIGUEL – “Adorn”: No male singer of the 2010s does yearning quite like Miguel, this is three minutes of naked thirst (a good thing, though it can’t quite get to the level I want for the shortlist). NO.

ICONA POP ft CHARLI XCX – “I Love It”: It’s easy to do snotty and bratty in pop but a lot more difficult to do it actually well without a lot of people really hating you – the 10s in particular feel like they’re strewn with chumps in this regard. “I Love It” is not a work of profundity – it’s Shampoo in a monster truck – but it walks that particular line superbly. YES.

JESSIE WARE – “Imagine It Was Us”: Jessie again (and not for the last time!) with the slinkier side of her sound, and probably the aspect I like more. In a year of big beats, hardass rappers, maximal sounds, I do feel I want to give some props to the more seductive bits of pop. YES.

ZEDD ft FOXES – “Clarity”: Another example of the actual dominant pop sound of the era – enormous EDM belters. Foxes pours her lungs out on the mantric chorus, strapping herself a sound so big I’ve never bothered stopping to think whether the song makes any sense, or even what it’s saying. NO.

RUDIMENTAL ft JOHN NEWMAN – “Feel The Love”: A dancefloor pop belter from a slightly different tradition – when this was in the charts it felt like it had been far too long since I’d heard big honking breakbeats on a pop hit, and these ones really go off. Truth be told it’s been slightly dimmed by its endless use in ads, in which D’n’B is a one-size fits all signifier of “energetic”. But I’m fond enough to give it a pass. YES.

Feels like it’s all getting a bit more random – that continues with 2013, which (I think) will be the last year with enough candidates for a single post…

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FearOfMu21c #10 – 2010-2011 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-10-2010-2011 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-10-2010-2011#comments Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:53:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34522 I felt out of touch with music in 2010: a tricky proposition, as I was filing columns on it three times a month. But the shape of it felt, and still feels, indistinct. I could hear interesting things but no longer felt confident in attaching them to wider ideas or putting names to trends – and was still enough of a creature of the UK music press to think those things mattered. Here’s what survives for me.

THESE NEW PURITANS – “We Want War”: A rare thing by 2010, almost extinct now – the big statement artrock single. These New Puritans were scrappy post-punkers who suddenly reinvented themselves with an extraordinary new sound – part 17th century chamber music, part dancehall, telling a story of the old unquiet ghosts of England. YES.

ARCADE FIRE – “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”: Another enjoyable surprise of 2010 – a band I’d entirely written off suddenly deciding to make a “Heart Of Glass” new wave disco banger about feeling caught between the city and the suburbs, a subject which gnawed at me as a fairly recent arrival in Zone 6. The band are not built for groove in the traditional sense, and their gleeful clunkiness here is infectious. YES.

THE-DREAM – “Yamaha”: One of the few acts on this list I wrote about professionally – The-Dream eventually DMed me with an “I just want to talk” message about a decade-previous lukewarm review of the LP after this one. Weirdness aside, the guy had a moment of extreme heat and this is one of two all-timer songs from this era (the other, the untouchable “Fancy”, was scheduled for my Uncool50 but it was never actually a single). The-Dream’s Prince worship is gloriously evident here. YES.

GIRL UNIT – “Wut”: What was I actually listening to in 2009-10? A lot of it was this UK bass/dubstep-adjacent dance music, thick with low-end texture, centred on the Night Slugs label and the “Purple” scene of Bristol-based artists. The exact tracks I was deeply into have been lost to time, memory and hard drive catastrophes – I should do some excavation. “Wut” was always the scene’s most famous tune though, a succession of splintered climaxes. YES.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE – “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)”: AKA The One With Grant Morrison In The Video, appropriately as this is MCR at their most comic book, a collection of hot phrases that would pop on the page strung together over glammy hard rock. There’s even a Batman cameo! NO.

ALICIA KEYS – “Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart”: There’s a lot of early 10s pop doing what this does – a singer contemplating her situation over a single big drum loop – and quite a bit of it has found its way into this longlist. At the time it was the big-hair and shoulder-pads chorus I really fell for, though. Still great but a bit clumsy compared to some later iterations. NO.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS – “Postcards From A Young Man”: Has the comforting meat-and-potatoes stomp of Morrissey in his solo prime, except listening to James Dean Bradfield take stock of his (or Nicky Wire’s) youth is a lot more palatable than hearing Spiked-era Moz talk about anything – and a more honest self-reflection, too. NO.

DIDDY DIRTY MONEY ft SKYLAR GREY – “Coming Home”: Speaking of self-reflection, Diddy’s Last Train To Paris LP as part of his Dirty Money project was a hugely unexpected turn to quality in a career known for ostentation. Not that “Coming Home” isn’t ostentatious – it’s a vast, chest-beating, closing-credits epic which smuggles in some honestly touching sentiment, Diddy looking in the mirror and realising it’s time to grow up a bit. (Did he? No idea). YES.

JAMIE WOON – “Night Air”: Woon’s nocturnal meander is clammy and sickly, but still really gets the crepuscular vibe of being out by yourself in the dark and cold. NO.

YUNG HUMMA ft FLYNT FLOSSY – “Lemme Smang It”: “I like to mix it up. I like to do stuff.” Sadly leaving this one off the shortlist as it would simply be unfair on all other jams in the poll and would only create feelings of inadequacy as those performers try to keep pace with the Turqoise Jeep. NO.

MARCOS CABRAL & SHUX – “A Lifetime Groove”: Can it be… the long-ass dance track? It can! A shining jewel of the late 00s/early 10s Balearic revival (though let’s face it, there’s always a Balearic revival going on somewhere), turning an old New Edition song into a deeply relaxed poolside epic. YES.

KATY B – “Katy On A Mission”: If “Night Air” is the feeling of emerging at 3AM onto crisp, chilly, empty streets, “Katy On A Mission” is the feeling of pushing through the fuggy heat of bodies in the club, feeling and hearing sound muffled by walls and people. YES.

Onto 2011, with my music writing side hustle coming to a natural end, and fewer tracks on this longlist than any time since 2005. (But there are some real greats)

PJ HARVEY – “The Words That Maketh Murder”: I’d long since reached the point where I figured I’d never really enjoy another PJ Harvey record and then suddenly she came back with my favourite album of the year, and of her career, and this quietly savage song about war and the impotence of the international order. YES.

AZEALIA BANKS ft LAZY JAY – “212”: Those moments when a song came out and it seemed like everyone was talking about it were rare in the 2010s, and when they did happen they often felt stage-managed by some massive artist machinery. But this was one of them, from nowhere to everywhere – the beat (thanks Lazy Jay!), the sweater, the swearing, the everything. YES.

NICKI MINAJ – “Starships”: Lot of big room EDM pop around – Nicki Minaj seemed to stake her career on it, and won: “Starships”‘ is a lowest common denominator hands in the air stomp, but it has a determination to be absolutely fucking huge that a lot of even major singles lack. NO.

NICOLA ROBERTS – “Lucky Day”: The last truly great Girls Aloud related song, maybe the last great Xenomania-affiliate track, too – taking Nicola Roberts’ shrillness and turning it into a vibe of desperate optimism, quivering on the edge of mania. YES.

NADIA OH – “Kate Middleton”: Call it by its name – “Taking Over The Dancefloor” indeed. Probably the crassest pop record of the 21st century, so in your face it makes “Starships” sound like The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. Enormously divisive among critics, some of whom abhorred its apparent endorsement of the parasitic royals, some of whom just found a robot choir going “W-WE SWAGGINGTON” a sign of pop’s end times. Obviously it’s a YES.

PACHANGA BOYS – “Time”: May be the final entry in the long-ass dance track sweepstakes, and the longest ass one of all (unless you’re counting “Little Drummer Boy”). Future releases have extended the exquisitely mournful sweep of “Time” beyond even these 15 minutes. YES.

Halfway through in years, over halfway through in tracks – but 2012 is another huge year coming up.

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FearOfMu21c #9: 2009 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-9-2009 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-9-2009#respond Mon, 18 Sep 2023 19:21:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34519 A post went round Twitter a while ago where people were getting all RETVRN-style “look at what we have lost” about the high tide of US indie rock in 2009, a period of pretty stupefying consensus as I remember it, which as we’ve already established may not be much. Of the five horsemen of GAPDY, only one shows up in this bunch of candidates.

LADY GAGA ft BEYONCE – “Telephone”: A dialogue between two stars but also between the cutting-edge pop sounds of ’09 and ’99 – “Telephone” is a RedOne style EDM churner swallowing the delicate harpsichord-and-hi-hat sounds of late-90s R&B – Rodney Jerkins is even on the decks. A passing of the torch, if only because Beyonce had better things to do than worry much about the singles chart. YES.

YEAH YEAH YEAHS – “Heads Will Roll”: As a newer bunch of indie acts took a turn in the spotlight, some of the early 00s bunch went belatedly all pop on us – “Heads Will Roll” is closer to P!nk’s chrome-plated New Wave borrowings than to the YYYs earlier material. I’m in a constant state of indecision as to which of their 2009 singles I like better. NO.

SLEIGH BELLS – “Crown On The Ground”: It used to be so fun playing this out. The basic idea isn’t new – it’s a variation on what the Jesus And Mary Chain were doing back in the mid 80s, playing classic pop at completely fucked, blown-out levels. But it works better with Sleigh Bells’ call-and-response and jump-rope pop than it did with the more Spectorish stuff, and the digital edge on the distortion beckons to hyperpop. YES.

SHAKIRA – “She Wolf”: AH-OOOO! YES. (Though I might go for “Loba”, the English lyrics are a bit of a squash).

MAJOR LAZER ft NINA SKY – “Keep It Goin’ Louder”: One of the earlier, better examples of Major Lazer’s brand of party-rockin’, elevated by smoothness from Nina Sky and with a lovely bait and switch ending (that 90s trance riff suddenly coming in is the best few seconds of the song). This kind of big-room pop is the sound of the turn of the 10s, keep on dancin’ til the world ends, &c – it mostly sounds better to me than it did then, when I was too old and too burdened by responsibilities for it. NO.

TEMPA T – “Next Hype”: Absolutely rabid grime tune with enough comic timing to keep its gonzo violence on the right side of entertaining. NO.

ARMAND VAN HELDEN ft DIZZEE RASCAL – “Bonkers”: Meanwhile the first wave of grime stars were selling out as hard as possible. I dunno if I’ll go back to Dizzee – a domestic violence conviction tends to stick in my mind when the aggression is, or was, so much of the appeal. For old time’s sake I put this on the longlist though – Number 1 when my second child was born. NO.

LINDSTROM – “Little Drummer Boy”: The 40+ minute “Little Drummer Boy” is the greatest Christmas record of the 21st century and is absolutely one of my 50 favourite singles by any metric other than “do I want to hear it repeatedly?”. No I don’t, I want to hear it once a year on Christmas Eve, and that’s what I’m going to keep on doing. See you in 3 months and 6 days! NO.

CAM’RON – “My Job”: One of the most easy, pleasant to listen to rappers who hasn’t always had the material to match his talent – “My Job” is an exception, built on a lovely piano hook with Cam’Ron taking on radically different perspectives – a woman stuck in a grinding office job and an ex-con trying to find work on the outside. The common denominator: work sucks and the deck’s stacked against you. YES.

FUTURE OF THE LEFT – “Arming Eritrea”: C’MON RICK! I don’t listen to much punk (or hardcore, or post-hardcore, or whatever this is) but every so often something cuts through and I’m very glad of it. As with Cam’Ron’s track, if you can’t empathise with “I know my own worth! I’M AN ADULT!” sometimes I envy you your working conditions. NO.

YEAH YEAH YEAHS – “Zero”: “Zero” handles its builds very well – almost every time I play it I think when it starts, oh, this is a bit weedier than I remember, and then brings in layer upon layer until that filthy great glam guitar riff gets smeared all over the track and I’m, oh NOW I remember why I love this song. YES.

FUCK BUTTONS – “Surf Solar”: Sound the long-ass dance klaxon! Not that this is precisely – or even vaguely – dance music, though it does sound like the shuddering rhythm of some vast extraplanetary machine. YES.

Next it’s a new decade (and possibly a double-bill year, the volume of tracks per year drops a bit as we go through the 10s).

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FearOfMu21c #8: 2008 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-8-2008 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-8-2008#comments Sun, 17 Sep 2023 13:27:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34515 2008 was a rough year, for the world, for me: I ended it with what I realised later was a breakdown, several weeks into a new job. I was fortunate: medication worked, though shredded my memory – that, and the loss of two hard drives from these years, mean that for the next stretch I’m constantly wondering to myself, what am I missing?

CASSIE ft LIL WAYNE – “Official Girl”: You could ask that question in a wider sense. The tail end of the 00s are peak leak: official and unofficial releases turning up a track at a time, reducing entire careers to strings of intermittent pearls. This seemed to happen particularly to women in R&B – Ciara and Cassie, whose attempts to follow “Me And U” were a series of false starts. In the middle, this quietly dramatic song about being the side chick, with Lil Wayne’s raspy, ever-inventive crassness painfully apt as the point-missing lover. YES.

DANITY KANE ft MISSY ELLIOTT – “Bad Girl”: “Official Girl” and “Bad Girl” (and Britney’s Blackout) are produced by Danja, a Timbaland protege who was eclipsing his mentor at this stage – less rhythmically innovative. he was a master of layered synth timbres and vocal treatments. Alongside The-Dream, who’ll show up later, it meant the sound of late 00s R&B was opulent, velvety, lush in a way the early 00s hadn’t been. Perfect sound for a girl group – Danity Kane didn’t always have the songs to match the sounds, but “Bad Girl”‘s choral fembot bubblebath still sounds wonderful. YES.

LILY ALLEN – “The Fear”: The personal consequences of 00s celebrity culture are still grimly playing out, but Lily Allen’s best song wouldn’t work so well if it was only satire – there’s no other song, certainly no other No.1 hit, which captures so well how disorienting the rugpull on the 00s boom felt, even when it had been a long time coming. YES.

THE KILLERS – “Human”: This is, obviously, the Killers song which should be perpetually in the charts: a thing of total, gorgeous, emptiness, the pop version of Zoolander’s Blue Steel. YES.

WILEY – “Wearing My Rolex”: A stand in for a pile of assorted dangers who I can’t listen to with much (or any) pleasure these days – I picked this one because it was by a mile my favourite single of 2008 in 2008, and would have been a cert for the Uncool50 as well as the #FearOfMu21c project if the first thing I think of when I see the man’s name wasn’t “antisemitic Twitter meltdown”. But it is. Oh yeah, and my favourite album of 2008 at the time? 808s And Heartbreak. Sigh. NO.

CHRISTIAN FALK ft ROBYN – “Dream On”: One of Robyn’s simplest songs, so open-hearted it maybe shouldn’t work but her performance is as wholly committed to the idea of grace as any gospel singer. Quite possibly her finest moment. YES.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND – “Oxford Comma”: A dozen Belorussian troll farms couldn’t have come up with a band as perfectly divisive as Vampire Weekend – and I suspect a year or two in either direction and they wouldn’t have made the impact (or the enemies) they did. I dunno if this is my favourite VW song but I think everything good, bad and interesting about them is in this one. NO.

PUBLIC ENEMY – “Harder Than You Think”: (Wrong year – this is a 2007 jam) I know they’re still going, and I’m keen to read Chuck D’s graphic novel, but this feels like a career capstone – two veterans pulling it together and proving why they were the best. You can hear the effort, and also the pride. YES.

HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR – “Blind”: ANOHNI and a disco bassline is such an outrageously effective combination it’s a shame it didn’t happen more often. It’s ultimately a bit too retro to really demand inclusion but “filling in the gaps between Sylvester and Ze Records” is as worthy a continuity insert as you could ask for. NO.

GOLDFRAPP – “A&E”: This worked for me so much better than Goldfrapp’s chilly synthpop era. Unfortunately slightly ruined for me by being stuck in my head the weekend I terrified everyone by ending up in A&E myself with a suspected heart attack (it was gallstones!). Anyway for what it’s worth the song is very accurate. NO.

MATIAS AGUAYO – “Minimal”: This year’s entry in the “long-ass dance track” stakes isn’t actually that long (a bijou 6 minutes), but it makes up for that by being waspishly funny in its attack on minimal techno (you might listen to it and think, now hold on there Matias… but genre in electronic music is a constantly warring fractal. NO.

GNARLS BARKLEY – “Run (I’m A Natural Disaster)”: File next to “The Fear”, “A&E”, and chunks of 808s under “songs I was with hindsight perhaps a little TOO into” (and I don’t want to listen to the very binned Cee-Lo Green anyway). Does always make me think of Final Crisis, which is one of my happier 2008 memories. NO.

PETER FOX – “Alles Neu”: You wait 65 years for a banger to sample Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and then 3 come along at one (well, OK, over another 5 years). Peter Fox – ex-Seeed frontman – was the first to spot the potential, his use being lifted by Plan B for “Ill Manors” – Fall Out Boy’s “The Phoenix” came at it independently. All three are excellent! I think Fox still has the edge – the drums on this sound so good and German is a fantastic rap language. But Plan B’s chorus is better, and FOB squeeze even more aggression out of it. YES.

TV ON THE RADIO – “Halfway Home”: As I say, I successfully and very stupidly avoided TVOTR throughout my time writing for Pitchfork (their rubbish band name only slight mitigation) – so until we polled 2008 I had no idea they were splitting the prog/post-punk difference so thunderously well. YES.

Next it’s 2009 – Gaga vs GAPDY!

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Fear Of Mu21c #7: 2007 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-7-2007-2008 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-7-2007-2008#respond Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:16:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34506 In 2007 I fulfilled my teenage dream and became a Music Journalist, jumping straight into the position of being a paid columnist with free rein to write about anything I liked at two different, highly respected publications. It’s hard to overstate the way in which just being an early blogger (in whatever field) opened doors – especially if privilege greased the hinges: I wasn’t a nepo hire but as a 30something straight white guy I certainly had the rockcrit ‘cultural fit’ part nailed.

Whether I used these opportunities well is for others to say! But it meant a shift in my listening again – I was concerned with “keeping up” from a professional perspective, which is less fun than just doing it. Even so, bangers abounded, and when my peers at Pitchfork went mad for a song it often meant a new favourite for me. Case in point…

UGK ft OUTKAST – “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)”: My favourite thing by any of the people involved, honestly – Andre 3000’s opening verse would get it through alone, the use of the endlessly ecstatic sample is astonishing, the whole thing is a wicked revel, one of those songs where everyone knows they’re making a classic and raise their game accordingly. YES.

M.I.A. – “Paper Planes”: Kala was my joint-favourite LP of the year and it was exciting to see this break out so enormously. Fair to say I would not subscribe to a substack from M.I.A. exploring her viewpoints on world affairs but Kala and this song retain their god-tier swagger. YES.

BRITNEY SPEARS – “Piece Of Me”: My other joint-favourite LP of the year was Blackout, still one of the best pop albums ever and a secret ancestor of a lot of woozy, messed-up 2010s pop – we’ll be hearing Blackout-esque tracks in several years to come. “Piece Of Me” is the best of its singles, with percussion like rattling chains and Robyn hanging around on backing vox to dial up the eeriness. YES.

RIHANNA ft JAY-Z – “Umbrella”: Imperious, and so dominant in the charts and on the radio that it was years until I could listen to it again. Someone on Twitter argued it’s the shift from 00s boom time pop to financial crisis pop, and I can hear that – an R&B thundercloud. YES.

SPOON – “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”: My favourite indie band of the century, but not always for their singles – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is in places (like this!) Spoon’s poppiest LP but its best track is Beatles-bummed non-single “Black Like Me”. This cryptic power-pop groover will more than do, though. YES.

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT – “Supermayer Lost In Tiergarten”: There’s a potent internal battle on my list to be the winning example of what one might call the “long-ass dance track” – I first heard this in a poll this year and it’s leapt into contention, a delightful bit of Van Dyke Parks-y pop theatre which morphs into a lysergic journey through wet foliage on a wintry night. YES. Oh god what a lot of Yeses.

GROOVE ARMADA – “Song 4 Mutya (Out Of Control)”: Just a stellar chorus, steam coming out of Mutya’s ears as she tries not to explode with rage at a rival. I managed to get this to the lower 90s of a Pitchfork 100 tracks list, the high watermark of my poptimist career tbh. YES.

DUDE ‘N’ NEM – “Watch My Feet”: Extremely endearing fast-feet novelty which certainly doesn’t deserve to become my first rejected 2007 candidate but the fun dance-rap lane could get crowded. NO.

LIL MAMA – “Lip Gloss”: It’s the “Grindin'” beat stripped back even further with chants and call-and-response vocals and it’s about lipstick – who could resist! Not me. YES.

FALL OUT BOY – “”The Take Over, The Break’s Over””: There was an unwritten – as far as I know – edict at Pitchfork that ‘mall emo’ bands like FOB and My Chemical Romance were non grata – I guess when a scene appeals so strongly to your readers’ younger sisters there’s going to be suspicion. Unfortunately this coincided with those bands hitting a hot streak and releasing some of their hottest and hookiest music, like this huge ever-circling riff. YES.

BONUS CONTENT: Leftover from 2006!

NELLY FURTADO – “Say It Right”: OK, the fact I didn’t remember to put this on the list initially is probably a fatal stroke against it – honour your error as a hidden intention, as the man says, unless I misquoted, in which case my hidden intention was to misquote, aaah. Anyway yes this is really good, queenly and sultry, but I do think there are other tracks in this vein I like better and am likelier to include. NO.

Well, that was too many YES votes. I intended to run a double-bill with 2008 but it looks like that has even more songs – I can already tell though that the reaper will be a lot busier…

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Fear Of Mu21c #6: 2005/2006 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-6-2005-2006 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-6-2005-2006#respond Thu, 14 Sep 2023 09:21:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34501 By 2005 I’d been a music blogger for 5 years: it seemed like long enough, so I shut down New York London Paris Munich – Freaky Trigger continued as a generalist site with some pop music elements. Maybe at the back of my mind was a sense the music I’d been writing about was falling off a little – certainly I don’t look back on that year with the excitement I have for earlier ones.

Just going to put in a reminder that – unless I say otherwise, ha! – everything here is very good even when it has a big fat NO on it. If you think that means I’m about to thumbs-down some big tunes… well, you’re probably right.

GIRLS ALOUD – “Biology”: Not that some acts weren’t dependable – the bizarre, bold, layer cake of styles and hooks that is “Biology” proved as much. But the UK pop renaissance proved unfortunately top-heavy – an abundance of Xenomania gems in 2003-5 masking the fact that new people making this kind of smart, self-aware pop weren’t really coming through. We’ll always have this. YES.

AMERIE – “1 Thing”: It took me a long time to love “1 Thing” – in fact it took me a long time to even like it that much: it seemed rickety and backward-looking when I wanted more futuristic sleekness or sonic warping to (as they say) push things forward. I was wrong, obviously. Eventually I saw that Rich Harrison’s work here is just as radical, only tied back more closely to the sound of R&B 40 years before, a sound he explodes as much as draws on. Still don’t adore it the way some do, though. NO.

THE VERONICAS – “Untouched”: If I was judging based on importance or ‘influence’ I might put this in – more than most other teenpop-type songs of the mid-00s I can imagine “Untouched” coming out in 2023, it’s in that pop/alternative interzone that’s such fruitful territory right now. The most 2005 thing about it is also one of the best – those strings! NO.

ROBYN – “With Every Heartbeat”: I’m not lukewarm on Robyn exactly – she’s always interesting and Honey is one of my favourite LPs of the 10s – but the tracks I love don’t seem quite to intersect with the Robyn fan consensus. This song, a forcefield of longing and confusion structured as a giant build and release, does for me what, say, “Dancing On My Own”, never quite manages. YES.

FANNYPACK – “Seven One Eight”: Wonderfully bratty ska-hop, very much what I’d hope a Daphne And Celeste rap track would have sounded like. Fannypack’s two LPs are delightful, light-hearted party rap gems in an era where even the good-time bangers tended to be pretty macho. (Did any men make a good record in 2005? Magic 8ball says: doubtful) (Oh I guess Kleerup counts!) Anyway YES.

2006 has another big personal milestone – I became a Dad at the end of the year. Parenthood isn’t some kind of magic spell which turns you away from music but it’s true that my focus from now on is more scattered – that’s partly a function of life changes, but partly a result of the fragmenting scene meaning a clear ‘narrative’ for pop became harder to discern (or invent). Anyway everything from this point is BY DEFINITION Dadrock.

BEYONCE – “Irreplaceable”: A lot of later Beyonce is exciting because it shifts genres and plays with structures in interesting ways – you don’t quite know what you’re going to get when a song starts. “Irreplaceable” isn’t like that – it’s a very straight-down-the-middle R&B ballad, so not a great representative of her work. But it’s such good songwriting, and brings out one of her best assets – her flair for drama and, for want of a better word, ‘line readings’. YES.

TV ON THE RADIO – “Wolf Like Me”: TVOTR were happening off to the side of everything else I liked – I filed them as a ‘Pitchfork band’ and then continued to ignore them even when I wrote for Pitchfork. But with hindsight they’re way more interesting (i.e. Pitchfork were right) – “Wolf Like Me”‘s chant and grind doesn’t sound like anything else around. I had to be introduced to it years later by the 2006-set Phonogram: The Singles Club, where it has a starring role. Better to come from them, tho. NO.

TATU – “All About Us”: My music internet presence at this point was largely confined to LiveJournal and the Poptimists community – tATu’s second LP (with this bombastic emo centrepiece) was something of a Cause among the people I ran with, though it bombed in the so-called real world. Again, the emotional territory here feels very 10s or 20s, the artifice with which it’s put together is of its time. YES.

CAMERA OBSCURA – “Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”: Indiepop isn’t a scene I follow at all – I’m happy for a killer tune to bubble up to my notice via others’ ears. Belle And Sebastian at this point weren’t making the kind of music I liked any more, so I was perfectly open to hearing fake B&S from other parts of the Scottish scene. Not much more than a riff and a chorus but maybe that’s all you need. NO.

M.I.A. – “BirdFlu”: I tactically promoted “Paper Planes” in the Uncool50 challenge but at the time this was the M.I.A. track that blew my head off – comfortably my favourite single of the year, an absolute thrill-powered racket with shrapnel shards of great lyrics everywhere (tho I guess “credentials are boring” hits different in light of 2020s conspiracy-head MIA). YES.

T.I. – “What You Know”: Melodic production so thick you can squeeze it over cat’s-cradle trap beats, T.I. anchoring everything on his line endings – for me this one’s just endlessly pleasurable to listen to. Only the fact “Rubber Band Man” is a lock stops this. NO.

THE PIPETTES – “Pull Shapes”: I had happy memories of dancing to this – everyone (who went to indie-adjacent clubs) danced to this in 2006! But… it’s a bit ropey, sorry, and the meta elements have stopped being charming, as is the way of meta elements. My favourite 50 songs of the 21st century aren’t going to include something that sounds like the Belle Stars. (“That’s your loss” – angry Pipettes hive) NO.

MUSE – “Knights Of Cydonia”: The second track of 2006 I only knew cos of a comic – Tsutomo Nihei’s generation ship/mecha epic Knights Of Sidonia, which has absolutely nothing to do with Muse’s song except it happens at a colossal scale and bits of it are entirely ridiculous. It took a pop poll nomination to really open my eyes to its stupid glory: the bit where it goes FULL QUO is magnificent. I cannot actually justify it being in my Top 50…surely. NO.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE – “Teenagers”: “Black Parade” has a claim, too (and neither are getting in) but this is quite something – I love how the swaggering, glammed-up music and the lyrics push against each other, leaving the whole song in a state of wild ambiguity. NO.

LETHAL BIZZLE – “Police On My Back”: ‘Grindie’ (Grime and indie) was written off as a terrible idea roughly 10 seconds after the NME invented it, but this is great – it’s just Bizzle telling a story, trying out a more conversational flow, over a Clash sample, and given how open the Clash were to hip-hop back in their day that feels pretty appropriate. It’s no “Pow (Forward)” but it was well worth doing, and hearing. NO.

SALLY SHAPIRO – “Anorak Christmas”: One of two ‘Christmas songs’ on my longlist – this one melts like a snowflake on a mitten. I think there was a more celebrated/famous Sally Shapiro song but this one was my smol jam. NO.

COLDPLAY – “Talk (Thin White Duke Mix)”: Very much the usual Jacques Lu Cont trick of turning a rock song into an electropop banger by adding breakdowns and drops. But if it works, it works – “Talk” is the one that nicks big chunks of “Computer Love” so adding lots more electro bells and whistles feels only right, and ironically it holds up better than “Brightside” because the original song’s so meh, it’s not fighting against its cyborg makeover. YES.

BELLE LAWRENCE – “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”: I was listening to a lot of dance remakes of rock songs at this point, as if you couldn’t tell from all the remixes. A lot of the best ones were put out by Almighty Records, which did hands-in-the-air cover versions for gay clubs. Belle Lawrence (who may have been several people) was one of their stars, applying a brassy, belting voice to the hits du jour. This is her best, because making a song about dancing like a robot from 1984 into a huge club banger is a sensible thing to do, and because it brings out the energy in the Monkeys’ chorus (a good one, I reluctantly concede). NO.

THE SOUNDS – “Tony The Beat (Rex The Dog Remix)”: To this day I don’t think I’ve heard the non-canine “Tony The Beat” (the Jaques Lu Cont equivalent of this is “Avalon” by Juliet) – and there’s no clue the song has that title, it’s just THIS song with THAT enormous chorus. As pure a distillation of the mid-00s rock/dance remix sound as you’d want, then. NO.

CANSEI DE SER SEXY – “Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above”: A bonus addition – this was the first new favourite I heard via some POP MUSIC ORGANISED FUN that I was running, so it’s the secret origin of the pop polls in a way. Stevie T was managing Brazil in the first Pop World Cup we did on LiveJournal, and put forward CSS, which none of us had heard and which swept the round (he was very early on the hype train for this one, so we all got to share a bit in the thrill when it became A Thing). Stands up well. NO.

A brutal culling today – 2007 has a lot fewer songs but also more big favourites. No wonder there’s panic in the industry.

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Fear Of Mu21c #5: 2004 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-5-2004 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-5-2004#respond Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:48:20 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34496 Alongside 2000, this is the year with the most longlist picks – a real bruiser. In the wider world of music discourse, 2004 is the year Kelefa Sanneh publishes “The Rap Against Rockism”, corralling some of the sprawled-out conversation around ‘rockism’ (and ‘poptimism’, though from memory it’ll take a while for that word to become a fixture) that’s been floating around message boards for a few years. Coincidentally – or not – 2004 is a high watermark for the catchy, knowing Anglo-European strain of pop I particularly dig. Onto the tunes.

JOHNNY BOY – “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve”: 2004 is also marked by resurgent British indie, not yet hit with the “landfill” tag. Most of it is reheated junk: Johnny Boy approach their Lego-Wall-Of-Sound rebuke as if it’s their only shot at a hearing (it is) and make my favourite indie single of the era. YES.

ALCAZAR – “This Is The World We Live In”: An era of clever pop is also an era of astonishingly stupid pop, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, and at the very least you can’t work out which is the Trojan horse and which its payload of warriors. Alcazar take one of the most overproduced, empty hits of the 80s (which is saying something) and drop it into the middle of a disco party. YES.

RACHEL STEVENS – “Some Girls”: Digitised glam rock concealing an all the way down streak of nastiness; the catchiest and most iconic song from the UK’s smart pop wave – a dizzying metatext that gets a whole chapter to itself in Michael Cragg’s oral history of the era. YES.

THE KNIFE – “Heartbeats (Rex The Dog Remix)”: Alongside Stuart “Jacques Lu Cont” Price, Rex The Dog was the most delightful remixer of this pop moment – here he’s taking the Knife’s fabulously chunky early single, already probably their single catchiest moment, and turning it into a machine that keeps all the hooks while building inexorably to a truly ecstatic drop. Accept no cover versions. YES.

LETHAL BIZZLE – “Pow (Forward)”: A grime track so incendiary and hard it was banned from multiple clubs because fights kicked off whenever it was played. You can hear why: absolutely bug-eyed, hulked-out stuff. YES.

THE WALKMEN – “The Rat”: More bulging-vein intensity on top of a jangle blurring into a thrash, as if The Wedding Present had dropped the nice-guy passive aggression and just got… aggressive aggressive. A difficult NO cos there’s only so many times I can listen to it.

AMADOU ET MARIAM – “La Realite” & “Senegal Fast Food”: Two singles from their breakthrough Dimanche A Bamako – the former is more a good-time groove, the latter is jittery and intoxicating, an odder and fresher fusion. LR: NO. SFF: YES.

BIG AND RICH – “Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)”: Rich – or Big, or both for all I know – is a MAGA dickhead now, and “Save A Horse” plays these days as a kind of inverse of that rotten “Small Town” record this year – here the cowboy hits the city and all the city girls love him. The music, though, is as open-minded, infectious, inclusive and goofy as the singer’s philosophy isn’t (well, goofy in a good way). If the final list was purely a historical record of my loves, this would be a shoo-in. As it is, a cautious YES.

V – “Hip To Hip”: I admit it, this never had a chance of progressing but I just enjoy hearing it. A snapshot from an alternate world where One True Voice (or A.N.Other boyband) ended up working with Xenomania instead of Girls Aloud. A minor pop gem. NO.

KILLER MIKE ft BIG BOI – “A.D.I.D.A.S.”: After a few years of listening to loads of rap I seem to have been more tuned out in the mid-00s. I liked crunk but it didn’t do it for me the way the previous wave of Southern hip-hop did. But that wave had crested, too: this is two Dungeon Family alumni goofing around doing sex raps – ultimately not as good as I remembered, with a few red-card lyrics, tho very catchy and the instant pleasure of hearing these guys rap is there. NO.

ARCADE FIRE – “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”: I never got properly into the AF – by the time their second album came out I was heartily sick of them – but I had a soft spot for the first track I heard by them, thought they used crescendoes and heart-on-sleeve yelping really well. But the seeds of my later exhaustion are definitely here. NO.

CIARA ft LUDACRIS – “Oh”: Ciara made a ton of reliably very good singles without ever quite making an all-time favourite jam of mine. Felt like this might be the one and it’s close – oddly what lets it down is an atypically washed-sounding Ludacris. NO.

NINA SKY – “Move Ya Body”: A late entry in the R&B/dancehall crossover stakes – like Lumidee a wonderful, hypnotic near one-off, in this case on the “Coolie Dance” riddim. Being realistic there’s probably not room for both on the final list but I don’t WANT to be realistic. YES.

GIRLS ALOUD – “The Show”: Like a lot of these songs (and “Memories” by Elaine Paige) this ended up on my Glastonbury 2004 tape, frankly one of the core texts of Poptimism. They had our attention before but this really kicked off the period where every new GA single was a “what are they going to do next?” moment. In this case, 80s-style electropop with that Xenomania jigsaw structure that made their tunes so thrilling. YES.

TEDDYBEARS STHLM ft MAD COBRA – “Cobrastyle”: Last of the Club FT floorfillers this year, a novelty mash up of a great Mad Cobra verse (from “Press Trigger”) over an accordion-rock instrumental, with a somewhat rubbish Bomfunk MCs type chorus. With hindsight it’s the chorus that’s the problem – the badass dancehall toasting actually does work better here than on “Press Trigger”‘s own slightly emaciated beat. Later used on some football highlights show, which was slightly annoying. NO.

That ends 2004. The next update will be the first double-year one – 2005 has only a handful of tracks, though 2006 has loads (a surprise, I’d have guessed the other way around).

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Fear Of Mu21c #4: 2003 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-4-2003 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-4-2003#comments Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:25:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34482 2003 was a big year personally – I got married! – and in terms of writing – I started Popular! – and at least at this point the new focus on pop’s past didn’t push me too far off the present. As ever, I’m working out which tracks from the longlist I want to include on my shortlist.

T.I. – “Rubber Band Man”: T.I.’s public pronouncements give the impression he’s a bit of a dickhead, but the music on “Rubber Band Man” is irresistible to me, Escher stairs of fanfares giving the impression of a song that’s perpetually peaking, T.I.’s casual, drawled flow stretching languidly over them. YES.

JAMMER ft D DOUBLE E – “Birds In The Sky”: Only ever on a white label, this is the early grime tune that’s really stuck in my head all these years, D Double E’s “mwui mwui” sound and the chiling faux-oriental melody combining to make the song feel strange and heartless. YES.

BEYONCE ft JAY-Z – “Crazy In Love”: My Beyonce pick is probably sealed but there’s at least a chance I’ll switch it and pick her early landmark – Rich Harrison’s production still a diamond even in a very expensive sample/production era. YES.

WIR SIND HELDEN – “Guten Tag”: Sentimentally added to the longlist this bouncy early-DJ-set staple by Neue Deutsche Welle revivalists WSH. Those of a harsher disposition might suggest “Guten Tag” bears some similarities to what you might call Mülldeponie-indiemuzik but I think Judith Holofernes’ hoarsely cool voice and the language barrier help head that one off. NO.

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – “Stay Loose”: I mentioned I got married – well, we went to Poland on honeymoon (in November, in some ways not the wisest of options) and we had a long, cramped bus journey where we had to perch in separate bits of the bus. I had a CD-R of recent MP3 grabs, including this, and played it a few times as we crawled through the Polish countryside. Happy memories, then, which elevate this – apparently either forgotten or despised – Joe Jackson esque throwback into one of my favourite B&S tracks. Though that can only get it so far. NO. (I do wish they’d done more like this, though).

DAVID BANNER – “Like A Pimp”: I think I meant the screwed & chopped version of this! But now I listen to that it doesn’t sound as slow or woozily fucked-up as I remember it. So this shouldn’t really be on the list – on the other hand it is a good track, and representative of a strand of heavy, hooky Southern rap I spent a good bit of time listening to in 03-04. So it’s nice to be reminded of it anyway. NO.

LUMIDEE – “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)”: Hurrah, it’s the Diwali riddim at last! Hypnotic for the beat, obviously, but also for Lumidee’s low-key performance, like we’re eavesdropping on something she’s singing to herself. After the maximal R&B of the first few years of the 00s there was something of an interior turn going on, with tracks like this and Tweet’s awesome “Oops (Oh My)”. YES.

A.R.E. WEAPONS – “Hey World”: A.R.E. Weapons were mostly treated as a joke and this was not in general unfair (their pub designation: “Arse Weapons”) but there’s something alchemically great about this anthem to/for fucked-up kids, partly that it sounds like Suicide (well, Suicide wannabes) trying to write a Bruce Springsteen song, partly that on the second verse the cool why-hello-there posturing drops away into a relatable anguish at how screwed his protagonist is. NO.

N.A.S.T.Y. CREW – “Cock Back”: Annoyingly the only version of this on Spotify is a later (2006?) remix with new verses from a new incarnation of the NASTY Crew. It keeps the none-more-aggro chorus, though, which is the second best thing about it, and D Double E’s verse, which is the best: “Think you’re a big man cos you got a beard? Bullets will make your face get weird”. That said, I’ve already got a better D Double tune and the all-time king track of shouty grime is up in 2004 so NO.

THE KILLERS – “Mr Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont’s Thin White Duke Mix)”: Jacques Lu Cont remixes were a mainstay of my listening and DJing – this and Coldplay’s “Talk” were the big tunes, turning tedious originals into drawn-out synthpop playgrounds. Listening now it’s a tricky one – “Mr Brightside” has become the longest-lived hit of the 21st century and while the remix vaulted cheekily out from under its shadow in 2003, that shadow has drastically lengthened. I’ll bin it, but add “Talk” for consideration in 2006. NO.

Look at that, only 4 YES picks – this might get more manageable. 2004 is an absolute beast of a year, though, so perhaps not.

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Fear Of Mu21c #3: 2002 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-3-2002 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-3-2002#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2023 17:51:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34475 My #FearOfMu21c challenge selection posts continue with 2002! This was a feverish high point of my engagement with current music, the first year in which I had internet speeds fast enough to make large-scale MP3 acquisition a reality AND had an office job in London one block away from Select-A-Disc, Reckless Records, and other meccas. So it’s weird in a way that I’ve ended up with half the candidates I had in 2000. The first three were all in my #Uncool50 list last year, which pretty much guarantees them passage from longlist to shortlist.

SUGABABES – “Freak Like Me”: The apotheosis of the bootleg ‘era’. a cover of Girls On Top’s “We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends” mash-up. Also a UK No.1 and Popular 10 out of 10. Also the last great pop record of my 20s? Maybe. Feels like a watershed personally and musically. YES.

STUSH – “Dollar Sign”: AKA Sticky ft Stush, which was how my MP3 was credited. Sticky had done Ms Dynamite’s breakthrough “Booo”, but I liked this even more, a UK garage beat with London dancehall vocals by Stush, who flickers from voice to voice, containing multitudes in the way Nicki Minaj will later. YES.

MISSY ELLIOT ft LUDACRIS – “Gossip Folks”: A controversial pick last year – “Work It” made the greater impact (and was one of the great records to experience collectively online – what was she singing exactly?) but I still think this might be Missy’s boast – her calling back to the funk era, Timbaland’s proto-crunk beat, and some of her most wonderfully southern rapping. YES.

THE WILDBUNCH/ELECTRIC SIX – “Danger! High Voltage”: I think this was a re-recording, or at least a remix, rather than a straight re-release. I also think the E6 version is probably better – a little bit faster and tighter. I’ll need to cross-compare. Like “Hard To Explain” and “Party Hard”, a version of indie rock that was cool because it was also ridiculous, a trait that soon got lost. YES.

MASSIVE ATTACK ft MOS DEF – “I Against I”: Stranded on the Blade II soundtrack if I remember – all the oppressive cyber-skanking of the Mezzanine era Massive Attack, with a hard as hell Mos Def performance too, maybe my favourite thing I’ve heard him do. Can’t see myself finding room for it, but it’s very strong. NO.

CLIPSE – “Grindin'”: Not the last time we’ll see the “Grindin'” beat (or a close relative). Not the last time we’ll hear Pusha T either, from the off one of the most downright evil sounding guys to ever pick up a mic. This has aged monstrously well and was notoriously brutal even at the time – the most hardcore Neptunes production. I think I’m going to go with different options but might swap this landmark back in if want to get tactical. NO.

THE STREETS – “Let’s Push Things Forward”: This has not aged monstrously well, but Mike Skinner’s geek/goofball word association and cut-up phrasal soup was at least one-third defiantly cringe even in 2002, and frankly that’s part of why I loved it. This has a glorious hook and riff, reminding me of the Sabres Of Paradise. Would be a huge reach to say it’s still one of my absolute faves though, so NO.

SEAN PAUL – “Like Glue”: Around this time, if you typed “riddim” and the year into Soulseek, Kazaa or whatever, you’d be rewarded pretty quickly by a dozen of the weirdest and most exciting sounds you’d ever heard. The breakout 2002 riddim is the Diwali Riddim, which Sean Paul rode to the top on “Get Busy”… but it’s not the best Diwali song OR the best Sean Paul song. This perpetual motion machine, on the “Buy Out” riddim, is. NO.

SCOOTER – “Ramp! (The Logical Song)”: Hardcore will never die, and certainly has never died. Germany’s eternal keepers of the rave flame hit biggest here with this pilled-up version of Supertramp, which introduced my social circle to the legendary Sheffield Dave (not from Sheffield, not called Dave). Chipmunk vocals and all, this is a brilliant record. Can I justify its inclusion? Probably not but I can’t bear to do away with it yet. YES.

CLIPSE – “Young Boy”: Hard to lose this one as it’s just so viciously good, a gutbucket Neptunes productio and Clipse’s extremely nasty take on the sentimental growing-up rap trope. But if you learn one thing from Clipse records it’s that there’s no room for sentiment. NO.

TOGETHER – “So Much Love To Give”: A record seen by some as a piss-take, or at least the moment where French filter house Went Too Far, eleven minutes of ecstatic repetition of a single phrase like a mantra (or a car alarm) while the background minutely shifts and buckles behind it. “HOUSE MUSIC IS REPETITIVE ON PURPOSE” tetchily explains the top YouTube comment. YES (HA HA HA YES)

That’s all – next up 2003: grime properly arrives! (As does the Bey-funk era).

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Fear Of Mu21c #2: 2001 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-2-2001 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-2-2001#respond Sun, 10 Sep 2023 11:40:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34468 Continuing an attempt to work out my favourite 50 21st Century singles for a music challenge. As before, what I’m doing is trying to reduce my longlist (>200 tracks) to a more manageable shortlist. It’s proving a challenge.

JAY-Z – “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”: At this point Jay-Z was probably my favourite MC, just on the level of “how much do I enjoy the sound of this guy rapping”, and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” is still an almost perfect example for me of how hard you can own a beat without even sounding like you’re trying. Kanye’s beat, of course – Ye himself is one of several artists whose terrible behaviour ruled them out, but I can still listen to this production with real pleasure. YES.

DAFT PUNK – “One More Time”: I once would have confidently called this my favourite single of the 00s, and the most audacious part – that yawning, yearning breakdown – is still a beautiful, remarkable thing to have pulled off. The rest… I love it, but its power to thrill and move me has worn off a little. A victim of the one song per artist rule (entirely self inflicted). NO.

MISSY ELLIOTT – “Get Ur Freak On”: An instant classic and its rep has never really wavered. Its all the little ad libs and asides around the riff that keep it fresh for me. Is it my favourite Missy Elliott single, though? Last year I said no – this time… well, it really is sounding VERY good. YES.

MARY J BLIGE – “Family Affair”: One of those records where I look at it on a list and think “eh, I’m a bit bored with this” until roughly 0.5 seconds after the beat actually starts. I’d be interested to know if and how the records from this (what seems to me) unbelievable golden age of R&B sound dated now – what about them says “20 years ago”. I’ve lost all perspective. YES.

ANDREW WK – “Party Hard”: I’m not doing a great job of winnowing these down! There are more rock records than you might think on this shortlist, but most of them are doing what this does – a straightforward, heads-down attack in service of a big hook. I don’t think any of them do it quite like “Party Hard” does though, like a happy hardcore take on hard rock. YES.

BEENIE MAN ft MYA – “Girls Dem Sugar”: These few years are the prime of the Neptunes but they rarely had vocal hooks this great to work with. I want to get a Jamaican dancehall artist into my 50 if I can. Beenie Man’s sweet lovers’ track has a decent shot. YES.

RADIOHEAD – “Pyramid Song”: Amnesiac is my favourite Radiohead LP and this is my favourite Radiohead single – Thom Yorke as vocalist does my nut in so credit to the band for finding a musical backdrop he really suits, an attempt in the wake of apocalypse to reconstruct what “ballads” might have sounded like. One of the great drum entrances in 00s rock too. Even so, NO.

BASEMENT JAXX – “Romeo”: Another one I played to death, and alongside “Get Ur Freak On” an absolute mainstay of the club night Carsmile Steve and I did in Oxford. Basement Drain Smell more like, etc. Love how staccato the keyboards are, real jab-you-in-the-ribs stuff. But like most Jaxx stuff, it’s faded for me a little. NO.

AALIYAH – “More Than A Woman”: The groove here – which is gorgeous, opulent, expensive sounding – is really dwarfed by Aaliyah’s vocals, shining out in a dozen different ways while never grandstanding. YES.

SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR – “Murder On The Dancefloor”: Even more than her meeting with Spiller (never considered), Ellis-Bextor’s encounter with Gregg Alexander really brought out the best in her – her arched-eyebrow voice the perfect match for Alexander’s “is he really going to be this corny? oh shit he IS” songwriting. YES.

JUSTUS KOHNKE – “So Weit Nie Noch Nie”: I want something from the cool European zones of 00s dance music – the schaffel, the Kompakt, the microhouse, the minimal – but not sure this is it. All about the way the vocal sounds summoned onto the track as if at a seance. NO.

DAFT PUNK – “Digital Love”: One of the funny things that’s happened with Discovery is that the yacht-y, soft-rock-y elements that seemed almost scandalous in 2001 – surely they’re putting us on! – have now been entirely recuperated into hipster taste. There’s no other way to take this lush keytar jam in 2023 except at face value, and that suits “Digital Love” just fine. YES.

LEXXUS – “Monkeys Out”: Spectral dancehall folding Max Martin’s Britney chords into (I believe) a Lenky riddim, Lexxus toasting on top. I could (should?) have two dozen early 00s dancehall tracks in this list, all of which would have no chance of making a Top 50 but every chance of making a Top 250. That’s constraints for ya. NO.

FREELANCE HELLRAISER – “A Stroke Of Genius”: One of the crown jewels of the bootleg scene, a moment I still have extremely happy memories of. Are those memories enough to put this ancient remix, whose joins are more audible than ever, through? The best bits are where Freelance Hellraiser coaxes a new climax from the original structure, very much the way Richard X did on “We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends”. Which is a better single, and not going in, so nor can this. Should have had its own remake. NO.

THE STROKES – “Hard To Explain”: OK, so what about the original, the Strokes’ closest approach to the dancefloor and – for me – the only record you need from the entire NYC return-of-rock scene? Listening to it reminds me both how much the Hellraiser did but also how much he didn’t NEED to do – the music here judders and twitches in all the right places. A surprise YES.

OSYMYSO – “Intro-Inspection”: The best version of “Intro-Inspection”‘s delirious pick-and-mix overload is – I still maintain – the non-expanded 7-minute version – but even if there’s too much (of the too muchness) the extended 12 minute version is still a tremendous achievement, pushing the boundaries of listenability with its blend of radio pop quiz and plunderphonics, every comforting moment of recognition immediately snatched away. YES.

Hmm, 10 out of 16 YESes – not ideal. Join me next for 2002 – Sugababes (again!) Missy (again!) and we get faster – harder – SCOOTER.

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Fear Of Mu21c #1: 2000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-1-2000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-1-2000#respond Sat, 09 Sep 2023 16:01:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34464 This Autumn I’m taking part in Arron Wright’s #FearOfMu21c challenge – a bunch of people selecting and listing their 50 favourite singles of the 21st Century, one a day.

It’s the sequel to last year’s #Uncool50 challenge (see below), which involved listing 50 favourite singles since 1976 (the same tracks can appear in both, in fact we’ve been sternly warned that they should – at least mostly). As the # sign suggests, the challenge is happening mainly on Twitter, though some players will be posting their choices on Bluesky instead, or as well.

My Uncool50 (and a bunch of near misses) from last year

So what is this blog post – series of blog posts, even – for? Well, I started making a shortlist for the challenge. And it grew. And grew. It’s currently over 200 songs long, and let me remind you I need fifty.

As I listened to it I felt like I had things to say about the tracks. Profound things? No. Bloggable things? Probably.

So these posts are a document of my sorting process. I’m not going to be spoiling my final list – in fact, I can’t, cos I’m nowhere near even starting to make it. But I want to get down to about 100 tracks and crunch it from there – so at the end of each mention here is a YES or NO: is this track getting through to the second, real shortlist? A YES doesn’t mean it will be in the list. A NO does mean it probably won’t.

The songs range from indelible favourites to “gosh, I remember that! Wonder if I still like it?” one-offs. If you’re shocked at an absence, tell me!

First up, tracks for consideration from the year 2000.

OUTKAST – “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad): The first 21st Century song in last year’s list – a last-minute inclusion, as Outkast fatigue had set in a bit. But irresistible as a marker of “yes, we’re in a new century now” shock-of-the-new, as well as one of the great pop duos when they were still aiming in the same direction. YES.

BROADCAST – “Come On Let’s Go”: A near-miss last year, which would also work very well at the head of a list, as a beckoning-in. It’s a very kind record and good advice too. However I plan to waste plenty of time on people that I’ll never know, and COLG doesn’t quite have the, dammit, hauntological vibe of something like 1999’s “Echo’s Answer”. NO.

AALIYAH – “Try Again”: Oh the happy times spent on message boards geeking out over Timbaland productions. His furthest out beat, or so it seemed to me – that acid squelch buzzing around everything like a big sexy wasp. I wonder if it gets in the way of Aaliyah a bit too much? I feel like as the years go by it’s her I want to focus on, more than the (brilliant) productions surround her. Still, a YES.

SUGABABES – “Overload”: I haven’t 100% decided whether to limit myself to 1 track per artist or not, if I decide not to then this might come back into contention, and I couldn’t bear to leave it off the longlist. “Overload” is still a dream, doing nothing you’d have expected a girl group track to do – it’s closest to All Saints in sound, but it doesn’t sound like a committee put it together: so diffident, so unresolved, what the hell is that guitar solo doing? But I’m guessing I’ll pick a different Sugababes track in the end. NO.

LAMBCHOP – “Up With People”: Like “Overload” it choogles, but it’s as comfortable as “Overload” is awkward and moody. A track I only remembered to include when I saw other people mention it – I knew it best from parent LP Nixon but damned if it doesn’t work wonderfully well as a build-it-up jam. Points off for obliquity, maybe? I want this to stick around so I can judge properly, so YES.

WU-TANG CLAN – “Gravel Pit”: Part of the fun of FearOfMu21c is trying to work out what other people might pick (“not hip-hop” is all too often the answer, though). I think “Gravel Pit” is the most likely Wu to draw support, so I thought I’d give it a go to see if I could find it in my heart to pick it. I can’t really – I mean. it’s great, it’s the most FUN Wu-Tang tune, Ghostface sounds great on it, but it’s just not my favourite eligible single by them. NO.

ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION – “Real Great Britain”: Obviously fiery lyrics but I think what I love most about this is how it did the “Sound Of The Underground”/”Addicted To Bass” surf-DNB before any of those. All about that chorus. YES.

LUDACRIS ft PHARRELL WILLIAMS – “Southern Hospitality”: A huge favourite from the NYLPM days, one of the first Neptunes productions I recognised and loved as such. Still sounds exceptionally cool but there’ll be better examples of Luda and the Neptunes to come. NO.

ALL SAINTS – “Pure Shores”: The first of a regrettable phenomenon – songs I really like but got a bit sick of when they were in a pop poll. It’s not your fault, All Saints! Sorry, William Orbit! I’ll come back to it. NO.

BRITNEY SPEARS – “Oops.. I Did It Again”: Peak TRL-era teenpop, peak Max, but is it peak Britney? That’s for later instalments of this to decide. For now I stand by my Popular verdict: a classic. YES.

THE ARK – “It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane”: Glam rock inclusivity anthem from the band Maneskin wishes they were, one of the great pop-rock vocal belters. Really glad I remembered this dark horse. YES.

SAINT ETIENNE – “Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi)”: I had this with the Pet Shop Boys’ “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct” last year, that weird feeling when you realise that some minor single (second off a little-discussed LP, here) is not just one of the best by a band but might be the best. Could find a slot depending on how political I’m feeling – it’s the Blair-era “S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G.” YES.

THE BETA BAND – “To You Alone”: The bass on this sounds so good! This was a very exciting single at the time, partly because the BB had fucked it with their first LP, partly because there were tantalising hints of a band listening to current UK dance sounds. Now it sounds like a pointer to Hot Shots II and probably works better as that than as a standalone. Great tune though. NO.

SWEET FEMALE ATTITUDE – “Flowers (Sunship Edit)”: One of the big issues with this shortlist has been which UK garage tunes to include, tricky in that I can never remember which came out when. Fortunately “Flowers”, perhaps the greatest UKG-pop track of them all, is April 2000. The drum programming on 2-step records is so beautiful and tactile I could honestly weep. YES.

JESSICA SIMPSON – “I Think I’m In Love With You”: Another big old school NYLPM tune, only helped by the fact I’d never actually heard “Jack And Diane” at this point (it’s better than “Jack And Diane”). Should be remembered alongside “Candy”, “Genie In A Bottle” as a high point of the post-Britney wave, but there are tracks doing this sort of 80s-tinged ecstatic pop better later, so NO.

3LW – “No More (Baby Imma Do Right)”: Thanks owed to Kieran Hebden interpolating this last year into “Looking At My Pager” and reminding me what a wonderful little teen-R&B track it is. (Except it isn’t little, like a lot of 2000s era tracks it gets an extra couple of minutes it doesn’t need at all, which is enough to put it out of contention). NO.

WU-TANG CLAN – “I Can’t Go To Sleep”: I didn’t realise this extraordinary track was a single – Ghostface Killah and RZA absolutely melting down and sobbing over a bleeding chunk of “Walk On By” before Isaac Hayes comes in like a cosmic Dad. YES.

That’s it for 2000! (Not every year has so many candidates). Next: 2001 – Missy! Basement Jaxx! Bootlegs! Radiohead?!?!

If you want to join in #FearOfMu21c – running from October 1 – then work out your own top 50 21st century singles and let Arron (@nonoxcol on Twitter and Bluesky) know.

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Around The World In An Hour https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/06/around-the-world-in-an-hour https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/06/around-the-world-in-an-hour#respond Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:46:12 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34382 Just a bit of CROSS PROMOTION with the Peoples Pop part of the site, where we’ve launched a new! feature – The LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS!

It’s a music discovery game. You listen to a themed 12-song playlist each week and pick your four favourite new-to-you tracks from it, then vote for them in the poll. The first week’s theme is Placenames, with songs ranging from 1960s country soul to 2020s gothic synth fighting for your approval. We’re halfway through the 6-day voting period so give it a try!

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Pop As Ghost https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pop-as-ghost https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pop-as-ghost#comments Tue, 09 May 2023 13:14:26 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34096 ABBA Voyage, The ABBA Arena

In Jim Steinmeyer’s fine history of stage magic, Hiding The Elephant, he goes into detail on the history of Pepper’s Ghost, the illusion that captivated Victorian London and revolutionised the tricknology of magic performance. The ghost’s inventor, engineer Henry Dircks, wasn’t the first to conceptualise the technique, which is simple enough – the arrangement of mirrors so that action under the stage (a performer playing the “ghost”) is projected onto an area of it, meaning performers appear and disappear at spectral will. The problem Dircks solved for the magician John Henry Pepper was one of scale. Previous designs for the ghost, or a ghost-like effect, would have worked, but would also have required the construction of an entire bespoke auditorium to perform it in.

If Pepper and Dircks’ actual ghosts are still hanging around London, they will surely appreciate the ABBA Arena, a fulfilment of the original mad illusionist’s dream of building an entire theatre to perform a Pepper’s Ghost trick. The gimmick by which the digitised “ABBAtars” appear on stage was revealed before ABBA Voyage even opened. You are watching a concoction of lights and video screens around a superflat reflective surface, on which the recordings of the ABBAtars are projected to give the illusion of a stage and depth. 

In the band’s 70s heyday, episodes of Doctor Who would often use reflective sheets like this to give the impression that some hi-tech base was vaster than the studio confines allowed. ABBA Voyage is brilliantly done, with a precision to match any of the group’s perfectonist studio work. But there is something wonderfully ABBA-ish about the fact that this very 21st century concert may center on what is basically a colossal piece of tinfoil.

The instruction you’re given before the curtain rises – do not give away the secrets of Voyage – also conjures a stage magic vibe. All the details of Voyage are available – costumes, setlists, mechanisms. If you choose to look, that is, and I didn’t. Illusion is about the management of expectations – treat an experience as magical and it becomes more so. And in fact, the best moments of Voyage are often the ones least spoil-able, the transitions or momentary effects. Yes, you’ve seen the ABBAtars in their TRON lightsuits, but it’s the way those costumes are introduced that makes you gasp or cheer.

ABBA never quite cracked America; they are unlikely ever to get a Vegas show. So Voyage is a proof of concept both for that lost ABBA residency and for the idea of a bespoke, long-running Vegas-style spectacular in London. With its stars captured in fully digitised youth, the show is wonderfully future-proofed – all you need are technicians and a decent live band and it could run indefinitely. There are enough certifiable bangers left off the set that it could also refresh itself after a while, should a need arise to lure former visitors back.

Still, the idea of ABBA Voyage may be – and has proved to be – an obvious banker, but that shouldn’t cover up the fact that tricky creative choices went into making it. ABBA are a band of two halves: a group firmly rooted in a particular decade and pop moment, the perfect 70s blend of kitsch and earnestness, artifice and melody, glamour and soap opera. And then a phenomenon who found a second life as the kings and queens of the jukebox musical, a band whose songs lend themselves to narrative and who won a whole new fanbase because of that.

ABBA Voyage combines the two – for chunks of the show they’re being as honest as a digitised band can be, offering a perfected version of what seeing an ABBA performance in their heyday might have been like. The music choices reflect that – this is, ironically, a version of ABBA with a strong emphasis on the idea of them as a working, gigging band. If your favourite version of the group is the chugging, glam rocking ABBA of “Summer Night City” and “Does Your Mother Know” you will like Voyage even more.

But there are also bits of something more fantastical, with narratives invented entirely for this show*, plus new songs which seemed metatextual enough on record and now absolutely scream at you that they’re about The ABBA Story (“Don’t Shut Me Down” demands a very literal reading indeed). There’s also enough tender touches between our recreated stars to keep the fan service detectors busy.

For a lot of acts, it wouldn’t work – the illusion of performance and the trickeries of immersive theatre would clash, a sweet-and-savoury collision of authenticity and artifice. With ABBA, who’ve been careful curators of their work for 30 years, and embracers of the theatrical for, oh, 50, it’s fine. It helps too that they’re a band with a stack of songs about lost youth and the compromises of adulthood. Sometimes I thought “this is amazing, this will be the future of legacy pop entertainment”. Other times I thought “this is amazing, only ABBA could pull this off”.

Voyage has been hyped as a revolutionary, innovative show. But its relationship to the future of pop is a thornier question than “is it any good?”. It arrived before the current furore around generative AI and music, which seems to offer a different answer to the question “can we and should we recreate old and lost stars, and what can we have them do?”. It also arrived in the middle of a second trend – the rise in song catalogue purchases and investments, and the beginnings of more aggressive efforts to monetise older songs, which is leaving some observers feeling queasy. (Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene has a good overview of the state of retro play here.)

Voyage is an intervention and an example – witting or not – in both these arguments. And in both cases what makes it stand out is its craft – the care and attention to detail. ABBA Voyage is strictly speaking on the wrong side of the industry-wide division between exploiting old tracks and promoting new artists, but it’s also an elegant move by an artist to set and control their own legacy. Beautifully executed, too. It’s perhaps an odd thing to say about a big, gaudy experiential show with its own bespoke arena – including an uncanny virtual recreation of Swedish drink prices – but Voyage could have been a whole lot crasser. It does the obvious stuff very well but it does a lot more too: it’s not just a nostalgia trip, and wouldn’t work so well if it was.

The question of Voyage’s relationship to AI is more vexed. Voyage is at once a glorious technological feat and a defiantly analog one. Four pensioners, wired up to motion capture sensors for weeks to capture and recreate the gestures and expressions they made when younger, before computer modelling turns them into animated recreations. It’s the kind of thing the mouthier promoters of AI would both respect and lust to replace – all that (shudder) human labour and cost when vocal and image and video models will come up with something almost as magical, if you give it time. There’s a gap in that “almost” as large as the market will bear. ABBA’s curatorial care stands in contrast, at least currently, to the kind of banal stylistic mix-and-match we’re seeing touted as AI music’s unique selling points. In a future of true pop eidolons maybe ABBA will sing anything we want. Why do we want it?

The word most often used for the ABBA Voyage recreations isn’t the mildly cringe “ABBAtars” but “holograms”. They aren’t holograms, any more than Pepper’s Ghost is. But holograms works as a word because, like the Tron imagery, it speaks not to the present but to an older future, the future of ABBA’s past. The first true hologram I saw was on National Geographic magazine in 1984, a picture of an Eagle that was slightly less impressive than the lenticular Daley Thompson badges you got in cereal packets. Holograms in the sense ABBA want to invoke date from 1977, a princess on loop in a droid’s memory: these living hololograms were science-fiction, and still are. ABBA Voyage is futuristic, but part of what makes it moving is that it’s the future that existed when ABBA broke up, the holographic future of 1982, full of lights and wonder, forever being overtaken by a shabbier reality.

*this was the only part that didn’t really work for me, though people I went with loved it. It’s either a fabulous animated video for two classic songs, or excerpts from an abandoned 90s ABBA LaserDisc game. Of course, this being ABBA, it can be both.

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Pointillism And Laugh https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pointillism-and-laugh https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pointillism-and-laugh#respond Thu, 04 May 2023 09:44:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34016 TALK TALK – Laughing Stock (1991)

Written as a “Designated Champion” essay for the Best Album Of The 90s tournament on Twitter.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s 1991 and there’s this band, minor in their genre but well-liked, with a publicity-shy but visionary leader who’s gradually reinvented their sound until it’s something wholly fresh. They go into the studio to make a new album, but the process is creatively arduous and financially atrocious. Innovation and perfectionism combine to take the band to their limits and the label to the brink of bankruptcy. The LP, when released, is a masterpiece, massively influential but also unrepeatable. The band implodes and nothing more is heard from their leader for years.

This is the story of Loveless, the record which has been seeded as favourite to win the Best Album of the 90s tournament. But it’s also the story of Laughing Stock, a record which I pulled out of a list of contenders to have another doomed tilt at glory. While MBV eventually returned, and Shields, thank goodness, survived to see his and Loveless’ reputation grow and grow, Talk Talk and Mark Hollis have a sadder story. 

The band fell apart, commercial pariahs and broken by the vagaries of Laughing Stock’s creative process. Hollis dropped out of sight, returned to release one fine, enigmatic record of hushed sketches then retired for good, sadly and suddenly dying a few years back, firmly out of the public eye. Talk Talk are still best known for the mid-point of their evolution, the churning synth-prog grandeur of “Life’s What You Make It”. While you can hear traces of Laughing Stock in post-rock ever since, the album, their last and best, remains a strictly cult favourite.

Which is how its devotees like it, frankly. You hear from old heads sometimes about how Trout Mask Replica forced them to learn a new way of listening to music, unpicking their expectations of song stitch by absurd stitch. Something similar happened to me with Laughing Stock, when I first heard it sometime in 1992. It happened, I’ve since learned, to a lot of other people. 

This is music where long, near-silent passages of scattered notes or half-phrases suddenly erupt briefly into structure; where mumbled invocations sit next to lucid, touching snatches of lyric; where aching orchestral beauty struggles to get a foothold, is replaced by ugly blocks of guitar, only for those too to fall away into abstraction.

“Ascension Day” is just about a song. “Taphead” threatens to become one, before its fragile acoustic picking drifts into a sea of woodwind reeds and is lost in marshy cries and electronic undertow. (When Hollis keens his way back into the track in his higher register, one sound in the background is surely Thom Yorke taking frantic notes: come back to this in 10 years). “Myrhhman” is a featureless moorland punctuated by blurts of guitar like unsheltering trees and rocks: it ends with the record’s manifesto – “Step right up – something’s happening here”. “New Grass” is motorik pastoral, uncomplicatedly pretty, complicatedly sad, Hollis rocking himself to comfort in the middle. Not sure I’m hearing a single here, lads.

One of the remarkable things about Laughing Stock is that it sounds, in places, like humans jamming in a room together, maybe vibing off each other, perhaps having a “good time”. Little could be further from the truth. By the accounts of those involved, making the record was agonised, studio madness of a kind perhaps only Brian Wilson would fully recognise. Like many perfectionist artists, Hollis demanded take upon take upon take. But unlike them, what his band and hired hands were playing weren’t songs, but fragments, jams, snatches of disconnected music, like actors being made to record every word in a scene on different days. 

Laughing Stock is a pointillist record, assembled from this endless, useless studio labour by Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene. A mosaic of music, precisely arranged to give the impression of musicians responding to each other’s creative choices in real time, when they’re all moving parts in Hollis’ shadow theatre. But what a performance we’re given.

Come at it another way, bring to bear the full critical armoury of comparison. There are lots of things Laughing Stock is a bit like.

It’s a bit like Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way – early 70s Miles Davis also involves a lot of tape splicing and collage, and the comparison was actually what got me into Miles (“at last! Another record that sounds like Laughing Stock!”)

It’s a bit like The Rite Of Spring – an attempt to wrestle an orchestra and unlock its wildness, its connection to the earth.

It’s a bit like (in its more rhythmic moments) Can, Faust, Popol Vuh – rhythm as the accomplice in a derangement of song.

It’s a bit like wind and wet earth, a walk alone through wild places.

It’s a bit like Talk Talk’s earlier Spirit Of Eden, which sounds to me like a too-polite dress rehearsal for this, and sounds to some other people like Hollis got these ideas right the first time, thanks.

It’s a bit like Tim Buckley’s Lorca and Starsailor LPs – Hollis doesn’t have Buckley’s cosmic pipes but the approach to folk/rock vocalising isn’t too far off in its far outness.

It’s a bit like playing an open world game and finding that over time terrifying surprises become familiar, even comforting landmarks.

It’s a bit like a host of artists that came soon or later after – Bark Psychosis, These New Puritans, bits of Jim O’Rourke, 90s Scott Walker. It’s still echoing today. I love some of those people but I like Laughing Stock more than any of them.

Mostly though it’s only like itself. If you love it already, enjoy hearing it again. If not, I hope you find a way into it this time.

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2021: Grandson Of Poll!! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2022/01/2021-grandson-of-poll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2022/01/2021-grandson-of-poll#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2022 23:57:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32923 Writing this proved to be an extremely slow process for all sorts of tedious reasons, but here are my notes on DAY 3 of the 2021 poll. Now long since completed but you can listen along on YouTube here – some true greats in this stretch.

 

Day 3 – 5 Discoveries

  • BLACK DRESSES – “PEACESIGN!!!!!!!!!!”
  • PAULI THE PSM – “I Got The Beat”
  • SERPENTWITHFEET – “Same Size Shoe”
  • TOKISCHA et al – “Yo No Me Voy Acostar”
  • ZAKES BANDWINI & KASANGO – “Osama”

Qualifier 13

LIZZO ft CARDI B – “Rumors”: Like Lil Nas X, Lizzo is going for a walking-event model of pop stardom, and like Lil Nas X that also means downplaying the rapping a bit in favour of big theatrical hooks. The best bit of this for me is Cardi’s brief cameo, everything else feels a bit overcooked.

CAROLINE POLACHEK – “Bunny Is A Rider”: Skeletal, cryptic electro-pop which reminds me a bit of (last year’s winner) Christine And The Queens. It’s the first Polachek thing which has connected at all with me, and it’s still so aloof I want to keep my distance a bit. But it’s good.

MANESKIN – “Zitti E Buoni”: On the night I was keen for these glam/funk rockers not to win Eurovision, but with hindsight it was probably the most interesting outcome…? That doesn’t make it an interesting song, tho, and without the context/contest there’s not a lot to this. Also the knowledge that there are bands like this pushing their RHCP styled rock in every corner of Europe makes me fear this is Not To Be Encouraged.

ELLE KING & MIRANDA LAMBERT – “Drunk”: I like the rhythm on this, the chorus is big and obnoxious enough to work, and I like that there’s no real ‘moral’ expected here. But I’ve also got to be honest and say, noisy drunks are the worst part of drinking, so kick them out.

Qualifier 14

AASIVA ft RIIT – “Piqatiikka”: This is really good, eerie electronica-pop from Nunavut, and I’m sad it didn’t pick up more support from the Bjork massive as you feel it would be right up their glacier.

KODO ft BABA PAMA & MC YALLAH – “Olympiaaku”: Veteran drum performance group Kodo team up with Ugandan rapper MC Yallah for a breakneck celebration of the Olympics. I’m a big fan of Yallah though I don’t think this is her best hook, but the blistering pace and use of live drums and traditional Japanese instruments make it one of the more unusual tracks this year and I’m glad it’s found a (small!) audience.

MABE FRATTI – “En Medio”: This one got plucked out of the bonus pool as soon as I read the words “experimental Guatemalan cellist” and to be honest I’m amazed it didn’t do better – it has Side-2-of-Low style atmospherics allied to a haunting shoegazey melody and (for me) stands out amongst some of the other slow/semi-instrumental tracks this year. But this is an all-killer qualifier I admit.

PAULI THE PSM – “I Got The Beat”: Softly spoken rapping and precise drumming, it’s hard to catch in words how idiosyncratic this track sounds to be honest – it should feel slight but it’s magical.

Qualifier 15

AYRA STARR – “Bloody Samaritan”: One of the great Afrobeats pop songs last year, an insistent but unshowy groove held together by a remarkable vocal from Starr and little licks of sax – Afrobeats is a style that expects a lot from its vocalists and it’s so rewarding when they deliver. Of all the tracks to exit in the qualifiers, “Bloody Samaritan” is the biggest shame.

CZARFACE & MF DOOM – “Jason And The Czargonauts”: As someone said in the poll comments, this is well above most posthumous releases, and it’s nice to be able to say goodbye to DOOM. I wish more hip-hop was progressing, though – DOOM was great but it seems like there’s a big blindspot when it comes to contemporary rap (as we’ll see in later groups). Anyway this will stand out more in Round 1.

GINGER ROOT – “Loretta”: Chintzy half-drunk lounge-pop (I think from Korea), actually pretty appealing, the kind of thing you can imagine being a beloved cult hit at an indie club. There’s a proper groove underneath it which saves it from disposability.

KEIINO – “MONUMENT”: There’s been a lot of Eurovision related stuff in this poll. Perhaps…too much? It’s all been pretty good though. This is very much in the modern E-Style – a collision of disparate elements (in this case dubstep beats, schlager, throat singing and keening string arrangement) where the point isn’t so much to be coherent as to provide a sequence of surprise “ah!” moments musically (and visually, on the night).

Qualifier 16

ASHLEY MONROE – “Siren”: Trace elements of country in the singing, but this has more in common with both the modern pop tracks in the poll and (more surprisingly) the post-punk. More in common with what I just described Eurovision as doing, for that matter. Odd, beguiling and very good.

BLACK DRESSES – “PEACESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!”: I have added an arbitrary number of exclamation marks, as seemed right. A squall of vomitous noise which reveals a kernel of really great pop hooks, which are themselves immediately swiped away and destabilised. “Can we make something beautiful with no hope?” Yes – what it can’t do is last.

DARREN CRISS – “Walk Of Shame”: McCartney-esque melancholy from someone I know nothing about (was he on TV?) – got a bit of a rough reception in the comments, not wholly deserved I think, as trad songs go this is a good one, you can imagine Bruno Mars enjoying himself with it.

DEYAH – “Shoreditch”: The beat is delightfully crisp, the arrangement is full of lovely touches, the delivery – I dunno, it’s very theatrical in ways I can feel sowing the seeds of deep irritation in later rounds. 

Qualifier 17

MDOU MOCTAR – “Afrique Victime”: Takes a little while to lift off but once it does, wham! The most unashamedly hard-rockin’ track to get poll support in a while (well, OK, since Guns N Roses last month). Galloping, elemental music.

SAULT – “Light’s In Your Hands”: Finalists in the 2020 poll, out in the qualifiers here – SAULT’s principled stand on an ephemeral streaming presence may have cost them, or it might be that this delicate slowie was too sleepy to have the energising effect they did last year.

SERPENTWITHFEET – “Same Size Shoe”: Speaking of delicate… this is a beautiful song, tender and funny (the trumpet section!) and sincerely loving. Too good for this world, or at least for this poll. 

THE WEATHER STATION – “Parking Lot”: Mac-esque sophistipop whose combination of grand arrangements and subtle vocals is really growing on me, though hasn’t quite broken through the barrier of pleasantness yet.

Qualifier 18

CARCASS – “Dance Of Ixtab (Psychopomp And Circumstance)”: I never really know what to say about metal! It also tends not to stick around long enough for me to either dig deeper or get bored of it. This has the various metal food groups – chunky riffs, growling, solos – all represented and as such I feel most satisfied.

NUBIYAN TWIST ft CHERISE – “Tittle Tattle”: If there’s an issue I have with the welcome uprising of UK jazz acts, it’s the pool of vocalists they work with – there’s a lot of very mannered neo-soul types out there, and Cherise on “Tittle Tattle” is one of them. I’d dig this much more as an instrumental, to be honest.

TOKISCHA, LA PERVERSA, YAILIN LA MAS VIRAL – “Yo No Me Voy Acostar”: I made a conscious effort to funnel more Latin stuff through this year, in the full knowledge that a lot of it would likely get kicked out right away. I’m not literate enough in the various Latin American dance and street styles to tell my dembow from my reggaeton from my brega funk, it all sounds basically reggaeton-based to me. But dry reggaeton beats with hard-ass lady rappers are very much my cup of tea.

ZAKES BANDWINI & KASANGO – “Osama”: This one came right out of leftfield for me – a mix of space disco and South African song, immediate and really uplifting in a way that reminded me a little bit of old 90s faves Trans-Global Underground. A glorious end to a strong day.

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2021: Son Of Poll! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2022/01/2021-son-of-poll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2022/01/2021-son-of-poll#comments Sat, 08 Jan 2022 22:18:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32917 Thanks to getting Covid (again!) I’ve made only slow progress on the poll track write-ups – in fact I only finished this selection after all the matches ended (oops). YouTube playlist here:

Here they are though! 

Day 2 – 5 Discoveries:

  • Anderson Neiff etc – “O Neiff Me Ligou”
  • Burial – “Dark Gethsemane”
  • Mon Laferte & Gloria Trevi – “La Mujer”
  • Shannon Lay – “Rare To Wake”
  • Young Dolph ft Key Glock – “Aspen”

Qualifier 7

BTS – “Butter”: One thing about being out of touch is understanding broadly why a sound is popular but not getting what the most popular examples are doing right. Why BTS precisely? Why Dry Cleaning? It’s not that there even is an answer, just that you’ve lost the skill to convincingly post-rationalise one.

GIRL IN RED – “Serotonin”: A song about the mechanics of depression which works better for avoiding metaphor and just being as blunt as possible, quite frankly.

HALSEY – “You Asked For This”: Good songwriting & catchy but I found all the shoegazey surges a bit mannered, maybe it feels like it misses the point of texture to suborn it to song like this? Not sure.

SUECO – Paralyzed: Nu metal pop which sounds unpleasantly like the times Busted tried to be serious. 

Qualifier 8

DAYFLOWER – “Sonic”: Proves my point about shoegaze, it shouldn’t be caged up in a pop song but free to roam in a loving recreation of its original habitat, viz. the Fulham Greyhound in 1988.

DOLOUR – “Pick Up The Phone”: Cheerful example of what used to be called ‘sunshine pop’, I originally pegged it as a mid 70s vibe but Jeff W wisely mentioned mid 90s Boo Radleys and I think that’s a better spot, has strong NME single of the week vibes. In a good way!

SERENGETI – “Our House Cover”: Simultaneously one of the most straightforward and weirdest nominations this year, Anticon associate and underground MC Serengeti doing an entirely straight cover of Madness’ “Our House”, so all-in enthusiastic in fact that it manages to reinvent the sound of Bus Stop ft Daz Sampson.

WYCH ELM – “Scold’s Bridle”: “I Sold My Soul To The Forces Of Darkness And All I Got Was This Old PJ Harvey Record” – a track that doesn’t seem to be delivering on anyone’s prior expectations of what a song called this by a band called this might be like but on its own terms this one’s growing on me. The Peel Rule stops me voting for it tho.

Qualifier 9

BURIAL – “Dark Gethsemane”: I generally found that a little of Burial’s ASMR for crate-diggers thing went a long way, so I was surprised and delighted by how much this 10 minute track made sense to me, particularly when it switches gears and just becomes about playing with one joyful vocal sample.

DRY CLEANING – “Strong Feelings”: My first time hearing this much hyped outfit – first play I was rolling my eyes, second play I think I got more of a handle on it, there’s an Alan Bennett like mildewed sadness which is more interesting than the brash approach some of these bands take.

KYLIE x DUA LIPA – “Real Groove (Initial Talk Remix)”: Points for the k-k-kylie bit, in fact if that was all there was I would be more into this. It’s lively and works in a historical recreation society sense.

TYLER THE CREATOR – “Sweet/I Thought You Wanted To Dance”: One of those long, languid prog-rap epics which I (rightly or wrongly) blame/credit Frank Ocean with. As is often the way with them I enjoy the parts as they’re happening without getting much coherent sense of a whole – that said this one dips into cod-reggae at the end which made me happy.

Qualifier 10!

ANDERSON NEIFF, MC TERROR et al – “O Neiff Me Ligou”: Loved this. The spacey, melancholy backing initially seems like a bit of flimsy decor but really it’s the discreet glue that holds together all the different directions the beat wants to go.

BACKXWASH ft AVA ROOK – “I Lie Here Buried With My Rings And My Dresses”: Rook’s burned-lung howling steals the show from Backxwash’s confrontational but ponderous rapping. 

BANKULLI ft NOT3S – “Foreign”: Smooth, lonesome Afrobeats with some typically diffident MCing. I like this (especially on headphones where the crisp production really comes over) but it’s not going to convert anyone who isn’t into the genre.

CHEEKFACE – “Crying Back”: Spot-on Malkmus imitator channeling the spirit of Weird Al or They Might Be Giants or (sez its nominator) Half Man Half Biscuit. As addictive or intolerable as you’d expect from that description.

Qualifier 11!

JPEGMAFIA – “HAZARD DUTY PAY!”: I’ve liked everything I’ve heard by JPEGMAFIA and this is no exception; messy, chaotic sound with urgent rapping – so I need to explore deeper even if his catalogue is big and daunting.

MON LAFERTE & GLORIA TREVI – “La Mujer”: Love this, a big unexpected slab of belting Spanish pop – no fancy stuff, just big woozy brass and lung-busting dismissals of (I assume) some feckless lover or rival.

PRIYA RAGU – “Chicken Lemon Rice”: My understanding is this was a big TikTok thing, but I’m not sure which bit they’d extract – there’s a ton going on, it’s a really busy, hook-stuffed dance-pop-rap record. Very tasty.

YOUNG DOLPH ft KEY GLOCK – “Aspen”: This track by the late Young Dolph took a few plays to resolve for me – the flow is fine but it obscured how nice those organ stabs and bar piano twinkles in the beat are. Really good, and sad that it landed in a very strong group.

Qualifier 12!

HANNAH PEEL – “Emergence In Nature”: I’ve not spent enough time with the Fir Wave LP – Peel is prolific, and tries lots of different things, and some of them take a while to latch onto. Heard on its own this semi-electronica piece works really well, though, bustling with life like a water droplet under a microscope.

JULIANNA HATFIELD – “Mouthful Of Blood”: One of several “are they still going?” reactions in the poll, but unlike some of the veteran tracks this year, “Mouthful Of Blood” earns its place – solid indie-rock about the discomfort of feeling silenced.

SHANNON LAY – “Rare To Wake”: Blissed-out Americana in a slightly Fleet Foxy vein, but with a mystical, earnest push to it which drives past the hokiness you might expect. Basically I don’t usually vibe with this kind of track but I was absolutely struck by this.

SONS OF KEMET ft MOOR MOTHER – “Pick Up Your Burning Cross”: No great leap forward for the Sons (& related acts), but there doesn’t need to me – there’s a lot of mileage in this itchy afro-jazz sound they’re working with, all these mazy thickets of percussion and horns springing up around the listener.

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2021: The Poll! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2022/01/2021-the-poll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2022/01/2021-the-poll#respond Tue, 04 Jan 2022 16:41:58 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32914 Here are my listening notes/capsule reviews on the first day of this year’s round-up poll. If you want to take part the polls are here and there’s a link to the Spotify playlist too.

5 Discoveries from Day 1:

  • Arooj Aftab – “Mohabbat”
  • NCT Dream – “Hello Future”
  • Noporn – “Geleia De Marango”
  • RXKNephew – “American Tterroristt”
  • Sorry – “Cigarette Packet”

Qualifier 1

Lil Nas X – “Montero”: Who is saying we should separate the music from the video/persona/marketing? Lil Nas X surely isn’t. If you insist on doing so, it’s flimsy but still audibly a hit.

Ashnikko ft Princess Nokia – “Slumber Party”: Sounds like it’s been mastered for super cheap speakers, or maybe it’s just that I’m listening to it on super cheap speakers. One way of working out what Lil Nas X does well is looking at someone who is doing kind of similar things visually and conceptually but ends up not as entertaining, and here she is.

City Girls – “Twerkulator”: Entertaining Planet Rock tribute about bums. A bit Benny Hill but probably the track I’d most rapidly play again in this group. I’m a creature of habit.

St Vincent – “Pay Your Way In Pain”: This is alright but dissolves in a snowstorm of Scary Monsters style pseudo-alienating production choices.

Qualifier 2

Buke & Gase / So Percussion – “Ancient Tool Gadget”: nice contrast w/ the St Vincent – lots of jagged (vaguely Frippish) percussive approaches but applied with a bit of self-discipline. Good stuff.

Emerald Hill – “Feliz Aniversario”: yearning Brazilian indie-rock. Not for me, though the casio percussion is REALLY reminding me of something (something by… THE FALL perhaps?)

Noporn – “Geleia De Morango”: Ahh, I like this a lot, spoken word over the melancholy sound of bygone raves. Almost certainly helps that I don’t understand the lyrics. The vague New Orderish vibes I was getting are 100% confirmed by a drum breakdown that’ll put the Shep in yr Pettibone.

The Brother Moves On – “You Think You Know Me”: venomously angry South African poetry/jazz/funk, compelling and uneasy – also one of the first tracks to channel fury at governmental/the West’s Covid response, though that’s only part of what’s going on here.

Qualifier 3

Azealia Banks – “Fuck Him All Night”: I love beats like this which have immense motive force despite seeming to do almost nothing. Banks on this evidence has become one of those Alex Chilton kind of figures where the scrappy chaos is the deal.

Low – “The Price You Pay (Is Starting To Wear Off)”: This is good, well-thought-through, interesting, all those faint-praisey words. It ‘sounds great’. The other track in the poll by them is better IIRC. 

Madlib – “Road Of The Lonely Ones”: Immediately very attractive to me, wispy doo-wop diffusion with rattling drum tattoos to ground the introspection.

United Kingdolls – “UK Hun?”: I have never watched Drag Race! (I’ve never watched anything). There’s a Keith Flinty cheekiness to the “gender bender/system offender” one. Still, you had to be there I think.

Qualifier 4

Illuminati Hotties – “Cheap Shoes”: One rule of thumb I’m applying this poll is that if I could imagine it being in a Festive Fifty I heard live, I’m not voting for it. That’s not to say those tracks are bad, but… *expansive shrug*.

Midwife – “Enemy”: Makes Low’s track sound like “Twerkulator” but I’m here for this one, because I don’t think I’ve heard anything else which gets the grey suffocation of illness so plainly. At the same time it’s somehow beautiful.

Pom Poko – “Cheater”: Math-twee!! Not exactly hard to trace the lineage here but loving the sudden lurches and tempo changes.

Real Lies – “Nicotine Patch”: World-weary 80s electro, pleasant but a bit exhausting.

Qualifier 5

Manic Street Preachers – “Still Snowing In Sapporo”: You know what they’re going to do in this song, they know what they’re going to do, they do it. They’ve reached the stage where they no longer make actually *bad* records, I guess. Manixologists might detect new tweaks in this where I cannot.

Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders – “Promises, Movement 1”: I have fallen asleep literally every time I have put this LP on, which has to be a win. Deserves the plaudits, great use of space, Sanders’ entrance is a lovely moment.

Sorry – “Cigarette Packet”: There’s a lot of this stuff about, eh? Enervated electro-rock with semi-spoken vocals, soundcloud post-punk. Not that I’m complaining here as this is great – the key to this is economy of effects, dropping the vocal distortion or extra instrument in at exactly the right moment to create that Zen Garden totality.

Tori Amos – “Addition Of Light Divided”: No mountains are going to be moved by this but it’s good, feels like the work of a mature artist in the way a certain other track in this group doesn’t.

Qualifier 6

Arooj Aftab – “Mohabbat”: First listen I’m afraid I filed this one as “a bit Mercury Prize” but wow, it’s gorgeous, would be a really intricate and lovely piece of music even if it didn’t have Aftab’s singing. Definitely got to do some further listening here.

NCT Dream – “Hello Future”: I don’t fully understand what’s going on here but I love the positive vibe with a hint of weird darkness, like a theme park where they keep pointing at the bits you’re not supposed to notice.

RXKNephew – “American Tterroristt”: Don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like this before*, a 9-minute rap which makes you feel like you’re trapped in an elevator with the rapper: relentless free association mixing conspiracy theory, boneheaded galaxy brain takes, terrific one-liners and toxic id-spew.

Zinoleesky – “Naira Marley”: Greater love hath no man than to write a mellow bop about his label boss. Better than fine, but slightly outclassed in the best group of the day.

*actually no, I have, Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” from the 2020 pop poll exists in the same weird region of ideaspace.

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The World Cup Of Four Letter Words* https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2021/08/the-world-cup-of-four-letter-words https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2021/08/the-world-cup-of-four-letter-words#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2021 13:40:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32811 *Four Letter Word Song Titles, that is.

As you all know I spend a lot of my pop time these days running elaborate Twitter tournaments.  These have a lot of matches and it can be tricky keeping track of what’s going on, so this is an experiment whereby I’ll link to all the polls that are running currently.

QUALIFYING ROUND:

YouTube playlist (now complete)

Qualifying Round Leaderboard (most votes)

  1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps” (353)
  2. Gary Numan – “Cars” (337)
  3. Gorillaz – “DARE” (328)
  4. The Commodores – “Easy” (248)
  5. The B-52s – “Roam” (237)
  6. Portishead – “Numb” (232)
  7. Radiohead – “Just” (231)
  8. Joni Mitchell – “Blue” (225)
  9. The Beatles – “Help” (218)
  10. The National – “Abel” (214) / The Kinks – “Lola” (214)

Results / Completed Matches

Artists in bold have definitely qualified for Round 1. (3rd place artists will go into a Repechage Round between the Qualifiers and R1)

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#16: Can’t you see I’m trying? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/16-cant-you-see-im-trying https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/16-cant-you-see-im-trying#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:46:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32602

The final bracket spotlights the great hopes of indie rock – at least as far as the NME was concerned – The Strokes. Googling magazine covers for the lead-in illustrations to the poll brought home a couple of points. The first is how quickly and heavily the NME went all-in for The Strokes. The second is how little else they had to talk about in the same breath – their natural tendency to roll a few acts up into a “scene” seems initially thwarted. That would change, fairly quickly, but it accounts for the way Detroit’s White Stripes, already on their 3rd LP, would be swept up and treated as a new band.

The Stripes contribute three tracks in this bracket; the Strokes two. This seems fair to me – the Stripes were a more distinctive and interesting group, even if their stuff (at this point) didn’t work as pop as well as The Strokes’ did. All of these five tracks should do fine – whether they’ll do better than fine is another matter – the Stripes’ best-known track from this era, “Fell In Love With A Girl”, didn’t pick up a nomination; The Strokes’ biggest hit (“Last Nite”) did, but I’m a little sceptical that people really love it that much.

After that, the bracket veers away from garage rock – there was plenty more out there, but not yet as celebrated – and takes in a range of other US altrock activity, from the shaggy good vibes of My Morning Jacket, through The Faint’s synth-punk, Radio 4’s dance-punk, and The Dismemberment Plan’s knotty, complex indie rock. Perennials Spoon, Guided By Voices, and ex-Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus show up too.

This bracket, outside the Strokes and Stripes, is where my Britishness weighs most heavily upon me, which might be why I put it off until last. I think some of this music is pretty good and some of it is pretty bad but I find it extremely hard to care which: I can only imagine people outside these scepter’d isles would feel the same about, say, Feeder. Hopefully in the heat and dust of competition some of these relative cyphers will come into their own for me. For now, this bracket feels like a two-horse race, and they aren’t even horses I particularly fancy the odds on.

POTENTIAL WINNER: I can see “Last Nite” racking up votes and eventually spectacularly collapsing when it meets one of the bigger favourites. But it’ll stick around a while, surely.

BEST TRACK: Ooof, this is hard, honestly almost none of these deserve it, even the ones I thought might – I love Spoon, for instance, but they still sound like a work in progress here. I’ll go for “I’m Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman Every Day”, the most idiosyncratic and fun of the three White Stripes pieces in the group.

DARK HORSE: Radio 4’s “Dance To The Underground” isn’t the greatest example of early 00s dance-punk, but it has a pulse, which might work in its favour for a couple of rounds.

DISCOVERY: OK, actually this is “Best Track” too – I’d never bothered to listen to Rilo Kiley because of their terrible name, and also probably (a la Bran Van 3000) I thought they were likely to be a guy named Rilo. Idiot me – this track is solid pop-rock with a good singer though, like almost everything in this set, I can barely remember anything about it.

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#15: Looks good, sounds good, looks good, feels good too https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/15-looks-good-sounds-good-looks-good-feels-good-too https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/15-looks-good-sounds-good-looks-good-feels-good-too#respond Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:41:02 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32600

It’s the electroclash bracket! Er… kind of. Maybe half the tracks here would have some claim on that hotly contested genre, but the vibe of this bracket is “what might have been played at a hipster club night?”. Did I go to hipster club nights in 2001? Ah, not really.

It’s a good opportunity to revisit electroclash, though – one of 2001’s claims to a ‘movement’ or a microgenre or something new. Not that “new” was the word that jumped to mind at the time – it felt like snooty kids doing amoral 80s cosplay. Time has been kind to it, though. Partly because 80s cosplay has barely gone away in the 20 years since. Partly because that criticism has things the wrong way round: for me the best electroclash is club music more than it is pop music, so it’s not early synthpop updated with new technology; it’s electro-house with song elements injected. (This is why the best way to hear Fischerspooner’s “Emerge”, as proved by repeated experiment, is in a club at +8).

But that’s just my electroclash. For a genre that’s supposedly so elitist, it was extremely welcoming of different interpretations. Ladytron, for instance, might or might not get past the door (they were on the “pink album” – the 2CD Futurism compilation – so for me they count) but they were far more wholeheartedly a synth-pop outfit than anyone else in this group. At the other end of things, Vitalic is a techno producer but is there a more brutal electroclash-flavoured monster than “You Prefer Cocaine?” There is not.

At the centre, though, were Fischerspooner, Felix Da Housekatt, Miss Kittin, who fit the template I outlined – electrohouse tracks with repetitive, decorative song structures worn like couture or a peacock’s tail. This is the stuff that really wouldn’t fit anywhere other than 2001, and to me that’s worth looking kindly on.

There is, though, a lot more in this group looking to elbow them out of the way. At the top end, riddling but addictive genre exercises from Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx. Gerling’s muscular “Dust Me Selecta”, from Australia. Le Tigre’s all-too-prescient howl of frustration, “Get Off The Internet”. Purer, but slamming, dips into house and drum’n’bass from Armand Van Helden and Dillinja. And two bits of Girls On Top’s bastard pop, one of which at least will be more familiar than its title suggests.

The problem with this bracket, as always with the club ones, is crossover – a lot of this stuff was either not known or not trusted at the time even by people into Gorillaz, Kylie, Missy. In the 1990s poll, the harder dance music got pushed aside quickly – that could well happen again. Or electroclash and its rarefied cousins might have populist legs after all. Whatever happens, this is definitely one of the brackets which feels most like 2001 to me.

POTENTIAL WINNER: Keep an eye on “Playgirl” – one of Ladytron’s best pop songs, which is likely to give it a big advantage against some of the less accessible material here and should stand it in good stead once the genre barriers come down.

BEST TRACK: In a bracket with a lot of tracks that go very hard, Vitalic’s “You Prefer Cocaine” goes really VERY hard.

DARK HORSE: Freelance Hellraiser was ruled out of this poll, so Girls On Top carry the ‘bastard pop’ torch. They get two goes at it, too, which might help – if people look past (or enjoy!)  “We Don’t Give A Damn….”’s familiarity from its future life as a Sugababes hit, it might do rather well.

DISCOVERY: This is another group where I was familiar with most of it – maybe I was going to some hipster nightclubs – but one thing I had completely lost touch with was drum’n’bass, so the steamroller beats of Dillinja’s “Valve Sound” was like a headbutt from an old friend. 

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#14: Es swingt dich in die Knie, denn der Riddim is Hardcore https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/14-es-swingt-dich-in-die-knie-denn-der-riddim-is-hardcore https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/14-es-swingt-dich-in-die-knie-denn-der-riddim-is-hardcore#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2020 21:30:30 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32596

For the fifth poll in a row – it’s become a tradition! – we have a bracket dedicated to non-English language pop. This started as simply a couple of groups in the People’s Pop Poll in May, but it’s grown as we’ve done the polls. In the 1990 poll there was almost enough for an entire bracket – in this one we had too many for one, and a certain amount of sleight of hand was needed to accommodate it all.

The foreign language groups are traditionally the least voted-on, which is probably inevitable but of course also a bit of a shame. I couldn’t imagine the polls without them – they’re a window on the world’s pop and an opportunity to judge music almost free of context.

I think this poll has overall our strongest crop yet, with some fantastic and strange tracks in, as well as a couple which are just plain baffling. As usual we have some J- and K-Pop in the mix, but there’s also African rap, Romanian folk, a couple of Brazilian tracks, our first Indonesian and Hebrew entries, and a LOT of stuff from Germany.

There’s not much point in trying to pretend I can rope this stuff together into a trend piece – one thing I will say is that it feels a bit more aligned with anglosphere pop than the equivalent brackets did in 1990. I’ll just list who we’ve got and what to expect. Wikipedia, aid me in my quest!

Berry Sakharof, the “Prince of Israeli rock” (IDK whether this is Prince as in royalty, Rogers Nelson, or both!) released the moody “Monsoon” as the single from his 2001 LP The Other.

Bonde do Tigrao play baile funk, a bass/hip-hop derived sound from the Rio favelas, later much admired by US producers like Diplo.

The upbeat dancefloor-ready “Vacaciones” is from Spaniard Carlos Berlanga’s 2001 comeback LP, sadly also his last before his death in 2002 from cancer.

Celine Dion is a French-Canadian megastar whose English-language work you probably know. She’s here duetting with fellow Quebecois singer Garou.

Die Prinzen are a German group originally formed by members of a cathedral choir. “Deutschland” is at the satirical end of their oeuvre.

Fanfare Ciocaria are – according to their record label – a “24-legged Balkan brass beast” playing ‘gypsy funk’ to delighted audiences across the globe.

Fettes Brot is a slang term for “good hash” – the Hamburg hip-hop veterans had a hit with the less classifiable “Scwule Madchen”.

Iveta Sangalo is a Brazilian pop star – “Festa” aka ‘Party’ was one of her first big national hits.

Indonesian musician Fahmi Shahab recorded his biggest – possibly only – hit “Kopi Dangdut” at least twice, but extensive research (by someone who actually knows what they’re doing) suggests this is the right version.

Lee Jung Hyun’s “Michyeo” aka “Going Crazy” isn’t on Spotify, but I wish it was as she is known as the Techno Queen Of Korea.

Mandoza (who died of cancer in 2016) was a South African kwaito artist, winner in 2001 of the Kora African Music award for the best performer in Southern Africa – his “50/50” makes use of a famous English-language pop hit.

Seeed are a German dancehall, hip-hop and reggae act known for their excellent stage shows. They crop up twice, with singles from their debut New Dubby Conquerors LP.

Soapkills are a cult Lebanese electro-indie band whose “Zizi” is one of two partially English-language tracks in the bracket.

Nigeria’s Tony Tetuila provides the other partly English-language track in the bracket with his hip-hop hit “My Car”.

Utada Hikaru was one of the biggest pop artists in Japan at this point – the pop-trance “Traveling” was an Oricon No.1.

POTENTIAL WINNER: It’s all about whether any of these can actually reach the final groups (which would be a first for something from one of these brackets). What has the best chance? A lot of these have potential – there’s surely something for everyone here – but Carlos Berlanga’s “Vacaciones” might be the most pop-friendly in sound.

BEST TRACK: I nominated Bonde Do Tigrao but was mightily tempted by “50/50” and glad someone chose it, since its irresistible propulsion and great throaty performance makes it the stronger track.

DARK HORSE: Can it still be a horse if it has 24 legs? Fanfare Ciocarla, the “Balkan brass beast”, are catchy and different enough to break out of these groups and perhaps go further.

DISCOVERY: All of them! Well, OK, I knew some of them already, nominated one, and was tempted by another two… so I’m going to pick Beirut’s Soapkills as the thing that’s most genuinely different from anything else I’ve heard. But there are four or five others which I could name too. It’s quite a bracket!

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#13: Hey, must be the money! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/13-hey-must-be-the-money https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/13-hey-must-be-the-money#respond Mon, 07 Sep 2020 21:26:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32594

This is the mainstream hip-hop bracket, with a chunky three tracks each from the critical King and Queen of the genre in 2001, Jay-Z and Missy Elliott, and appearances from a host of other royals – Nelly, fresh off months at #1 with his Country Grammar LP; snarlers Ludacris and Mystikal; Outkast and Wu-Tang. Debutants too – the Timbaland-produced Bubba Sparxxx and kinda-conscious rappers City High.

It’s a big-hitting bracket, and it’s interesting to compare it to the hip-hop we looked at in 1990. Hip-Hop then was by no means new, but its claim to mainstream acceptance and the US media networks around it were still quite fresh – Yo! MTV Raps and The Source were less than 2 years old, for instance. 11 years on, even if rap still wasn’t the highest-selling genre in the US, its position at the centre of popular music was strong: this bracket is a sound in its pomp, during the long CD boom, with MCs celebrating the platinum-plated lifestyle their music has bought them.

No-one celebrated better than Jay-Z, whose sound on The Blueprint is expansive and expensive – the Jackson 5, who provide the chassis of “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”, don’t come cheap. Jay-Z treats these top drawer beats in the manner born – his conversational, drawling flow is at its peak, with the same deceptively casual relationship to rhythm and arrangement as 50s Sinatra.

But Jay-Z is also an exception – most of the beats we meet here are built, not bought. The Blueprint throws producer Kanye West into pop’s mainstream, but for much of the year the productions people were listening for came from Timbaland and The Neptunes. The latter turn up here with an honestly magnificent beat – the jazzy, rubbery “Bouncin’ Back” for Mystikal – but Timbaland’s productions are the ones to watch in this bracket.

Two of them are for Missy Elliott – the two at the peak of their working partnership. (Missy’s third entry in this bracket is a Timbaland co-production). Never a tongue-twisting rapper, Missy’s main asset is her presence and her gift for a hook – though she also knows when to get out the way of one of her collaborator’s hooks, as on “Get Ur Freak On”, where her chorus is propping up the bhangra riff and her real work is dropping one-line phrase bombs throughout the verses. On the housey “4 My People” she takes charge of the beat, and on “One Minute Man” she gets to sing more, and play the straight woman to Ludacris’ wonderfully lubricious guest-verse. It’s a good set of choices that show her variety, though Timbaland’s other finest few minutes here aren’t Missy’s – Bubba Sparxxx’s “Ugly” is “Get Ur Freak On”’s speedfreak hillbilly cousin.

The pace of hip-hop meant it could react more rapidly than other genres to current events. Jay-Z’s The Blueprint was released on the day of the World Trade Center attacks. Within 2 months, OutKast had put out a track (“The Whole World”) referencing the mood and situation obliquely and Wu-Tang had released “Rules” which is… less oblique. The two groups had started at similar times, but where the Wu-Tang’s grimy New York sound had been epochal in the 90s, Outkast’s Atlanta scene had risen more slowly, and it was only in the few years prior to 2001 that it and they got world attention. That gradual regionalision of US rap is the other big story at work in this bracket.

POTENTIAL WINNER: The irrepressible “Get Ur Freak On” starts as at least joint-favourite with Kylie, and may even have the edge – it’ll be a case of which track retains its appeal most over repeated rounds.

BEST TRACK: “The flow of the century”, Jay-Z says at the start of “Izzo”, which is a bold claim to make 1 year in. But quite possibly defensible.

DARK HORSE: Bubba Sparxxx raps “Ugly” like it’s his one chance at any kind of happiness or success – there’s a desperate edge to his breakneck rapping which is memorable and very endearing.

DISCOVERY: Honestly I knew almost all of this – this is probably my personal peak engagement with contemporary hip-hop, plus it was crossing over to the UK charts as never before. But either I didn’t hear Jadakiss and Styles P’s “We Gonna Make It” or, er, I forgot it. It’s good! A slightly grittier, lower-budget take on the retro Blueprint sound with some strong rhymes. (But not as good as the famous stuff in this bracket.)

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#12: Every word seemed to date her https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/12-every-word-seemed-to-date-her https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/12-every-word-seemed-to-date-her#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2020 18:27:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32592

Roots and Americana don’t make up much of my musical diet – too fibrous – but I’m delighted we’ve got enough for an entire bracket of them here: it gives us something a bit different in the tournament mix. And it’s also reflective of a real 2001 trend which you couldn’t miss even if you didn’t like it – the steady swell of interest in Americana, country and other acoustic musics which had crested at the turn of the millennium, partly thanks to O Brother, Where Art Thou?…

…which, of course, heavily involved Gillian Welch, whose Time (The Revelator) LP dominates this bracket – the most tracks (the maximum 3 permitted), the longest track (“I Dream A Highway” might be the longest track we’ve EVER polled – it’s 10 seconds longer than “Rapper’s Delight”), and, though only POLL SCIENCE will determine the truth of this, quite possibly the best tracks. Though she’s rubbing shoulders in these groups with some extremely big names, it’s the austere vision of her songs and the deep, pooling held notes in her voice which set the markers and the pace here. Next to her, other arrangements seem overdone, other songs seem oversung, and occasionally both.

Otherwise it’s the veterans who hold my attention. Dolly Parton has two fine tracks from her back-to-basics Little Sparrow, reminding people that the rhinestones are a choice, not an essence. And two tracks from my own favourite album of 2001 at the time, Bob Dylan’s warm, loquacious Love And Theft, the record that makes the absolute best use of his cracked late-period honk of a voice (well, best aside from one we’ll get to in the December poll). For Welch, the past and its music are the bones under the skin of life. For Dolly, they’re a costume she knows how to wear better than anyone. For Dylan, they’re a medicine show, full of delights, bad jokes, and disreputable carnies who all turn out to be him.

The poll being what it is, there’s other stuff thrown in here too – I decided Manu Chao (the most streamed song in the bracket!) was too big and too rootsy for the Overseas selection, so in goes “Me Gustas Tu” to play a wild card role. Contemporary folk and modern country are represented by Alasdair Roberts and The Chicks. Mordant raconteur Jim White occupies a dark corner of the bracket, while Lucinda Williams brings the rock. As I said, these aren’t styles I spend much time with on the whole – but Uncut County is a fine place to visit for an hour.

POTENTIAL WINNER: It’s one of those brackets where nothing suggests “blockbuster” to me. Someone’s sure as hell listening to Manu Chao out there, though, and it would be neat to get a non-English song into the final groups for the first time.

BEST TRACK: “My heart’s not weary, it’s light and it’s free”: “Mississippi” is one of Love And Theft’s highlights, and also the one that’s the best summing-up of the LP as a whole – Dylan as a half-happy, half-rueful, somewhat-dirty old man walking through another set of self-created wreckage and tossing off one-liners as he goes.

DARK HORSE: Tempted to say “Highway” just because I’m fascinated by how far a track like that can go. But I’ll say Dolly Parton’s “Shine” – of her two songs in the group, it’s the catchier one and far less streamed, which puts it down in the softer half of the draw.

DISCOVERY: I admit, Gillian Welch’s stuff was entirely new to me – despite reading a few raves at the time which I should have paid more attention to. “Revelator” in particular was an instantly brilliant song even if I can’t work out yet what’s going on in it… but that’s often part of the appeal, isn’t it?  

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#11: Leave your situations at the door https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/11-leave-your-situations-at-the-door https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/11-leave-your-situations-at-the-door#respond Sun, 06 Sep 2020 18:05:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32590

This bracket shares very porous boundaries with Bracket 5 – the pop/R&B one – since R&B was a driving creative force in 2001 and we easily had enough nominations to spill over brackets. In this group the emphasis is a little more on the singers: Mary J Blige, Aaliyah, and India.Arie get two songs each, there’s neo-soul from Sunshine Anderson and Angie Stone, veteran soul from Sade, and sitting atop it all, in popularity terms at least, Alicia Keys megaballad “Fallin’”.

At the time – as a British guy coming to all this stuff via the Internet – my reaction to it was grossly ahistorical. In my mind, 90s R&B had been Boring, but 00s R&B was now Exciting, because of a surge of Innovation. This is how I’d been taught – by long years reading the UK music press – that music scenes and music progress worked, and with the blithe idiocy of the late-20something know-it-all I decided my experience of R&B was an acceptable stand-in for the whole.

Not so. Yes, there was a grain of truth – something like Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” from ‘98 really does have the shock of the new to it – but I was missing a hell of a lot. For a start, the story of R&B in the 90s was one of continuous innovation, as the music was in constant dialogue with hip-hop, feeding from and back into it – the fact that all this flowered into extraordinary pop on the UK charts from ‘99 on was one chapter in a longer and deeper story.

But also, the application of rock’s “How innovative is this music?” framework – a question with its own very specific historic roots – misses the extent to which 00s R&B is building, not breaking. It’s putting its own spin on a century-long history of black popular vocal music, one I really wasn’t an expert in and one where performance and interpretation and technique shared focus with innovation.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that at the time I only really liked the bangers in this group. I loved the sharp-edged putdowns of Mya’s “Case Of The Ex” but the wounded disappointment in Angie Stone’s “Wish I Didn’t Miss You” passed me by. I loved Aaliyah, but the acid-flecked bounce of 2000’s “Try Again”, not her tender sex jam “Rock The Boat”. I enjoyed the vengeful spending spree of Blu Cantrell but found India.Arie’s “Video” rather didactic (still do, probably)

And I guess the stuff I love most in this very strong bracket is still the parts where the futurist R&B aesthetic and powerhouse soul performances blend most easily, like Aaliyah’s “More Than A Woman” and Mary J Blige’s anthemic “Family Affair”, whose martial stomp and call for unity feel like one of the tracks where everything 2001 got right comes together.

POTENTIAL WINNER: Assuming voters can get the Mary J Blige tracks with the choruses about “no more drama” straight, “Family Affair” could and should go very deep into this. I’ll be disappointed if something from this bracket doesn’t reach the last eight, and this might be the one.

BEST TRACK: “More Than A Woman” gets a little overlooked compared to Timbaland’s other work for Aaliyah, because it’s so joyfully maximal it can be overwhelming. But the combination of Tim going all-out for a wall of sound and Aaliyah in total smooth control over the top is unbeatable.

DARK HORSE: Mya’s “Case Of The Ex” feels a little like a holdover from the angry-R&B wave of ‘99 – it could have fit on Destiny’s Child’s Writing’s On The Wall. But that’s not at all a bad thing, and Mya’s track is hard and catchy enough to pick up support.

DISCOVERY: Angie Stone’s “Wish I Didn’t Miss You” flew by me at the time but has sunk its hooks in now – a great use of an O’Jay’s sample, naggingly never resolving, giving Stone the canvas for her regret and longing.

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#10: A secret code carved https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/10-a-secret-code-carved https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/10-a-secret-code-carved#respond Sat, 05 Sep 2020 18:23:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32588

Inevitably when you’re sorting out 64 tracks marked as indie, you’re going to find some which don’t really fit anywhere else. That’s this bracket, a buffet of leftovers with maybe an arthouse and experimental thread running through the core of it. But not entirely – there’s also tracks here which are more indiepop than anything in the indiepop bracket (Saloon’s pretty “Free Fall”) and more proto-landfill than anything in the radio-friendly one (I won’t name names).

Given the variety of approaches it’s hardly surprising this is the bracket where I have the widest reactions – I find the appeal of a band like Cake, who sound like a very poor man’s Devo, absolutely baffling but love the fragmented yelpings of Life Without Buildings. But there will be listeners who feel quite the opposite – and maybe plenty of them, given how massively “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” outstreams the rest of the bracket.

This grouping is a strange mix of fringe characters and veterans. Electro-sleazeball Chilly Gonzales, unlucky acoustic outfit I Am Kloot, and indietronica critical faves The Microphones find a home here. But so does Carter USM’s Jim Bob (as Jim’s Super Stereoworld), Rufus Wainwright, and a Garbage who sound way livelier than I remember them being by this point. You can imagine almost all of it repelling or seducing, which will make for some fascinating minor groups.

It’s hard to draw any conclusions about trends, or the year, from this motley. Two acts stand above the rest, though, in fame and reputation. Bjork and Mercury Rev both have two songs here – Bjork’s from her “domestic” Vespertine LP, Mercury Rev’s from their post-breakthrough All Is Dream. Bjork has a strong track record in the polls though I wonder if the Vespertine material is too hushed to get her usual momentum going. Mercury Rev are new with this tournament – by this point in their career, though, they’re well into their burnout Disney music phase, and it’ll be intriguing to see how well their sound is received now.

POTENTIAL WINNER: It’s hard to know whether any of this stuff can reach the final groups, and a lot will depend on how fondly Cake are remembered – something I can make no judgement on! I feel Mercury Rev’s “The Dark Is Rising” has a shot at doing well – it’s grand and sad and has one of the bracket’s prettiest tunes.

BEST TRACK: In the right mood, Life Without Buildings were electric, every line reading suggesting some new hook or idea. In the wrong mood, they’re like the poetry slam from hell. So far when listening to “PS Exclusive” I’ve been in the right mood every time.

DARK HORSE: Rufus Wainwright is one of a few acts here I don’t really ‘get’, but he has a fanbase, he’s in a relatively soft bracket, and with “One Man Guy” he’s singing a song by his Dad, which seems to rein in the more ornate parts of his approach. Could do well.

DISCOVERY: Garbage were such a quintessential 90s band some part of me imagined they’d turned into white mice and pumpkins when the clock struck 12 on Millennium Eve. Not so, of course – “Androgyny” was a hit even if I’d never heard it, and it’s comfortably the best pop experience in these groups.

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#9: Sunshine in a bag https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/9-sunshine-in-a-bag https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/9-sunshine-in-a-bag#respond Sat, 05 Sep 2020 18:18:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32586

I’m not totally sure this bracket ‘works’, in that it’s likely to feel unfair to one or both of the two streams of music I’ve pushed together here. There’s the more big-room, commercial end of dance music, like Superman Lovers’ “Starlight” and Safri Duo’s “Played A-Live (The Bongo Song)”, but there’s also alternative music darlings making club or hip-hop or sampladelic music, like Gorillaz and The Avalanches. And sitting between both worlds, there’s Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx at the poppier end of their 2001 work. Mix in a few hits overflowing from other categories and you have our bracket.

The risk is that the name recognition value of the critic-friendly acts will obliterate the floor-filler factor of the big dance hits. A shame if so – I’m agnostic about the “Bongo Song”, which nobody could accuse of deceiving its audience, but “Starlight” and DB Boulevard’s “Point Of View” are respectively euphoric and hesitant highlights of the year’s pop in any genre.

Whereas Gorillaz…. there’s a cruel take on Damon Albarn which reduces him to a Gillespie-style magpie imitator, forever yearning to make music that’s as cool as the music he’s listening to. I think it’s impossible to deny that tendency, but it’s also impossible to ignore the actual talent he has at trying to adapt that music to his own ideas (and his melodic abilities). He’s a risk-taker, happy for his reach to exceed his grasp. 

He’s also canny enough to give himself cover by getting people involved who know what they’re doing. So “Clint Eastwood” casts him as the hook singer in a Del The Funkee Homosapien track, a job he’s awful at, but Del is at least quite good at his.

I’m spending so long on Gorillaz because I can’t stand them and at the same time I’m aware they’re one of the biggest and most discussed things of 2001 and are likely to eat up a lot of the airtime around the poll. Do people love that they tried so many different things? Do people hate that they did them all badly? (Sorry ‘rillaz and ‘rillettes) We’ll find out. There’s something ultra 2001 about their very in-yer-face eclecticism, but also it’s a year in which they’re facing off against a lot of artists who are great because they’re focused hedgehogs, not adaptive foxes.

Avalanches, Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk are definitely at the vulpine end of things, which should tilt this bracket foxwards, at least. “Romeo” is the most straightforward thing on Basement Jaxx’s messy and delightful Rooty, “Digital Love” one of the least straightforward on Daft Punk’s sublime and puzzling Discovery, but both are terrific, and “Since I Left You” is the Avalanches’ airiest, finest moment too.

POTENTIAL WINNER: It might be wishful thinking, but I don’t think the unremixed Gorillaz tracks have the horsepower to go all the way – “Since I Left You” might get near, though.

BEST TRACK: “Digital Love” is a salad of ingredients – twee French droidvox, keytar solos, canned fanfares, disco-house – which somehow ends up one of the most blissfully romantic songs ever made. It’s this poll’s equivalent to the 1990 tournament’s “Being Boring” – a song with fanatically loyal fans which will draw “WTF?” reactions from some.

DARK HORSE: DB Boulevard’s “Point Of View” is a gorgeous house slice-of-life whose relatively low streams get it a draw where its quality might have a chance to tell.

DISCOVERY: The only track I didn’t know here was Bran Van 3000’s “Astounded”, which I think I was put off by a) the sleeve, which looks like a self-published BDSM novella, and b) me, er, assuming it was one dude called Bran. Anyway, it isn’t, it’s a candyfloss dancepop tune which trumps everyone else’s guest stars by getting the final collaboration from a dying Curtis Mayfield.  

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#8: It’s got leather seats, it’s got a CD player https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/8-its-got-leather-seats-its-got-a-cd-player https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/8-its-got-leather-seats-its-got-a-cd-player#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2020 20:07:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32584

We’ve already had a look at the scrappy, self-sufficient, grass-roots corner of indie. Of course that’s only part of the story. There’s also the parts of what used to be “indie” that were happening in, more or less, the mainstream. But that didn’t mean what it had even a few years before.

British guitar rock and pop had been at the centre of Radio 1’s makeover in the early 90s; that in turn had fed back into the Britpop phenomenon, which had given Oasis the platform they needed to become the country’s biggest band and inspire many, many others. Factor in the surge of interest in festivals, the Blair-era expansion of higher education, the continued interest of previous generations of indie fans in guitar rock, and a whole new media sector in the form of lads’ monthlies and weeklies, and you had an entire ecosystem which required a steady flow of band-shaped content.

Now while it’s never been the case that the demand for British guitar bands has exceeded the supply (which is endless), meeting that demand has sometimes meant a certain amount of compromise vis-a-vis quality. The nominators, in their mercy and wisdom, have spared us the dregs of early-00s British guitar rock – no Travis, no Starsailor, no JJ72 or “New Acoustic”. 

What we have in this bracket is more interesting and generally better – a bunch of Britpop-era survivors and former hypes trying to adjust to life in a post-indie world, where they weren’t providing an alternative, more servicing a demographic niche.

The newer and younger bands adapted with the best grace. Feeder’s “Buck Rogers” is a guilt-free pop-punk winner, the type of thing Ash were meant to be making (instead they’re a kind of British Foo Fighters, which has its own appeal I guess). British Sea Power, just starting out, don’t have the sonic oddness their eccentric set dressing promised, but they do a solid Chameleons impression. 

Some of the bands here are just getting on with what they’d always done – New Order, the Divine Comedy, and I suppose Pulp, though the dying embers of Pulp are more interesting than most bands’ prime. What’s more intriguing to me is the way in which some of the groups are messing around again with rhythm, maybe following in the footsteps of Radiohead (who crop up here with a savage live version of 2000’s “Idiotheque”).

Obviously the most commercially successful of them was Damon Albarn, whose Gorillaz project has mostly been shunted into the next bracket. But there’s also the wayward Ian Brown and his very odd trip-hoppy “F.E.A.R.”, The Charlatans doing an odd, scratchy take on funk-rock, Super Furry Animals’ shimmery ersatz disco, and best of all, The Beta Band getting a UK garage producer to screw and chop the beats of their folk-rock while leaving its hippie soul intact.

It’s not exactly a movement, more a bunch of creative musicians trying to do something interesting in a world that’s getting more rigid for them. It couldn’t last – we’re a couple of years from Britpop II: The Landfill Years. But it’s more intriguing than I thought it would be.

POTENTIAL WINNER: There will come a point where people of good conscience won’t be able to vote for “Buck Rogers” and its dumb, shiny mosh-a-long hooks. But I think that point might be really far into the competition. This poll’s EMF?

BEST TRACK: It could be doomed but The Beta Band’s “Eclipse” might be the best thing they ever did, a rambling campfire parable which keeps finding new hooks and odd directions, building to the tour-de-force last minute.

DARK HORSE: Pulp’s “Wickerman” is probably too far out/up itself for contention but their migrant anthem “Weeds” is darkly catchy and horribly relevant and could go a distance.

DISCOVERY: I dimly remember it from the time, so this is a bit of a cheat, but Ian Brown’s “F.E.A.R.” was at least a strange and entertaining rediscovery, a frazzled oulipo pop record that’s pointless and somehow epic at the same time.

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#7: Come sun come rain come hailstone pelt https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/7-come-sun-come-rain-come-hailstone-pelt https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/7-come-sun-come-rain-come-hailstone-pelt#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2020 20:04:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32582

This is one of those brackets where I’ve pushed a few disparate things together. It’s a rap bracket, clearly, and rap that’s on the margins of pop (with a couple of big exceptions). But there are two distinct reasons why it’s on the margins. It’s split between underground hip-hop, which existed in a sometimes critical self-exile, alienated from rap’s glittering new mainstream, and British MCs, on the geographic margins of rap’s development.

And then the British MCs are themselves split between rappers trying to make hip-hop with a British accent and sensibility (like Roots Manuva), and MCs coming out of garage who are trying to push their genre forward.

It can be hard to look at this stuff without the benefit of hindsight. Maybe it’s not worth bothering. We know what happened next in these stories. When we reach the mainstream hip-hop bracket you can judge for yourselves how much, and how successful an alternative the underground stuff was – for me, despite the angry preaching of KRS-One on “Get Your Self Up”, it works best taken on its own terms without any implied contrast. The Coup’s corny but lovable parental advice, and Cannibal Ox’s fearsomely angular sci-fi bleakness are dispatches from their own realities, not part of any imposed conflict.

As for the Brits, the proto-grime of More Fire, So Solid and Sticky feels more interesting to me than Ty or Roots Manuva not just because it has more energy but because it has a future just around the corner from 2001. But on the other hand that’s completely unfair. In 2001 it wasn’t obvious at all what might happen next. UK hip-hop felt energised and fertile – helped by the fact I had a friend making me many compilations of the best cuts – and Manuva’s overground success with “Witness” looked like it would open the door to others. 

Meanwhile, partly despite, partly because of the rise of So Solid Crew, garage was losing the backing of the record industry: acts who’d been pressured into “going garage” were now being kept at arm’s length by a business which was fundamentally nervous of young black British talent and audiences.

Some of the music is still divisive – “21 Seconds” might have become an accepted classic, but the raw bragging of Oxide And Neutrino’s “Up Middle Finger” may not win so many friends. I love the angry inventiveness of the garage crews though, and the way they brought Jamaican style toasting and clashes back to the UK scene. (Which is one reason I rounded the bracket off with Wayne Marshall’s dancehall track and DJ Scud’s apocalyptic “No Love”) 

POTENTIAL WINNER: “Witness (1 Hope)” put a solid run together in the People’s Pop Poll and it’s still one of the warmest and most likeable things in this bracket. If it gets through and gets a lucky draw… who knows?

BEST TRACK: Lethal Bizzle’s jumping-bean energy makes More Fire Crew’s “Oi” a firecracker of a record. He’s had a variable career, to say the least, but on form he’s one of the best MCs Britain has ever produced.

DARK HORSE: Cannibal Ox were the beneficiaries of vast hype at the time and for me “Iron Galaxy” hasn’t aged that well… but it’s still striking and coherent in its vision and could be a rallying point in this bracket for those less keen on the grimey types.

DISCOVERY: I haven’t checked out all the YouTube-only tracks (this bracket has more than most) but I did enjoy The Coup’s rap addressed to a young daughter – a Marxist hip-hop “Kooks”, what’s not to like?!

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#6: I’ll be the one to tuck you in at night https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/6-ill-be-the-one-to-tuck-you-in-at-night https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/6-ill-be-the-one-to-tuck-you-in-at-night#respond Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:48:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32580

In the 1990 poll we had a bracket for – to put it delicately – veteran rockers, acts like Fleetwood Mac and Van Morrison who were feeling their way into a fourth decade in the biz. The bracket returns for the 2001 poll, but its terms of engagement have shifted. For one thing the cast has changed (well, aside from Nick Lowe, back for the third poll in a row!) – people like Joe Strummer, REM and Depeche Mode fit into it alongside Elton and Macca. And where last time I had to throw our handful of country songs in, the 2001 poll has enough for a whole Roots bracket.

But there’s a subtler shift in play too. The rock class of 1990 were still a big deal, still the unit-shifting heart of the industry – albums like Behind The Mask and Rhythm Of The Saints were releases their labels cleared the decks for. A decade on, the grand old men (and women) of rock are more of a niche concern, selling CDs to that famous strawperson, “50 quid man”, but no longer priority artists. And they know it, and they’re relaxed about it, crafting music which lets them stretch out if they want to, sometimes addressing ageing head on.

The self-lacerating Elton John of “I Want Love”, for instance, is massively preferable to the AOR hit beast of “Sacrifice” and “Circle Of Life”. Rueful Nick Lowe beats smart-alec Nick Lowe. McCartney and Cohen, a decade or so deeper into the ageing process, keep on doing what they’ve been doing well for a while. Mary Margaret O’Hara emerges discreetly from seclusion with the lovely “Dream I Had (II)”. Strummer goes wider and wilder than he could when the spotlight was fully on him, telling sharp stories of life at the global margins.

Not everyone does so well with their late career moves – REM have more interesting late work than “Imitation Of Life”; I tend to assume Depeche Mode’s flame sputtered out in 1993 or so and “Dream” doesn’t change my mind. The newer, younger acts make for grim listening too. The bracket is rounded out with interesting choices pulled free of their usual context (a sitcom theme and a musical number). On the whole though, it’s a good, sympathetic showing for a part of 2001 which tends to get lost in the tumult.

POTENTIAL WINNER: OK, let’s not go overboard. It’s not going to win, and it’s not even that great, but “Imitation Of Life” is a band people like making a solid stab at recreating past glories: that and name recognition give REM a fighting chance at the final groups.

BEST SONG: “I Want Love” is one of the great mid-life crisis tracks, a lyric which sounds like Bernie Taupin doing Nick Cave set to a whomping Elton piano ballad.

DARK HORSE: Suzanne Vega had a great run in the Debut Singles poll, and “I’ll Never Be Your Maggie May” is just as good as “Marlene On The Wall”, with a gorgeous arrangement and a biting, disappointed lyric. If people give it a go, it could do well.

DISCOVERY: Tempted here by a Mary Margaret O’Hara vignette I never knew existed, but for the sheer gap between expectations and what I got I have to pick Joe Strummer And The Mescalero’s “Shaktar Donetsk”, a scrabbly folk song haunted by radio noise and voices from society’s cracks – its closest cousins in the poll are Pulp’s “Weeds” and “Wickerman”.

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#5: Thought I wouldn’t sell without you, sold 9 million https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/09/5-thought-i-wouldnt-sell-without-you-sold-9-million https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/09/5-thought-i-wouldnt-sell-without-you-sold-9-million#respond Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:44:41 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32578

The music that excited me living through 2001 is spread across 4 or 5 of the brackets. This one has some of it – the bits where R&B was going pop, and pop was going R&B, with a sprinkling of other things which seemed to fit better here than somewhere else.

But “R&B” here doesn’t always mean R&B – the cross-pollination agent could be ragga (Beenie Man’s Neptunes-produced “Girls Dem Suga”); it could be UK garage (Mis-Teeq’s bumping “All I Want”). It could even be rock – Britney’s determined plunge into raunchy R&B is mirrored elsewhere in the bracket by P!nk clawing her way out of the category and into a skin she feels more comfortable with. And even the Neptunes, fresh from creating the beats that allowed Britney her escape route from teenpop, decided they want to step into political funk with “Lapdance”.

So maybe it’s a kind of restlessness that defines this category, an ambitious itchiness with the safe categories that pop – only a couple of years before – had seemed settled into. That restlessness expressed itself through career moves – most of them canny, with hindsight – but also through production. It felt like a race was on to make pop records sound new and unlikely, skittery colonies of beat-machines let loose to scavenge, explore and mutate.

And while those deeply into the music knew other names too, the discourse around this future-pop was dominated by two beatmakers – the Neptunes and Timbaland. My polling whims have kept them apart: Timbaland we’ll meet in other brackets (though there’s a great slice of fake-Tim production here with Dream’s “He Loves U Not”), the Neptunes star in this one. They’d come out of hip-hop, and kept making beats for rappers – while NERD and Beenie Man were in shops they were making the brutally minimal “Grindin’” for The Clipse, released in ‘02. But 2001 also saw them revelling in the opportunities pop offered them to make over megastars with their pinballs-and-laser-guns sound palette.

The Neptunes’ pop innovation leads the way in the bracket, but it’s also quite possible to imagine none of their stuff qualifying, so strong is the rest of the field. It has Destiny’s Child at the peak of their Imperial phase, P!nk remaking herself, and charmingly carnal hits from Janet Jackson and Shakira, neither of whom care much for trends, both of whom are making superb pop. Everyone will have their favourites here and tracks they feel are woefully overrated (I’ll keep schtum about mine), but overall this is going to be one of the most painful and highly contested sets of tracks in the poll.

POTENTIAL WINNER: How ready are voters for this jelly? I’d expect at least one track from this bracket to make the last 8 – and “Bootylicious” might be the one.

BEST TRACK: “Neptunes make number one tune!” Beenie Man and Mya’s “Girls Dem Sugar” is one of the most joyful tracks in the poll, and a marvellous mix of sounds and voices, with The Neptunes deploying one of their bounciest beats.

DARK HORSE: Janet Jackson shone in the 1990 poll, and “All For You” is one of her biggest (and catchiest) UK hits. She’s in a fiendish starting bracket, but I think she’ll get through.

DISCOVERY: I knew all but one of the tracks here, and I didn’t like that one much. So I’ll pick Nikka Costa’s “Like A Feather”, at the rootsiest end of this bracket, because of course I knew the song but never the artist or title.

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#4: I cry when angels deserve to die https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/4-i-cry-when-angels-deserve-to-die https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/4-i-cry-when-angels-deserve-to-die#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 16:43:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32575

One of the phenomena of the 1990 poll was that we managed to get an entire bracket out of baggy – the pie-eyed marriage of British indie and dance music. We haven’t managed to get an entire bracket of 2001’s great hybrid, nu-metal’s splicing of rock and rap. But we’ve got some, and I’ve put it together with pop-punk, just-plain-punk, the remnants of hard rock and whatever the hell Muse imagined they were doing.

And this is my first big surprise of the poll – this is a really good bracket! It probably helps that I don’t think the selectorate includes that many committed rockers, so people are picking the big popular numbers here and also drawing some lines (there’s a case that Limp Bizkit SHOULD be in the poll, but they aren’t).

The problems with nu-metal (and pop-punk, to some degree) haven’t exactly gone away. For instance, there are a few brackets in this poll which are very heavily gender-skewed – in some of them my preconceptions are partly to blame but not here, I think. This is an exaggeratedly, inescapably masculine set of tracks – men howling, men raging, men swaggering. But also men thinking stuff through, trying to raise people up, showing vulnerabilities (and covering them up). As a 28-year-old man all I heard in it was a pit of sweat and angst whose indie alternative I was trying to climb out of. As a 47-year-old man I’m struck by the variety here, the heart, and the occasional sweetness.

And the hooks! Linkin Park, Jimmy Eat World, Andrew WK, Sum 41, even Rammstein have killer hooks. (Alien Ant Farm too, though theirs are borrowed). Almost nothing is too sludgy or slow or using aggression as a cover for weak popcraft, which is probably why this is the most streamed (on average) bracket. This is a moment of peak catchiness for Kerrang! type music – you’d have to go back before grunge, I reckon, to pull a hard rock bracket together that can compete this well on pop terms.

That doesn’t mean it’ll get a positive response, of course. Warrant and Guns N Roses had hooks in the 1990 poll and were chased out of town in short order. Aerosmith’s gorgeous “Jaded” might meet a similar fate. So might Linkin Park’s cataract of rap-rock misery, “In The End”, or System Of A Down’s winking, tongue-twisting “Chop Suey!”.

Two acts appear twice, both preaching a gospel of positivity amidst the angst. Andrew WK I knew and loved at the time, and I’m interested to see if his turbo-pop-metal holds up to wider scrutiny: the concern back then from those who minded about such things was that it was all a put-on, though WK has very much committed to the bit ever since. Entirely new to me, and rather likeable, are positive punks Bouncing Souls, who most definitely do mean it and want to bring their audience up with them. One of the nice discoveries in a bracket surprisingly full of them for me.

POTENTIAL WINNER: It means not much to me, but I’d guess there’s enough affection – and good memories – around Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” for it to put on a strong showing.

BEST TRACK: It has competition, but the euphoria bullet that is WK’s “Party Hard” is a hardened favourite.

DARK HORSE: It seems weird to describe the most streamed track in the ENTIRE POLL as a dark horse, but Linkin Park’s “In The End” will have work to do with this audience to escape a disdain for nu-metal. I think it has the hooks to do so and push further into the competition.

DISCOVERY: It sticks out in the bracket as a relic of a former age, but Aerosmith’s “Jaded” is a great, rueful old-man’s song amidst a lot of young men beating their chests – it’s a sort-of cousin of the Elton, Dylan and Jarvis Cocker tracks elsewhere in the poll, but with maybe a better tune than any of them.

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#3: When you’re lost I know how to change your mood https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/3-when-youre-lost-i-know-how-to-change-your-mood https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/3-when-youre-lost-i-know-how-to-change-your-mood#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 16:36:09 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32573

This bracket is heavily informed by two European developments in the late 90s. The first was the release of Air’s Moon Safari in 1998, which pushed chillout music into the spotlight and (because dinner parties last more than 45 minutes) created a mini-boom among acts looking to follow-it – as well as creating a major headache for Air themselves.

They crop up here with the Beck-guest-spot “The Vagabond”, not in fact the most idiosyncratic thing on their Difficult Second Album 10,000Hz Legend. (It’s aged rather well.) The more song-orientated Zero 7 and the slightly trackier Royksopp are also here – sleepy-lidded, melancholic pop, thoughtful and sometimes a little dull. 

The second big development was happening in Cologne, with increased attention to the Kompakt label and its discreetly gorgeous, detail-rich house productions, which had picked up Anglophone attention under the nom-de-genre ‘microhouse’. Kompakt was the latest in a line of underground German electronic labels – after Berlin’s Basic Channel and Frankfurt’s Mille Plateaux – who were keeping things minimal, specialising in productions which seemed barren or baffling until your ears accustomed to the changes, sounds and shifts hidden in the unfolding track. 

There are three German productions in the bracket – from Jurgen Paape, Corsten Just and the mysterious Phantom/Ghost – but the ethos extends to work from NYC’s minimal disco duo Metro Area, with Matthew Herbert’s found-sound house music also a kindred spirit.

In the schema of the poll, with groups partly structured by streams, you might expect the post-Air chillout pop to land in the more ‘popular’ groups and the trackier German music in the less-streamed ones. But this is only partly the case. For one thing the boundary between the two isn’t as firm as all that – check out the microhouse-y clicks and miniature crunches on Royksopp’s “Remind Me”, or consider how the loveliest song in the whole bracket comes from Kompakt’s Jurgen Paape. For another, some of the tracky stuff became justified classics.

And in any case there are a whole bunch of songs here which don’t easily fit either of the bracket’s two main currents. The most streamed track in the entire group is a 2-minute piano fragment from the Aphex Twin’s Drukqs double-LP. There’s an ambient track by Stars Of The Lid, “Requiem For Dead Mothers”, which hovers in a changing same as effectively as a minimal techno track. Cameos too from Stereolab, dab hands at pop hauntology, with the epic “Suggestion Diabolique”; from Squarepusher’s mutant drum’n’bass; from Osymyso’s hypnogogic bastard pop experiment “Intro-Inspection”, and many more. What looks like one of the most forbidding brackets is also one of the most attractive when you dive in.

POTENTIAL WINNER: It’s vastly unlikely that anything here will have a podium finish but Aphex’s “Avril 14th” is short and pretty and well known enough to put up a strong fight.

BEST TRACK: Jurgen Paape’s “So Weit We Noch Nie” is one of the most entrancing things in the whole poll – it became a little better known in a 2002 reworking but this original should make a lot of friends.

DARK HORSE: Paape would probably be my pick here too, but name recognition and their track’s ambition could see Stereolab put a run together.

DISCOVERY: Herbert’s clicky, noir-ish “It’s Only” is a great find from an act I had – wrongly – written off as not-for-me years ago.

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#2: My head’s to the wall and I’m lonely https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/2-my-heads-to-the-wall-and-im-lonely https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/2-my-heads-to-the-wall-and-im-lonely#respond Tue, 01 Sep 2020 16:30:09 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32571

A bracket dominated by indiepop – some established at this point, some emergent, some doing things a little differently. There was a lot of this stuff about in 2001; it found a natural home on internet mailing lists and proto-blogs, and if the bigger music press names kept it at arms length, plenty of new websites were cropping up to celebrate it.

I’ve mixed the big names and tracks with stuff I didn’t recognise by sight. In some cases this has meant a blurring of genre lines – for instance, Weeping Willows’ “Touch Me” has the self-obsession and airy post-Morrissey vocals that fit the bracket, but its more muscular guitar chug feels like it could be from a few years later, mixing it up with the Kaisers and the Killers.

I knew and liked people who loved this stuff, but its folkways by this point were mostly closed to me – I had an MP3 of The Shins’ “New Slang” (titled as “When You Notice The Stripes”) at the time, but I couldn’t tell you why it became the breakout track from all these.

What I can hear is music pulling in different directions – bands like Death Cab For Cutie and Soundtrack Of Our Lives reaching for rock structures to push their songs forward; songwriters like Ben Folds and Belle And Sebastian pulling back from it to something more orchestrated. There’s outright sentimentality (Folds again, Augie March, Gorky’s) but also Arab Strap’s determined rejection of it. There’s careful arrangements but also scuzzy good times. Lyrics are central – except when they’re absent – and range from awkward, cryptic poetry to dumb-ass chanting.

What makes this bracket different from the other indie ones is that variety, and the sense that these are fertile niches existing out of the spotlight and out of hype’s way. Some of the bands had been through hype or would have hype in their future, for sure, but mostly this feels like sample slides from a thriving microcosm. A generation of artists which came of age with low expectations, picking through the post-commercial wreckage of alternative rock and Britpop and building audiences their way: what indie probably should be, in fact.

Do I actually like it? Well… not all of it. The Shins’ track is sleepily pretty; Belle And Sebastian’s is an awkward pile of ill-fitting lines; dntel’s “The Dream Of Evan And Chan” is captivating, even if what it invented was often bad; The Moldy Peaches are a novelty, but not an awful one; I still can’t stand Ben Folds. And so on. As a bracket, I think it’s rather good – a hustle of different approaches and it’s hard to call which ones will come out on top.

POTENTIAL WINNER: Much of this stuff is likely to run aground as soon as it meets more populist tracks, but “New Slang” might make a run into the final groups.

BEST TRACK: “Evan And Chan” could take it for stepping so far outside the formulae, but others here might well grow on me.

DARK HORSE: It’s very pretty, and its low streams put it in the softer half of the draw, so Gorky’s “How I Long” might get the chance to build an audience. Or it might get spanked in its qualifier, who knows.

DISCOVERY: I’d never heard of Dakota Oak before and its spindly instrumental “How Danny’s Friends Became A Force For Good” was a mysterious and enjoyable surprise.

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#1: La la la la la la-la-la https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/09/1-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/09/1-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2020 16:24:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32568

This bracket is for what you might call ‘pure pop’, though in the 2001 context that has very uncomfortable overtones, since the stuff in here – Kylie, Steps, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and others – is mostly music that’s resisting the pull of R&B we’ll see elsewhere. Mainstream pop, maybe – or just traditional pop, pop that’s at least friendly to the tween audience of Smash Hits or Saturday morning TV.

It’s a space in transition, created by two very recent booms (the ‘98 UK pop explosion in the wake of the Spice Girls, and the ‘99 Backstreets/Britney US one) but with its original stars changing direction or fading out, and its machinery about to be part-replaced by reality TV.

In the context of the poll, it’s dominated by a single song – Kylie’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”, which accounts for 50% of the entire bracket’s streams. It’s a track with markedly more effort behind it than most of the songs here – it’s at least trying to think about what 21st century pop might sound like, even if its answer turns out to be a little sterile. (Lesser-known “Come Into My World” repeats the motorik trick, and sounds fresher for not being so omnipresent).

Beyond Kylie, the most modern sounding song is Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For A Girl”, whose low-key bubbling has aged very well. The rest break down into three categories. There’s effortful, athletic, aggressive Cheiron-style pop – Britney’s own farewell to this style, “Overprotected”, is the best of it. There’s songs aimed at the kiddies – undemanding but usually remembering to pack a good tune. 

And there’s retro stuff – I had forgotten 2001’s fascination with disco and the 1970s, expressed with (Sophie Ellis-Bextor) or without (Alcazar) a sense of propriety. At the time I thought S E-B very chic and Alcazar a little too blatant: now the gusto of “Crying At The Discotheque” sounds a lot better than the arms-length genre exercise of “Take Me Home”. It doesn’t help that previous poll success has ruled Bextor’s best, and best-known, song out of this contest – “Murder On The Dancefloor” has life and swagger thanks to Gregg Alexander’s taste for a big hook. In its absence, her other tracks sound tired and diffident. Nobody else in this group is asking the questions Kylie and her team is, let alone coming up with convincing answers.

POSSIBLE WINNER: “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” is one of the two big favourites at the start of the competition.

BEST TRACK: “Come Into My World” is like “Head” but warmer and (as you’d expect) more welcoming.

DARK HORSE: “Crying At The Discotheque” is a lot of fun and if it can squeeze through it might do well against more dour opposition.

DISCOVERY: allStars’ “Things That Go Bump In The Night” enjoys itself hugely as it fulfils its ‘Kids’ TV Thriller’ brief.

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2001: A Poll Odyssey https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/2001-a-poll-odyssey https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/2001-a-poll-odyssey#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2020 16:20:21 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32566
As you probably know, I’ve been entertaining myself – and others, it seems – by running themed music polls on Twitter. The next one is based on the year 2001 – participants have picked 256 tracks which I’ve divided into 16 roughly genre-based brackets.
 
The last year poll we did was on 1990. This one will be very different. 1990 was the year I turned 17, I was paying close and voracious teenage attention to music and had a strong sense of what mattered and why the year was important. In fact one of the most interesting things about the poll was talking to people who thought 1990 pretty much sucked. What I heard as thrilling cross-fertilisation as pop came to terms with house and hip-hop played to them as embarrassing bandwagon-jumping or a lack of focus.

 
In 2001 I turned 28. I was firmly online and running Freaky Trigger and the I Love Music board, which meant I was constantly taking rapid and public positions about music, positions I enjoyed fighting over. What excited me most about the year at the time – the rapid fusion of pop and R&B, and a wave of terrific hip-hop crossover singles – was only a small part of what was going on. The nominations for the poll revealed clashing and overlapping 2001s – a surge of interest in roots music; the revival of short, sharp guitar rock; the flash-lit moment of electroclash; and in terms of what people still stream from that year now, the dominance of nu-metal, rock’s last great moment of mass impact.
 
It’s an unsettled year, a year which ‘rock history’ has cherrypicked without really imposing a narrative on. An ideal year for a poll, you might think.
 
What I want to do is go through the brackets of the poll (which I created, so they already reflect my own preconceptions) and make some notes and observations about what I find there – a guide and commentary in 16 parts.
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The People’s Pop Poll: Starts 5th May https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/05/the-peoples-pop-poll-starts-5th-may https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/05/the-peoples-pop-poll-starts-5th-may#comments Mon, 04 May 2020 14:40:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32445 Below the cut is a very geeky process-oriented post about THE PEOPLE’S POP POLL, which starts tomorrow on Twitter (@tomewing).

The main thing, though, is that over 100 people have nominated the songs which will fight it out in this poll, and donated over £2100 for Refuge (the fundraiser is still open!). They are amazing and make this whole thing something I’m very proud of.

You can listen to 186 of the songs here (the others are not on Spotify)

READ ON FOR THE ORGANISED FUN GEEKERY

The big problem with setting up this poll is the diversity – not just in genre (that’s a good thing) but in fame: you don’t want a situation where every result is driven by how well-known a track is.

With the Number 1s and 2s polls this wasn’t so much of a problem. There was a demographic crunch in the 1s poll which meant the non-70s/80s stuff got ditched pretty fast, so for the 2s one I arranged it chronologically. This also had the happy effect of making the first round matches a lot tougher, which helps keep the poll interesting early on.

So I needed a way of bracketing the People’s Pop Poll which wouldn’t lead to many first-round mismatches and great songs going out without a struggle. Also, people paid money to nominate, so I wanted to make sure that every song got the fairest chance I could give it.

The solution I’ve come up with is to create brackets based on Spotify streams as a proxy for “well-known-ness”. It’s an imperfect proxy – famous older tracks will tend to have less streams than famous newer ones – but it broadly works, and means that songs will be competing (until the final rounds) within their “weight class”.

I ended up with 6 brackets of 32 tracks each, from the whales (75 million streams and up) to the minnows (300k streams or less). For the six tracks only on YouTube, I took the views of their most-viewed upload. It sort of works! I hope.

Having sorted that out I went through each bracket to put it into eight groups of 4, that being the number allowed by the sacred geometry of Twitter polls. This was harder – and more enjoyable. The aim was to make sure every group would be at least somewhat competitive, if not for winner then for second place.

My ground rules were:

  1. Rough similarity of style, era or ‘feel’.
  2. No tracks by the same artist in the same group.
  3. No tracks nominated by the same person in the same group.

(If I’ve failed on the third, my apologies – there were lots of nominations and JustGiving is – entirely fairly – not set up for going through comments)

So I’ve ended up with 48 groups, most of which have an internal logic which works (for me). I’ll be putting them up on Twitter over 8 days. Each day we’ll start with the whales and move down to the minnows, and I’ll accompany each poll with brief descriptions and links (so people can check out the obscure tracks).

I still don’t know how well this will work! There’s no unifying theme – which is great, it’s just a lot of tracks people passionately love! But might make for a weird poll. I guess I’ll see how things shake out after the first round.

Good luck to everyone who nominated – and I hope you enjoy it.

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Top 100 Tracks Of The 2010s Part 1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/01/top-100-tracks-of-the-2010s-part-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/01/top-100-tracks-of-the-2010s-part-1#comments Fri, 10 Jan 2020 14:53:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32224 I’ve been running this on the Patreon – available to patrons of any tier – but the intention has always been to export the entries onto this site in chunks. So here’s the first set! Track #100 serves as a fair intro to the project as a whole. Expect a leisurely pace on this stuff.

100. MANIC STREET PREACHERS – “Postcards From A Young Man”

“I’m quite prepared to admit I was wrong,” sings James Dean Bradfield on this song about ageing and reflection, and rejecting those things for a moment or two of bloody-minded resolve. He doesn’t sing it like it’s true.

It won’t have escaped your notice, but you’re older than you were in 1999. Me too, it sucks, I know. But maybe you’ve made the best of it, grown into yourself, found what makes you happy. I hope so. In a lot of ways, I’m in a better place than when I made a list of my Top 100 Records of the 1990s, pushing my opinions out, day on day, to an imaginary audience, trying to pretend I was a music writer.

At the end of the 2000s, I was, in some financial sense, a music writer. I had a column in Pitchfork and one starting in the Guardian, and while I made an expansive list that year, I never got far with writing about the records. I was busy, and not motivated, and too deep in the horse-trading world of public lists to feel like looking back for my own.

But now here I am again, trying to put a rope around a decade, and write a hundred things about songs I liked. It feels more difficult, but it feels right because it’s so difficult that it’s absurd too, and absurd things might be fun.

The biggest difference between twenty years ago and now is that I know how much I don’t know. My 1990s list felt, in some deep private smugness, like the work of an eclectic and discerning listener, and I tried to write like that listener, as if each choice had been carefully selected from dozens of others.

Looking at it now, it is what it was, postcards from a young man who’d been a passionate reader of the music weeklies, who’d followed some of their writers (at a nervous distance) on the journey to rave, who’d discovered a way for his ornery streak to come out in online brawling. Who’d listened, honestly, to nowhere near as much as he thought he had.

In 1999 it felt like a noble effort – or at least like a fun piece of critical cosplay – to try and sum a decade up. In 2009 I got to do it for money and it was a fucking nightmare, if I’m honest. In 2019… where would you even start? 

My listening in the 2010s has been so spatchcocked, months of paying attention followed by years of broken receptors, formal games and chance encounters, the recommendations of dear friends and of fathomless networks. All refracted through my life and my body, a fat white man, no longer young, a contented Dad living in a collapsing polity.

“This world will not impose its will”: I first heard this song long past the point where I imagined I’d ever care again about the Manics. Nothing else I’ve heard by them this decade has its defiance, or its ambiguity, or its stiff-legged swing, like a man kicking the blankets off his legs on a winter morning and getting up one more time to drag himself through the day, because the alternative is to stop, and sink into the fog of resentment and disappointment. The way you see other men doing.

“Postcards” feels like a band taking stock and rededicating themselves – in an awful irony, its specific type of catchiness recalls solo Morrissey to me, someone who really has sunk into the dark. It’s a song where hope beats regret, but only just, and with the rueful foreknowledge that it’s a vote that’ll be rerun many times yet. Still, a win for all that. 

I know I believe in nothing, this band once quoted, but it is my nothing. Here they’re saying, I know I believe in bullshit. But it’s my bullshit. That’s a progression. And it was the only possible place I could start.


99. JANA RUSH – “??? ??”

Spotify’s best-known recommendation engine is its Discover Weekly playlist, but I’ve found that takes a long time to train up before it stops trying to tempt you into remaking youthful errors. The Discover tab is cruder but also more useful – a basic “if you like that, try this” system which creates paths into the untracked megaforests of music the service hosts.

Careful mapping and exploration is possible – I preferred to plunge into the underbush and trust to instinct. I would guess my path to footwork producer Jana Rush came via fellow Chicagoan Jlin: Rush’s surly, lean Pariah LP came out the same year as Jlin’s more experimental and lauded Black Origami. Rush – who got her first break in the mid-90s as a 13-year old and now makes music on the side of two day jobs – doesn’t waste much time on the conceptual. Her tracks are called stuff like “Beat Maze”, “Chill Mode”, “Frenetic Snare” and “No Fuks Given”. Her music is dark, fast, functional – percussive obstacle courses for flashing sneakers. At home I listen and try to keep up, a tortoise attempting to understand the leg muscles of hares.

“??? ??” cuts through the album with urgent joy – a trilling flute sample riding on murky rolls of sub-bass, then low, swinging horns, then those horns sliced up into a strobing pulse. No slower or less intricate than the rest of Rush’s music, it still feels like her world opening up, saying the quiet part – footwork’s debt to rave, funk, jazz – thrillingly loud. No wonder an arriviste like me digs it most.

A lot of this list will be these finds, torn by algorithmic whim from living context – which I work to reconstruct, once the music’s made me care enough. Singles only in the sense that everything is if the data slices it that way. This is how I listen now, often. Out beyond Jlin and Jana, the forest path goes on: I haven’t yet wandered down it.


98. KANYE WEST – “Runaway”

One of the decade’s themes – across media of all kinds – has been dudes winning plaudits for admitting what shitheads they are. For me, the ‘asshole confessional’ style mostly makes for boring art: the scab-picking and raw honesty oscillates wanly between morose and narcissistic. “Runaway” incarnates all the style’s worst impulses at extreme length, so why do I rate it?

Three reasons. First, once I had this song in my life I didn’t need anything else remotely similar – no other soul-dredging is likely to compare to “Runaway”’s pushing the simultaneous limits of self-flagellation and self-regard.

Second – and this goes for all the better stuff on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – the opulent extra-ness of it wins me over despite myself. From that portentious one-note piano intro, to ending the song with four minutes of corrosive autotuned flailing, it goes all-in on fucked grandiosity. MBDTF is a determined attempt – one of the last, maybe? – to make a ‘classic album’, it gives me the sense of a man making recording decisions with at least one eye on future documentaries about them. The force of will carried a lot of people along. 

“Runaway” is a massive, self-destructive, mess of a song. That absurd intro leads into one of the hookiest choruses Kanye West has written, which he follows with a couplet of such sleazebag self-disgust it might be from an Arab Strap song. Pusha T’s verse – controlled disdain next to West’s purgative thrashing – is a snapshot of the viciousness the rest of the song confesses to, a reminder of why forgiveness is not deserved.

And third, I’m not immune to feeling this toxic. One thing that can make great pop music great is its power of crystallising a sliver of feeling in a single line or moment. Those feelings aren’t always noble. In the real world, when you realise that you’ve been a fuck-up, or how damaging you can sometimes be, the right next step is to pick yourself up and start finding out how to put it right. That isn’t what “Runaway” is about – it’s the song for the selfish moment before that, where you want to be irredeemable. You’re a black hole and you know it, but at least that still makes you the centre.


97. SHAKIRA – “Empire”

I don’t have any great insight into “Empire”, I just adore its bombast. Back in 2010, with Gaga ascendant, it felt like records this theatrically demonstrative might be a common occurrence. That hasn’t really happened – a lot of the decade’s pop has felt dialled-down and diffident. That has its virtues – but listening back and rediscovering “Empire” made me feel it as a loss.

Shakira gets no songwriting credit on “Empire”, but the prolific songwriters who do have little in their discographies to match its bravado. Perhaps she encouraged them to take more risks, stretch their journeyman metaphors a little until they ended up with something as absurd and awesome as “the stars make love to the universe”. Which Shakira rightly plays completely straight, following it up with her growled “and I’m like – and I’m like – AND I’M LIKE-“ and then a wordless roar, more triumph than bliss.


96. STORMZY – “Big For Your Boots”

 

A lot of Stormzy’s appeal lies in his range – sometimes dark, sometimes god-fearing, sometimes playing clever games, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes thoughtful: he’s one of the only UK performers who could play the reflections-on-my-fame card (on “Crown”) and not make it sound like a humblebrag. 

So maybe it’s odd that my favourite Stormzy track is such a straightforward banger, a song that does its job – reintroducing Stormzy as a lead for his album, smacking down the competition – with vigour. The dramatic production helps, of course, but the quality is all in the details – the peachy way Stormzy pronounces “Boots” as “bewts”; the devastating dismissal of older rivals; and best of all a handful of great punchlines – “never too big for Adele”. Stormzy is a lot of things and has come to stand for even more – but one of them, when he wants to be, is grime’s funniest MC.


95. TIERRA WHACK – “Only Child”

Tierra Whack got famous for the string of 1-minute miniatures which make up Whack World, a hip-hop taster menu of formal play and private feeling. She’s followed it in 2019 with a series of singles, more conventional only in length. “Only Child” feels like an expansion of her collage approach, shorter vignettes and baby hooks patched together over the beat, a sketchbook of feelings from a collapsed relationship.

Like a lot of rappers this decade, Whack’s approach is polyvocal – shifting between singing and rhyming, switching registers from stoner sing-song to sharply dismissive rap to a sad, bunged-up coo. With her the effect isn’t virtuosic or dramatic, but more playful. Even when Whack’s poignant or cruel, she’s funny – the theatrical neediness of the ‘what about me?’ section, for instance. I get the vivid impression of a restless mind, working through ideas and dancing around styles because it amuses her. We’re fortunate we get to listen in.


94. ARIANA GRANDE – “No Tears Left To Cry”

Is it safe to say Ariana is the critics’ favourite pop star this decade (among pop stars who actually have big, regular hits, at least)? I found her hard to get on with at first – a lovely, flexible voice applied to material which felt offhand or slight. It eventually clicked with me that this slightness is – somewhat – the point: a good Ariana Grande song feels like a sketch of a mood, a sensation that the song can then flesh out and work through. “Right now I’m in a state of mind”, as she says at the top of this track.

The moods are plain, relatable – relief, satisfaction, often lust – and she’s candid and conversational about them, but their presentation is anything but plain. Over its cantering beat, “No Tears Left To Cry” puts Ariana the easy-going emotional diarist in the front, backed up by Grande the soaring, swooping, hollering multi-octave performer. That adept balancing of casual intimacy and stadium-filling scale is what makes her such a strong pop star for her times, where knowing how much to share is a celebrity’s most finely calibrated skill.

At her best, though, it all comes back to those moods, and “No Tears” captures its feeling gloriously – the energy of getting over something, and putting yourself out in the world again. It’s a song that’s indecently eager to hustle its singer, and its listener, out of the door and back into their lives.


93. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE – “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)

Back when I was 15, Pop Will Eat Itself put out “Def Con One”, one of the knockabout rap-rock pile-ups they used to specialise in. I thought “Def Con One” was cool as fuck, because it was rammed with Alan Moore comics references*, mostly from Watchmen, including very deep cut Watchmen references (“How Sick Is Dick?”) which I felt extremely proud of getting. 

It was a bit disappointing to start buying the NME and realise, rapidly, that this record I thought was the last word in style was held in great contempt by my new arbiters of hip. Some of their suspicion was basically regional prejudice. Some of it was a bit more grounded, as I realised when I went back and heard “Beaver Patrol”.

Anyway, since then I’ve been made aware that for reasons of cosmological balance, for everything to do with Alan Moore there must also be something to do with Grant Morrison, and after 22 years, the universe brought us the Grant Morrison equivalent of “Def Con One”, and I was pleased to find myself loving it with the exact mix of enthusiasm and embarrassment. Here it is.

It’s not a complete parallel – there’s no actual references in the song, but Morrison shows up in its video. What “Na Na Na” is, though, is an adrenalised glam-punk recreation of the giddy experience of reading a Morrison superhero comic – a compressed rush of dramatic moments and stylised one-liners, but in the service of some shopworn rebel-kid rhetoric which often slides into outright cringe (“Na Na Na” has the most awkward spoken-word break this side of “Shake It Off”).

Part of what makes it work is that hip-comic-book is exactly the effect you suspect Gerard Way is going for (he’s a huge Morrison fan, of course), and his enthusiasm amps up the thrill-power and carries the song sailing through its dodgier bits – he’s at the end of MCR’s first career, doing whatever he likes, and so all the sloganeering and fist-pumping feels playful, like glam rock should feel. Shut up and let me see your jazz hands!

*It’s NOT the “Alan Moore knows the score” one, that’s “Can U Dig It?”


92. FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE – “Shake It Out”

British artists aren’t for the most part especially religious, but they do love to borrow the sounds and phrases and aesthetics of other people’s worship, and here’s a song which structures itself like an idea of a revival meeting, with lyrical hooks cobbled from school assemblies and stale sayings and whirled up into a secular exorcism.

Of the maximalists who thrived in UK pop at the start of the decade, which seems an age away now, Florence Welch is the most endearing in her vastness. Coldplay are too banal, Adele too grounded, but Florence at her best has that streak of wild absurdity and make-believe which lured me to pop in the first place. “Shake It Out” is her best song because it has her best chorus, but also because it commits so totally to its ideas -the organ drones and trembling keyboards and drum tattoos all working to call you to Florence’s dance. She’s pouring everything into selling it, too, her line readings turning cliche – “it’s always darkest” – into high drama, but also using them to pull in stranger, more pagan imagery – “tonight I’m gonna bury that horse in the ground!”

And yes, you could sneer at it – I know this because at first I did – fretting that the blowout approach shreds any chance of genuine mystery. Stadium hauntology – who thought that was a good idea? But it turns out it is a good idea. I don’t quite trust it but I love it; its force sweeps me along. Scale has its own powers, and there are more things to do with ghosts than conjure them.


91. KENDRICK LAMAR – “King Kunta”

At some point Spotify did a deal with Genius (formerly RapGenius) to feed snippets of into about songs onto your screen while they played, a kind of streaming music equivalent of the DVD commentary track. These are always banal and annoying, except in the one case of “King Kunta”, where I watched the whole thing goggling at the references – samples, borrowings, lyrical nods – Lamar was layering the song with for my app to glibly unpack.

Kendrick Lamar makes extremely dense music which only sometimes sounds that way – “King Kunta” is my favourite song by him partly because it wears its density more lightly than most; everything in the track is subordinate to its striding rhythm, this determined march across decades of black American culture and funk history – Roots, Bootsy, Michael Jackson, and dozens of others crowding into the groove. Lamar is the tour guide but also the destination. Even if you don’t take in every point, the pride in the walk is unmistakable. And intoxicating. 

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A Great Philosopher (DR ALBAN – “It’s My Life”) https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/01/a-great-philosopher-dr-alban-its-my-life https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/01/a-great-philosopher-dr-alban-its-my-life#comments Wed, 08 Jan 2020 01:34:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32216 (Reached #2, September 1992)

In Britain, Alban Uzoma Nwapa was known for two things. This song was one of them. The other was his dental practice – teeth had brought him to live in Sweden, and music paid the dentistry school bills. A dip into Google suggests there are now many rapping dentists – there are many rapping everythings – but Alban was the first, and the combination seemed amusing. A touch provincial, maybe – it had the same vibe as when England go up against Andorra or the Faroes in football, and the commentators hold up day jobs in the post office or the doctors’ surgery as the bona fides of plucky authenticity.

What did it mean in practice? When you’re listening to Dr Alban you’re listening to a man in his mid-30s, who’s chosen a tough career in a new country and made a success of it. A man with little to prove, you’d say. On “It’s My Life”, the intro promises drama. Producer Denniz PoP layers in the sounds one by one; a ringing house piano line, a chirping keyboard rhythm, the bass, the hi-hats, some pseudo-gospel humming, a string part and a backing vox bellow, all in crescendo, and then – 

“It’s my life. Take it or leave it.”

Alban’s flow – on “It’s My Life” in particular, but on his other European hits too – is disarmingly soft-spoken. He sounds like he’s issuing this plea – for people to think before they assume things, to take a wider view, to give him a little peace – for the thousandth time, and his tone is the tone of a reasonable man driven more to contempt than anger by the fact he has to keep saying the same thing. “STOP bugging me STOP bothering me STOP fussing me” he raps, aware they won’t, and aware, maybe, of what they will say and do if he lets the reasonable tone drop.

Denniz PoP’s job is to turn this exhausted diffidence into a pop smash – the record’s beauty is in how he does it while leaving Alban’s dignity untouched. Alban’s care not to let his control slip gives PoP licence to do it for him, with a cararact of torrid disco angst from the backing vocalists, whose wailing repeats of Alban’s beat-down lines give the record the emotional (and dancefloor) climax it needs.

Don’t criticise what you can’t understand – there have been lots of songs, before and since, which take the same basic line as “It’s My Life”. But none of them have quite its weary tone. Songs of empowerment tend to be proud, or self-justifying, or triumphant, flinging the truth of the singer’s existence back in the world’s face. “It’s My Life” is not one of those. Alban offers no specifics and no justification, and the power of his performance is that you can’t tell whether he’s acting from high principle or bleak experience. 

8 out of 10

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Popular Crystal Ball 2019: You can say I’m hatin’ if you want to https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2019/12/popular-crystal-ball-2019-you-can-say-im-hatin-if-you-want-to https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2019/12/popular-crystal-ball-2019-you-can-say-im-hatin-if-you-want-to#comments Tue, 31 Dec 2019 15:08:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32178 As is the annual tradition, a look over the year’s number ones, from best to worst. After a couple of years where this was an exercise in barely managed apathy, there are songs here I actually love. Save a chart, ride a cowboy! Behind the scenes, the machinery required to shape “the chart” is creaking badly, though.

LIL NAS X ft BILLY RAY CYRUS – “Old Town Road”: I marginally prefer the unremixed version – Cyrus’ verse is delightful and turns “Old Town Road” into more of a ‘song’, but the original is as mysterious and perfect a world in two minutes as anything in pop since “Outdoor Miner”. I listened to both mixes every day for weeks.

ARIANA GRANDE – “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored”: As soon as I saw this song on thank u, next, I figured I would either loathe it or it would be my favourite thing on the record, depending on whether it lived up to that gloriously amoral title. It does – playful rather than mean, delighted by its own wicked impulses, and with one of Grande’s most instant choruses.

STORMZY – “Vossi Bop”: More than anything else, what I want from Number 1s is that I can hear something new in them. “Vossi Bop” delivers with one of the starkest beats on a No.1 ever – its muffled, musical-box menace perfectly fitting Stormzy’s sleepy-lidded notes from a life changed for good.

ED SHEERAN ft KHALID – “Beautiful People”: Sheeran’s collaborative project is a chance for him to stretch his genre legs, as well as burnish his long-forgotten cred. While it doesn’t make me love the guy, it’s a welcome shift. He’s not half bad on this R&B slow-burner, though he’s also not half as good as Khalid, whose melancholy minute by itself makes this Ed’s best Number 1.

SHAWN MENDES AND CAMILLA CABELLO – “Senorita”: Mendes enlists the “Havana” hitmaker to make a record which… isn’t a cigar’s length away from that song, only a bit more summery and sleepy. Has enough sultriness to it that it just about gets away with its basic lack of ideas.

ED SHEERAN AND JUSTIN BIEBER – “I Don’t Care”: You will always find him in the kitchen at parties. Unfortunately, he’s the one with the acoustic guitar. I like the sentiments here a lot more than the drab execution.

ELLIE GOULDING – “River”: Perhaps more interesting from a wonkish perspective than a musical one – it’s the first Amazon-exclusive Number One, a declaration of intent in the soon-come “Streaming Wars” which are going to bore the fuck out of everyone for the next few years. Spotify users will just have to content themselves with the Joni Mitchell version, I guess, something this subscriber, at least, can probably live with. It’s a hell of a song, as you knew: Goulding is content to stay in its shadow.

ARIANA GRANDE – “7 Rings”: The materialism I can take or leave – though it makes Ariana Grande sound like she’s buying her friends, which can’t be the idea. The Sound Of Music borrowing, though – oooof. Hard to do well, not done well here.

ED SHEERAN ft STORMZY – “Take Me Back To London”: The music weeklies used to run interviews sometimes where two huge stars would interview each other about being famous. (It’s tougher than you think, is the general idea). Here’s one of them, except it’s a record. Sheeran gets to prove a point about his rap credentials (he’s bearable at it); Stormzy gets to cement his A-lister status; what we get out of it isn’t so clear. Both men had better No.1s this year individually, about much the same things.

LEWIS CAPALDI – “Someone You Loved”: With big Ed going urban there’s a gap in the market for strained balladeers, and Lewis Capaldi has filled it. It’s shorter than you think it’s going to be! That’s all the kindness I can show it, really.

TONES AND I – “Dance Monkey”: The jaunty catchiness of the hook, balanced against the hellish irritation of the baby-talk vocals and the slightness of the song. Number one for a masochistic ten weeks – I suspect the mechanisms of it all would depress me horribly.

LADBABY – “I Love Sausage Rolls”: I looked kindly on this guy last year, but I was wrong. Do you know how many songs have rock’n’roll in the title? Really quite a lot.

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My Thoughts Big I Just Can’t Define (THE VERVE – “Bitter Sweet Symphony”) https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2019/11/my-thoughts-big-i-just-cant-define-the-verve-bitter-sweet-symphony https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2019/11/my-thoughts-big-i-just-cant-define-the-verve-bitter-sweet-symphony#comments Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:21:13 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32110 (Reached #2, June 1997)

One of the repeating themes in British indie music is bands hitting the rocks because the guitarist and singer can’t work together. The Smiths, The House Of Love, The Stone Roses, Suede, The Verve – for a decade some of the biggest names in British guitar rock kept flaring out like this, until the music became boring enough that it stopped being an issue (you can’t have creative differences when nobody’s doing anything creative).

It’s worth asking why it happened. My initial impulse – often the way – was to blame Morrissey: he set the pattern where the singer’s role is to forge a song out of the music their band brings to them. But that isn’t really how the other bands worked. Then it struck me that the Smiths – or at least their success – was the main issue, because it created a kind of selection bias. The funnel from obscurity to fame was the music press, and while readers of the music press would – naturally – consider themselves above the squalor of gossip, tension sold papers.

The dyad of flamboyant frontman and moody, intense musical genius – and the relationship between them – served the same function in the NME as celebrity marriages in the tabloids. No surprise bands built around that dynamic got attention.

The Verve were always presented with Richard Ashcroft at the centre. But his relationship with his own band’s music wasn’t straightforward. Onstage he got a reputation for getting caught up in the sound (and the drugs), climbing amp stacks, crowdwalking, subsuming himself in the noise guitarist Nick McCabe and the others were making. Which meant that on record, McCabe was the dominant force – at its best the band’s first album, A Storm In Heaven, makes its singer sound like he’s exploring the music along with us, reacting to it with streams of ideas and half-songs. McCabe’s own best trick is keeping the heavy atmospherics mostly in his pocket and instead using his dappled guitar lines to magic up a haze of prettiness (Jonny Greenwood took plenty of notes).

The band’s career looks like a simple tilt in this balance, from McCabe to Ashcroft – the latter broke the group up after their second LP in 1995, wrote most of Urban Hymns as a solo album, then called McCabe back in, a decision he later (at least sometimes) regretted as a loss of nerve. What complicates things is that the way Ashcroft is used on A Storm In Heaven – a man pushing wide-eyed through is own songs, letting the sound inspire him – remained easily the best way to use him.

This became clear on that second album, A Northern Soul, which was vastly better received in the press, even though it sounds like a man who’s had a massive crisis of confidence after hearing Oasis. (Lots of journalists were going through a similar crisis, so could probably sympathise). Ashcroft completely reinvented his vocal style and centred the band on it – his new schtick was a combination of Gallagher aggression with visionary preaching. Tellingly, it works best when McCabe plays along – the unstable, glitchy effects on the title track, and the storm surges on “This Is Music” give Ashcroft something to push against. But a lot of the record is Ashcroft singing his ponderous, mid-paced songs, with McCabe and the band a sullen background presence, and it’s a snooze.

That’s why Urban Hymns is a chore, too – Ashcroft works best when he’s got some interesting sounds to bounce off, and he’s too convinced of his own genius to let interesting sounds get in the way of it.

Fortunately, there’s an exception. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” isn’t just the biggest Verve hit, it’s the one which sounds least like anything else the band ever did. But the reason for all this backstory is that “Bitter Sweet Symphony” works because it does what successful Verve tracks always did – its track-defining sample gives Ashcroft something to push against, which makes it sound like he’s exploring a song again.

When the band found themselves shafted for the royalties by Allen Klein, they made aggrieved attempts to downplay the importance of the sample – it was only six notes. But a listen to the orchestral “The Last Time” belies that – the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra lift structures the track. Whatever they precisely sampled, The Verve borrow the song’s tremulous, string-driven vibe, its cock-of-the-walk rhythm, and the soaring melody which ignites Ashcroft’s vocal.

As samples go, it’s a magnificent spot – the rest of the ALO Orchestra LP is largely the greed-soused instrumental cash-ins you’d expect, but “The Last Time” has real imagination. The Verve treat its bounty with care: once the song’s got going, McCabe and the rhythm section act like a curling team, doing their bit at the edges to keep the momentum high, with the result that “Bitter Sweet Symphony” feels like a song in perpetual ascent (even though there’s no actual climax). McCabe in particular is in a position to fuck the track up but instead he rediscovers his knack for prettiness and the embellishments he drops in – like the squiggle of echoey guitar after “then you die” work to lighten the track and open it up.

It’s Ashcroft who’s the centre of the song, of course. It’s easily his best few minutes as a pop performer, because while the sample gives him something to react to, it forces him to react in a particular way, to follow the logic of the song’s relentless momentum rather than pause, wallow or wander. And these tramlines suit what he’s singing about – life’s unstoppable forward motion and whether you can change yourself when you can’t change direction.

Chris Martin once called it “the best song ever written”. “The song I’ve been trying to write for 15 years” might have been more accurate – this is the record, more than any other, that shows Coldplay, Keane, and similar the way to marry widescreen rock with polite motorik flow. Don’t let that turn you against it, nor the fact that Ashcroft never did anything remotely this fine again. “It was good as far as pop goes,” said McCabe sometime between the second break-up and the last one, meaning it as faint praise. But how right he was.

9 out of 10

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All one can do is die (CRASH TEST DUMMIES – “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”) https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2019/10/all-one-can-do-is-die-crash-test-dummies-mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2019/10/all-one-can-do-is-die-crash-test-dummies-mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm#comments Sun, 13 Oct 2019 13:27:54 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32089 (#2 in April 1994)

Fortune is the issue here: the blind bad luck of the song’s kid subjects, the random chance of us ever hearing about them. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is a fluke, but a fluke brought forth from a particular moment, the end of the alt-rock gold rush. First there were the years when major labels pushed Nirvana’s peers, rivals and sometimes elders out across the world (even I bought a lumberjack shirt). Later, alt-rock became modern rock, a settled category in the US and barely a concern elsewhere. But alongside all that were the chancers, the one-hit wonders, the unlikelies, trawled up by the industry’s tuna nets as it tried to meet MTV and radio demand. Green Jelly. Ugly Kid Joe. 4 Non Blondes. This.

It’s clear why “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” worked on a superficial, additive level. Brad Roberts’ resonant, resigned baritone has something of the pitch-dipped growl of Cornell or Vedder – but it’s set to a stately, attractive arrangement (care of Jerry Harrison) that owes more to the gentle folksiness of REM’s market-stomping Automatic For The People. REM’s achievement on that record was to wear their craft on their sleeve, making everything Michael Stipe sang sound both homespun and hard-won – a distillate of a decade making music and a lifetime hearing it.

“Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” comes on like it has its own wisdom to impart, or at least a story to tell. But it’s a far weirder record, an exercise in deflected expectations and a track which makes a virtue of running out of things to say. The title sets up double expectations – someone humming a tune, someone acting noncommittal – and the song fulfils both. Where you expect a fourth verse to be – tying the song together, offering a lesson – there’s only the lament of the backing vocalists. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” comes on like a parable unmoored from its creed, or a comic cancelled before the heroes even meet. But its overt refusal to untie its own knots is the point of the thing.

Alternatively, it’s just an annoying novelty. Some people really hate this record, and the usual case against “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is that Brad Roberts’ singing is unendurable, a wracked procession of half-familiar vowels, crammed into words like wrong jigsaw pieces. And yes, he’s mannered – there’s a reason I’ve never felt tempted to try a second Crash Test Dummies song. But in the course of a single hit, that’s a strength – the abstraction of the delivery makes the song work just as an exercise in texture and never mind anything else. Roberts sings “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” as if he’s as confused by it as his listeners are, dragging himself through his song’s broken-backed cadences, his tarry voice filling words like “she” and “shook” with gulps of woe and shudders of dread, as if the vignettes he’s presenting have implications that are almost physically unspeakable. Shaggy dogs can be black dogs too.

6 out of 10

(Less Popular are reviews of songs which did not get to #1, originally published on the Patreon and requested by patrons. Thanks to them for their continued support!)

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