The UncoolTwo50 is over – well, the voting phase is – but the posting continues. These are the final 10 near-misses.
60. PUBLIC ENEMY – “By The Time I Get To Arizona” (1991)
I learned too late that this record is NOT in fact a single, despite having an (incendiary) video made for it, it was a B-Side. But that’s OK! Because apparently an album tracks challenge is planned and this apocalyptic heavy funk curse on the state of Arizona can get its due in that.
59. PULP – “Razzmatazz” (1992)
At the end of the 90s, “Common People” topped my list of the decade’s 100 best songs, but I didn’t really consider it for this challenge. The truth is that I’m kind of discoursed-out on that song, though it was good to see some people grapple with it in interesting ways over the course of the UncoolTwo50 and it’s still, obviously, an excellent record (I dropped it at the penultimate filtering). I’m more drawn to Pulp’s cusp-of-breakthrough songs, the weird, itchy, sweaty, black-hearted things they collected on the Pulpintro LP. “Razzmatazz” was the first thing I heard by them – a friend bought it and it sounded mysterious and seedy; it does the thing Pulp did on “Common People” too, a song of crushing, judgemental scorn about a woman with a furious, spiteful chorus. I think “Razzmatazz” feels less justifiable and excusable than the class animus in “Common People” but perhaps that’s more honest – we can’t always come up with very good reasons to despise people.
Anyway then I decided I didn’t want any Britpop bar a late Auteurs single, so out it went.
58. DE’LACY – “Hideaway (Deep Dish Radio Mix)” (1995)
Another late cut, as it actually was in the first Uncool50 event – poor “Hideaway” can’t catch a break. Deliciously crunchy drums on this soulful house track which felt like a cool breeze in a year when guitars were everywhere.
57. THE MAGNETIC FIELDS – “100,000 Fireflies” (1991)
I love The Magnetic Fields and this was a touchstone single of my early 20s, full of brutal lines about romantic misery during a time when things in my own life were pretty difficult. I still love it, and I still feel far too close to it. Its skeletal, trebly sound ended up just not fitting the vibe of the final list so I dropped it.
56. MAN 2 MAN MEETS MAN PARRISH – “Male Stripper” (1986)
As I said in my thread for the No.1 song in my list, the AIDS epidemic is the black hole at the centre of the 1977-1999 era’s music, a scourge which cut to the heart of the communities who made some of the most vital and beautiful music of the time, but who would and could certainly have made more. The death of youth from AIDS haunts the pop culture of the 80s like the death of youth in war haunts the 60s. In the video of “Male Stripper”, a gorgeously silly, matter-of-fact Hi-NRG song about sex work, money and desire, you can see how thin and ill Miki Zone looks; he died of AIDS-related diseases at the end of 1986, months before his song became a huge hit in the UK and his surviving brother Paul Zone got to perform it alone on Top Of The Pops. None of which changes how much life there is in the song’s bare-wired, irresistible groove.
55. MADONNA – “Burning Up” (1983)
Three songs now by acts who got a single into my Top 50 – as the years go by it’s Madonna’s earliest records I keep coming back to, the hungry NYC disco tracks by a star on a scene, not global level. “Burning Up” is almost her best single, a disco-rock hustle which matches its title and makes promises she will keep: “I’m not the same / I have no shame”
54. PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION – “Kiss” (1986)
Of the Prince “big” singles this is the one I was most drawn to this time, for its compact effectiveness – just a guitar figure and a beat, a modernist version of something Bo Diddley would have understood immediately 30 years before.
53. THE ORB – “Blue Room” (1992)
I came so close to just saying “fuck it” and putting the 40-minute Blue Room in, and my pick of “Little Fluffy Clouds” was as much tactical as sentimental in the end. Not a ‘single’ in any truly meaningful sense of the term, and indeed released just to fuck with the technical definitions imposed by the Official Charts Company (it lasts 39 minutes and 59 seconds). But it’s also The Orb at their most imperial-phase maximalist, a wonderful dub techno composition from a time when nobody was putting deep basslines and wibbly-wobbly noises together with as much gusto. A masterpiece and a piss-take: very them.
52. NEW ORDER – “Regret” (1993)
The kings and queen of the first Uncool50 run had a trickier time with vote-splitting this time, with their (far inferior, I’m saying) Joy Division incarnation running away with a lot of the points. For me the two bands tell a single story of almost continuous improvement, and it properly ends with the redemptive, triumphant populism of 1990’s Number 1 “World In Motion”. “Regret” is a beautiful coda, maybe their best actual, you know, song and Barney even seems to have made some effort with his lyrics. Luckily they never released anything else after it.
51. FATIMA MANSIONS – “Blues For Ceaucescu” (1990)
My “Song 51”, the track I’d most like to have found room for, is this howl of punky/grungy/indie/just plain wrathful rock, the late Cathal Coughlan pulling the temple of the British establishment down around him, damning not just the freshly-dead Romanian dictator but the corrupt West patting themselves on the back for their Cold War victories, as he imagines Ceaucescu born again in the bosom of the great and good. A splenetic, raging grind from the nightmare zone the Mansions evoked (or possibly prophesied).