Category: Musical Snobbery

Triple J’s Hottest 100 of the Last 20 Years – Part 1

I’m currently listening to the countdown for Triple J’s Hottest 100 of the Last 20 Years. I’m running my usual obsessive analysis and while so far I pretty much approve, I do have to say

GANGSTER’S PARADISE!!!??!?!?!? HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE MAD!??!?!?

More to follow…

Not only did Common People get in, they played the full version with the really vicious second verse. Awesome!

TEENAGE DIRTBAG!!!??!?!?!? YES THE WHOLE WORLD HAS GONE MAD!!!

I tell ya, Pretty Fly for a White Guy better not be number one again…

I’m keeping a running average of my own personal approval rating for each song. It was looking good at 82% for the first ten songs, but Coolio and Wheatus managed to knock a full 11 percentiles off in the second ten for a total of 71%. Here’s hoping it gets pulled back up soon…

Some stats – we’re at number 74 and so far there have been 12 songs from the USA, 9 from Australia, 5 from the UK and one from Iceland. The most popular year so far is 2007 with 4 songs. Following up are 1998, 2005 and 2006 with 3 songs each. With 2 are 1995, 1997, 2010 and 2011. Years with one song are 1994, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2008.

Can’t say I expected Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros to get in, but I am well chuffed!

Hmm, well, the averages were looking up until Wolfmother crashed the party, I couldn’t stand them back in ’06 and I can’t stand them now.

Aha! The Gorillaz restore some sanity! I got sunshine in a bag!

And Regurgitator fight a valiant defence to maintain the average at 71%, thirty-one songs in.

As of number 66, there have been four songs that cross over with the Hottest 100 of all time from 2009. Wolf like Me by TV on the Radio, Common People by Pulp, Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine and Berlin Chair by You am I.

And a fifth country joins the list with Daft Punk.

Woohoo! The mighty Kids by MGMT at 64 – the first one of my votes to get in! 😀

Spiderbait’s Buy Me a Pony at number 62 hauls Australian artists equal to American Artists at 15 songs each.

At 40 songs in my average rating has risen to 73%. Good.

Glycerine?! I suppose grunge fans had to vote for something with Smells Like Teen Spirit out of the running.

Waitaminute – Bush are British!? You learn something every day!

Well, we’ve obviously hit the British 90’s dance section of the broadcast with Underworld’s Born Slippy followed by Fatboy Slim’s Praise You. Not bad, although did they really have to play the 20 minute long version of the former?

Urgh! One of my most hated songs of the last 20 years, the utterly dismal Sex on Fire. Limp guitars, vocals jumping from mumbling to wailing with barely a tune to be found between them, just urrrgh! Bring back Wheatus!

For a second there I thought we had Regurgitator’s Black Bugs, but no, it’s just Placebo. That’s cool.

Woohoo! More Gorillaz at 52 with some extremely creepy laughter.

And the Dandy Warhols finish up the lower 50. Let’s have a look at our stats…

My approval rating for the first 50 songs of the countdown is 73.20%, which equates to between “OK” and “I Approve”. So that’s not too bad. There were ten tracks that also appeared in the Hottest 100 of all time back in 2009, and they were heavily clustered in the lower numbers, so we can probably expect a bunch more to appear in the upper 50.

There was a good spread of songs over the 20 years, with peaks around 1996-97 and 2006. No songs rated from 1993, 2009 or 2013.

The majority of songs were American (18) followed by Australian (16), the UK (13), French (2) and Icelandic (1).

Tune in tomorrow for more inane commentary and inept statistical analysis!

Snakes into Saints

In a follow up to my last post, I was recently quite disappointed to learn that the lyrics to the Killers’ Mr Brightside are not ‘turning snakes into the sea’, but ‘turning saints into the sea’, which is still a bloody puzzling thing to say, but somehow nowhere near as cool.

This is the second thing I got wrong about the song. When I first heard it I thought it was about seeing someone you have a thing for – but are too timid to attempt a shot at – going home from a bar or party with someone else. It actually turns out to be about suspecting your partner is having an affair.

I find it darkly amusing that my brain – even when simply considering a song – refused to construct a scenario where I have a partner, and instead cast me in the role of the pathetic, forever alone guy watching the girl he wants walking away ;D

Where will we be in 20 Years?

As anyone who cares about radio stations aimed at a demographic way younger than them should know, Triple J are doing another one of their special Hottest 100 polls. This time around it’s to find the hottest 100 songs of the last 20 years – a period they claim to have chosen because it’s the 20th anniversary of the first hottest 100, but have clearly actually selected to prevent Love will Tear us Apart or Smells like Teen Spirit from taking out the number one place. Again.

In a spirit of generosity not seen since Adam and Will were on air, they’ve allowed us punters not just 10, but 20 votes each! So, over the last few weeks I’ve spent many hours combing through my music collection and the lists of the previous 20 Hottest 100s to come up with some kind of list summing up the best music the world has produced over the last two decades.

Naturally I failed. So I just sat down today and threw together a collection of songs that seemed more or less acceptable, and which adequately covered the period in question. All are – of course – songs I love, but they aren’t “the best” 20 songs of the last 20 years, because such a list is clearly impossible. They’re just a representative sample.

So, here goes…

1994 – Bug Powder Dust – Bomb the Base
1995 – Girl from Mars – Ash
1995 – Santa Monica – Everclear
1996 – Frank Sinatra – Cake
1997 – The Cure – Wrong Number
1999 – Deeper Water – Deadstar
2000 – All the Small Things – Blink 182
2001 – Zak and Sara – Ben Folds
2002 – That Great Love Sound – The Raveonettes
2003 – Lighthouse – The Waifs
2003 – The Dresden Dolls – Girl Anachronism
2003 – The Mountain Goats – Palmcorder Yajna
2004 – Mr Brightside – The Killers
2006 – Knights of Cydonia – Muse
2007 – Det Snurrar I Min Skalle – Familjen
2007 – Gimme Sympathy – Metric
2008 – Kids – MGMT
2008 – Magic – Ladyhawke
2008 – Now – Mates of State (Only video with the full song I could find!)
2011 – Palaces of Montezuma – Grinderman (Couldn’t find a non-live version, so here’s one from Jools Holland)

I don’t know how many, if any, will get into the countdown, but we’ll see.

By the way, I linked to an alternate mix of Kids because I like it more than the official version. Deal with it! 😀

Columbia ≈ Alphaville

I was messing around on my computer this weekend just gone – probably building an apartment block in Minecraft or something – when Visage’s one and only (as far as I know) hit Fade to Grey came on iTunes…

This reminded me of Kelly Osbourne’s quite blatant rip-off re-imaging of the song from a few years back, One Word, so I fired it up on YouTube…

It’s actually not a bad song, no doubt because it steals references so many elements from the original.

In any case, the video clip reminded me that although I was fully aware of the ground breaking 1965 French Sci-Fi film Alphaville, I actually had no idea what it was about (apart from modernist Paris architecture). So I looked it up on Wikipedia and was surprised to note a number of similarities with Bioshock Infinite – to wit in both stories a man is sent to infiltrate a closed off, technology obsessed city run by a dictator with an obscured past, and becomes involved with his mysterious daughter.

Of course the resolutions of the stories are completely different, but it was just a kind of cool thing to stumble over on a Sunday afternoon.

Oh, and while on the subject of Alphaville, here’s the song you’re probably thinking of…

Crazy Bioshock Inifinite Theories Number One

I suspect that the developers of Bioshock Infinite didn’t actually want to use Girls Just Wanna Have Fun in the game. I think they wanted Time After Time, but they couldn’t get the rights.

Why? Several of the other anachronistic songs seem to contain references to the plot and general theme of the game. Fortunate Son and Everybody Wants to Rule the World in particular. Time After Time would seem to tie in with the time travel elements and the relationships Elizabeth has with several of the other characters, and hence fits the game better than Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

It’s a theory!

Went to a Quiz Night with Justin and Marika last night. Our table came about 5th or 6th out of 30 or so, which isn’t bad. We were actually in the lead up until the last few rounds, but we had a couple of bad ones, and some other tables had some good ones. It was a good night – although the organisation was shambolic with the result that it didn’t finish until just before midnight.

Additionally, one of the questions was “What did the S.S. in the name of the S.S. Titanic stand for?”. The correct answer – as any fule shud kno – is absolutely bloody nothing, because the Titanic wasn’t an S.S., it was an R.M.S. There was a $50 penalty for challenging questions so we gritted out teeth and ran with it, receiving full points for the completely erroneous “Steam Ship”. Honestly, who vets these questions?

But yeah, stunning ignorance of historical ship designations aside, it was a really fun night and apparently raised a lot of money, so that’s good.

Hmmm, what else has been going on? Oh yes, I’ve been watching some Adventure Time on YouTube. It’s one of those series I’ve been meaning to check out for ages, and against all the odds now actually have. It turns out that it’s every bit as good as I’ve heard – here’s an episode for you to see for yourself! (assuming lawyers haven’t swept down and destroyed it…).

Finally, here’s some nice, soothing music by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy to tide you over…

Jerusalem

Imagine a train. A steel black, armoured train drawn by a massive behemoth of a steam engine which groans slowly into life, accelerating out of the station and onto the tracks, its whistle howling bleakly into the night. As far as the eye can see is a bleak, post-industrial landscape of broken earth, shattered buildings, and dead chimneys, pierced through by the rail line our train follows, its ever increasing speed turning the piles of collapsed bricks and bent girders into a blur with only the cold, dead hills appearing clear in the distance.

The cabin is occupied by two engineers, their forms concealed by greatcoats,  goggles, rebreathers and caps. One ceaselessly shovels mounds of coal into the roaring furnace while the other types cryptic codes into a worn keypad, frayed and dangling wires carrying his signals back to the carriages behind. A greasy printer mounted on the cabin wall coughs to life and starts outputting a list of towns – the keypad engineer ticks them off as the train hurtles through their broken remains.

A golden light appears on the horizon. As the train climbs the hills it becomes brighter, and brighter still until the engine rounds a curve and a vast industrial complex is revealed, occupying the valley below. The sky is lit by gouts of flame and great searchlights, illuminating the stacks and towers of the refineries and furnaces that stretch to the horizon. The train slows as it comes down off the hills, entering a brightly lit corridor between the stacks. The horns and bells of the complex sound out in welcome and the train whistles back – rolling through the great gates that open in the wall of the largest factory…

Got that? Good. Now listen to it.

TROLL METAL

Oh, like I seriously wasn’t going to troll you!

In response to yesterday’s post about the Black Satans, frequent commenter Martin C. recommended looking up Troll Metal. I did, and have to echo his comment of TROLL ON!!

It’s like Limbonic Art without all that annoying screeching!

Enjoy some more Troll Metal here, here and here.

On another subject, good lord, the Government is just falling to bits. I already had a horrible feeling that Tony Abbot was going to win the election, this pretty much makes it a certainty 🙁

Denys Knows Nothing About Death Metal

Seriously, I know almost nothing about death metal. I can identify it when I hear it, but I am completely unable to distinguish good death metal from bad death metal, or identify or discuss any subgenres of the form that may or may not exist.

As such I have no idea whether The Satan of Hell by the Black Satans is a fine example of the genre, an excellent parody of the genre, or a load of old cobblers. What I can say however is the video clip is hilarious. It’s clear that the band simply got dressed up in leather and corpse paint, then filmed themselves piss-farting around in the Finnish woods. Observe…

The entire clip is ridiculous, but highlights include…

0:28 – Get funky!
0:43 – Going for a jog!
1:03 – Even more funky!
1:06 – Die tree! Die!
1:29 – Missed it by that much!
1:51 – Whoops!
1:53 – Hold! Hold! Now dance!
2:11 – Peekaboo!
2:44 – Snowball fight!

Great stuff! 😀

(For those who dislike the sound of machine gun drumming and gargling, try pairing it up with Yakety Sax. Works like a charm!)