Chart Music

[Lang Spoon]

And some poor old unloved Great Auntie, that can’t get fucking Dollar out her brain as she passes over.

[Hot Pepsi]

Hahah, quick on the draw there HP re the Dandy Warhols!

At the risk of sidetracking, Oasis made what was – to me and my ilk, which was apparently a whole heck of a lot of people as it turned out – a genuinely thrilling noise when they first came on the scene. Songs like Rock 'N' Roll Star, Cigarettes And Alcohol and Live Forever had a swagger and an electricity that made many people instantly sit up and take notice; the latter in particular emerged as a fully-formed anthem straight out of nowhere that seemed, for a period, to speak to just about everyone. A clutch of great songs on their second album duly propelled them into stratospheric sales and an omnipresent cultural profile, which alas led to them burying themselves in a nasal snowdrift from which their sensibilities and sound never quite recovered their former heights.

Blur, as has been commented on in many places, were many more 'different' bands than Oasis, if that makes sense. They went via baggy-aping, Kinks-channelling, Mockney, Americanish lo-fi, artily angular and beyond in a way that some people regarded as commendably adaptable, an ability to reinvent themselves and shift the musical goalposts; others on the other hand regarded the same thing as making them superficial, just blowing with the wind and having no real musical identity of their own. I usually liked them though often found them hard to love, perhaps for just that reason. I'd take issue with "stupid novelty band", though, which undersells them rather – but it's true that there were a fair few 'novelty songs', you could say, in the form of the increasingly excruciating 'character songs' that reached a nadir on The Great Escape, ironically the album that went head-to-head with Oasis at the height of the "Battle of Britpop". Their profile west of the Atlantic is a curio, of course, since they're known by the almost entirely unrepresentative Song 2.
Personally, it's usually the slower, less 'affected' and more affecting songs that mean most to me. Try, perhaps:
To The End (from Parklife)
This Is A Low (album track from Parklife)
The Universal (from The Great Escape)
Tender (from 13)
No Distance Left To Run (from 13)

I was going out of my way to be dismissive of Blur so that I wouldn't have to rethink a prejudice. And now you've ruined it.
Yeah, novelty songs, I guess, are the ones I heard the most. But those were also the ones that were presented, to me at least, as the ones that were groundbreaking. Even 20 years ago, I wasn't so interested in rock being groundbreaking. I just wanted it to be good, for lack of a better term.

Really, this bit posted in the CM video list ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClcwKgxu2wk ) describes how Blur and Oasis felt to me. Some of the songs were good. Some were shit. But either way, they weren't the next Beatles, which is how they were often being presented. They weren't the next Beatles partly because they just weren't as good at song-writing as prolific in such a short time, but largely because The Beatles weren't really THE BEATLES either. Their massive impact was as much due to luck and timing as it was to their transcendent awesomeness and the circumstances that allowed for them to seem like the most important thing ever are probably not going to come around again. Certainly not in the Clinton-Blair boring-ass mid-late 90s.


The late 90s were SOOOOOOO shit in so many ways. Really. For me personally, to a large extent, but also for pop culture. The internet was just becoming a thing, but all it seemed to be accomplishing was making a lot of really annoying assholes very rich and amplifying the opinions of mediocrities like Camille Paglia. There was no Spotify or Netflix or YouTube or vast repositories of useful information, even. And my computer could never get photos to look right and was really slow. The music wasn't very good overall, but more importantly, the music on radio and MTV was really shit. I can't recall anything good about fashion in those days. The sports situation, at least for me, was mostly shit. It was just shit shit shit shit shit.

The only thing interesting going on in that era was film and now my memory of that is heavily damaged by knowing that that whole movement was being driven by serial rapists.

[Hot Pepsi]

There is always a disclaimer early in each episode saying, yes, we are going to rip the arse off your sacred cows, but we acknowledge they have been on TOTP more than we have.

But equally, ffs, it's a highly irreverant podcast and we want the contributors to express themselves freely, not have to put everything through some "fair and balanced" metric. They are clearly not going to be racist, sexist or homophobic so there should be no danger of being offended when you listen.

I'm sorry.
I didn't mean it in the sense of "Ah, you're just a bunch of moaning gits who just love to hate everything" (although sometimes I suspect that of most critics, especially British ones) I just find their enthusiasm for the charts and TOTP at odds with how much of it they actively despise. I love a good deserving evisceration as much as the next person, and I love the show and wish they'd do one every day. I just don't understand how they can tolerate wading through so much dross. I could never be a critic.

I also literally have no idea what any of the presenters really love or why, apart from a handful of tracks that are just so good that just about everyone likes them (like the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back") . I know Simon was a goth at one point and wrote a book about Manic Street Preachers, but both of those sounds seem at odds with some of the other things he's said about favoring disco over punk in a general aesthetic sort of way (That was over ten years ago, so I may have misunderstood).

Perhaps that's good. Its best for critics not to lay out their biases, maybe.

They certainly haven't taken down any of my sacred cows. I don't think I have any anymore. I hope the cult of unassailable "rock gods" (or pop gods, as the case may be) is gone for good as it should be. Plus, I'm old enough to know that other people can have different taste and that doesn't make me wrong or them right or vice versa or present any reason to argue about it.

And looking back, I suppose I can relate to why everyone watched TOTP back then. We certainly cared about "The Charts" too, for some reason, and when I was a kid and radio and TV were pretty much my only sources of music, I sat through literally hours of stuff I didn't like or was indifferent to just to hear a few things that I did. Unfortunately, I didn't have the education or critical reasoning skills back then to explain exactly why I didn't like it. Indeed, in those days, I pretended to like stuff that I really didn't like very much just because it seemed like the only way to get by.

[G-Man]

Well, if it's safe cows you want slaughtering, Stubbs is your man. His The Reaper articles are masterful take-down of the supposedly unassailable (though some of his targets have become very assailable indeed). David has said that he did not subscribe to some of the arguments he made as The Reaper. It's a good example of how in cultural analysis, it is possible to state, and even hold, conflicting perspectives which are nonetheless valid.

[Gerontophile]

And if it's foul-mouthed invective you are after, try Mr Agreeable, also by Mr Stubbs (AKA wingco, formerly, and hopefully still, of this parish).

[Hot Pepsi]

He’s wrong about the Cohen brothers and partly wrong about The Clash, among other things. And for some reason, The Quietus looks all wrong on my computer. It only takes up half the screen and the type is too small.

And it’s too wordy.

[Artificial Hipster]

I loved “the Roses” so much from about 15-22, now they make me get a little sick in my mouth. Maybe the most pernicious bunch of fucks to hit alternative music in the last 30 years.Oasis took their template and junked all the unworldly, fey even, rhythmic weirdness, till there was just a similar simian cunt in a bowl cut acting the maggot over music that sounded like Carling, bad coke and John Player Blue smoke. Plodding obvious shite, lyrics that were almost physically painful. That piss poor overdriven snow blind production. If your band are obnoxious coke heads, might be a good idea to have a producer on different or no drugs, unless you are Steely Dan and the arrogance is deserved. Wouldn’t like to hear Bonehead try and play along with Aja.

They eye-fucked the corpse of UK alternative music into the millennium.

Kulkarni’s take-down of the Stone Roses’ remastered debut in The Quietus is heart-warming thump the table in agreement stuff. He is guilty of utterly Hobbesian wrongness with his take on Fool’s Gold however.

It's one long breathless and pointless sneer is what his review is. I mean, yeah he's right about the album (I'm also with him on the appositely named Fools Gold), it's no masterpiece, it carries more than its fair share of filler and its legacy is a barrel scraped to ever-diminishing desperately derivative returns (even if a strong case could be made for Definitely Maybe to be its superior as a stand alone debut).

None of that's important though, but then he's not really reviewing the album, he's reviewing the dolts up north who failed to realise that, to take just one of his examples, three middle class boys from New York had something more important to say to them than this bunch of chancers who they stupidly imagined they could identify with. The album is important because it was and remains important to a hell of a lot of those people.

And it has one of the best opening lines to any debut album on which basis another thread beckons.

[Benjm]

Neil Kulkarni's from/still based in Coventry, isn't he? He may well think that Roses fans are dolts but he's not punching downwards geographically.

[Artificial Hipster]

Neil Kulkarni's from/still based in Coventry, isn't he? He may well think that Roses fans are dolts but he's not punching downwards geographically.

Fair do's, I was at Coventry Poly for 3 years so I can't argue with that.

[Lang Spoon]

New one is out.

[Lang Spoon]

Enough with mahoosive, please Mr Kulkarni. Apart from that, it’s doing the job. Totes agreed on Mr Costello.

[Disco Child Ballads]

Why are these podcasts so long? I really don't have the three hours to spare to listen to one of them.

[Lang Spoon]

Geldolf gets a fine savaging from Taylor. What a terrible wanker he was.

His Bobness, not Taylor.

[Lang Spoon]

Kinda like the meandering 3 hourness myself. But then, my life is a wee bit lacking momentum at the moment. This one worked well in half hour segments. Got to strut it to “Da” You Think I’m Sexy? through town on my way home this evening.

[Lang Spoon]

Oh, was the terribly ugly named Pop Idol type Irish star called “Eoghan”? That’s just Owen spelled up.

[Various Artist]

Got to strut it to “Da” You Think I’m Sexy? through town on my way home this evening.

Admit it, this was no different from any other evening, eh LS?

[Lang Spoon]

They don’t call it “Dame St” for nothing. Cos it was built on a dam.

Meal for one from M&S the end result of the strutting more often than not.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Blimey, the new one is 3h 27m long. Editing could be in order.

[Satchmo Distel]

I don't mind the length of the episode but I think there's a danger of repetition: e.g. this was the third Three Degrees appearance

[Satchmo Distel]

Another odd pronunciation - Aleister Crowley

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

I read NME from 1974 to 1996. As far as I was aware, Melody Maker was for people who liked Barclay James Harvest...

This. Absolutely this.

[Jah Womble]

Until around 1980, it was.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Until around 1980, it was.

Maybe a little later than that. But MM was the magazine for heads.

[Satchmo Distel]

Oh, was the terribly ugly named Pop Idol type Irish star called “Eoghan”? That’s just Owen spelled up.

I think this was Malachi Cush on the BBC's piss-stained Pop Idol imitation, Fame Academy. Still has a career in N Ireland on radio 2 type drivel local radio and banging out niche CDS for grannies.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

On the podcast, I can't tell them apart.