The delectable and sexy Mr Alex Cronk-Young came out with this little nugget on Twitter earlier:
(in other news, great job on that Twitter integration, WordPress. Love it. But I digress.)
Ahem. Anyway. Following that statement, I decided it would be a good idea to go back and investigate if the music I listened to back at school actually was shit. Well, actually, I know for a fact that some of it was shit, even back then, but I’m interested to see how it compares to the shit we have today, if you see what I mean.
I’ve carefully selected ten tracks for your delectation. Those of you who have Spotify can clicky-click the titles to hear them if you’ve never heard them or can’t remember what they sound like.
So here goes! Let’s jump in.
Oasis were huge while I was at school. It was the height of the “Oasis vs Blur” nonsense, which I never quite understood because they were two completely different bands with very different sounds from one another.
Within the Oasis fans, though, there were a few subsets; the people who just bought the albums and listened to their stuff on the radio, and those who thought they were “hardcore” because they’d bought all the singles and thus had access to all the B-sides.
The thing is, though, most of Oasis’ B-sides and album tracks were considerably better than the singles they put out. For starters, they didn’t always stick to the standard “guitar, bass, drums, vocals” combo that most of their singles did. This track, for instance, includes a bit of subtle organ work (easy there) in the background and as such has a very different sound from a lot of their other work.
Most of the B-sides were just plain better tunes, too. Rocking Chair perhaps wasn’t the best of them, but it’s certainly one that I’m fond of, and less well-known than the now overly-played The Masterplan.
Jagged Little Pill was the second ever album I bought. I’m not entirely sure why I bought it, because Alanis Morissette was on local radio on the school bus pretty much every single day and I wasn’t entirely sure that I liked her voice.
I was pleasantly surprised by the album, though. There was a lot of very obvious angst throughout, particularly in this track. She swore, too, which made it A Bit Rebellious.
Now obviously I wasn’t an angry young Canadian woman in my teens, so I perhaps couldn’t relate to this album on a particularly personal level. But she wrote some decent tunes and had a distinctive sound of her own. More to the point, these songs still hold up pretty well today.
The Verve were one of those groups that I picked up the album for after much deliberation. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the singles I’d heard on the radio were quite what I was looking for, and once I’d picked up the album I still wasn’t convinced that they were actually any good.
This track stuck out, though. It may have been due to my friend Craig’s incessant insistence that we try and learn how to play it in the school’s music practice rooms every lunchtime—that and most of Oasis’ B-sides, some of which we actually did a respectable job of—but, besides the over-over-overplayed Bitter Sweet Symphony (which still gets rolled out on TV promos today) this was one that seemed to be tuneful and memorable.
Listening to it now, it’s a bit dull and morose, but it is better than the rest of the album.
Too many guitars! Need more crap and cheese! (That sounds like the worst party ever.)
The Spice Girls were overproduced rubbish who couldn’t sing live. They were supposedly “hot”, but I found their aesthetic appeal somewhat questionable. Victoria Adams (now Beckham, of course) was too skinny and moody-looking. Emma Bunton looked a bit… I don’t know, odd. It was unfashionable to find Mel C attractive and she had pikey trousers (but would go on to be by far the best solo artist) and Mel B was just too frightening and weird to find in any way hot.
That left Geri, of course, who was ginger at the time, and thus made anyone judging her to be the “hottest” feel a little conflicted thanks to the age-old ginger stigma—something else I never quite understood.
Also, this song made us giggle at the time when we all determined that it was about fucking. It’s really not subtle. At all.
I actually didn’t own a Cardigans album until much, much later, but this track was on a dodgy compilation CD called “Essential Indie” (the rest of which was utter shit, as I recall) which I got free with my Discman. I remember thinking that I liked the combination of Nina Persson’s sweet, girly voice and the unusual inclusion of flute and bassoon in the backing instruments.
Turns out I still do like all those things. What do you know.
Bernard Butler’s People Move On is another album that I don’t remember why I bought. I also remember thinking that the vast majority of it was dirge-like, boring crap. This track, though, had energy and “power” behind it, and I enjoyed listening to it, even if the rest of the album was dirge-like boring crap.
Still sounds all right today. I like the strings. I’m a big fan of string parts in guitar bands generally.
Ah, actually, I think this one was also on “Essential Indie”. It’s also another song about fucking.
I was a bit torn on whether I liked James or not; “Sit Down” was one of those tracks that was played so often on the radio and TV that you felt a bit dirty liking anything that was associated with it. But this was a decent enough song, even though it doesn’t really go anywhere and has way too much falsetto.
No, actually, it’s not that great at all. Fuck James.
Time for more cheesy crap! Britney hit the bigtime while we were still at school and I found myself liking her cheesy bullshit despite myself—even without taking that video (which, for the record, no-one was quite sure if they were supposed to find sexy or pervy) into account.
I’ve chosen this track to prove that I have indeed listened to her whole album. I also quite liked the fact that Metropolis Street Racer spoofed this particular song quite nicely on its excellent, completely original soundtrack.
Mansun were weird. Their album Attack of the Grey Lantern appeared to contain some sort of rudimentary conceptual storyline, until the bonus track told everyone otherwise.
This track pretty much summed it up. A song about a vicar who wears plastic trousers and gets away with stripping, who then dies.
It’s still pretty bewildering to listen to today, to be honest. Decent album, though—worth a listen.
This is the most depressing piece of music of all time, without question. It’s not as if OK Computer was a particularly uplifting album at the best of times, but for this track to show its miserable, suicidal face just four songs into the disc pretty much made it clear that if you were going to listen to this album all the way through, you were in for a Rough Ride.
It’s still a profoundly affecting track today, full of whiny miserable emotion and dodgy vocal synthesis in the backing. It’s difficult to know what is the “right mood” to listen to this track, because if you listen to it while feeling miserable, it sure isn’t going to help. But this song could bring a candy convention in Happyland to its knees, too.
Basically, it’s a great song but no-one should listen to it if they want to smile ever again.
There you go. A super-uplifting playlist for your Saturday night, circa 1999. Enjoy.
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The whole “OMG YOU MUST SEE THEM LIVE” argument has never really washed with me. In my admittedly limited experience of going to gigs, the experience of hearing a beloved band (or, in one case, a beloved band of my friends’, and one which I was totally unfamiliar with) performing their best work on stage is infinitely inferior to sitting down, putting their album on your high-falutin’ home theatre setup and cranking up the volume.
