10. Blues fans

Let it go seriously. Who goes to these blues festivals? Who the fuck could have the blues anymore? The blues over what? The fact that you’ve lost your enviable retirement supplement? The fact that the world is currently in a state of “disharmony”. Do people just like the style? How do people still want to go to the bar to here random generic blues? It’s the same thing over and over again. How can anyone be satisfied with this? Just listen to a Robert Johnson box set and get over it. The blues were born in a context that has long since past. You can’t relive the blues that someone like Robert Johnson felt and you will never hear it again, so why are you going back to it? The comfort in the past never visited; the identities first attempt at self-idealization.

9. Jimmy Buffet Fans (Parrotheads)

It’s actually difficult to criticize “Parrotheads” because they’re so unselfconscious of their own actions that they’re sincere.  Regardless these people are annoying to be around.  You find them in hotels following around Jimmy Buffet, drunk 24/7 singing the same 2 or 3 popular Jimmy Buffet songs that I don’t care to go into now out of the unwanted grimace of recognizing those songs.  These fans are well beyond their middle age and are trying to live young again.  People say age is a state of mind…not when your face looks like leather and you spray paint your beard white.  You’re very much your age.  An age that is very much old that is giving it’s last shot at being young.  Hopelessly romantic, or just hopeless?  Either way, there’s an alternative graceful-aging that should be the hope of those young.

8. Heavy Metal fans

Heavy metal fans are a lot like video game nerds.  Where some people drown their sorrows in their parent’s basement by playing video games, some go out to heavy metal shows, dressed in the stereotypical all black, and mosh or headbang. When you think about moshing, its just a bunch of guys rubbing on each other, which, if you think about it, is kind of gay. Just like the hardcore gamer there are very few girls at these events, as most girls don’t like heavy metal. This further frustrates the heavy metal fan and leads to further violence amongst them. The heavy metal fan also likes to claim that they are railing against the life of the common man, the average, or the normal people. They do this by dressing exactly the same, wearing the same color, growing their hair long, and doing whatever they can to become indistinguishable from the next fan. This little contradiction never cross the heavy metal fan’s mind. Sadly, we here at OW love a number of heavy metal bands and have been to a number of heavy metal shows. Oddly enough we dressed in our typical jeans and a t-shirt where the most unique people at the show. One time I had to go straight from work which had me where a white polo. For those who don’t know white is the only color that can physically harm the heavy metal fan. Anyway I got a lot of bad looks at that show.

7. Ska Fans

You don’t find ska fans many places and this is a good thing, because if you did the world would be a massively annoying place.  Instead you find them in the confines of small clubs with mobster top hats on and suspenders mimicking the style of The Specials.  They dance like assholes.  They don’t know how to dance.  The music is goofy and so are they.  Where does the instinct come from to enjoy this music?  Where was the instinct to transfer the horn sound into pop music?  Out of all the orchestral instruments that made the transition to pop music, the horn played in staccato has to be the most annoying.  I claim no understanding in the instincts of where people start liking this music.  I just know I don’t like being around it nor it’s fans.

6. Rap fans

Yes, you’re tough.  You look like you’ve come from “the streets” even though your street is blooming with evanescent willows.  Yes, your pants are falling off your legs.  Yes, you have a scar on your face that you probably gave to yourself because you saw that Eminem gave one to himself.  Yes, your car speakers has no frequency higher that can be heard higher than 25 HZ.  Yes, your car sounds like it’s about to explode.  Yes, you wear your hat backwards late at night in attempts to court trampy women.  Yes, all these signs point to the fact to that you’re tough.  Yes, you need all these signs to point to the fact that you’re tough.

5. Dave Matthews fans

Have you ever been to a Frat party? How do you feel about Birkenstocks? Backwards hats with curved brims? Greek letters? Chugging terrible beer? Keg stands? If the answer to each of these questions is resoundingly positive, then you may be  fan of the Dave Matthews Band. What is more interesting is that DMB is actually a talented band, with a  world renowned drummer, bassist, and saxophone player. Oh they also have this gigantic dude that plays violin. I don’t know if he is any good, and I don’t want to be the guy who tells him otherwise. In any case we here at OW generally like this band but boy do we hate the fans. They are either insanely obsessed or drunks looking for a party. Or sometimes both. We have even heard of DMB fans who will only listen to DMB because they claim nothing else is even worth it. Further research has even shown that there is an on going feud between DMB fans and Blink 182 fans. Why is completely beyond us. Going to a DMB show is like watching every jock, frat boy, and sorority slut get so hammered they forget they were even at the show. But don’t worry they have pictures on facebook to prove they were there.

4. Punk fans

Punk fans don’t like music.  At least they don’t like anything substantial in music. They are more interested in the style of the music, meaning how the band appears aesthetically on stage and the quantity of pierced rings are on the band members faces.  When punk isn’t so obviously expressive in it’s aesthetic repugnancy, it relies on a supposed understanding of anything political.  In comes The Clash, one of the most Overrated Bands of all time.  Instead of wearing your heart of your sleeve physically, you wear your heart on your brain disingenuously.  You read the most superficial account of the Sandinista revolution and somehow equate it as a total repudiation of American foreign Policy.  Anything that can decenter you to others is what’s more important for you.  This argument is tired.  It has to go without saying at this point.

3. Emo fans

Drooping razor edged hair, an operable-to-all sulk, a little eye liner below the eye, the Emo fan wants you to know about them.  Nobody else wants to know about them and never did, so that’s when they turn towards the appearance, the appearance that wants attention, needs attention, and seeks it in the hidden corners of the most marginalized places of modern suburbia.  One day maybe someone will come around and truly understand your plight of always being misunderstood, or rather, never trying to be understood because you weren’t important enough.  Either way, sympathy for the sake of sympathy may come along with another is bored, and together you can feel sorry for yourselves feeling sorry for yourselves.  Objectless, without any idea, the height of egoism is Emo’s inner soft shell.

2. Phish fans

What’s the difference between a  DMB fan and a Phish fan? Drug use. Your average DMB fan drinks a lot of beer, smokes some weed, and depending on how rich and white they are, do a little coke. Your average Phish fan is on everything from LSD to Heroin almost all the time. Where the DMB fan wears clean pressed button up shirts, the Phish fan might change cloths once or twice a year and generally walks around smelling like patchouli oil. Which, by the way, barely covers up the constant weed smell, since they smoke pot like cigarettes. Much like the DMB fan they are obsessed with all things Phish. I have even heard stories about fans doing Heroin because lead singer Trey Anastasio was doing it. The difference being they were dirt poor, couldn’t afford it, and generally don’t have jobs. Much like the DMB fan, we here at OW enjoy most of Phish’s albums but, once again, there fans are terrible people who try to pretend it’s still the seventies. If it wasn’t for this band the tie dye industry would have disappeared years ago. Yet despite OW’s best efforts people still buy these terrible t-shirts.

1. Indie Fans

Indie fans are the worst fans of any genre in the history of music.  They wear the tightest jeans imaginable to the point of buying woman’s jeans if it’s possible.  They walk like storks with their elbows always turned behind their hips.  They wear tight ass T-shirts with some logo on it representing something either socially perfunctory (that they think is significant) or something in the guise of an absurdity in the attempts at making another laugh.  The craving of attention inside the Indie Fan is much like the emo fan except with the ostensible hope that their attention-seeking is methodologically more sophisticated.  This is more gross than the Emo fan when the mask of ball hugger sized jeans is unmasked and the secret loser is revealed.  Only someone of this disposition could listen to such abominable  music that loves to think it‘s quality in it‘s unchecked “creativity“.

10.Will Sergeant

Will Sergeant of Echo and The Bunny is an often overlooked guitarist.  One listen to their album “Ocean Rain” though and one will hear some of the most innovative and neurotic guitar playing of the 80’s. His classic delay used on their previous album’s was overwhelmed by spontaneous creativity on every single song off of Ocean Rain; more specifically the song “Thorn of Crowns”. It’s hear that Sergeant matches the Voltairian madness of Ian McCulloch’s vocals delivery to a song that exists somewhere in the sadistic reaches of and 18th century romantic comedy. Beyond the brilliance of his work on Ocean Rain is his work on subsequent singles like “The Cutter”and “Lips like Sugar”. He could play pop, spontaneous guitar madness; everything under the sun but his work always sounded distinctly his own. Break out Ocean Rain to hear what creative guitar playing sounds like.

9. Noel Gallagher

Hmmm…Noel Gallagher on the greatest guitarists of all time list?  Well, this is Old-Wizard’s list so we didn’t have a choice so we might as well start going into his great solos and ending it like that. First off, listen to the solo in “Live Forever“. Simple, but emotive and perfect in the context of the song. Listen to his massive amount of guitar overdubs in “D’Ya Know What I Mean”; That was certainly a new sound for the time regardless of how much someone would like to simply call it psychedelic. Listen to his hypnotic guitar lines in “Up in the Sky” and “Columbia” and one will find further evidence of a man who just had a sense for what a tune was and what a guitar needed to do to carry that tune. Alright, that’s it.

8. Jonny Greenwood

Since The Bends onwards, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead has established himself as one of the greatest guitarists of his generation. Whether it’s in alt-rock modes like “Just” or the twiddling heard on “Paranoid Android“, Jonny Greenwood is always looking to expand the sound of the guitar, and when he couldn’t anymore he turned to the programming for his sounds. But between The Bends and Ok Computer, he exhausted all the emotion out of the guitar that there could possibly be. Beyond his actual playing is his striking sound that pierced the listeners ears especially during a solo. He moved across the fret board with a feeling of limitlessness not seen in most guitarists. His expansion of what the guitar can sound like puts him in high rank among the endless list of guitarists through the instruments history.

7. Kevin Shields

Kevin Shields, leader of shoegazing’s most coveted band My Bloody Valentine took the guitar and made it sound like something it never sounded like before. Forget the simple overdrive and sometimes guitar interplay of his “alternative-indie” contemporaries. He made the guitar sound like flowers and volcano explosions at the same time utilizing the whammy bar of a fender Jag more creatively than any guitarist before. It was with Kevin Shields that the obsession with guitar pedals became enormous for better or worse.  What many people didn’t understand though was that Shields got his sound from the way he played his guitar, the way he would exaggeratedly bend notes on entire bar chords with countless amounts of amps portraying the sounds. The sound of the guitar had never seen it’s most outward limits since Kevin Shields and no one has come close since.

6. Jimmy Page

There is no guitarists with as many recognizable riffs as Jimmy Page. No matter how queer it sounds, he is the “riff master”. It would be too obvious to name the obvious songs that one recognizes immediately by his playing. Beyond his penchant for creating memorable guitar riffs though was someone who commanded the guitar itself like a toy. Watch him during the early days in the DVD “How the West was Won”. Watch his playing during “Misty Mountain Hop“. He has total control over what he’s playing that answers every musical move by the rest of the band with an ease unseen by any guitarist before or after. He just knew what to do with the guitar at every second and created memorable lines in 80% of the songs in the band. He is THE hard rock guitarist of all time.

5. John Squire

John Squire of The Stone Roses may be more recognized by “GUITARISTS!” for his second album “The Second Coming” which perfectly updated Jimmy Page’s style into a 90’s alternative sound, but it was with their debut album that John Squire will always win his legacy. Every one song on The Stone Roses debut album was sprinkled with the shine of the best Byrdsesque guitar playing and sound. When he wasn’t sprinkling sunshine on the groove of these songs, he was going to subterranean Caribbean guitar styles that took this pop music into a completely different place never occupied by pop music before. Take a listen to “Bye Bye Badman”. Listen to his solo at 3:00 minutes in and think about the style he played in the entire song before.  Combining this Caribbean shuffle with guitar lines that literally sounded like a sunny day made for one of the most enjoyable guitar experiences put to record. Whatever Squire was being influenced by at the time, we were the beneficiaries

4. Jimi Hendrix

What Jimi Hendrix did with the guitar influenced so many guitarists afterwards. It would take an endless amount of time to list all of them. He not only influenced guitarists who concentrated on their musicianship, but all those other guitarists who wanted bend the living shit out of the guitar string, the other guitarists who wanted to make one note sustain for five minutes, the other guitarists who wanted to combined 10 delays with 20 reverbs to see what massive sound would come out of their Marshall Stack after all this work. Hendrix epitomized a figure who influenced the most disparate amount of guitarists of all time. Think about it. What other guitarist could both influence Eric Clapton and Kevin Shields? The legacy of Jimi Hendrix is without question. You know him, you hear him, you know what he does. It’s pretty simple actually.

3. Johnny Marr

The jangly guitar is owned by Johnny Marr. Listen to the entire Smiths catalogue and at every turn you will find Marr coming up with the most creative guitar lines that was perfectly complimented by Morrissey’s idiosyncratic lyrics. But this is what makes Johnny Marr such a great guitarist. It was never just guitar wankery. Every song had to be tuneful and melodic guitar lines. Everything popped out in Johnny Marrs pop playing. Listen to “This Charming Man” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” to get a glimpse at the quality that Johnny Marr put into his guitar work. Every note meant something. There was no chugging or power chords; it was all just melody that never got in the way of the vocalist. This sense for restraint and melody puts Johnny Marr as one of the greatest guitarist of all time.

2. David Gilmour

One feels like a charlatan putting David Gilmour as the 2nd greatest guitarist of all time because of not including Syd Barrett with his psychedelic musings that must have influenced Gilmour. But when one listens to Gilmour, one hears a guitarist more controlled while still retaining the intensity that Syd Barrett originally brought to songs like “Astronomy Domine.” One hears this equal control and intensity in Gilmour’s guitar playing on “Meddle“, especially “Echoes” which is listed on our greatest songs of all time list. It’s hard to argue the greatness of Gilmour during the solo of Echoes. He pulls something off that’s unspeakable from any guitarist before or after. It’s unfortunate that Gilmour turned into such an average musician ‘rehashing the classics’ in his old age when he was at one time operating at such a primal level in his guitar playing. It’s hard to think of a guitarist who just understood the instrument more naturally than Gilmour.

1. Keith Richards

Keith Richards certainly wasn’t the best technical guitarist of all time but we already said in the introduction that we could care less about that. What we do know about him is that he wrote the beginning guitar line to “Gimme Shelter.” What we know is that he wrote the riff to “Brown Sugar.” What we know is what he played in “Can’t you hear me knocking.” We know how he responded to all of McJagger’s vocal lines. What we know is that we listen to him and we hear someone playing the guitar in a way that evokes more soul than any guitarist before or after. He has an instinct for knowing when to make his playing sound haunting. He has an instinct to know when to make his playing sound more raw than any player in guitar history. 2 albums; Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. Listen to these albums, and you will hear a guitarist with the most instinctual sense for the guitar. He is the rock guitarist who matters most. The guitar was more than a guitar for Keith Richards. It became his body and something more.

10. Sam Roberts – Brother Down

Now that Sam Roberts has become somewhat popular and a major live music attraction, no one remembers what started him off on his path to great music. It was a call to existential despair in “Brother Down” that paved the way for the spirit of Sam Roberts. If you want to find the origins of where Sam Roberts comes from, you have to return to this first single. This song was recorded in an 8 track but busted open the doors of Canadian radio to a new style of quality songwriting, a style that would trump all those other shitty Canadian indie bands that came after. For any Sam Roberts fans out there, don’t forget this song.

9. Kenny Logins – I’m Alright

This song is seen as a joke by everyone who hears it probably because it was always going to be tied with the most funny movie of all time in Caddyshack. But try to distancing yourself from any idea of the movie and one will hear an amazing cheesy 80’s song with an absolutely ripping chorus that is as odd as it is poppy. The lyrics speak for themselves but not so much to the point of blatant obviousness. It’s at 1:44 that the song takes an incredible turn with a stop in all the instrumentation. It’s perfectly ung vocal harmonies arranged in a completely unexpected way. This song is one of the most odd and blatant pop songs you could hear. Everyone needs to hear it.

8. Suede- Electricity

No one talks about Suede’s “Electricity” off their rippin “Head Music” album. This song grooves like no song after. The bass line is strange. It’s sort of dumb sounding with the drum rhythm in the verse but conveys a feeling of unease. Wait till this fucking chorus hits you though. If you want to know what a great chorus sounds like, listen to “Electricity.” You could listen to this damn chorus for a year straight and never get sick of it. How this never went #1 in the British charts is beyond me. This is the music that is meant to go #1 all over the world, not just in your native country. This is Suede doing more perfect pop.

7. Oasis – D’ya Know what I mean

How easy it is to forget this amazing first single off one of the greatest albums of all time? “D’Ya Know What I Mean” kicked the ass of the listener into listening to good music. The beats were heavy and compressed, Liam gave a perfect vocal delivery, and Noel experimented with guitar overdubs on par with Jimmy Hendrix. In short, this was a psychedelic maelstrom. This was Oasis at their finest. Massive sounding, unafraid and enveloped by a great chorus. That this is never named in Oasis’s greatest songs is beyond us at Old-Wizard. This shit dominates 90’s rock.

6. The Vandellas – Come and Get these Memories

The Vandellas, like The Supremes seemed to have a never ending amount of great songs (much due to the DHD songwriting combo). People forget this early single from The Vandellas though. It barely made a dent in the charts but after a couple listens this may just be The Vandella’s best single. It’s starts off big, and ends off just as big. The chorus is big while still retaining an easygoingness that’s known to the best of Motown. The song rhythmically moves well and doesn’t reach too far lyrically which is to the songs credit. It’s simple and great, like most great pop songs.

5. Kasabian – Processed Beats

Kasabian are the shit. Their first album was one of the best albums of the new decade, but people never mention “Processed Beats” as being one of their great songs. This song grooves with the best R and B ever made while still retaining it’s cool from songs like LSF. It’s vocally delivered with a rawness that only Tom Meighan knows how to deliver. And what about that chorus? This thing is slinky and sensuous. Imagine getting in on this at a dance club with people who actually had good taste in music. A dream come true if only others had good taste in music. Kasabian may have had more popular songs but none ripped the groove harder than “Processed Beats.”

4. Shed Seven – The Heroes

Listen to this song and you will wonder why you never heard this band, let along this song. How could a song be so good and the band isn’t even popular. How can a production be this smooth and melodically so perfect without anyone knowing about it? How is this song not going to be remembered for decades to come? How is this band not going to be remembered for decades to come? Unfortunately for them, they were competing within one of the greatest musical movements ever in Britpop where every song was a single. The thing was, Shed Seven’s songs were just as good as the “first rate” bands as proved on this grand sweeping waltz of a song. All Old-Wizard readers, download this song, down this album “Let it Ride.”

3. T-Rex- Dreamy Lady

Has there ever been a song with better sexual lyrics than Dreamy Lady by T-Rex? Bolan of course was the master of turning on everything under the sun, but with this song he goes all out. “Oh, dreamy lady, won’t you come to my bed…night is the right time, to get acquainted, with my head, in my bed”. Just barely a metaphor, the obviousness of this line is hilariously executed. The song itself is a super melody of sass and passion. For all it’s sexuality it still retains it’s innocence which is one of Marc Bolan’s greatest traits. It’s a shame that all his later work became ignored because it was just as good as early work even if more dramatic. The songs were still there and is exemplified best by this oddity of a song.

2. Happy Mondays- Dennis and Lois

This song starts off like your watching the beginning of Wheel of Fortune and that’s great! Whenever “Pills Thrills and Bellyaches” is mentioned, this song is never mention as being one of the standout songs on the album, but this is one of Shaun Ryder’s best vocal deliveries in the Happy Monday’s history. Never mind the vocals though, listen to the song. This song has got spirit. The chorus is made for a stadium but not in a cheesy Bon Jovi way, but for the way the British know how to make timeless songs that can be sung by 100,000 people in an arena. “Dennis and Louis” was never released as a single and was in the middle of this timeless album but it can’t be forgotten as an incredibly good song.

1. Stone Roses- Bye Bye Badman

The Stone Roses debut album is certainly not underrated, not in Britain at least. It has been listed as the greatest album of all time by publications in the UK. Never though is Bye Bye Badman mentioned in the reviews of the album and it’s arguably the best song on the album. The song is strangely excluded from their greatest hits album also. This song defines what makes The Stone Roses debut album probably the greatest debut album of all time; An insatiable rhythm section, Ian Brown’s lyrics that are full of bravado while never feeling forced, John Squire’s indelible guitar playing that shows his greatest guitar work in The Stone Roses history at 3.00 minutes in. This song says everything about why The Stone Roses are a band that will never happen again. That these elements can combine into this one sound is an anomaly, one for better or worse is only reserved for the nature of pop music’s flexibility.

10. The Catherine Wheel – Black Metallic

Catherine Wheel were always going to be an underrated band. The vocals weren’t a traditional timbre and the style was always just too pop to be considered “credible” by underground publications but too indigenous to ever become a high selling pop band. Existing in-between this line is a difficult way to success, if that’s even what The Catherine Wheel wanted in the first place. With the delivery of “Black Metallic” though, one could tell that Rob Dickinson and co didn’t really care. Whether they cared or not, this slice of guitar wash and perfect pitched vocals created a space for Catherine Wheel as a band that would be looked upon nostalgically forever. When listening to this song, you will always be forced into previous memories.

9. Chapterhouse – Pearle

Chapterhouse is often forgotten in the Shoegazing crowd for worse. They created a collection of songs that would all be signatures of the Shoegazing genre. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than on their album “Whirlpool”; specifically on the song “Pearle.” The vocals are as dreamy as Shoegazing vocals ever became. The drumbeat is hypnotic, the lyrics are quixotic, and the song is overdubbed with anything that could possibly create a pure atmospheric experience. In some ways, “Pearle” is Shoegazing in it’s most cliché, but that is to it’s credit because the song was executed sincerely; meaning this is a good place to start off for anyone wanting to invest their musical experiences in the Shoegazing genre.

8. Oasis- Columbia

Shoegazing found its best bastard child in Oasis, especially the Oasis of their first album Definitely Maybe. Any number of songs on Definitely Maybe could be considered Shoegazing classics, but it was “Columbia” that inherently understood the musical hypnosis of Shoegazing and gave it a blistering rock vocal delivery and Bolan swagger combining the pomp of past rock and the nuance of the Shoegazing genre. There’s no space for dynamics in this song; which is the heart of most great Shoegazing songs. The marginalization of the “need for dynamics” that was always privileged was destroyed by Shoegazing. Along with Rave culture in the late 80’s, the never ending Ecstasy filled groove became the hallmark of musical spirituality. Oasis took these styles and filled them with Lion’s teeth.

7. My Bloody Valentine- Only Shallow

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, My Bloody Valentine is the first and foremost recognized band in the Shoegazing movement and deservingly so. Without My Bloody Valentine, there would be no Slowdive, Lush, or Chapterhouse, regardless of the fact that either of those later bands may have written better songs than My Bloody Valentine. When Loveless came out it was one of the most unique musical experiences to ever be heard in the pop music medium. Everything was faded into each other. Nothing was spaced out. Everything was pushed into an atmospheric medium that at any moment sounded like it was going to explode, and it did explode on “Only Shallow”, the title track on Loveless. Listen to this enough times in your car with speakers up and you will lose your hearing before your 30. See this song live and you will become physically sick by how much headroom the music takes up. Talk about musical experience.

6. The Telescopes – The Sleepwalk

The Telescopes were a band who started off as a band basically sounding like Spaceman 3. It were punk vocals and sped up songs that tried to mesh punk with psychedelic, without the inherent privileging of psychedelic over punk that Spaceman 3 always operated under. As The Telescopes career moved on though, they got the beat, literally and figuratively. They expanded their sound into a massive guitar clash that was more raw than dreamy combined with beats as grooving as songs off The Happy Mondays “Pills, Thrills, and Bellyaches”. It was a perfect combination of dance, caustic vocals, and massive guitar production. They were the only band to accomplish this and it’s perfectly exemplified by The Sleepwalk. Their was a band from California (in the name of Casper) who recently was making music like this without even knowing about the Telescopes, but their want for stardom turned their beat into a Killers copycat. If they only knew, and if they only begin to realize what they once had, stardom would pale in comparison to the music that they once created, which was a new form of The Sleepwalk.

5. Ride- Vapour Trail

The shamelessly romantic “Vapour Trail” always had to be on the best Shoegazing songs of all time list. It’s hard not to be hit by this song in a profound way. It’s hard to not believe in the un-believable and culturally relative concepts of love when listening to Vapour Trail. It sounds more meaningful than any explanation of what the sentiment could ever convey in words. It’s distance, it’s confusion, it’s problems with a romantic musical accompaniment serving as the background to arguably Andy Bell’s best vocal delivery. If there has to be the one song that epitomizes a vigor to traditional romantic love, it would be Vapour Trail. It’s expansively heartening without sounding unctuous. It’s a true accomplishment for a concept that has become so consigned to meaninglessness.

4. Lush – Monochrome

When listening to Lush, one really feels that credit first has to be given to the Cocteau Twins for creating a genre (without their wanting to) in the name of “dream pop” which sometimes can be seen synonymously with Shoegazing, but not quite. This is proven best with Lush’s best song from Spooky and arguably their career. “Monochrome” is a perfect dream with perfect vocals and when the song hit’s the pure instrumental at 2:39, one can’t help but feel that the northern climates will always have a more profound spirituality than any of the southern climates regardless of our history. The world begins in ice, water and snow. The dance of the world begins with primordial ice skaters figure-8ting a sweeping design in the world bestowed upon what was once nothing. This feeling for northern spirituality has never been captured as perfectly as this masterpiece by Lush.

3. Slowdive – Allison

The first song from their “Souvlaki” album, the song starts off in an instrumental haze. The vocals come in that are even more hazy. It’s almost like someone took the tape machine and used a tool to slowdown every track on the record, or it was a band who was operating under a disposition of “just floating”. The haze slowly pushes into a chorus that’s one of the most catchy in the Shoegazing genre. Sisters are spinning, but she’s just fine, she’s just out there somewhere. It’s this sentiment that perfectly captures the spirit of the Shoegazing genre; absolute vagueness but a realization that something is still going on that is always on the verge of barely being understood, to eventually understand it’s superfluous to even try to get by the “barely-being-understood” and the vagueness that points to a more grounding reality than one of reason and enlightenment could ever hope for.

2. Swervedriver- Duel

This song is never even recognized in the Shoegazing genre and it’s more powerful than most every song in the genre. Maybe it was because the guitars were too overdriven with masculinity, maybe it was the masculinity of Adam Franklin’s voice that made this song seem more rock than Shoegazing. Either way, both genres were always closely touching each other. This is nowhere more recognized than on Swervedriver’s Mezcal Head and Oasis’s Definitely Maybe. But with Swervedriver’s “Duel,” Shoegazing was taken into something that was even more transcendent than the laters previous forms. It was taken to an affirmative space where the nebulous center of Shoegazing was no longer falling into a relaxed complacency; it was taken to ages beyond itself, still going for a thousand years, going to the absolutely general “marketplace”. This song was not just the negation of the world that Shoegazing found in it’s most stoic and dreamy acceptance, it was the negation of the negation; it negated the fact that there will ever be a point in which a “pure” reality will ever be realized. The circularity of eternity found it’s most perfect musical example in “Duel” by Swervedriver.

1. Ride- Leave them all Behind

Everything perfect about the Shoegazing genre was found in Ride’s “Leave them all behind.” This is their second place in the list and they earned the number 1 spot for this beast of a song. Listen to it once and you know something’s going on. Listen to it two or three times, and for some reason you listen to it a 4th and 5th time. It’s that 5th time that this song becomes absolutely addicting and hypnotic without utilizing the traditional modes of pop music. This song is grand in sound and lyrics. What starts off as a simple synth turns into a massive wall-of-sound guitar cornucopia. With Mark Gardener and Andy Bell’s duel vocaling, the vocals sounds as hypnotic as the music itself. Like all great songs, the vocals match the vibe of the song. It’s in space, in purgatory, and the vocals match this perfectly. This space though is not something that just sounds “floaty.” It’s heavily intense and commands the listeners attention at every second. The lyrical sentiment speaks for itself and is arguably the most profound in all of Shoegazing proving this time that laconic style, when done right, trumps detail and complexity. This song ends in an explosion and the listener is left with nothing left than something that has just happened to them.

Who were the trendsetters in music?  Well of course the British.  Everyone followed the style of British musicians and they still do today.  When Liam Gallagher grows his hair out so does a nation.  When Pete Townsend develops mod culture and style that goes along with it, a nation wears the style.  When The Stone Roses epitomized the “baggy scene” in loose pants, everyone started buying them.  No American band inspires this kind of mimicry.  The British know what great style is and combine their great songs with it.  The Americans write average songs and wear straight legged Levi jeans.

9. Better Haircuts

This is obvious.  Check out George Harrison’s hairdo.   Check out Robert Plant’s blonde curls.  Look at Liam Gallagher’s Zeus like hair.  What do musicians haircuts from America look like?  They’re thick dark pieces of shit and more often than not look dirty.  The Brits would never allow themselves to get away with having dirty hair.  Their rock stars; they’re the God’s of the modern age.  They can’t appear at shows with crap hair.  When style has been made by musicians, even in more blatant pop (E.G. Lilly Allen) it’s always been from British musicians.

8. The Birth of Rave Culture

Could you image a world without rave culture?  A world without DJ Shadow or Aphex Twins?  A world without the Chemical Brothers or Massive Attack?  Where would the beat be in music with Rave Culture?  Thank God for Tony Wilson and Factory Records for putting this absolutely essential music genre on the map.  The birth of the DJ was the birth of music as the groove, as it always should be.  The British bands that have spawned from this style are innumerous from The Stone Roses to The Happy Mondays, to New Order, to Monaco, to The Space Monkeys…all British bands…of course.

7. More Ambition

The Brits aren’t afraid to be big.  Starting with Lennon’s quote of being bigger than God which he stated simply as an empirical fact at the moment, The British weren’t afraid to take their music to the masses.  They weren’t afraid to dream beyond their bedroom and the music from Brits benefited from this attitude.  American music is afraid of ambition probably from some reaction to its cultural political surroundings that places itself in a position of manifest destiny.  So because of this we get lo-fi shit or boring bitch fests.  It’s time to turn modesty on it’s head and there’s no better place start than British Music.

6. Shoegazing

Britain gave us one of the best music genres in the past 20 years in Shoegazing.  Do you think Americans would be creative enough to come up with the sounds you hear out of “Loveless” or “Nowhere”?  Do you think an American could create a song like “Leave Them All Behind”?  They could copy it and it wouldn’t be good enough to even be covered by a small American “zine.”  Because of the Brit’s the music listener was able to enjoy Lush, Slowdive, and Chapterhouse.  There’s something distinctly British about these bands;  they all have imaginations, something lacking in most American music.

5. Oasis

In case anyone didn’t know.  Oasis came from Manchester England.  That’s a northern city in England.  Oasis is one of the greatest bands of all time if not the greatest band of all time.  America doesn’t have an Oasis, nor did they ever have an Oasis or any band that could compete with Oasis.  Take whatever America’s best band has ever been (can’t think of many) and match it up against Oasis’s songwriting catalogue and Oasis will undoubtedly win.  In fact, take Americas top 5 bands and put their songwriting catalogue against Oasis’s.  It’s still a no-contest.

4. Better Record Labels

This is certainly a difficult task to list all the great record label that came out of Britain.  For starters, there was Factory Records who hosted The Happy Mondays, Joy Division and The Inspiral Carpets just to name a few.  There is Creation Records who hosted Oasis, Ride, Swervedriver,  and Hurricane #1 just to name a few again.   There was 4AD which hosted the Cocteau Twins, Lush, and Slowdive just to name a few again.  Nude Records had both Suede and Geneva.  The list could keep going on.  No American label could match the quality output of bands on any of these British labels.

3. Condemns the awful indie genre.

British bands correctly condemn indie music whether it be American (which it is most of the time) or British (when some publication tries to tie them into that tag).  The greatest bands wanted nothing to do with it.  Ask Oasis if they’re indie  They’ll laugh at the word.  Ask the Stone Roses if they were indie and Ian Brown will say “The indie scene is shit”.  Ask Brett Anderson about the word “indie” and he says “It’s a dirty word to me.  A word that means people who don’t know how to play their instruments or write songs”.  This penchant for criticizing indie music has gone a long way for making British music bigger and better sounding than American music.  American music has it’s head up its own ass too much too see that their own self-reflection and loathing is superfluous.

2. Better Bands

Think about it.  The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Oasis,  Pink Floyd, T-Rex, The Kinks,  The Stone Roses?  What does America have besides The Byrds and The Beach Boys?  One can make an infinite list of all the great British bands and barely be able to make a top 10 list of the greatest American bands of all time.   Who are the top 10 greatest American bands of all time?  We can’t even think of 5 off the top of our head right now.  This is a no-brainer.

1. Better Songs

The most obvious reason why British music is better than American music is the songwriting.  C’mon now,  Oasis, Radiohead, The Verve, The Stone Roses, Suede, Dodgy, Coldplay, Shed Seven, Travis?  These are bands that mastered songwriting craft to a T.  There isn’t one American band out right now that could come close to the quality of songwriting produced by these bands (except maybe for Wilco), and these are just the modern British bands.  We aren’t even putting Zeppelin, T-Rex, The Who, and Bowie on this.  There are too many no-brainers on this list.

5. The Musicians smell

Ever have to walk by one of these messy loafs?  They smell like ass.  They probably ate at some shithole pizza place “in the city” and haven’t showered in days.  Dirty fuckers.  But that’s the way its supposed to be.  Ultimate freedom in smelling like ass, and if you can’t relate to their smelliness than you’re the guilty one for not understanding their stink fest which masquerades as some gesture for purity.  Don’t let the stink fool you.  Just because a musician smells like shit doesn’t mean they make good music.  It just means they want to make good music but can’t, so decide to smell like shit instead.

4. Bad Musicianship

The musicianship in these indie bands is abominable, and some jackass producer lets them get away with it because they know it will sell well to some mentally challenged group of people who think that bad musicianship means authenticity.  No it doesn’t.  It means they suck ass.  Because you suck ass doesn’t make you good.  By liking shitty musicianship, it encourages others to think that not knowing how to play their instrument is a good thing which produces more shitty unmistakable indie rock.  The only people who are listening to it are the people who are saying “HEY LISTEN TO THIS PART!”, which is probably some discordant bullshit.  It’s basically people catching the bad musicianship in a song and liking it because it’s different from what’s inherently harmonious.

3. The Worst Fans

Oh lord.  The fans, those indie fans.  The clothing they wear.  All those ripped tight ass shirts from the salvation army that have emblems from some old sports team or some saying from a charity organization that’s supposed to be funny in it ostensible “irony” (ostensible because it’s not irony.  It’s just people trying to be funny and not being funny).  These people ejaculate when they hear their shitty songs they think they love around other people because they know no one else knows the song but them making them feel different and therefore important.  Fat bastards; get rid of your tight clothes, lose some weight and go listen to Oasis’s first album and you’ll lose your arrogance in the guise of humility.

2. Bad Songwriting

I don’t know how to go about writing on the songs from the indie genre.  They’re not really songs.  They’re a mess of things put together.  You can list an entire bands catalog from the indie brand and they’re all bad.  These bands don’t know how to write a good chorus, never get to a chorus, or if they do, it’s usually indistinguishable from anything else in the mess of a song.  There is no song craft, probably because there’s a sense that song craft is something “limiting” to the much better unlimited songwriting of throwing shit together and thinking it sounds good because it was thrown together.

1. Cacophony

When the classical movement of expressionism became somewhat popular it paved the way for a style of music that focused not on tragedy, but was border line hard to listen to. Schoenberg though still operated under musical modes that required strong musicianship.  He would often tell his musicians “No No.  You’re playing it wrong, but it’s still not right!”  If only the jackass indie rock musicianship could take this aphorism and staple it to their forehead and on their ass every minute of the day then maybe we wouldn’t have to bear the ridiculous gestures of The Pixies, which to be sure are gestures, not music.  As was said before a million times in the past music articles written on Old-Wizard, difference for the sake of difference doesn’t equal quality.  It just means that you suck at music and have to rely on a mode of being that is infinitely flexible.

10. Sam Roberts Band

Sam Roberts is Canada’s answer to Oasis. It wasn’t their first album that established them with the power of Oasis (although their 1st album certainly had quality songs on it). It was their 2nd album “Chemical City”, specifically the first song off the album in the name of “The Gate” that took the Oasis sound and gave it a Canadian Rustic aesthetic to it. It’s as if a bunch of lumberjacks were listening to Oasis for 5 years and then started a band. It’s hard to think of a band that comes across as earnestly as Sam Roberts. Sam Roberts’ lyrics are as heart on sleeve as they come without ever falling into banality. Sam Roberts passion is unlimited. All their songs are on a quest for infinite spirituality and their sound is as huge as their quest sounds. One listen to Chemical City and you will understand the importance of this band.

9. The Space Monkeys

The Space Monkeys flew under the radar in the late 90’s influenced by a ton of music but their Manchurian roots were undeniable. Much like Kasabian, they took the pulse of Oasis and quickened it with acid house. Their first track off their debut album “The Daddy of Them All” in the name of “Acid House Killed Rock n Roll” is a raucous speed drenched song with Richard McNevin-Duff singing with more vitriol than Liam Gallagher at times. This song setup the rest of the album full of great songwriting across the board and factory-records-beats behind all the great melodies. Equally Oasis, The Roses, and The Happy Mondays; The Space Monkeys never got the recognition they deserved, but their debut album is of great importance. It will be rediscovered some day by a generation of kids looking to find bands that mean more to them than Oasis. They may find it in a band like The Space Monkeys.

8. The Strokes

The Strokes were a maelstrom for rock music when they released their first album “Is this It”, more specifically their first single “The Modern Age”. The last time a song was this hypnotic was Oasis’s “Columbia”. This song grooved with the best rock music ever released. It was hard and slow at the same time. Lead Singer Julian Casablanca crooned like a Jersey singer from the 50’s. The sound of the album was aesthetically on the level of Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe“. When a band captures this spirit it shows a direct signification for being timeless. The rest of the album followed suit with even stronger singles like Last Night and Hard to Explain. If you were in college when The Strokes came out, it would mean your memories of that time would always be tied to this album, and this is just their first album. They would continue the quality of their first album with “Room on Fire“ and more specifically “Under Control“; finally a song that dudes could think about girls to without feeling so fucking gay. The album “First Impressions of Earth” transformed The Strokes into an even further musical powerhouse showing a technical musicality that surpassed every band on this list. The Strokes will be remembered for some time to come. They have yet to release a bad album and is unlikely they will in the future.

7. Travis

With the release of “All I wanna do is rock”, it was pretty evident for the time being who was going to have filled the shoes of Oasis. This song was sung by Fran Healy with the exaggerated snarl of Liam Gallagher. One wonders how much Liam Gallagher must have wished Noel wrote this song for him. It wasn’t just their first album though they gave Travis their importance. It most importantly came from their 2nd album “The Man Who” which was filled with some of the best singles of 1999. “Writing Reach You” was a ballad that you could listen to without feeling sick. Their was a purgatorial sense of tragedy to the song and the chorus was catchy, but in a very curious way. It wasn’t predictable, but incredibly satisfying to listen to. Certainly having Nigel Godrich behind the boards on this album helped with the amount of great songs on this album. Travis continued to consistently make good to great albums all in the footsteps of the great Oasis.

6. Idlewild

Idlewild has the production pomp of Oasis but took the sometimes effortless stream-of-conscious lyric writing of Noel Gallagher and brought it into an caustic critique of modernity that was neither political nor cultural, but much more metaphysical. Attacks on self-identity, post-modernism, and thinking in general were enveloped by stellar musicianship that was abrasive and sung with fire by lead singer Roddy Woomble. Oasis for intellectuals? It would be more accurate to call them the Oasis for James Joyce and Jean Genet lovers. Roddy Woomble made the sound of Oasis sound much more poetic without losing any of the bite of Oasis’s vocal delivery and sound. Check out their album “100 Broken Windows” to see how strong of a band Idlewild are.

5. New Pornographers

Whether A.C. Newman admits it or not, he was influenced by Oasis. One listen to the incredible “Twin Cinema” (one of the best albums of the decade) will show a taste for perfect pop that was very much it’s own sound though. Listen to “Sing me Spanish Techno“, “Bones of an Idol“, “Jackie Dressed in Cobras“, and the song “Twin Cinema” and you will find a band operating under a very classic mode of songwriting but integrating it in less obvious changes and chord progressions than the rest of the bands on this list. It wasn’t just Twin Cinema though that makes The New Pornographers an important band, it was their debut album Mass Romantica with incredible songs throughout the whole album. “Letter For an Occupant” and “Slow Descent into Alcoholism” are some of the most catchy songs of the decade but they don’t sound like normal pop songs at all, but certainly operate under the traditional structure. This slight bending of the rules of what quality songwriting is puts The New Pornographers in their rightful place as one of the most important bands since Oasis.

4. Coldplay

Coldplay has been called every derogatory term by the indie crowd from generic to bed-wetter’s, to soft. You’re not getting away from the fact that Chris Martin writes great songs. This is undoubted, and anyone who questions this quality in Coldplay doesn’t listen to music for good songs. Chris Martin consistently spreads his love for Oasis by covering a song from every new Oasis album that comes out. The highlight of them all though was his live version of Liam’s songbird. For better or worse, Coldplay took the pure songwriting quality of Noel Gallagher and made it even more crafty and pop, but never enough to be considered a “guilty pleasure” except by the queer indie crowd. No one is arguing “Yellow“, “Lost“, “Talk” (Regardless of it’s obvious Kratwerk affectations), “Shiver“, “The Scientist“, and “In My Place” are not great songs. You just cant argue that these are not great songs after only 1 or 2 listens. Oasis paved the ground for this songwriting craft that had to always reach a certainly quality.

3. The Thrills

Like many bands on this list, The Thrills took the pure songwriting quality of Oasis and put it into their own sonic style. In the case of The Thrills it was the sunkiss sparkle of Southern California that made a bunch of Irish boys leave their country to live in southern California soaking up the sun and all the influences around it from smooth relaxed backup vocals to lyrics about the “Big Sur” and the California sun. Their sound wasn’t timid. It was mastered hard, it was layered pretty heavily. This band may have come across sonically and aesthetically as breezy and laid back, but their ambitions and songwriting were as big as Oasis’s. It had to be. They toured with Oasis multiple times. Noel Gallagher was seen whistling and singing “Big Sur” by himself walking to the supermarket one day in London. The ultimate approval for any band.

2. Kasabian

Kasabian IS the most important band since Oasis. They have carried Oasis’s bravado to a new level and layered it with a newage-electronica that sounds like a combination of Oasis and The Chemical Brothers. All their songs have grit and sass known to the best Oasis songs. Lead singer Tom Meighan spews out vocals as resonant as Liam Gallagher and as loose as Shaun Ryder. The lyrical output of Serge Pizzorno is that of a boxer fighting a heavyweight, not some small personal battle against personal demons but a fight to take over the world. This shits like a Martin Scorsese film. Kasabian is like Napoleon on the battlefields and even more ruthless, on par with Vlad the Impaler which they actually wrote a song about (the best song on their new album). See them live and you will seen one of the best live shows of your life. Pure Energy, pure groove at wall of sound levels. Kasabian is the true heirs to Oasis’s crown.

1. Oasis

For better or worse, Oasis have still made at least average music into the new millennium. Their album “Don’t Believe The Truth” still showed that they could make a rock album better than any rock band in the genre today. They still tour non-stop selling out stadium everywhere they go. With the additions of Andy Bell and Gem Archer to the band, Oasis has become a force to be reckoned with. The only band that could compete with them is the Oasis of the 90’s so it makes sense that Oasis’s only competitors are Oasis themselves. The only band that can come close to their crown is Kasabian listed at number 2 and they haven’t put out enough albums yet to take Oasis from the kings chair. Hate to say it, Oasis are the best band since Oasis.

10. The Jayhawks – Blue

The modern ballad of country music belongs to The Jayhawks in Blue. This is country that went pop without sacrificing quality. The loose acoustic delivery was augmented by Mark Olson and Gary Louris’s pop country vocal delivery that relied heavily on both traditions. The chorus flys on this song which everyone knows who has heard it. The piano is charmingly country in it’s ragtime delivery (the piano delivery that country music always borrowed from ragtime music) and the lyrical sentiment is simple. Blue is a simple song. The Jayhawk’s in general are a simple band but they’re always pleasurable to listen to proving that simplicity still has it’s place in music and songwriting regardless of how much it’s been used to create regurgitated modern music. Blue epitomizes this quality for simple song craft and a heart-on-sleeve sincere delivery.

9. Drive By Truckers – Never Gonna Change

The Drive by Truckers took country music and made it the most rock it had ever been. This is shown nowhere more clearly than “Never Gonna Change”. The music and lyrical theme stayed within traditional country but the overdrive was pushed to toughen up the sound that it never experienced before. Hard driving guitars replaced light sounding slide guitars and soft heartbreaking vocal deliveries. The Drive by Truckers were a band let on the loose of their creative desires to modernize country into something much more rock and consistent with it’s context. Traditional country could actually retain it’s original sentiment in the Drive by Truckers without sounding antiquated by their insistence on raw power in their live sound that was never sacrificed on record.

It wasn’t until “Blacklisted” did we hear the power of Neko Case’s voice and soul.  This second track has a depth unknown to whatever is called “real country”.  The vocal is as expansive as a country voice has ever been when the chorus hits.  The haunted backup vocals bring in an element to the country medium that it was once afraid to touch because it didn’t like touching anything that was haunting and not limited to to usual country tropes.  Neko Case’s entire output can be seen as an expansion of country music with a grit and determination that tradition contry music thought it owned.  Take one listen to “Deep Red Bells” though and the listener will realize where the real balls are are in country music.  In this case, it took a women.

7. Wilco- I Must be High

Little known fact about Wilco. They made a straight up country album in their first album A.M. Coming from his previous band Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy took the some of the “down-south” out of the alt-country Uncle Tupelo was making and infused it with the best aspects of pop/rock music. With the help of the recently deceased Jay Bennett, Wilco created a classic example of alternative country for the 90’s that everyone forgot about when their subsequent album “Being There” was released. The country slowly faded into more rock and then eventually into experimental and folk with Wilco. While this music was arguably Wilco’s best, their first album with this first track still remains as classic sounding as the first listen. The song is loose, Tweedy’s gritty voice favors the style of country more than his former band mate Jay Farrar who’s more traditional country voice couldn’t cut through a mix like Tweedy’s could. This song is perfect example of relaxed country music doing what it does best; making the listener loose.

6. Old 97’s – Won’t be Home

A strange progression for the Old 97’s. Starting off as cow punk, then becoming straight up pop (with only the most subtle hints of country) and then finally arriving at the alt-country they were always tagged with their album Drag It Up. The glossy production (for it’s credit that created some great singles on Fight Songs and Satellite Rides) was gone for a live produced album that started off with this blistering country anthem. Country Shuffle and Rhett Millers effusive delivery were kept in check for an honesty owned by country music. Maybe it was Miller’s vain attempt at going solo (that financially failed) that made him realize that quick success was diametrically opposite to the honesty that makes memorable music, or maybe it was just the band hitting their musical apex that created this intense delivery, whatever it was, it was Old 97’s finest moment.

5.Ryan Adams- To be Young

The first song in Ryan Adams rollercoaster ride of a solo carrier, this established Ryan Adams has the figure mark of a form of country that was always straying from it’s roots much in the vein of what Gram Parsons was doing in the 60’s. The themes were simply never “good” but the taboo notions that were raised to the forefront much from the rock star life style that these country influenced songwriters were living. This attitude is displayed perfectly on this rambunctious opener by Ryan Adams. Not only was the style in the lyrics, but it was in the production as a whole. Ryan Adams vocal was loaded with a noticeable delay that made the music sound bigger than country ever sounded before. It simply sounded like the wild ride that Ryan Adams was about to embark on; a ride that hasn’t stopped and has had as many twists and turns than one person could possibly handle.

4. The Byrds- You ain’t going nowhere

The Byrd’s went from the most noticeable psychedelic pop band in the late 60’s to a band immensely inspired by the country music of the south-western style exposed by Gram Parson’s and co. His accent was mimicked in this song. It must be said that this song was originally written by Bob Dylan, but the Byrd’s took it and made it into something completely different; a form of country that was smooth and relaxed without sounding lazy. The rhythm section was undoubtedly influenced by classic country with a slight hint of folk. Like The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Byrd’s (specifically on this song and album) paved the way for a new country that was more representative of it’s original intensity than it’s more popular offshoots that repeated the same themes with the same style from the late 50’s and early 60’s. There’s a sense of purity in this song not heard by anything in the modern country era.

3. The Flying Burrito Brothers – Devil in Disguise

If there was any song that so defined what would become of creative country in the future, it would be this classic by the Flying Burrito Brothers vocally delivered by alt-country’s favorite and most tragic son, Gram Parsons. His country voice wasn’t low and rumbling without inflexion. It had hints of psychedelic pop to it that gave the genre of country a new flexibility unknown to it until the emergence of The Flying Burrito Brothers. Not only was the vocal inflection different, but the style was more creative and lyrics covered more details on what made the female the ‘Devil in Deisguise’, rather than just generalities that everyone experienced, these were personal experiences in this song. This creative leap by the FBB’s created a space for country music to evolve into something that more than just country fans could listen to.

2. Uncle Tupelo – Slate

By far Jay Farrar’s best song ever written, the nostalgia of this song and “Anodyne” in general proved to be consistent with the fact that this was their last album. Slate was folk and country without ever sounded exactly like either genre. Jeff Tweedy’s back up vocals sat perfectly with Farrar’s big country bellow. No percussion (except for tambourine); just a driving acoustic and a fiddle, with Farrar lyrically at his best and most reflective. Slate is one of the few songs that uses the fiddle in a folk style that accomplishes not sounding overly sentimental. The song just moves forward reflectively without having anything for looking back. The nostalgia on this album and this song isn’t one that brings-people-together, but feels a way without necessarily wanting to….or not wanting to. This is what makes Slate one of the few nostalgic songs that can be listened to, because it’s wasn’t it’s intent to be that way.

1. Beachwood Sparks- Silver Morning After

That no one knows about the Beachwood Sparks is a crime. Do they care? Probably not, and this is why this band can create such great music. Obviously inspired by the innovative country that was being made in the late 60’s spearheaded by the Byrds, The Beachwood Sparks took this innovation and put it into clean production with unparalleled musicianship. This song is mysterious, distant, and somewhat confused (in lyrical substance, not in it’s musicality). “Alternative Country” is an inappropriate tag to place on this song and band. “Post-Structural psychedelic country pop” may work better if the tag wasn’t so long which is to the credit of the band. Regardless of the individuality of the band’s sound, there was something very country about it and heard best in this song. There was a slide guitar, but it was everywhere. There were slide guitars being layered over other slide guitars and soaked in delays along with a vocal delivery from somewhere in purgatory. This is the best country has done for itself in it’s new version started in the early 90’s. This band is the band to follow. There is no other that is bending the ideas of country while still retaining it’s best pop instincts from the past.

The live versions of this song are full of Jim Morrison pontificating on solipsistic poetic themes.  Then comes the song.  One of the more boring songs of all times, but for some reason immensely popular.  It’s hard to image a chorus as dull as Morrison’s delivery of “Come on baby light my fire”; not just vocally dull, but just as lyrically dull.  The only thing interesting about the song is the resonant funeral organ that’s fortunately mixed as high as Jim Morrison’s limited vocal capacity.  Still, instrumentation aside, nothing could save the song from being just a very regular song.  It is regular at it’s core.  It doesn’t move fast nor slow.  It doesn’t want to do anything other than be bored with itself.  This works to some songs advantages.  The La’s for example were masters at this, but Light my Fire just comes across as plodding psychedelia.

9. Radiohead – Creep

Radiohead are a great band (as you can see on our Top 10 90’s Bands list) but this song is too representative of the early 90’s (American culture at it’s arguably worst moment).  Oh so much pain, too much pain.  I suck, beat me up (I’m already being beaten up).  Oh the irony, “I wish I was special”.  Wait, you mean that you never took this as Irony in what Thom Yorke was delivering?  No wonder why you were getting your ass beat and listening to this song.  No wonder why you were getting overjoyed by sneaking out of the house and drinking with all your other loser friends relating to each other in your pretend suburban nightmares.  Oh the misery of it all!  Wasn’t Euthanasia legal back then?

8. U2- I still Haven’t found what I’m looking for

This song sucks.  Wow.  U2 have two places on this list.  It’s not their fault though that their shitty songs are over appreciated by a insipid mass.  What the fuck is Bono looking for?  Why does he keep wondering that there is something to look for.  Who gives a shit?  This gesture I guess is supposed to be spiritual.  You know, you’re at a low point, a mid-life crisis and you don’t know what you’re looking for in your life so you get in your car and start crying as this song comes on.  Isn’t that what you see on the TV?  People going in cars crying about things that don’t matter.  Oh, now I know why you like this song so much, because you can be endless searching for the sake of being emotional just like the people on the TV!

7. Drops of Jupiter – Train

Uh Oh.  That piano beginning.  This is when Train were going to be taken seriously for the first time.  Part modern country, part pop, vastly mainstream.  Lyrics mixing the elements into pseudo-poetical form.  The formula is all there.  And just when you thought the formula wasn’t need in any other formulation, you have the ending with the endless Na’s.  This was really a great song.  It was like every other song that had to be heard of as good.  This had to be a good song like all the other songs that had to be good.  It had strings to it sweeping up into the final chorus.  When will these gestures ever become exhausted?  “Si seulement une nation de philosophes a existé” – Rene Descartes

6. Van Morrison- Brown Eyed Girl

Poor Van Morrison.  All those above-average songs and only remembered for this one “party song”.  Hyper happy, hyper soulful and never possible of being disliked (“What’s wrong with you man! This is Van Morrison”!).  A chorus everyone can sing too.  A chorus a monkey can sing too.  We can all sing together in Brown Eyed girl; Man, Woman, Child, Monkey, Grasshopper.  Everyone, cmon, lets get altogether, arms around each other….here comes the chorus…..SOCIAL EJACULATION!  You made it in western society.  You sang an obvious song with obvious people at an obvious place.

5. Nirvana- Smells like Teen Spirit

It wasn’t Kurt Cobain’s fault that this song was overrated.   It wasn’t a bad song.  It was transformational for a generation and deserves credit for this movement that was heard in the song.  But it wasn’t transformation for anyone else, at least it wasn’t supposed to be if children (also including “adults”)  could only find the will to create their own identities from the knowledge of their absence from a past presence.  Their different context couldn’t be understood as being absent from this time when every time they flipped on VH1 or MTV there some goon saying “This song changed music”.  Platitudes and tropes; the artistic stabilization of what was always meant to be forgotten.  If only Cobain could live in that world, he would still be alive today.

4. Greenday- Good Riddance (Time of your life)

Meta-emotional in delivery.  It’s a time for graduation.  Graduation from high school, and if you go to a below-average college, another high school style graduation.  An endless amount of nostalgia pricking at the bellows of forgettable memories, or unforgettable memories that would be forgettable if not for the neurotic impulse to self-define in every single event that happened in one’s life.  Greenday must feel the same as the high school graduate.  Judging by their hair styles now (How old are they now, mid 40’s?) they’re still on the brink of finishing their final class and earning that final C in the “general science” class, the class for…you know…people who don’t take Physics or Chemistry.  The time of their lives, your life, the most average life.

3. U2- Beautiful Day

This song is a pile of tricks.  It’s exploding  predictable chorus is trick number 1, and it’s not that it’s a difficult trick to perceive.  It’s difficult for anyone who sees U2 as anything other than “great”; an impenetrable band who writes only quality music. Well this song is complete shit.   The chorus isn’t even catchy.  With an entrance and soar in the production at least make it catchy.  Instead it’s a big pile of shit.  It’s come downs and massive builds up back and forth.  It’s wedding songs for couples who think they’re different from those other wedding couples who play “cheesy” music.  U2 cut the cheese on this song.  Some people just aren’t smelling the stink.

2. The Long and Winding Road- The Beatles

Paul McCartney’s masturbation session in Burt Bacharach tropes could only sound as boring as it’s intent.  One wonders who can listen to this song consistently.  Certainly one can come across this song in the Beatles catalogue and hear McCartney’s immense insecurity of never having written a song as good as John, but to listen to it again?  This is highly improbable unless one feels they have to like the Beatles because they are afterall “The Beatles”.  This song is slow, lacking in any passion, lacking in everything that makes a song good.  It just moves on record waiting to be heard because it was written by someone in The Beatles…but by the weak songwriter in The Beatles.

1. The Pixies – Gigantic

Fucking boring ass bassline.  Some ugly ass whining in back.  Some stupid ass talking about “everyday” bullshit in the guise of importance.  Shitty ass production.  Predictable guitar noise, more predictable overdrive in the chorus.  A repeating chorus with poor and obvious insinuations.  The same thing again.  Complete trash.  The instinct of Indie music epitomized.  The diminution of everything musical from centuries past.  Not only one of the most overrated songs of all time, but likely the worst song ever put to record.

10. Krautrock

Krautrock is a peculiar genre in the fact that it spawned great music that was not ashamed to admit that it was influenced by the Krautrock genre.  The difference was, the modern musician sped up the trance that was supposed to happen in Krautrock, and created forms of trance, whether in the genre of house or rock in general.  Going back to the “oldies but goodies” though, one has to endure a session of a Neu album, unless of course one wants to put on inconspicuous background music.  If that’s the case, there’s much better played elevator music  for this like Johnny Mandel  and any lounge music in general.  Just as long as it’s not Nickelback, it will serve as much better background music.  But something about sounded interesting, so of course it had to be good.  Interesting is relative, and so then Krautrock can be recognized as good while being the last thing anyone would listen to.

9. Modern R and B

Modern R and B has been the butt of many a comedian’s joke.  The pseudo-suave beginning with the protagonist speaking in a soft urban voice either expressing his “infinite” love of the other, or repenting from his sin of cheating on her.  It’s  from here that cheese blasts into pure comedy with strings swirling up to ostensibly capture the moment of the lovers highest affection for the other…or his phallic-mania masquerading as “love”, a term as ungrounded and relatively used as “God” and “Presence”, even more so than the later because of the cultural acceptance of the idea as a grund (primoris res).  Grounding of ungrounded ideas aside, the cheesiness of modern R and B is all pervading.  It’s  not just in the music, it’s in the videos too.  Hulking men professing love.  The dichotomy between physical strength and spiritual Eros?  In the West?  No, this isn’t Greek antiquity.  One is a mask for the other.  Which one you ask?  Last I heard the world population is growing exponentially.

8. Modern Blues

Traditional blues, the blues of Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry are undoubtedly the precursor to any form of pop music in general and should be privileged for because of it.  That musicians can continue playing what was played 70 years ago however is not strange to a culture whose fever for archiving anything that at one point was considered “good” is obsessive.  The absolute bore of listening to blues now after this many years is overbearing.  That musicians who play the style are not bored by it must find their motivations for playing the style in other grounds other than enjoying what they’re playing.  Pleasing an elderly audience?  Pleasing a younger crowd who parasitically followed an elderly audience?  Pleasing a dingy bar with people who like this style?  Something is going on with “Pleasing”, but it doesn’t have anything to do with music.

7. Punk

Punk music was always on it’s way with the flexibility of pop music starting from the 50’s.  It was only a matter of time that a group wouldn’t like it’s surrounding context because it appeared to a majority as “successful”.  Instead of personally doing away with the concept of success, and more importantly with what was considered as success, punk music found it’s grounding in not expressing it’s own psychological neuroses, much for the sake of finding it’s own success, because it couldn’t find it in it’s own context.  Now, this attitude is understandable at it’s inception.  For the reason of novelty  alone qualifies the act of punk, but that the genre so parasitically attached itself to anyone picking up an instrument is the problem of the style.  For anyone, any child, looking for an identity now, they can find it in a context they don’t currently occupy and chances are, never will.  Much like emo, without an appropriate subject for the musician, there’s an imaginary subject made up to exert one’s energy towards.  This making up of a subject to “rise against”, to always oppose itself too, sounds as flat as the notes being played in the genre.

6. Pop Metal

When you look on you tube under the term “Speed Metal” and “Grindcore” you find clips of adroit fans incessantly attacking what is perceived as fake Speed Metal and Grindcore.  Not coming from a Metal background, I can’t tell the difference but one thing came over my mind when listening to the music being compared, but what I do know is that these people have probably have so much disdain for pop metal that they don’t even consider it music.  While I would probably have different reasons for disliking Pop metal than a Grindcore purist, the singular complaint would probably be analogous.  It’s soft shit that tries to sound hard.  It doesn’t matter how big a bassist’s biceps are, if he’s still playing soft music, he’s soft.  The feigning for grittiness in bands like “Dead by April” and “A Day To Remember” is obvious.  No amount of tattoos can save either band from sounding like Ben Stiller in Dodgeball.

5. Mainstream Country

Modern Country is at least noticeable when it comes on the radio.  It only take less than a half a second to switch the channel because the sound of this emetic genre is so unpleasant.  It’s ultra polished, if not the most polished sound on modern radio, even more so than modern Hip Hop and R and B.  The goofy southern accent singer talks about what he usually talks about.  The ideas are too obvious to point out without feeling guilty of stating something so obvious.  Mainstream Country is the money train, where people go to relax and gain a sense of “home-goingness”, whatever that means…being at home, not moving, doing what your neighbor does, getting in a fight with your neighbor for a slight oscillation in personality that is perceived.  This music doesn’t move and doesn’t want to move.  It sits as comfortably as a patient with dementia in a retirement home.

4. Hip Hop

While Hip Hop’s roots were the grounds for some hypnotic grooves unheard of until its point, it was it’s aging form that became grossly overused.  No longer were good beats a matter for the modern Hip Hop musician, but was simply the objectification of sexual intercourse in every possible way; as if sex had not already lost it’s ostensible taboo in the 80’s with Madonna and other “express yourself” artists.  Of course maybe this was the “true” lifestyle of the hip hop musician.  Coming from the context of the Ghetto gives one the authority to do whatever they want, because after all they come from shit, so we must sympathize with this shittyness by simply being empathetic, meaning not having the right to see modern Hip Hop as absolutely unsubstantial and lacking in an power subtle enough to win for itself a legacy of class.  Bring on the leveling of culture through political correctness.  Hip Hop must deserve its privileged place as the thin line between money and caveman.

3. The Nickelback Genre or Mainstream FM “rock”

The Nickelback genre of music is so obviously a bad genre that even those who say they like it know it’s really bad.  If it’s randomly playing on FM radio in the backyard of raised ranch  backyard BBQ, people will hear it in the background and not say anything about it.  Only some will ever say they like the song, and will be convinced otherwise in a matter of seconds if they so easily can be grabbed by something so vacuous.  No one could even admit to liking the song on the grounds of a guilty pleasure.  It’s neither a pleasure nor a guilty pleasure to listen to, but a guiltless bad pleasure.  You’re just listening to a very definite idea of “bad” when listening to Nickelback and every band that sounds like them.  Unfortunately for a linguistics that would like to transcend the binary opposition of bad/good, it has to face the patent obviousness of bad in the Nickelback genre.  It’s powerfully bad.

2. Emo

When the luxury of a culture reaches it’s apex, the energy not being used by those who are unconsciously enjoying the luxury is often displaced into disingenuous forms.  In the case of Emo, this inappropriateness comes from an effusive (more accurately termed ‘mawkish’) reaction to one’s opulent surroundings.  This space for effusion is without an object.  The searching for an energetic object in this empty space creates a form of music that is strictly maudlin in character.  It’s maudlin for the sake of being maudlin.  Within an empty space, the effusion for any object in general to ruminate over creates unsubstantial objects for the sake of subjective yearning.  Romeo and Juliet, by prose and by time, lived within a context; this context was appropriate for their excessive yearning, the context of the late 20th century however was never appropriate for the type of yearning known in Emo.  No one seemed to  tell the self-identifying “Emo fan” that “it’s called life”.

1. Indie

The worst thing to happen to the elegance and taste of Pop music was Indie music.  The nauseating compulsion for every band to label themselves as “Indie” now is not difficult to understand.  The underlying premise of Indie music was unchecked creativity for the sake of itself.  The interest that one could muster into these bands would have to take thousands upon thousands of listens to “understand”; another premise of the style (that it was always and already in need of having to be understood).  Unchecked creativity is not guilty for some anachronistic, obscurely Christian idea of emptiness, but guilty of never having to think that creativity is in need of being checked.  The amount of bands that stemmed from the idea of “Indie” music was enormous just for this reason; because anyone could pick up any instrument, make any noise they wanted and it would be deemed as “good”, because anything that’s expressed is automatically “good”.  You no longer had to be a musician, no longer had to write good songs, no longer had to do anything other than to strike a note on any instrument to be privileged as  “innovative”; that bastardized term that has undermined the soul of inherent quality.