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Top 10 Shoegazing Songs

Written by Zeromage 69 Comments
Last Updated:: August 14, 2009

What happens when you take the production of Phil Spector, drench in pyschadelic 60’s reverb and match it with breathy and harmonious vocal melodies all done in a seemingly effortless fashion? You get the grandiose genre of Shoegazing that has been one of Pop’s best subgenres in it’s history. The original impulse for these creative masterpieces came from many different places. With Kevin Shields in My Bloody Valentine it came from wondering what it would sound like to put 50 Marshall stacks in one room and have a guitar connected to all of them with 5-10 different delays and reverbs pedals going. For Andy Bell formerly of Ride it came from an epiphany one day listening to The Beatles with a loud fan on. Combining the over layered fan with the melodies he heard on the radio gave him an impulse for noise and melody. Wherever the creative impulse came from, it always seemed to work in creating new musical experiences upon every listen.

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Top 10 Reasons British Music is Better Than American Music

Written by Zeromage 135 Comments
Last Updated:: August 7, 2009

Not many people understand that British music is better than American music. They don’t understand this because of the political hegemony that America occupies in the West and “The Blues”. It’s time to dig out the reasons why British music has always been better than American music. It’s obvious to us here at Old-Wizard and has been since we started getting into music and realizing the patent difference in quality between the two countries. Hopefully this list will only act as a preface to one’s actions of going back through the great music that the British made and realizing where the quality is. If all else fails, then one will just be in a position of admitting that they have bad taste in music.
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Top 5 Reasons Indie Music is So Bad

Written by Zeromage 37 Comments
Last Updated:: July 31, 2009

As any of the music readers of Old-Wizard know, indie music is our enemy. It was listed as the worst music genre of all time on our recent list “Top 10 Worst Music Genres of all Time”. That’s some position to have over and above Mainstream Country and even the Nickelback genre! Indie music worse than Nickelback? Surely you must be joking. Not really. Both are quantifiably bad but indie music takes the prize as worst genre because of how many people think the music is good. Nickelback was saved by most people knowing they’re shit. Here then is why indie music is the worst music genre of all time.
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Top 10 Most Important Bands Since Oasis

Written by Zeromage 100 Comments
Last Updated:: July 22, 2009

If hasn’t be objectively and empirically proved already by Old-Wizard, then we will just categorically state right now that Oasis is the greatest band of all time. Any argument against this claim has been refuted by the Old-Wizard staff and our recent neophytes. Our position is also held by the post-Oasis bands that have made landmark albums after them. Oasis’s influence on these bands is undoubted if not outright expressed in interviews. In this list we will go through these bands and list them as the most important bands since Oasis. If Oasis was the most important band of all time, then certainly the most important bands after them would logically have to be influenced by them. This list will define the most important ones though in a very definite order of importance.

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Top 10 Country Songs For People Who Don’t Like Country

Written by Zeromage 38 Comments
Last Updated:: July 16, 2009

This isn’t your grandfather’s best of country list, this isn’t even your father’s best of country list, unless your father was cool. This list is Old-Wizard’s best of country list, which means it’s a list of opinions masquerading as objective fact. You probably haven’t heard of most of these songs, but they are the best country songs of all time regardless. The focus of this list was more on a genre that was innovative with country music rather than traditional country music that was satisfied in it’s traditional and literal meanings that spoke to only the most obvious listeners. The term for this genre (we are focusing on) is often cited as “(alt)ernative-country”, but that tag is inaccurate for many of the songs on this list. Hopefully there will be more of an appreciation of the country genre after people take a listen to these songs and realize that country need not be limited to Garth Brooks and that other Australian waffle with the dyed blonde hair.

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Top 10 Ways To Tell if You’re Reading an Old-Wizard List

Written by Sage 29 Comments
Last Updated:: July 9, 2009

OW sucks. Let’s be honest. Their articles are dull and uninspired. They write about the same things over and over again. They harp on the same ideas over and over again and they think they are so cool. In fact their articles are so boring that they have recently been popping up all over the internet including on other people’s websites. It seems that OW has struck a cord with a few people and they feel we deserve to be quoted. But how can you tell if it’s an OW article or not? Well we have compiled some of the most common ways according to some of our bigger fans. These are the folks who come back every week to leave us a comment, send us an email, or post about us in some random forum or another. According to the statistics, our fact checking kittens, and the chimp we just hired these are the best ways to know you are reading an OW list.

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Top 10 Worst Video Games of All Time

Written by Zeromage 122 Comments
Last Updated:: July 1, 2009

Most video games are stupid, especially games made by Sega for some reason. If you’re wondering, yes we are still barking up that same old tree. Anyway I digress. Before I get back to the intro to this our latest and greatest list there are a number of things that need to be addressed. First we never received any Venn diagrams of our Top 10 Worst Fanboys list as requested so hurry up, the t-shirts are still available. Second nobody has offered us vast sums of money so we can sell out, so break out those check books and get on it. Third and lastly, we have yet to receive any suitable applications of our new religion which we have just named OldWizardology. We very specifically said no losers and no poor people. Do not send us your tired huddle masses yearning to breath free, we want well rested small groups who yearn to give us money. That being said our lastest offering is an inspired list about the worst video games ever. These games were so terrible that we would be shocked to find out they actually covered their production costs. Was Shaq ever really that popular, does he really need a video game that isn’t based on basketball? And who would ever be inspired by the career of a paper boy so much that they create a whole game about it? Maybe someone should make a game about sweeping or perhaps sleeping. That might be as entertaining. On the other hand some games are just to terribly conceived that even we don’t know what to make of them or who would ever enjoy them. Here is what we here at OW think are the absolute worst games of all time. And yes there are some Nintendo games on there, you jerks.

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Ask Old Wizard

Written by Sage 40 Comments
Last Updated:: June 28, 2009

This week we answer some grammatically challenged questions from Nintendo Boy about Super Mario:

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Top 10 Oasis Songs

Written by Zeromage 77 Comments
Last Updated:: June 25, 2009

Making a best of Oasis list with only 10 of their songs on it is difficult for us here at Old-Wizard. A Top 100 would probably be difficult for us. We think every song they ever wrote was at least good. The proof is in the pudding. Look at this band’s b-sides and you will see the inordinate amount of quality songwriting possessed in the genius of Noel Gallagher. This attempt at putting together the top 10 Oasis songs should be seen as a preliminary attempt at an impossible task. Yes, this is how good we think Oasis are. You have a problem with that? Just make sure Be Here Now isn’t playing on the jukebox or you’ll be done.
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OW Investigative Series: Violence in Video Games

Written by Sage 11 Comments
Last Updated:: June 21, 2009

Part 4: Pokemon

In recent centuries the world has been racked with animal on animal violence. You need not look further than Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, and sometimes History Channel (check local listings). Every where we look some animal is killing another animal. But why? Is it for food? Are the creatures pre-programed to hate each other? Or has gang warfare spilled over into the animal kingdom? Only recently, since man has evolved hunting and tracking capabilities, has human on animal violence escalated. Some people, so called ’scientists’, have postulated that these behaviors are what allowed human beings to become the dominate species on our planet. A quick look out the window, if you live in an urban area at least, shows you that yes there are a lot of humans everywhere. But why has modern man chosen to still attack, kill, capture, and even eat animals? Is it because proteins obtained from meat and poultry are essential to a healthy diet? Is it because a number of domesticated species would no longer be able to survive on their own without human intervention? Or is it because of the destructive influence a certain video game has had on the populace? As we have shown in previous articles, all violence in society can be blamed on video games, so it only make sense that animal cruelty must also be the fault of video games.

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