Dear Grant,
Such a funny thing for me to try to explain …
I can remember coming back from our half-year in Russia and hearing ‘Crazy in Love’ on Radio 1 for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. This tune felt like the one we’d all been waiting for, a tune that sounded totally of the moment, yet suggestive of the future: danceable, yearning, innovative. It seemed like a song that had stepped straight out of pop mythology, a vindication of the belief that magic can be unearthed in the unlikeliest of musical places. I listened to it over and over again throughout the summer, and for the next couple of years. At terrible, terrible club nights during my university years, just one play of this tune would be enough to salvage the entire evening. In poetic terms, I thought (and still think) that if ‘Crazy in Love’ were a physical substance, it would be liquid gold. It was the last CD single I ever bought.
I know our Tunes of the Decade list isn’t in any particular order, so ‘Crazy in Love’ isn’t technically our number one tune of the decade. I know you think Amerie’s ‘One Thing’ is the better tune, and you might have a point.
But for me, this has got to be the last tune on the countdown, the final word on our cack-handed, seven-month-long attempt at micro-macrocosmic cultural summary.
A conclusion then, of sorts.
The Tunes of the Decade countdown, and the website as a whole, has been terrifically important for me, and I really hope it has been for you too. This year hasn’t been a walk in the park for either of us, but when all is said and done (and at the risk of sounding like a sentimental gobshite), Read the rest of this entry »
In the wake of John Peel’s death, and in the context of the notable hole left by his absence on BBC Radio, a lot has been forgotten about the value of the man. The compilations released in his tribute focused on his 70s and 80s passions, from the Undertones, to The Fall, through Echo and The Bunnymen to Joy Division, and in some cases, they maintained a strict spotlight on the more mainstream acts that John Peel favoured in his early days, the likes of Bowie, T-Rex and Pink Floyd. For me this completely missed the point of Peel, an attempt to rewrite his contribution as a lovable national treasure despite the attempts to marginalise him at the end of his Radio 1 tenure, when in actual fact, especially in his latter years, he offered wide ears and a love that wasn’t bound by genres. His only sworn allegiance was to that which was original, always willing to embrace the new whether it be punk or dubstep. From African pop, to 48s, blasts of industrial noise, 30 second punks songs, new waves of electronica, instrumental ambience and bizarre novelty; it was about the unpredictable, the experimental, and the adventurous; disparate, but tied together by the fact he felt it. John Peel undoubtedly moved with the times – no sound too abrasive as long as it was different and ‘elemental’. It is easy to forget how important it was to have a champion of the alternative, and even subversive, in as conservative and mainstream fixture as the BBC, and with the internet’s new freedom and fracturing, its probably something that will never happen again.
He famously complained in 1988 that the festive fifty was full of “white boys with guitars” despite his varied playlist, so it should have come as no surprise that one of the last genres John Peel championed was dubstep, but he was always a little ahead of his listeners, and had a sixth sense for picking up on the swells in the underground; indeed Digital Mystikz, Distance and Plasticman made the festive list in the last year of his life. In the attempt to fill his void the BBC have tried many things; an alternative music station that has steadily grown in 6 Music, and if it were 1994, this station would be on the cutting edge . The BBC service itself has increasingly separated, creating distinct stations for various styles (1 Extra for example) but in the process lost some of that one stop eclecticism that made John Peel special in the first place and lessened the impact of something as potentially abrasive as dubstep hitting the mainstream in the same way.
Read the rest of this entry »
The line-up of our Tunes of the Decade list thus far has underlined two things: 1) that commercial pop music is relevant to the zeitgeist in a perhaps unprecedented way, and 2) that the implications of this fact are frustratingly difficult to make sense of.
Amerie, Girls Aloud, JoJo, R Kelly, Tatu, Nelly Furtado; all are utterly worthy of their places in a list of the most brilliant music produced over the last ten years. But how are we supposed to react to this development, this fact that music created by a bizarre conglomerate of songwriting teams, super producers, faux-lesbians, 13-year-olds, talent show contestants and (alleged) paedophiles, is at the forefront of the most innovative, exciting, artistically worthwhile stuff around? How can a new generation of bands, songwriters and creative individuals possibly hope to come up with a pragmatic response to this sort of confusing, hyperreal (non-)blueprint for making music?
One radical suggestion was provided in 2007, in the shape of Burial’s ‘Archangel’, the lead-track from his glacial sophomore masterpiece Untrue. The basis (if you can call it that) of the tune, is a sample of American R’n’B-pop maestro Ray J (more specifically, his 2006 ballad ‘One Wish’, a song I have been profoundly in love with since hearing it on Trevor Nelson’s Saturday evening Radio 1 show not long after my parents died). Read the rest of this entry »
