So that’s it, the first decade of the century down and what do we have to show for it? This half arsed semi-functional blog-come-website that more than a few people read, but few care about?
A sad state of affairs indeed . . . but if you’re in need of some time to kill you could do worse than to read our decade postscript of sorts below or to peruse our tunes of the decade list that has finally reached completion – just in time for you to be sick to the stomach of decade, or even year, related lists. Perfect.
Except our list hasn’t quite reached completion – and the Biz is fucked off about it. Something is still missing. As our list was constructed over the course of six months, and we are lazy, unscrupulous people, we couldn’t even be bothered to put it in any order of particular significance, so we need you to do it for us. Click here, scroll down below the final entry and cast your vote . . . all you need to do is pick the (up to) ten best tunes of the decade. Either that or you could base the votes on our attempts to justify selection. Hell, why not just do it here – no links required. Make your vote count – The Grain needs you . . .
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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 »
Sometimes it feels like Richard D James saw the shit that was coming this decade, stuck two fingers up at it, and then buggered off to do the things he actually cared about. He returned to his analog love with the hugely underrated Analord series of wonky acid vinyl released as AFX, and if you believe the rumour, the continuation of this sound that is the output of The Tuss (not to mention Rephlex of course). Half truths, grand in face statements, warped humour and self mythology was always a huge part of what made Richard James a major figure in popular culture, which in the nineties he really was (just think back to the ubiquity of the Windowlicker video or Come to Daddy hitting the top twenty), but this decade saw his refusal to play the game, and a movement to peripheral figure in popular culture and elder statesmen in the electronica scene. It’s easy to forget that his only release as Aphex in this decade was critically butchered, and universally panned. So what the hell is a piece of music by Richard James doing on this list?
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Youthful aggression and unjustified arrogance will get you a long in the world. Young people may be naïve, inexperienced idiots, but they don’t half do some fucking incredible things because of it. I Luv U smashes you over the head and grabs you by the balls. It sounded like nothing else then, and it sounds like nothing else now, and even though Wiley should take some credit as the pioneer, I still think it’s the greatest thing that grime produced, so kudos to Dizzee for killing it. Hell it might the greatest thing we (the UK) produced this decade. Its all of those good things about music that gets you excited, it original, its unique, and it catches you off guard, and of course Dizzee was only bloody 16 when it dropped.
Sonically it’s the sort of fierce fuck-off bass that makes me feel justified in using the word ‘sonically’ when talking about a four minute blast of popular music. Appropriately the lyrics are concerned with teenage relationships, sex, he said/she said back and forth, chatting shit to talk yourself up, and in the end pregnancy, delivered and handled with humour, realism and conviction. On record its bass blasts, processed hand claps, and previously unheard bleeps and processed sounds (sounding like the halfway house between futuristic and 8-bit), a surprisingly pop call and response chorus for new generation, and an MC with an English accent that had charisma and finally didn’t feel the need to ape them lot over the pond; as much a lyrical assault as a musical one. Once in a decade impact, a little bit of rare innovation in a stagnant cesspool of British music, something new that blew everything else away <insert your own comparison to punk, rave or bronx born hip hop here depending upon your age>, and despite some of his recent hip house shit, Dizzee is undoubtedly a talent who put together more than a few great pieces of popular music over the decade. (Side note – someone who won the mercury music prize and actually deserved it?) He’s become a bonafide star to boot, just shame it didn’t happen after he’d dropped this one rather than that Calvin Harris tosh. This TUNE(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) still gives me hope. . .
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‘As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing
puzzled me: What had happened, and why?’
(John Ashbery, ‘A Worldly Country’, 2007)
‘I didn’t understand’.
(Fleet Foxes, ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’, 2008) Read the rest of this entry »
