OK, OK, OK, OK, full disclosure: this ‘album’ is nine minutes long. It manages to fit five tracks into its runtime. Kinda. The first two tracks are essentially the same song. Oh, and of the remaining three tracks, two aren’t even close to lasting as long as a minute. I’m sure this will start a veritable flame war of controversy and divisive debate over whether it really deserves to be considered alongside the year’s greatest. I’m sure there will be much blood shed needlessly over this inclusion unless I get ahead of the narrative and immediately offer an apology.
Yeah, seem to have forgotten for a second that, although this list is actually scientifically backed up and objective data based approach to the year’s best music, it’s also indisputably my fucking list and any of you chumps have an issue with that be sure to send all complaints through to suck@mygigantic.ballsack. Dot com. Dot org. Oh, you don’t like it? Well how about you make your own list? Oh, what’s that, you can’t? Well isn’t that funny? Oh, oh, oh, you’ve made a list have you? Let me have a look…
Do you ever feel that art is our main bulwark against the strangulation of Capitalism?
Sorry, sorry, I’ve come in too strong there, haven’t I? I don’t usually start screaming extreme leftist agitprop until this whole annual exercise in laboured futility that I needlessly put myself through each Christmas has really rotted away the discipline and self awareness parts of my brain. By the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster at #38 my post consists of nothing more than a frenzied call for a brutal Maoist reorganisation of the state of home ownership. All caps. No spell check. So looking forward to that this year.
Sorry, I shouldn’t have got your hopes up, the Eighties Matchbox Be-Line Disaster haven’t released an album since 2010. That’s the hole in your life that you’re struggling to fill, don’t listen to your fascist psychiatrist who says it’s dissociative disorder)
Yeah, my subeditor Shawn picked that title, said it best encapsulated the feeling of the endless torment of duty that this list has become. “Shawn”, I replied, “You’ve done it again!”
A friend and I are both similarly shameless man boys, and are equally shameless enough in our arrested emotional and intellectual development to get together once every week to watch old wrestling PPV events from the early 00s, 90s, 80s and – if we’re feeling especially fruity and devil may care in our appreciation of video quality – even the 1970s. After each event – some amazing; some unintentionally hilarious; many, many, many absolutely fucking awful – we look back at the evening’s entertainment, give each match a star rating, hand out our individual awards. And read out the Death List. The Death List is the number of wrestlers and personalities we’d witnessed perform that night at an event forty, thirty. twenty or even just ten years ago who were now no longer with us.
It’s unquestionably a morbid joke, one that never allows us to forget the insanely short expected lifespan of professional wrestlers, particularly those from the steroids n’ cocaine heydays of the so called Golden Era, from the 80s to early 90s. Despite our flippancy, it’s not a completely disrespectful exercise, it’s rarely less than depressing to note how many great talents were lost to us early by being sucked into such a thoughtless and treacherous business. It never allows us to forget that people are killing themselves and being killed just in order to provide us with our shits and giggles. Considering that I’ve only been writing these lists since 2007, and in an era when musicians’ and pop artists’ lifespan is considerably longer than your average professional wrestler, it’s not a trope I’d ever imagined repeating for my Necessary Evil end of year countdown.
With no thought of the massive psychological damage it would cause to middle aged children and the dread it would impose on their already suffocating sense of mortality, with no consideration given to the fact that it was Christmas 2021, like, yesterday, 2022 is soon coming to an end. In previous years I have trailed the year’s Necessary Evil’s list of the year’s best music by naming the year’s best in comparatively unimportant sectors such as films and video games. 2022, however, saw an event so momentous that it renders all other debate on art or even the wider human condition comparatively meaningless, and so I owe it to my legions of fans, I owe it to the internet, I owe it to the culture itself to mention it. Not only that, but I’ll have to try and explain its importance to non wrestling fans, which might actually beyond my ability.
I’m not saying that this was the only thing that happened in 2022, just that all other stories pale somewhat in terms of significance and longterm repercussions. We all enjoyed the Conservative Party exposing the Capitalist lie that money indicates real value as some of the richest people in the country incompetently accused each other of being incompetent with such incompetence that it’s likely to freeze and/or starve a large section of their constituents. Lol! I am literally rolling on the floor laughing. I am a ROFLcopter. This isn’t new though, and of all the talk about opinion polls and potential general election losses, the ruling class fighting amongst themselves while the lower classes suffer is hardly new, will result in no revolution, and the best possible scenario in this country’s broken political system is the other party get in and basically continue the same shit. Sure, The Queen died, and in doing so revealed the longstanding lie that the UK is in some sense a developed country separated enough from its colonial history and repressed shame to be capable of rational thought. But will there really be any longterm ramifications of a gross head of a gross imperialistic state being replaced by a perhaps more gross son in a shamefully gross role? Come back to me when Charlie boy uses his accession press conference to bury the whole Royal Family and throw the whole system into doubt. In fact, have Charles Windsor come to me himself after that. I’d kiss his ugly face. Kings have press conferences, right? OK, we also had Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, after which Twitter had so much funthat Elon Musk decided he had to stop it. Because of… a weed meme or something…? Honestly, it’s hard to know with that nincompoop, he has the brain development of a thirteen year old Trust Fund kid, and so is extremely hard to understand as an adult. These things also happened, and I’m not ignoring them. The war in Ukraine also happened, which I am ignoring, because it’s difficult to make jokes over. Not necessarily for taste reasons – when has that ever stopped me before? – more that it’s a conflict with absolutely no good guys that any glib comment is likely to support fascism and imperialism in some form if just by association.
Hey! Speaking of ‘no good guys’! Speaking of… fascism…? No, I stretched the segue too far, should have stopped after the first one.
In a lot of way, it’s not your fault that you like shit stuff. A lot of the shit stuff you like you had no control over. Maybe the culture you were raised within normalised such abhorrence. Perhaps you just had really stupid friends growing up who liked really stupid things. I’m not going to blame you for that. You rarely get much choice who your friends are, they’re often just there because of some past and continued convenience. Maybe your friends from school are now registered sex offenders, maybe they’re big Fast and Furious fans, but either way it’s not your fault. Your parents could have maybe brought up in an environment where liking such absolute shite isn’t something to ashamed of. Is it your parents’ fault?? Am I saying that they’ve somehow failed at child rearing because of your shitty tastes??
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. But it’s not your fault. Please don’t take any of this post as me mocking your artistic choices. You can’t help it, you’re just wired that way, and me making fun of it would be like you making fun of my cauda equina. Like, dude, come on, I can’t help it. Cryemojicryemojicryemoji. You know how it goes.
You might have seen this repugnant rabble advertised recently:
Every once in a while, I work it all out. I cure my depression. I look around at my life and concede that I have it made. I accept that I have nothing bad going on in my life. I happily celebrate the fact that I am now officially, medically, happy.
2. There are no wars or anything (real wars, that is).
3. Ummm. Very little continental drift going on (that’s probably normal).
4. Somewhere, the president’s daughter is “like, totally wasted” right now.
There. One minor problem. Otherwise, things are swell. I haven’t really researched this much, but if something major was going wrong, I’m sure someone would have told me. So what are these Manic Street Preachers bitching about?
I discussed the Manics’ 2001 commercial hari kari ‘Know Your Enemy’ at length in my 50’000 word list of their 100 greatest songs published last year. I mentioned that it all started when an aging British revolutionary folk icon turned his nose up at the band’s private Portaloo at a Scottish festival. I mentioned how Manics bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire would later confirm that he wouldn’t have that same folk icon’s “Dick pissing in my toilet for all the money in the fucking world”. I mentioned how that shot of verbosity occurred during a T in the Park performance that acted as an reinvigorating reminder of the band’s routes as angrily political agitprops. I mentioned how people had mostly accepted they would never be that exciting again after the morose and Phil Collins infused ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours‘ had sold roughly seventy two squillion copies, making the band Britain’s biggest rock band after Oasis had politely taken their dog out of the fight with ‘Be Here Now‘. I discussed at length their line in the sand statement single The Masses Against the Classes*, the scuzz punk call to arms that became the first new UK number one of the 21st century. I noted how this moment – along with them playing the song live to 57’000 people at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium at new years eve 1999 – represented the absolute peak of their commercial success. For the benefit of the TL:DR generation, I then explained the release of their sixth album a little over a year later in meme form:
And despite everything I’ll discuss in this review, I still absolutely stand by that visual point. It’s simply inconceivable that the band ever believed that ‘Know Your Enemy’ would be a commercial success, and it’s likely that they correctly assumed that it would cut ties with the mainstream to such an extent that they would never again experience anything close to the success that they enjoyed in the late 90s. Their previous album, 1998’s ‘This is My Truth…’ sold five million copies worldwide (!), while ‘KYE’ sold 500’000. Nicky Wire would later even concede in Mojo Magazine that much of those sales were to dissatisfied customers, and also remark on how it marked the band’s commercial downturn: “To this day, you see ‘Know Your Enemy’ at service stations for £2.99, because they bought so many thinking it was by one of those commercial bands! In retrospect, it sold half a million copies. Imagine what we’d give for that now.”
So, yes: commercially, it was ritual suicide. But was it any good?
Boston’s mynameisblueskye can often seem a little… daunting.
And I don’t just mean his extensive and creatively rich discography. Since releasing his first music back in 2010, Skye has rafted dozens of albums, EPs, artistic projects and other ventures, dedicated to exploring the limits and potential of his own art. Even the partial catalogue available on his BandCamp page presents a vivid kaleidoscope of lucid cover art and arresting titles. Guy once released a record called Diary of a Pretty Corpse. Dude is metal as fuck. And all this is before you even listen to his music, which is often the sound of black holes collapsing in on themselves but expressed through the smallest rocks in the galaxy crashing together. You could probably describe mynameisblueskye as ‘lo-fi’, but this is often less a stylistic choice and more a necessity of his real world constraints. He manages to create magic using just a few keyboards and a laptop. But only because he has to. If you offered him a forty eight piece orchestra and the St Winifred’s School Choir, he’d sure as hell use them.
No, interviewing mynameisblueskye also felt a little daunting to me. I know very little about the guy personally, but from following his dedicated release schedule for maybe four years since being introduced to his world through a Z Tapes compilation, and from following his frequent incisive Tweets… I kinda got the impression.. that he’s a really smart guy…
mynameisblueskye straddles the black, LGBT, autistic and creative arts communities, seems to have a deep understanding and respect for all of them and is able to consume and analyse the culture of all the communities he intersects. And he isn’t an artist worried his music might be ‘too political’. He’s always aware of big issues and always has the confidence to take them on. Even that song which I glibly described as having a ‘metal as fuck’ title is actually about the state murder of black people and how people often only care when they’re presented with a body: “Diary of a Pretty Corpse is about feeling like a black life that doesn’t really get his due in the world until he was dead, and when he does die by the hand of cruel people, they get the audacity to rule it as something dark as a suicide.”
See? How dumb am I going to look asking him about superheroes and professional wrestling? He even knows far more than me about music, any interview could be a bloodbath.
Still, the release of ‘One Last Look’ – a collection of rarities and songs recorded for various compilations over the past five years – gave me an opportunity to reach out, a chance to get a quick idea of how the world looks through mynameisblueske’s eyes. The interview went to some truly fascinating areas, and Skye really stepped up to nail and then elaborate on each question. He was a fantastic interviewee, and after reading this you owe it to yourself to investigate one of our most singular artists further. And have you seen that back catalogue? Best get started…
Necessary Evil 