Ooooooh, that title is an open goal for renowned and celebrated political satirists such as myself, isn’t it?? ‘We’ve been going about this all wrong’, aye? What biting topical references could I make here??
#topical
OK, OK, let me just get my satire iron. I’m about to take you to a satire ground. Like higher ground, yeah? You got that? Allow me to put on my satirish dancing shoes and perform for you a satirish jig, Remember that Jim Carrey film, ”Satiar Liar’?? Well, that’s me.
We leave our higher educations that we all ‘must’ get With a signature stamped paper and a mound of debt The bank has got us by the throat and then we’re forced to settle For the jobs we hate, 9 to 5, 40 hour, 40 years ’til the day We are too weak to work, too frail to play No friends or lovers because they all passed away We’ve waited for this day all our lives long And on our death bed the stereo plays our favorite teenage anthem song And we sing along
Our Lives Would Make a Sad, Boring Movie
We into the top ten, God dammit! With, another album was wasn’t actually released this year: The Hotelier’s 2011 debut album that I just needed to complete my set.
There was a movie released recently called ‘The Menu’. Did you see it? It was pretty great, a riotous ‘high concept’ comedy thriller, the kind of ‘middle class’ Hollywood film you don’t get enough of these days, where every movie is either a multi-squillion dollar ADHD nightmare where Marvel’s ‘Dr Thorcock‘ graphically violates DC’s ‘The Lib Pungent‘ in gold plated 4D, or a zero budget Slovakian mood piece shot on a Nokia 3320 that depicts a peasant girl attempting to collect enough dead rats to properly honour her village’s head priest who recently died of gout. Oh, and that priest is also a violent and sadomasochistic child abuser. Oh, and all these movies are 250 minutes long.
I’ll try not to spoil too much, but ‘The Menu’ (107 minutes) generally concerns a ‘menu’ that a chef is preparing for an extremely despicable clientele at his preposterously high end restaurant. A speech that the chef makes to all his diners before they sampled his creations really came back to me while listening to Hatis Noit’s debut album proper:
I gave all you cretins, like, a million words back when this astonishing reconceptualisation of the divisive 2001 release by Our Lord Jesus’s Favourite Band back when it was released in September! “But Alex!” I hear your dribbling mouths bray, “This isn’t even a proper anniversary! 2021 would have been the *actual* twentieth anniversary, so wouldn’t it make more sense to put it on last year’s list??”. To which I lower my voice to an angry whisper, pull your collar roughly forward so our foreheads clash, and say, through gritted teeth, You think I don’t know that?? This is a band that fucks everything up! And that’s part of the reason we love them!! Now sit down and enjoy your Epicentre!!
Rerelease number two!By the way, I’ve also come to notice since I last wrote that Marina post signalling the Oncoming of the Rereleases, where I rather cerebrally and logically (some would say deeply sexually) explained how I’d been smart enough to collate the list’s three big rereleases all together just outside the top ten. Or maybe that was a complete accident. The point was: I’m a fucking critical genius. Well, afterwards, I realised that there were rereleases at numbers 14, 13, 12, then a completely valid 2022 record at #11… Then another ‘rerelease’ (not technically rereleased this year, but a ‘Legacy Release’ that I’d decided to include) at number ten. Honestly, I’ve no fucking idea what’s going on with this list. Or my life, for that matter. Please help me. Any clues on how to sort this shit out?
My life, I mean, I don’t want to hear about any perceived ‘improvements’ to this blog or the Necessary Evil year end list. Necessary Evil is a perfect little crystal and I’m very protective over it. My life? Meh, I’m not too fussed, so I’ll give everything a shot. Have I ever tried deeps sea crab fishing as a vocation, you ask? Why not!? Live out my days as a Dreamsexual?? That sounds pretty problematic these days. I’ll do it.
NE2022 enters into a strange ‘rerelease zone’ for these next three entries. I can’t remember if I did this intentionally. It’s difficult to consider ‘classic’ albums alongside newer material. You need to balance out any nostalgia and the unfair ten year start that some records have had to burrow into your subconscious. Yet you don’t want to go too far the other way, and fail to remember the original spark and energy that was originally locked within a song you’ve heard fifteen thousand fucking times already. You can’t give too much weight to cultural importance… but you certainly can’t just blindly ignore it. It’s an extremely complicated equation that I honestly don’t believe anyone reading this will be intelligent enough to fully grasp. Or, I just realised there were a lot of amazing rereleases this year and didn’t want them all clogging up the top ten, so parked them all just outside. Two releases still escaped and made the top ten. There are five records in the top 15 that weren’t released in 2022. Shut up. Ah do warra want!
Aw man, I feel gross even referencing that storyline, And yet here I am. Am I really better than the rest of you. Yes. But perhaps not as much as I once believed… No. Still as much. I just checked. Phew
We’ve already learned what magic can be created by the combination of Los Angeles and Newcastle-upon-Tyne but, guess what? Yorkshire by way of the Nigerian Igbo ethnicity creates magic that’s just that little bit better! There is but one question on everyone’s lips though:
Yeah, I know, it’s just ‘Bandcamp’, isn’t it? Not ‘BandCamp’ like it’s some internet 2.0 app allowing preteen marching band players share news about events (that later turned out to be a massive secret international pedophile ring), but I started calling it ‘BandCamp’ on the first sodding entry so now I have to either go back and change every entry – which will take, ugh, effort – or just continue doing so and hope nobody notices. I’ll change it in 2023, I promise. Resolution and shit, yeah?
Troubled don’t count the ways I’m broken Your troubles won’t count, not once we’ve spoken What troubles me now if I tear this open Some people won’t have the faintest notion
Necessary Evil 