Tag: 2022

#77 Soccer Mommy: Sometimes, Forever

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

We all like to imagine relationships ending in flames, don’t we? We want to think that all affiliations will grow into a whirlwind of emotions and angst until one partner is Marlon Brando STELLAAAAAAAAAAAAAing their guts out to the other partner, Adam Driver, inside the house… shouting…? I dunno, I’ve not seen that relationship film where Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson shout at each other, but I gather it’s rather intense. Both of the partners will inevitably accuse the other of gaslighting them because, Jesus Christ, we just can’t get enough of using that fucking word, can we? You don’t think this Burberry scarf goes with my faux leather pants? Quit gaslighting me. You fascist.

“No I am not getting changed before the wedding, stop gaslighting me. If your sister has an issue, maybe she should first think about how fat she’s got recently. Glass houses, know what I mean? You both get it from your bitch mother…”

When we see an old friend and find out that they broke up with Alan, we’re always so disappointed to hear they just ‘drifted apart’. No, fuck that! Where are the story’s of Alan punching through walls or cutlery being thrown across your apartment as you both exchange obscenities!? Where’s the anecdote of both of your infidelities coming to light on the day you were supposed to get married when it’s suddenly revealed that you’re both fucking the Imam officiating the wedding?? One of life’s most depressingly dull facts is that the vast majority of relationships end with a sad whimper. Listen, there are billions of relationships in the world, and billions of people will be in multiple relationships. The majority of these relationships won’t be good fits. They might have thought they were in love at one point, but more likely they just really liked each other. Then they started to merely like each other. Then they tolerated each other. Now, they just find each other a bit annoying. It’s fine, it’s normal, and I’m not talking about your relationship, you and Stuart are meant for each other. Yeah, that’s the person you’re happy to spend the rest of your life with, yeah? Yeah?

The rest. Of your life…

#78 Jordana: Face the Wall

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Allow me, if you will, to present a tale. A tragedy, really. One that took place in 2022. The biggest thing to take place in 2022. Yeah, I know, I previously said that some other shit was bigger, but I was just fronting, this was the tale that truly defined the year.

May I please be as bold as to take you back to last year’s Legit Bosses list, upon which Jordana appeared five times?

Pretty ballsy of me to state that Jordana not agreeing to an interview meant that she automatically hated me and everyone reading? Perhaps for other people, but I have always been confident in my writing skills and the affection that Jordana has for her fans, especially one who has been with her from the start such as me. Also, I have generally been good at judging this kind of thing in the past: I haven’t done many interviews for this blog in the past, but every person I’ve asked has agreed.

That includes you as well, reading this now, by the way. If she didn’t agree to an interview it meant she hated me, hated everyone reading that original post and also everyone who ever read this blog, and also everyone who ever read anything, on or off this blog, in the present, in the future, and in the past. Pretty hateful thing to do, I’m sure you’ll agree. But! Like I said! No worries! I knew we had each other’s backs.

but you drive me insane

#79 Waxahatchee: El Deafo (Apple TV+ Original Series Soundtrack)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

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.

(I’m not doing this bit on every entry, I promise…)

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…

will i have a look?? find out next!

#81 Beneath Utopia: Legacy

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

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)

OPen you eyes, your legacy is now

A Brief and Inadequate Mimi Parker Tribute

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

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.

Continue reading “A Brief and Inadequate Mimi Parker Tribute” →

The Biggest Moment of 2022

~ Lex Leeson ~ 6 Comments

“I’m here to try and elevate everybody”

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 fun that 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.

Go into business for yourself

Necessary Evil 2021 (70 – 61)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 12 Comments

70 Kings of Leon: When You See Yourself

(2016 #104, 2008 #17, 2007 #1!)

I’m allowed to still have Kings of Leon, right? You people will still consent to this? This is still OK, yeah? Nobody’s feeling mistreated in any way? I don’t want this to be one of those things where I was almost sure you were OK to me playing with my gross old man testicles while you watched holding back tears.

Remember that Simply Red song Holding Back the Tears? Well that’s what it was about. Mick Hucknall was so ahead of his time. He was trying to teach us, why did we refuse to learn? What’s that? It was actually called Holding Back the Years?? Well, shucks… Ah well, I’ve written it now.

I’ve done well, haven’t I? I’ve, like, mostly irradiated all the bullshit white guy rock that was honestly the entirety of all music I consumed before the age of about 19. I like to think that my end of year lists, while being a no way near exhaustive list of new music, is at least a forward thinking and progressive exercise in highlighting new and exciting progressions in style and presentation and in many different (and often new) genres. What’s your favourite Turmeric Trancotone album of 2021? Gotta be #26, right?

Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2021 (70 – 61)” →