Aaaaaaaaaaaaaw sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
There were only 121 of these bastards last year!! Extraordinarily poor planning on my part. There’s a lot of work to do, so I am not going to spend a lot of time on this intro. I will just say though… This list was named after a Sasha Banks catchphrase in WWE, and now she’s left that company… can I just have it?? Is it 100% mine now??
Anyway: Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else: 2022’s 154 best songs.
YOU KNOW IT’S ALL ABOUT THAT…
Holy shit! Happy birthday ‘Electra Heart’!
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!
YOU DON’T LOVE ME? BIG FUCKING DEAL
Get in line, pass the wine, bitch, we’re going straight to Hell
This Hell
There are few things as indicative of a grossly rotten capitalist system as Elon Musk. If this was a world that worked in the slightest way, if it was properly focused on providing correctly for all human life, or even if it were really the meritocracy that many on the right and the centre claim it to be, then people like Elon would not exist.
Elon Musk has, according to Forbes, eight two sillywillion-scumskillion-foreskillion-skatupllion dollars. Remember how arsey I got about Beyoncé? Well, Elon Musk spends ‘a Beyoncé’ every day on one of his special artisanal morning coffees (he makes it out of unicorn anuses and the condensed tears of one hundred an fifty million starving children, which needs to be collected en masse overnight. Tastes quite nutty. Because Elon nuts in it. Because the idea turns him on so much). If Elon earned this money by being especially good at something like playing billiards – even if he were the best billiard player in the God damn world – then being allowed to greedily accumulate that much wealth would still mean the system is broken. But Elon isn’t especially good at anything. It’s just the whole depressing and boring vulture capitalist, venture buyouts, stock market nonsense that all rich people do.
YOU MUST HAVE REALLY ENJOYED THIS ELON MUSK ALBUM
Remember how much I stanned the vertical bar in BIG|BRAVE‘s name at #71? Bro, I was super simping for that punctuation symbol, wasn’t I? It was totally… bussin’… and… PAWG…? Look at all these hip new words I’m using! As far as you know, I’m, like, 22 years old or something. Yeah, I’m a hip young gunslinger. Yes I am. Stop gaslighting me.
Eeeeeeeeeeew, ‘PAWG’ stands for ‘Phat Ass White Girl’?? I honestly never knew that, it’s so gross! I will state at this point that I personally will not be referring to either Melanie James/melodus nor Elora Driver/metagirl as ‘PAWGs’, though they are of course free to refer to themselves as such and may well fit the description.
‘PHAT’ STANDS FOR ‘PRETTY HOT AND TEMPTING’??
I changed so much since ‘Volume 1’
I don’t give a fuck who don’t like me…
Pandemic illuminates darkness
Uprisings just hit me the hardest
And all you virtue signalling fucks
Will not get to sample the harvest
Jesse Got Away
Hey. Hey. Hey you. Yeah, you, future cultural historian. Yeah. I’m contacting you from the past. Wooooooooooo! Wait… no, I’m not a ghost, am I? Scrap that last comment. Just put down your Diplomat smoking pipe and remove your monocle, listen to me for a second. How’s the future treating you? Flying cloud storage, you say? Electronic cigarettes with AI sentience? Well that all sounds absolutely pointless, but good luck to you. Gig economy for cultural history, is it? Because Elon Musk is now the Great Leader at more than a thousand years old and can’t afford to give any workers at all any rights because he needs to fund his great humanitarian expedition to carve a visible doge meme onto the surface of Jupiter? For the lols? You have to pay for your own monocle and pipe?? Yeah, yeah, that all sounds awful, but not much different from my time and I kinda wish you’d stop going on about it, it’s my turn to speak.
How are you currently gauging the cultural mood of the years 2020-21 out there in the year 3000? Sure, if you wanted an inspiring and comforting read on everything you could just go to Arlo Parks’s debut album. Perhaps if you wanted a glimpse into how humanity strived (and often succeeded) to make creative connections despite the viral barriers you could take a listen to Charli XCX’s magnificent ‘how i’m feeling now‘. Or, yeah, if you wanted to go all Pitchforky I guess you could name that Fiona Apple album. What’s that? You’re actually currently evaluating the era through the prism of Emily in Paris? Damn, that’s a good angle, and I’d love to see what horrors you’ve unearthed during your studies. But can I suggest something far more advantageous? How about you study the illuminating trilogy of albums released by Big $ilky over that period?
Continue reading “35 Big $ilky: Big $ilky vol.3”
Yeah, that’s right, I’m rolling on through!! I’ve promised myself that I can play a bit of the Resident Evil 3 remake after I finish this entry, so don’t expect me to be 100% focused…
#10 Charli XCX: how i’m feeling now
Oh, so she uses proper capitalisation on the album cover, but not in the official stylisation?? Seriously, Charli, what the WTF?
There is no better artist in recent times at embracing the everything than Charli XCX. Her genius has always been to encompass pretty much every facet of modern pop music and modern sound into bite size chunks and serving them up for the aimed consumption of literally every single person on Earth. She has always liked to do this through bridging as many connections with as many people as possible. She is an insanely public artist, connecting to all of her fans on every social platform and ensuring that they are always explicitly aware of how important they are in whatever success she has, leading to live performances that can feel more like a mass therapy session mixed with the prelude to the greatest mass orgy all thousand people present have ever experienced mixed with the purest exhibition of Arthur Janov‘s treatment of primal screaming. She’d also do this by collaborating with as many other artists as she could, ensuring that so many of her fans were introduced to slightly more challenging acts such as Cupcakke, Dorian Elektra and Tommy Cash. You have to imagine that Charli hugs each and every person she passes on the streets and tells them that she loves them, and to never stop being awesome. It makes every trip to the Post Office last about an hour and 45 minutes. For this most hyper-interactive, hyper-communicative, hyper-compassionate and hyper sharing artist- one who thrives on the maddening stimulation of modern life- to suddenly find that you’re not allowed to meet with anybody and, really, shouldn’t even leave your freaking house might have come as a defeating blow, like if you’re a My Little Pony fan and the government suddenly announced all swastikas were now illegal.
#50 Banoffee: Look At Us Now Dad
Banoffee’s debut album should act as an important reference point for Halsey. The subjects she covers here- from painful reconciliations to painful intergenerational trauma to, Jesus, why didn’t I just leave it as a one night stand with that prick??- are at least as weighty as those covered on Ms Frangipane’s latest. Banoffee simply covers them often more explicitly, with far more humour and raw openness. And, more importantly, does so with no shame about this being a pop album and with the mature knowledge that really shouldn’t take away from its artistic legitimacy. She’s not openly complaining about Band of Horses not being considered pop despite starting with the same three letters, she’s not arguing that her album being considered ‘pop’ and the Javier Muñoz Spanish language production The Occupant being considered a ‘movie’ is just more evidence of the suffocating patriarchy, she’s not pointing to the barbed wire around her wrist on the album cover as poof of how freaking metal she is. She has no qualms about being a pop artist and is confident in the utter magnificence she can still produce, how being a ‘pop’ artist doesn’t act as a barrier to producing such weird, challenging and effective music such as this.
This blog has never been the place for timely, contemporary and up to the minute fresh takes. In normal circumstances, if something notable happens during the year I simply put it aside in that special part of my brain that I hope to access around December, then at the end of the year I rant about it in a blog post about my 25th best album of the year, or whatever, when every other person in the world has long stopped caring about it. Or, most likely, I’ll simply forget all about it and instead go off on a tangent about rape fantasies or utter fucking nonsense. It was all we wanted. All we needed. We were happy.
Well, COVID-19 got me doing all sorts of crazy shit that I’ve never done before- last Tuesday I ate an unsalted pistachio*- so I guess I may as well add to the insanity by commenting on something that only just happened this last week. Partly this is because a particularly obnoxious crow outside my window has woken me up at two thirty in the morning, like I’m a 15th century wheelwright working in the tower of his master’s monastery or some shit, but partly because Lana Del Rey’s 21st May Instagram post really got under my skin. Yeah, mostly the former. Sniff, sniff, what’s that smell? Oh yeah! Precious motherfucking content!!
Continue reading “You All Knew This Was Coming [UPDATED]”
This is probably the only reason i still do this stupid fucking list that nobody reads and the one post that I actually enjoy writing (because it’s basically just me making lots of pretty pictures), statistical motherfucking analysis!! The numbers, the records and the science, yo! behind Necessary Evil 2019. Let’s start with with what (spit) other music journalists thought.
OK, we all actually agree on the nest album of the year, so the critics are actually correct for once. Chill out on Jamila Woods and Michael Kiwanuka though, yeah?
Continue reading “Because I Like Stats (and That’s the Way It Is)”
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