Tag: the fat of the land

12 Mogwai: Mogwai Young Team (Remastered)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Listen, boys and girls and others, I’mma keep this relatively brief. I feel like my words are pretty irrelevant here, I’m not sure that it’s easy or even possible to explain the beauty, the power, the genius of one of the greatest albums released during my lifetime. My short lifetime. I am young. I’m basically a baby.

1997 was the best year for music, don’t @ me. There wasn’t even a Manics album that year, so I’ll let that sit in just how powerful a statement that must be coming from me. British music, at least. I was in Britain at the time, you see, and though we were still obviously pathetically in awe of the USA – all the cool kids hated Friends, while every movie at the cinema starred Will Smith or George Clooney or… erm… Robert Carlyle…? – the world wide webification hadn’t yet taken over. What’s big in the US is now just big in the UK, because we’re all hooked up to the same companies’ propaganda machines, but back in ’97 we still kinda did our own stuff. Fucking Full Monty was the biggest movie of 97 (and, for a short time before Titanic, of all time in the UK*), nine of the top 10 selling albums of 1997 were by British acts. Trust me, bro: Jewel? Third Eye Blind? Tim McGraw? Notorious motherfucking B.I.G?? We had no idea who these people were. And you know what? We were happy.

I GOT A NEW MAN ON ME, IT’S ABOUT TO GET SWEATY

My Life in Albums (part 2 97-06)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 8 Comments

You want an intro? You got that in part one! Let’s get down to the dirty, sticky and dangerously unhygienic business:

1997

This was an important year for me, this was when shit got real. Yeah, Labour won the election, which I was aware I was supposed to celebrate but not yet conscious enough to know exactly why, just that ‘our team won*. Princess Diana died, inspiring a nationwide reaction that even 13 year old Alex Palmer recognised as being a bit fucking much**. All that was meaningless background noise though, as most importantly 1997 was the year that I became really switched on to new music. Before this point, most of the albums I’ve listed would have been discovered by me later and posthumously lusted after in the kind of nostalgic necrophilia that I would later grow to despise. Yeah, sorry if you’ve already imagined me as an incredibly cool seven year old bopping his head to Soon by My Bloody Valentine. From this point on, these important albums in my life and personal development were pretty much all discovered as contemporaries. Seriously though, ‘It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah’ was the first CD that I ever owned. Yeah. I’m that cool/weird.

young-man-mohawk-carried-personalised-floral-tribute-while
“Dad, this is why you’re only allowed to see me one weekend every other month…”

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