I am now of an age where I can listen to the Sunday top 40 musical singles chart and judge it instead of record it on magnetic tape. Which I never did because by the time I began to listen to the top 40 musical singles chart, tapes were going out of fashion.
Yesterday I listened to the Top 40 UK singles chart. Not all of it. I am not a monster. I listened from 27 to number 1. My conclusion is almost everything in the charts today is either derivative, nonsensical or simply Star Wars noises all about hooking up with babes at resort swimming pool sides, or being babes getting out of resort swimming pools and meaning I can’t buy underwear without feeling bodyshamed.
Now I am going to make a personal comment about a song in the charts, which I will justify with a very long preamble taking in about 75% of my musical references first. If you want to skip the words, then feel free to simply enjoy the embedded playlist. Starting with this:
This is the most purchased song in the UK right now:
Kiesza / Hideaway
What follows is the six ages of my personal (potted) musical history.
THE FIRST AGE - IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NO MUSIC 0-10
Key music:
Black Lace / Superman
Jim Reeves
Up until 10 years old, I didn't like music. I didn't really listen to any of it. At least not by choice.
My experience of music was either at birthday parties which were a mix of personally upsetting anthems about having fun doing actions excellent for musical statues, sung by emotionally rictus singers in oversized plastic sunglasses or, a lot of semi-religious country and western that my parents enjoyed listening to.
The radio in the house was tuned to a radio station which would get switched on for a Sunday to listen to religious teachings and debate and then a songs of praise programme.
OK, it wasn't the only music I experienced...
The family car didn't have a car radio so I would take the portable wireless we had in the house on trips with us. I'd pop batteries in and tune into the only station I could find which wouldn't fade in and out of static - given it was only a MW radio - Local radio. Whatever the local radio was nearest the road we were on. Queue quite a bit of adult soft rock.
80's popular youth music completely bypassed me and I reckon I was the only confused sole at my primary school disco who didn't know what BROS. was. I just stood there in the middle of the gym hall agog as my fellow pupils chanted: "We Want Bros!" over and over until the headmaster / DJ told us we would be getting Culture Club and like it.
I guessed Bros was part of the modern counter-culture including The Simpsons, which I also hadn't seen as a motion cartoon (and wouldn't until 1999) but practiced drawing Bart heads at break time nonetheless. I would have been happy with the headmaster burning his wheels of steel with something that sounded like the Beach Boys.
Let me explain...
THE SECOND AGE - THE VINYL HIPSTER YEARS 10-12
Key music:
Beach Boys
Edwin Starr / War
I was 10 before I was able to begin to explore music as something to listen to instead of endure.
My mother bought me a record player from a Scout jumble sale and I was allowed to choose a few records from the box under the table in the hall. And so my first steps into listening to music began with shockingly bright and balloon font covered LP: "Sounds Like the Beach Boys"
I loved that tribute band album. It was grooved sunshine. If that was what the Beach Boys sounded like, imagine what they actually sounded as!
More jumble sale vinyl followed and I soon had a small, yet eclectic collection: Tenpole Tudor, Tina Turner, Now That's What I Call Music 4, Motown Hits vol. 2, Billy Joel, Boney M, a multitude of Queen singles.
Part of the joy of Jumble Sale vinyl is the records are sometimes different to what the sleeves suggest and I ended up with a number of examples of this. What looked like the Smurf album could be anything: clearly a perfect sleeve front to something much more brutal inside. The smurf album did turn out to be the Smurf album, after all, but still - who else has heard the Smurfing Beer song?
I was a vinyl hipster right up to not enjoying music up to that point in my life!
Suddenly I was listening to spectrum of genres and I would listen to them, kneeling watching the needle rise and fall, intently at the lyrics. Beer, Beer! Smurfing Beer!
THE THIRD AGE - THE CASSETTE KID 12-15
Key music:
Donovan
Genesis / I can't dance
By the beginning of my teenage years I had a cassette player and my musical education began apace.
I had to rely on birthdays and Christmases for a music cassette or two so I had to choose carefully: The Beatles discography, Bob Dylan albums and Simon and Garfunkel collections were wise choices. It was a cold Christmas the year the latest Genesis album was under the tree.
Thanks to more jumble sales, soon I was listening to a lot of UK '60s music (Donovan, The Kinks, The Moody Blues) alongside the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly held in black cassette plastic briefcase holders.
I started writing strange, little weird stories, inspired by Jean Michelle Jarre compositions hissing from tapes late at night.
Just as the 80's popular music passed me by, the early 90's madchester / rave scene was something which was not on my musical radar.
And then I was into my defining music age...
THE FOURTH AGE - ADVENTURES IN CD 15-18
Key music:
Black Box Recorder / The facts of life
The Smashing Pumpkins
The ages between 15 and 18 are the ones most important in music. I was in this bracket when cassettes were on the way out and MINI Discs were only just being considered as the future they would eventually be an integral part of for us all (mark my words!). It was the age of the CD boom!
In 1995 my parents bought a CD player for the house, putting it in the TV cabinet in the living room. This was just in time for me having more freedom to go out into town to shops with the little money I was able to accumulate from a part-time after school job in a month.
It meant that any time I had to listen to my music in CD form, I had to do so with the permission, and in front of my parents - but it didn't matter to me, I was now able to choose music no longer by medium: I was able to play any music from that day on.
Within a year I had bought my own Radio/CD/Cassette player in my bedroom and my record player was consigned to under a pile of old 2000AD comics.
-------------------------------------------------------
Last Friday night BBC Radio 6, in a culmination of a week of celebration of the musical genre, played down their chart of Britpop anthems. It took me back to my middle-youth.
Until this countdown of many of the songs I still have in my music box, I had never associated my taste in music as being so involved with Britpop. I wouldn't have thought myself greatly involved with it. But here I am titling this blogette with a praise to it.
As I say, I wouldn't have classed myself as enjoying Britpop. Certainly not at the time. To me I was "into alternative and indie music": The Cure and Pink Floyd. Most of it was not British: REM, Smashing Pumpkins, the Crash Test Dummies, Pavement and later, The Eels, Wilco, and Mercury Rev vied for laser rotation with Pulp, Suede, Radiohead, Supergrass, Dodgy, The Longpigs, Ocean Colour Scene and Oasis... and Cast and, well, The Bluetones, The Verve and the Charlatans... and... OK, I guess I had a lot of what someone may suggest as Britpop. Oh! Paul Weller too.
I suppose to an alchemist a Britpop band was differing ratios of The Beatles' willingness to come up with a tune : The Who's conviction : The Kinks' observational lyrics of daily life.
To me, not an alchemist, I reflect on Britpop differently.
Britpop was music which, crucially, was inclusive. It was non-gendered. A girl could be just as much a fan of Blur as a boy. Young couples could go out hand in hand in the setting sun in Oasis T-shirts. It let youth listen to music in their rooms together or see a gig on equal terms.
Britpop wasn't aspirational in the American sense. It wasn't about the greatest love of your life or power ballading through emotional excesses. Britpop spoke about grubby nights out when having a grubby night out. In Britpop, empowerment came from self-determination. Britpop sounded like there was a knowing of something else going on - there was a hint of political engagement with society and something more polished US music lacked: a wink of irony.
Britpop, and a key to its success, was music boys could unashamedly get up and dance to with girls. Shuffling in a ragtag manner with a beer bottle cradled low in the hand was a legitimate dance move you could get away with. It was music which boys could sing and maintain an alpha swagger of youthful male chic.
So, for me, Britpop was androgynous, contemporary savvy and let me be cool.
This was no surprise. I was dead centre of the Britpop project - the sweet spot of the demographic.
I had listened to a bit Nirvana and Guns n' Roses with friends and, although it was good enough - the tunes seldom stuck and the sentiment seemed too alien in my mind. The stories told to me by Pulp were more affecting, the feelings from listening to Oasis more rousing.
My first CD album was REM's Monster but my first CD single was Girl From Mars by Ash.
I heard Girl From Mars playing in the record store and it is the first - and last - time I have gone up to the proprietor and asked what was playing. It was a proper tune to my ears.
In the years which went by I remember moments exclaimed by Britpop albums I bought.
As a reward to myself for passing my driving test I treated myself to Sleeper's It Girl album. Sleeper was classic Britpop - tuneful songs about ordinary Saturdays and in Louise, they had the most adorable Britpop babe of all time. She was biomechanically designed in a Britpop lab by FHM scientists to stir things in teenage boys. Stir things like Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.
There was a day I left school a class early and walked into town in black torrential winter rain to buy The Devine Comedy's Casanova LP and came home and played it straight away in the old CD player in the living room, hair still dripping water down my neck, mother cooking soup in the kitchen.
Clever music journalists talk of Britpop disappearing by snorting itself up its own nose. And there is something of this: The music did begin to play second to the stories of excess. But I believe Britpop had it's moment and it slowly and inevitably passed with the oncoming new youth no longer wanting to listen to what the "oldies" were playing and moved to make the next genre "theirs". It just happened to be more sincere: Coldplay and Eminem.
Looking back, Britpop was as novel as Glam Rock in the 70's. The Characteristics of bands are now cartoons. I am not ashamed to have enjoyed it, only disappointed that most of it now I would probably never listen to. Whether this is age or experience, I am not sure.
Pulp's Disco 2000, BBC Radio 6's number 1 Britpop anthem, is pure Britpop. It has all the alchemy elements turned up to the max. It is also a cracking song in any era. It was genre defining and breaking, as was - arguably - Radiohead.
However Disco 2000 is now very much of it's time too. It has dated, as it was written - unlike this blog - before Friends Reunited. The sentiment of Disco 2000 would have been very different if Jarvis used Friends Reunited like we all do these days.
THE FIFTH AGE - THE AGE OF SONIC 18-24
Key music:
Liam Lynch / United States of Whatever
Counting Crows
As the ashes of Britpop blew over the sand, I soon would be too. I was older and at university. Because I stayed at home, I didn't get to listen to the latest house music at house parties. Instead I stayed alone and my music was becoming more personal in taste as I became less involved in the zeitgeist.
There were moments of enlightenment at University: The Smiths became as important as Counting Crows. The Flaming Lips as important as Elliot Smith.
It was also a dark age, musically, and my musical tastes were turning bitter. I bought a Clem Snide album having heard Jonathon Ross recommend it on his Radio 2 show. I bought an Alabama 3 album from watching Later... with Jools Holland. The Polyphonic Spree from a review in Q Magazine.
I hit Slade pretty hard.
Best move on quickly...
THE SIXTH AGE - THE AGE OF A GREVILLUS! 24-
Key music:
Ellie Goulding
Grinderman
I have always been an eclectic musical collector and most recently I have loved finding music for all seasons. It is as if I have returned somewhat to my non-music liking roots, only this time I am doing it better.
I am no longer avoiding semi-religious country: I am finding the bits of it I like.
Indeed, American country music is a firm favourite of mine.
I am no longer scrabbling under tables in jumble sale halls to read the a-side notes of singles: I am searching recommendations for musicians I have never heard off on my laptop.
When the internet came, suddenly a world of music was available, and I have tried to embrace most of it. I am a big fan of Internet Radio and can tune into stations broadcasting all over the world.
I adore Ellie Goulding, her voice does strange things inside me. I am awfully fond of Lana Del Rey. Nick Cave is a favourite alongside the music of Ryan Kickland. I enjoy King Creosote and Yusuf Azak. There is so much music I have found which is great and not all of it in the Sunday top 40 chart yesterday.
Lana Del Rey
Fantastically, I am able to embrace what I thought was pretty much made up by myself altgoth - in the music bayous of the Death Country genre bands and Gloom-pop in the music of She Makes War and joyful tones of Einstein's Wardrobe.
It has inspired me to make the music I want (well... it's complicated) with Greville and the Tombstones.
And, yes, I enjoy a lot of the mainstream chart songs too. Kind of. Sometimes.
LMFAO
So, and here is the point of ALL THIS! taking this entire potted history of my music into consideration... I do feel I am therefore qualified here and now to say that this "song", below and positioned at No. 24 today in the top 40 chart is unlistenable drivel:
The Chainsmokers / #SELFIE
Actually, if the death of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens was the day the music died then #SELFIE by The Chainsmokers is something which came round late at night and dug the music up, removed it from its coffin, unloaded a full clip from a SIG P226 standard sidearm into the exhumed body, then set the music on fire and put the fire out with the shovels and then buried it back up again. And then played #SELFIE by The Chainsmokers through speaker phone on an iphone and had a good dance on the grave of the music. And took selfies doing it all and posted them on social media.
All this leaves only one question left: Who wants me to make them a mix tape?
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