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  1. 30. Highway Patrolman – Bruce Springsteen

    My introduction to Springsteen was broadly chronological. I came to him via Greetings From Asbury Park, wondering what he’d sounded like back when he was the latest new Bob Dylan. I progressed on to The Wild, The Innocent, which is where my own personal great click occurred and I suddenly got this music, suddenly understood. From there, Born To Run was an easy hop, because Born To Run is about as immediate and gratifying as Rock music ever got: every song a classic, every song a banger. Glorious, life-affirming, punch-the-air and thank god you’re alive music, The Boss spinning his tales of escape and adventure, ably assisted by The E Street Band.

    I was 21 years old when I came to listen to Nebraska, dutifully loading it up onto my minidisc player and heading out to catch the train into town for law school. I sat and looked out the window at the landscape rolling by as I listened to the album’s tales of blighted lives and crushed dreams. This, of course, was the antithesis of all the Springsteen albums I’d listened to before. The tales of the people who didn’t get away, who never met their Mary, who chased the wrong dream. Who failed to pull out of here to win. No E Street Band, no big choruses, no catharsis. And, of course, it’s that contrast that makes the album so moving: Springsteen is putting aside his hitherto prevailing survivor bias and showing you the other side of the coin. For every dream, ten nightmares.

    Springsteen wanted Nebraska to consist of “black bedtime stories”, and in contrast to its forebears it feels like an album whose tales are set exclusively at night and in places you wouldn’t want to visit. “I think I’d come out of a period of my own writing where I’d been writing big, sometimes operatic, and occasionally rhetorical things”, Springsteen would say of the record. “I was interested in finding another way to write about those subjects, about people, another way to address what was going on around me and in the country – a more scaled down, more personal, more restrained way of getting my ideas across.” These are tales of lives burdened by crushing resignation, seen out in tough places you’ll only ever pass through. Even the album cover feels like it’s shot out of a car window as you head for the state line as quickly as you can.

    Somewhere around the time I got off the tube at Goodge Street, Nebraska had reached its mid-point, Highway Patrolman. I will always remember that I started listening and everything was fine, until suddenly it wasn’t and I knew I wouldn’t be going to be going to any lectures, wouldn’t be learning anything about torts and equities, that day. The song froze me in my tracks, stood there in the street on suddenly unsteady legs as a black wave of recognition washed over me.

    I heard Highway Patrolman for the first time at a difficult moment in my life. The great calamity that I’d always felt in my bones lay in wait for my family, the impact for which I’d always braced, had seemingly arrived. My two younger brothers were so far off the rails as to be genuinely scary. We hadn’t put the name on it yet, and we wouldn’t for some time, but my two younger brothers were addicts, and it was getting worse.

    I will struggle to find the words to explain how painful it is to watch two people you love more than you love yourself seem to slip away from you day by day, as broken promise mounts on broken promise, as affront mounts on affront. What it’s like to sit late at night and torture yourself because you feel it in your heart that there must be something you can say, something you can do, some hitherto unspoken magic word, to set things right and bring them back. To blame yourself for not protecting them from themselves, as if anyone can ever be protected from themselves.

    I will struggle to articulate that desperation, that feeling as the noose only seems to tighten and tighten and you look down and see that at the other end of the rope is a heavy rock, sinking fast, taking you down with it, down to god knows where. I will struggle to tell you what it’s like to truly love an addict, and to fear that they are slipping away, will slip away completely.

    Looking back, the saddest thing is that none of us could see it for what it was. Couldn’t pin a label to the behaviour pattern until it was already too late. Maybe we were afraid to speak the word and give it life, maybe we just weren’t ready to surrender that frontier. Maybe in moments like that – when the truth is so glaringly self evident and so painful – it’s the flight from truth that keeps you moving at all. My brothers were addicts, and I didn’t know what to do for them.

    I hesitated before putting Highway Patrolman on this list, because the first time I ever heard it, it confronted me like no song has before or since, making it a difficult record to describe as a favourite. Springsteen’s tale of Joe Roberts, a smalltown cop whose brother Frank is out of control. The telling little details of their story: the “ever since we was young kinds, it’s been the same come down”, Frank’s time in the army, Joe’s failed farm. The sense that these are lives being seen out on tramlines, their paths inevitable. Joe trying and failing to help his brother, lost in his own delusion (“I catch him when he’s straight, teach him how to walk that line”), letting his transgressions slide.

    There was so much in Highway Patrolman that wounded me on that first listen. So many lines that cut to the core. There is no sadder chorus in all of music than “Me and Franky laughing and drinking/nothing feels better than blood on blood/taking turns dancing with Maria/as the band played Night Of The Jonestown Flood”. No clearer an indictment of the trend to enable when in Joe’s position than the line “but when it’s your brother sometimes you look the other way”, as if looking the other way will help Frank. But it was “Man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good” that ended me. Because I sensed that it was true, and the implications of that realisation terrified me.

    In Joe Roberts, I caught an echo of myself. The same high-minded ideals and self-image, the same quiet belief that he could save his brother through sheer reasonableness, that the situation was in any way, shape or form under his control. The same inability to comprehend the dimensions of the hole he’s in. Springsteen is charitable to his narrator, but the glory and horror of Highway Patrolman isn’t just in what’s contained in the lyric, but in the things that are left unsaid; the details of Joe and Frank’s predicament that you can feel being omitted. We’re getting Joe’s version here, and it’s the version he wants to believe, because the funny thing about loving an addict is that, while they remain startlingly clear eyed about what they do and don’t want, you find yourself practicing whatever self-deception is necessary to make the situation tolerable. To believe that there’s still a way out and that you’ll find it. To believe that you still retain some agency over your heart’s ultimate destination.

    The song ends with Joe chasing Frank through the night as he drives away from his latest transgression. Somewhere just short of the Canadian border, Joe pulls over and watches his brother’s tail-lights disappear, knowing he’ll never see Frank again, and knowing deep down what is likely to await him once he washes up somewhere his brother won’t be around to protect him. The loved one finally slipping away into the darkness, beyond your recall forever. The nightmare image that haunted me for years.

    On the day of that first listen to Highway Patrolman I skipped my law lectures. I found a quiet pub, sat and had a drink on my own, gathering my thoughts. After a while, I listened again, and it hurt a little less, which meant I could discern the song’s lessons a little more clearly. And then I listened to it again, and again, and again. It became my companion through those dark months and years, allowed me an avenue to express something I wasn’t talking to anyone about at that time. Allowed me to understand my own predicament a little better.

    I don’t really understand how Springsteen wrote Highway Patrolman. How in five and a half minutes, he creates these characters, these lives, and imbues them with so much tragic truth. How he sat at home alone, with his guitar and his four track recorder and just conjured this thing whole, to the point where it could touch and alarm me the way it did. How he was able to describe the sensations of my own life – sensations for which I had no words – without having lived it personally. Or maybe he did, maybe he too once loved someone and watched them slip. The song has the ring of truth, but it’s a fabrication: there is no Michigan County anywhere in the US, no land border between Michigan and Canada. At the time Springsteen wrote it, there was no song named Night Of The Jonestown Flood. Highway Patrolman is the lie that tells the truth, and it was more truth than I was initially prepared to bear.

    When I listen to the song now, I still feel a dull echo of that first panic, but it’s buried very deep. My brothers pulled themselves together a long time ago now. They found peace, found love. They got married and raised families and did well for themselves, to the point where it’s hard to believe that any of it ever really happened. That this was actually our life once upon a time. I love them both today as much as I ever did, and maybe even more. And I am so unbelievably proud of them for turning it all around, because I watched how difficult it can be to stumble like that and have to pick yourself up, and because they are both fantastic people who have helped me understand life a little better, and who have loved me just as much in turn.

    So, it’s a happy ending, and Highway Patrolman reminds me that our story did not go that way, that I never sat by the side of the road and watched them vanish inexorably in that black night, even though I dreamed of it a hundred times and woke in fear on every occasion. But I will never forget how it all felt: that powerlessness, that crushing and slow-building realisation that all my noble ideas about the power of my words were self-delusion. That choking, inarticulable fear as life slipped a little further away even as you lunged for it.

    Yesterday evening I had to go to a work drinks event, and on my way there I walked past the very spot where Highway Patrolman once froze me, over two decades ago now. I paused just a moment at the spot, and reflected on how much has changed, how far we’ve all come from that day. And the painful memories quickly ebbed away, as I thought of all the many happy times we’ve shared, all the parties and dinners and drinks. All the smiles and laughter. Nothing feels better than blood on blood.

    And as I stood there, the thought occurred to me that I love Highway Patrolman, not just because it’s a song I’ve been unfortunate enough to live, but because it’s a song I’ve been fortunate enough to live in reverse, with the flashback to happy times as the epitaph, rather than the prelude. And I know enough now to tell you that I arrived at that happy state of affairs through no wisdom or effort of my own, but simply because I am lucky. And to wish that we may all be so lucky.

  4. One of his best songs on one of his best albums. Much prefer this Springsteen to “The Boss”.

    As you say, it’s a novel – or screenplay – written in the form of a four minute song. I’ve not seen Sean Penn’s movie based on this song but I think I’ll search it out, now.

    • I’ve come to love both the quiet acoustic and loud bombastic Boss – I think he’s one of very few musicians equally capable of playing both games. Born To Run, in particular, wouldn’t be far off the bottom of this list, because it’s one of the most unrepentantly joyous and life affirming songs ever produced by a Rock artist.

      I haven’t seen the movie either. I’ve probably been avoiding it, because I have my version of Highway Patrolman, and it doesn’t leave much room for someone else’s.

    • Thank you, Lodestone. It’s an odd thing: I’d actually kind of been dreading writing about this one, but I found doing so more straightforward than expected, and perhaps even a little cathartic.

  6. One of the great posts on here, and one that does a great song justice. Magnificent stuff, Bingo – thank you.

    That ability of a piece of music to floor you, to somehow shed light on your life, your feelings, your anxieties, and in doing so help you to deal with them, is a profound thing. Of course other artforms can do the same, poetry, novels, etc, but there is something in a song like this which is about the power not only of the words, but also of the music and the performance that goes with them. Springsteen is indeed a master of this. ‘Wreck on the Highway’ is another magnificent example, so is ‘The Line’, but there are so many. And its not just the lows. Few can capture the joy and exhilaration of life like Springsteen. He can do it all.

    • No, thank you – those are very kind words.

      I didn’t leave space to talk about it above, but I think some of Nebraska’s power definitely comes from its intimacy. We’re used to Springsteen being this larger than life, macro-scale human being, shared with thousands. When he suddenly goes quiet and sincere and it feels like he’s talking to you and you only, as on this album, the whiplash is really something.

      I agree that he can really do it all, and he makes it look so easy. It’s slightly bewildering to behold.

  7. Excellent again. A brilliant song, turned into a movie by Sean Penn. Probably my second favourite on the album behind the peerless Atlantic City.

    Pedant hat on, you can drive over the border into Canada (Ontario) from Michigan in a number of places, either over bridges or through a tunnel (Detroit/Windsor), but his brother probably didn’t have a passport

    • I always thought his brother drove into just a different US state.

      And more pedant points for me please: any state could have a Michigan County. I always imagined the one in this song was in… Nebraska 😏

      • No Michigan County in the entire US, apparently.

        There is a song called Night Of The Johnstown Flood, recorded by Nolan Patton long after Highway Patrolman. In the same spirit, perhaps a Michigan County could be created.

        • Excellent piece – thank you! I never realised there wasn’t actually a song The Night of the Jonestown Flood – I always assumed it was a traditional country type song, but was far too lazy to try to find it. Springsteen absolutely convinces you it does exist.

          • I’ve always loved the song title. It typifies Springsteen’s attention to detail: even in the good times, Joe, Frank and Maria are dancing to a song about 2,500 dead in a single night, normal lives swept away suddenly and unexpectedly by larger events.

  8. Fabulous evocation of exactly the same sort of thoughts the song brings out in most, somehow all sounding individual and unique to each listener. Superlative craftsmanship from Springsteen, encapsulating his Everyman appeal. My favourite go to song by him, too. And the fact Sean Penn got near a whole film out of it demonstrates the power of the imagery.

    • You’re quite right that the magic of a song like this is in the way it speaks to each listener in a manner that feels so distinct.

      Springsteen is a master of this sort of intimacy. I first listened to Nebraska at a time when only weeks earlier I’d written him off as a fist-pumping, bandana-slinging, 80s meathead. Absolute shock and awe and a notable example of one of the many occasions on which I’ve been proved terribly, humiliatingly, but also gloriously, incorrect.

      • This is one of my top Springsteen songs. But reading that astoundingly well-written piece bought another song to mind, an obscure New Model Army track called Turn Away, so obscure they’ve never actually recorded it. I would have hesitated to post if your story didn’t have a happy ending, and perhaps it is still a little crass to do so, but I was so struck by the resonance that I had to get it out.

        The candle flickers and the shadows move distorted on the wall
        There’s a wire slowly stretching
        And now you ask him all the questions, the same ones as before
        But you know that he is lying
        And with your arms around him now, you’re begging please
        But he moves towards the open door
        And you find you’re screaming ‘no’
        But something breaks this time, you find you cannot move
        Is it wrong to let him walk into the water?
        Close your eyes for just one moment
        You get so tired the endless days of watching over
        And is it wrong as the waves boil up to greet him
        To turn away – he disappears into the tide
        All your love it cannot save him
        All your love it cannot save him

        in another little echo, Justin’s solo gigs used to feature a semi-regular cover of…Highway Patrolman.

        • Jesus Christ, Kid – I’m actually not sure I’d have survived listening to that at the time this was all going on.

          It’s not crass to post it at all, or at least no more crass than my having used Highway Patrolman to talk about this stuff (though I have no idea how else I’d have gone about explaining my relationship with the song).

          Thanks for sharing it.

  9. 29. Roots Bloody Roots – Sepultura

    Perhaps the best place to start is here: when I think of Sepultura, I always think of Paul Simon.

    I was in the process of turning 8 years old when Simon released Graceland, the heavily garlanded seventh solo album which saw him collaborate with South African musicians to sterling effect. The record, a self-conscious body swerve after the commercial failure of its predecessor (the also wonderful Hearts & Bones) was a roaring success, fusing Simon’s preposterous songwriting abilities with Mbaqanga, or Township Jive. But Graceland also swept along with it a warm tide of controversy, both in Simon’s breaching of the apartheid boycott in order to record it, and in the debate over whether his efforts constituted cultural appreciation or appropriation.

    Being nearly 8, I have to confess that these latter points did not trouble me, and as a consequence I was able to fall blissfully in love with Graceland; with its sounds, its textures, and above all its words. Graceland was the first album I ever recall listening to end to end, the first album that was on seemingly endless repeat play in my house at an age when I was capable of both noticing and remembering it. Graceland was the definitive article of 1980s middle class ubiquity; the soupcon of sophistication at the parental dinner party, the soundtrack to the long drive. As a consequence, Graceland became, for me and I’m sure many others of precisely my age, the sound of my childhood home, with all the soothing qualities that lofty position entails.

    I heard home in Graceland then, and I hear it now. Those mighty, distant drumbeats that launch Boy In The Bubble, the vast open plains of Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes, the crystalline delicacy of the opening to Crazy Love, Vol II. Sitting in the backseat wondering whether he was really singing “ever since the watermelon”. Leaning on the breakfast bar, nursing my morning cereal, moved and unsettled by the title track. The title track, which contained the first lyric that ever jumped right out of a song and claimed me, ever forced me to wonder about the depths of the adult life I knew would one day engulf me: “losing love is like a window in your heart/everybody sees you’re blown apart/everybody feels the wind blow”. God, what was that going to feel like when it was my turn?

    Naif that I was, I loved that Simon had felt compelled to explore African music, that he’d found a way to spotlight and share it, this culture that might otherwise never have reached the wider world. And then, four years later, he did the same for Brazilian music with Rhythm Of The Saints, and I thrilled that, for the first time in my short life, someone was promoting South America for something other than drugs, football, kidnapping and distant territorial dispute. Paul Simon had shared his light with us, and connected us back up to our roots. Perhaps he was even signposting a brighter future in which we’d all bask in one another’s cultures and sing Kumbaya. All of which brings us to Sepultura.

    It’s 1996 now, and I’m 18 years old, and I know full well that the future contains no such Kumbaya. I’m in my dear friend Al’s bedroom. Al has the best teenage bedroom I’ve ever seen; a collage of magazine clippings covers an entire wall, a collection of Coke cans and bottles the wall opposite. Al has the best bedroom, which is critically important at this stage, because that’s about as big as our worlds have got so far, and Al invariably has the best records. He’s the one who introduced me to Nine Inch Nails, and to Weezer and even to Smashing Pumpkins, and now he’s about to introduce me to Sepultura.

    Sepultura were a Brazilian Metal band founded in Belo Horizonte by Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vania, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family perilously impoverished. Originally trading in a particularly anarchic and nascent Thrash Metal, the band found a new direction with 1993’s Chaos A.D., responding to the challenge of Grunge by slowing their sound somewhat and focusing more on grooves and riffs. It was a sound that opened the gates to commercial success, which in turn allowed them some creative latitude and the necessary budget to pursue their muse.

    For Roots, Sepultura decided to delve into their Brazilian heritage. Their new sound brought Igor Cavalera’s drums to the fore, so they went in search of traditional native percussion and found their way to the Xavante Indian tribe, located in the remote jungles of Central Brazil and largely untouched by modern civilisation. In what surely must have resembled a scene from Spinal Tap, the various members of Sepultura met with the tribe’s chief, Cavalera, and asked his permission to adopt some of the forms of the tribe’s traditional music, and particularly their drum sound. As part of their pitch, they played the tribe Kaiowas, a notably indigenous sounding track from their previous album. “When we finished, they started talking to one another and we couldn’t understand anything they were saying”, Cavalera later said. “But the chief spoke a little Portuguese and he said they liked it and wanted to hear it again. So we played it again. That was probably one of the most intense audiences we’ve ever played for, because it was a different kind of audience: just 200 Indians sitting down and listening”.

    With the tribe’s permission eventually secured, the band retreated to the studio with Ross Robinson, one of the great architects of Nu-Metal, then fresh from producing Korn’s influential debut record and later to helm At The Drive-In’s mighty Relationship Of Command, and produced Roots, an album that somehow unifies all that traditional Brazilian percussion with the band’s classic Metal heritage and Robinson’s ear for the future. But of course, as I sat in Al’s bedroom, I knew none of this. I didn’t know who Ross Robinson was. I didn’t know what Nu-Metal would become. All I knew was that Roots Bloody Roots, the opening track of the album, was immediately one of the heaviest, funniest things I’d ever heard in my life, and therefore one of the most entertaining.

    Memorably described by Dave Grohl as “a fucking Metal track with a carnival passing through the middle of it”, Roots Bloody Roots sounds to this day like no other song I know. Opening with the cicada chirp which, based on this exercise, has evidently always been complete catnip to my listening sensibilities, the track detonates almost immediately into a droning snarl of guitars and drums. Then, at a mere 27 seconds in, the band detonates a whole new level of intensity: the guitars seem to multiply and swarm, the drumming becomes utterly ferocious to the point it feels like it might overflow the track entirely, and Max Cavalera begins to sing. “ROOOOOOOTS, BLOODY ROOOOOOTS”.

    That moment, that ignition the track achieves, is one of my favourite moments in all of music. Partly because it’s so eyebrow-raisingly intense, partly because the production is superbly primal, but mainly because in that moment, in that golden window of our youth, we sat and relished the simple joy of a very hairy man shouting his truth, on levels both ironic and non-ironic. If one cannot find pleasure in a screamed shout of “watch me freak”, then what even is life?

    But I suppose there was another reason too, and that reason was Paul Simon. As I sat and listened, as I drank in this almighty display of rage and power, I became conscious that in amongst the dark forms moving around the campfire I could discern his diminutive figure, and that in my heart I could feel the same stirrings that Graceland had wrought. Roots Bloody Roots is the sound of a Metal band delving into their own culture, into its beauty and horror, and totting up the ledger: “I’ll take you to a place/where we shall find our roots/bloody roots”. Where Simon used his global appeal to highlight the sound of African musicians and to transmit their joy, Sepultura were using their newfound commercial clout and nascent super-producer to amplify the horror and violence of the indigenous Brazilian experience. It felt akin to stumbling across a curdled version of a dream you’d once had and relinquished; the comfort of the familiar twinned with a kind of fascinated revulsion at the unanticipated ways in which it has bloomed awry.

    I’m still captivated by the sound of Roots Bloody Roots, still stirred by it on every listen. The drone of the main guitar riff and the way it feels like something that emanates from nature, a warning from deep within the canopy. The thunderous drumming and the glorious fills Igor Cavalera adds to the end of some of the early lines. The way it blends together so effortlessly seemingly disparate elements to create something that feels new. The breakdowns, where everything suddenly seems to come crashing down upon itself. The ferocity of Max Cavalera’s delivery of that first line, the way the first verse curdles into a slow motion scream. I suppose I hear in Roots Bloody Roots the squandered promise of early Nu-Metal – a music that, long before Fred Durst and Crazy Town, felt like it was going to take the traditionally conservative Metal scene and open it up to wider influences. Like it was going to take those early staging posts of Rage Against The Machine and Tool and Pantera and Downset and blow them out into something spectacular.

    Roots Bloody Roots is only a shade over three minutes long, but it gives me something I can’t get anywhere else: that combination of sonic adventurism, cultural commentary and sheer, unmitigated aggression. The overall effect is like being bludgeoned by a crazed genealogist. I listen to it now, and I remember that first listen, sat sniggering in Al’s bedroom, because what other sensible reaction could there be to something this wilfully intense? But it also makes me think about my childhood, and long family car journeys spent absorbing one cassette over and over again, and back to all my hopeless idealism about what my own cultural heritage might and might not be, and how it might be made to coalesce with the strictures of the world around me.

    And I can say all this, can provide all these pretty reasons why I love the song, and why I think it resonates, while knowing that – really, honestly – this one had me forever less than thirty seconds in, from that very first, preposterous cry of “ROOOOOTS, BLOODY ROOOOOTS”. Because Jesus Christ that is a wonderful sound and it felt so good to shout it at one another in our faux hairy man voices, and because I know that to this day if I were to text Al, or half a dozen of our mutual friends, the word “roots”, in total isolation and without explanation, I would shortly receive back the inevitable response “BLOODY ROOOOOTS” (always capitalised).

    Because, when all is said and done, it’s these little things that bind us and that are the very essence of friendship. And when you look back over life friendship is a strong force: stronger than heavy music, strong than explosive drumming and stronger, even perhaps, than culture. I listen to Roots Bloody Roots and I reflect that my oldest friends are my true foundation, linking me back forever to the person I once was, to the place I come from, and helping me to discern the person I might yet be. And I think about that day in Al’s bedroom, and a million other small, shared moments like it, a million other times we’ve put on stupid voices, or made up daft sayings, or just repeated things endlessly, to make one another laugh, and I reflect that maybe I got my Kumbaya moment after all.

  10. “Hello. We love your tribal drums, what we’d like to do is use them but bury them in a shit ton of rock instrumentation so that you can’t discern them at all.”

    Whilst I get Speultura wanting to pay homage to Xavante’s music and shine a light on the wrongs of colonial history I can’t honestly see a musical comparison between this and Graceland & ROTS, where the instrumentation and vocals are integral to the sound. I’ve only heard this track, and only once, so I’m probs missing a lot of the back story, mea culpa.

    • No musical comparison at all – just projects with a similar mission statement which I mentally filed alongside one another at the time.

      Or, to put it another way: at the time I first heard Roots Bloody Roots, it was the only other record from a mainstream artist apart from ROTS that I’d ever known to deliberately lean on Latin American music. Hence I received it as part of the same gene pool, even if they sound nothing alike, and that created a resonance.

      That said, I would pay cash money to hear Paul Simon cover this song. It would be a perfect fit.

      Also: lol at the quote.

  11. 28. Marquee Moon – Television

    It was Summer 2004 when I first found myself in New York City, arriving somewhere towards the crest of modern America, after the towers came down but before the walls started going up. It was a warm Summer, and the whole place smelt like asphalt and heated air, as if it was constantly being compressed under great pressure, which – in a sense – it was.

    New York was a difficult city to see clearly on a first visit. Too much baggage, too freighted with cultural history, too easily repurposed as a theme park ride for your own nostalgia, an aide memoire to times you’d never actually lived. The New York of Ghostbusters, of Do The Right Thing, of Warriors, of Kids. The long, swooping helicopter shot over the waters of the East River at the start of Working Girl. The browning leaves and bustling delis of When Harry Met Sally. The blighted neighbourhoods of The Fortress of Solitude, the uptown of Bonfire Of The Vanities. Where was the map that could guide me to these places?

    Everyone who has ever watched Hollywood movies or listened to American music feels that they have an innate understanding of New York long before they ever arrive there. I came to the city on that first occasion with a litany of cultural reference points swirling around my head, a series of demanding expectations that no place could ever hope to meet, because no place could ever hope to be all those things all at once. Because some of those things were in the past, had disappeared along with the illusion of security and belief in a just universe, or worse still had never existed at all.

    On the fourth day of my visit, I broke off from my new friends and went to make the pilgrimage I’d known would be necessary since before I even booked the trip. CBGB, down in the Bowery. I remember it took forever to find on foot, but I pressed on, buoyed by the knowledge of what the bar represented. A mecca for outsiders with poetic souls and torn clothes, the spiritual home of any number of my favourite acts, and the epitome of the music scene that occurs accidentally on purpose, cooked up by a small number of people and sold on to millions forever. CBGB was an authentic and longstanding beacon in my cultural inner life: pitched somewhere between Warhol’s Factory and Danson’s Cheers.

    When I eventually arrived, tired and thirsty, I found a venue nearing the end of its days. It was early afternoon, so the place was quiet, and it had the feel of a thousand other dive bars visited before and since: the authentically vintage posters covering every surface, the sticky floor, the revolting bathrooms. In many ways a cartoon of itself by this stage. I didn’t mind at all, because I was in the room where Television had once played. I sat, drank a soft drink, people watched a little and then – respects duly paid – I left. It was simultaneously a complete let down and utterly magical, with most of the latter being supplied by my own imagination. And I didn’t mind that either.

    Everyone comes to Television eventually. Everyone who enjoys guitar music. It’s a location to which all roads seem inevitably to lead, and just a question of which one you’ll ultimately take. In my case, the road felt less travelled: some time in the mid-90s I caught Christian Slater’s immortal Pump Up The Volume on late night TV. The movie introduced me to Love Comes In Spurts, which brought me to Richard Hell and Blank Generation, which in turn lead inexorably to Television and Marquee Moon.

    I knew the history before I heard the record. Hell and Tom Verlaine, on the run from their Delaware boarding school, crash landing in New York with their poetry books and high cheekbones. The Neon Boys, the Voidoids. Hell’s distaste for rehearsal, Verlaine’s hunger for the same, pulling them apart. The nascent Television begging a Sunday night slot at a local bar, conquering all and pioneering a sound that would live long beyond them. The perfect, unbeatable Rock & Roll backstory; what normal adolescent wouldn’t want to run away, recreate themselves from the name on down and found a thriving community in orbit to their own resonant artistic brilliance? I’d seen the album cover, the Rosetta stone for a thousand indie bands that followed; hungry looking white boys with doe eyes and charity shop wardrobes, their gaze pitched at that perfect balance of imploring and quietly defiant.

    Actually listening to Marquee Moon for the first time was a little like reading Infinite Jest having grown up on 90s Pomo US fiction. A little like that first visit to NYC itself, only in reverse. Everywhere you look there’s a cultural landmark, only instead of catching a faint echo of the event, you become acutely conscious that it’s the echoes you’ve been feeding on. That this is ground zero for an awful lot of the art you’ve loved and come to identify with. The intonation on the vocals, the guitar sound, the angularity, the sense of tension and release.

    In Marquee Moon I immediately heard Pavement and Sonic Youth and the Replacements. I heard Joy Division and The Clash and whatever it was that Graham Coxon was always trying to smuggle onto Blur records. But I also heard in the denouement of the title track the first rumblings of Post Rock; that privileging of the guitar as an instrument of conveyance, that commitment to building and collapsing whole structures from the instrument’s sound. Listening to Marquee Moon was like tracing a river to its source, like understanding the through line that ran from your favourite contemporary acts back through CBGB and on to Fun House, When The Music’s Over and I Heard Her Call My Name. The Harvard Crimson called Marquee Moon the Citizen Kane of albums. I’ll lean more 21st century and go with a 23andMe for your indie record collection.

    It’s the title track that makes this list, because it’s the definitive article, heart stopping and soul stirring. With its opening pulses, somewhere between Reggae and morse code, its duelling guitars, somehow street smart and regal all at the same time, and memorably described by Patti Smith as “like a thousand bluebirds screaming”. Verlaine’s vocal, with its hint of Marc Bolan: just listen to the way he sings the opening line, that “ah rememberrrrr….uh How the darkness doub-led”. Those gorgeous, impressionistic lyrics, virtually every single one of them fit to start a short story: “Well a Cadillac/it pulled out of the graveyard”, “I was listening to the rain/I was hearing/I was hearing/something else”, “A kiss of death/the embrace of life”. It’s a perfect city song, a hundred small narratives flaring and then vanishing off into the recesses and out of sight again. It brings a lush romanticism to the grime of the Bowery.

    Marquee Moon is ten and a half minutes of brilliant moments, one stacked after the other. The audacity of its opening, the moment Verlaine sings “just waiting” and invents Indie rock on the spot. The guitars, as beautiful as guitars have ever sounded. The glorious and unexpected emphasis of the repeated words “get in”, as if the listener is being suddenly and unexpectedly abducted. And of course, The Climb.

    The song closes with three of the most beautiful minutes in all of music. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd trading back and forth as the song absolutely locks in, the guitars spiralling ever higher in tandem until eventually all the instruments coalesce into a single, pummelling riff, and the entire thing, everything that’s been built over the preceding nine minutes, falls away and leaves us with the most gorgeous, twinkling guitars you will ever hear. Morning birdsong after an evening of drama and excess. Then the original riff starts up again, and we come full circle.

    In that latter period, that sense of escalation followed by release, we find the absolute zenith of the precise dynamic principle on which an entire genre (Post Rock) would later come to be founded. It’s one of the greatest moments in recorded music, because you’re forced to wait for it: I can think of no other song that hides its absolute, jaw dropping splendour away so thoroughly, that so confidently locks its beauty in the belltower. The final minutes of Marquee Moon stand almost unique in that they never seem to age, and every time you hear them they take you aback as if for the first time. You know it’s coming: the entire song is presaged on your knowing its coming, and yet it still surprises you. Some trick.

    As I sat in CBGB nursing my drink that day, I listened to Marquee Moon over headphones, as I’m sure a thousand others have done. I imagined the band tirelessly workshopping the song up on stage, Sunday night after Sunday night, workshopping it until it was perfect. The song was eventually recorded in one long, single take: years of practice to ensure that lightning would strike itself.

    As I sat there, I thought of Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan football writer, and what he had to say about location and memory, and I wondered if the same was true of music venues: “At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.”

    Just over a decade later, in the early months of 2016, my question was answered as I stood in my local shopping centre and heard a familiar song start up. Those same guitar pulses, in an unexpected place. And for ten happy minutes, I stood there, as the shoppers whisked past me, unmoved, and I gloried in the sound of Marquee Moon, and concluded that if it can still find an echo in a soulless retail park in South West London, then surely it must still reverberate through the Bowery and all of New York. That people and places and things may pass from view, but they never really leave us if we’re just willing to look and listen hard enough. I concluded that 2016 was going to be a great year.

    For me, Marquee Moon stands alone as the absolute peak of a certain kind of guitar music. It has all the ingredients the genre demands: the romantic back story, the sense of time and place, the apparently effortless virtuosity, the scene association. But it also has that sound, that distinct, one off, never to be repeated sound. Because although you can find the genesis of an awful lot of bands in Television, nothing really sounds like Marquee Moon, like those twin lupine guitars prowling the deserted, moonlit streets, hungry and gentle in their savagery.

    Marquee Moon is special, because nothing else is so impossibly languorous and gorgeous at the same time. Nothing else makes you wait so long and treats you so well while you do so. No other song starts so beautifully and only becomes more beautiful as it proceeds. It reminds me of that first trip to New York, and of chasing the past right down to the echo.

    • I was privileged to see them live on a co-headlining tour with Blondie. What impressed me the most wasn’t the twin guitars, having been weaned on The Beatles and Stones, but their sense of dynamics. The drummer, Billy Ficca, was a jazz enthusiast, and bassist Fred Smith was no slouch. They were superb live, holding the dramatic moments as long as they could. The match with Blondie was an odd one. They were completely different groups, with diametrically different approaches, different styles. Their only connection being to CBGB’s.

      My pilgrimage in New York was to The Village Vanguard, but that’s another story.

      • Supremely jealous: a band I would have loved to have seen live, but the opportunity never presented itself. The drumming definitely feels Jazz, such an odd melange of styles.

        I don’t think half those CBGB bands had a great deal in common beyond limited wardrobe funds. Presumably that was half the fun anyway.

        I actually saw Blondie last year. It was a lot of fun, albeit most of the energy understandably came from the crowd.

      • Interesting about the jazz approach. For me the timelessness of the guitar soloing in Televsion’s music is that it’s not based around the blues form, unlike so much of rock music, and feels much more like modal jazz.

      • Funny how New York has that effect, insisting the visit to iconic venues or even just iconic sounding venues. I have only been to the city thrice, but always factored in a gig. 1. Fairport Convention acoustic at The Bottom Line, which was a largish cellar with the vibe of a school gym or assembly hall.
        2. Dr John at BB King’s House of Blues; upmarket supper club with loads of tables and waiter service.
        3. Neko Case & the Sadies at Bowery Ballroom; veer scuzzy bar, like one of the pre-gentrification bars in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, with, when the doors open, a large and lovely seatless cinema/thetre style venue, one a couple of levels, much like many an O2 over here. Cabby couldn’t find it and was distinctly nervous in the neighbourhood. (It was the early noughties.
        My plan was CBGBs on another trip, but I don’t envisage going back anytime soon.

        • The Village Vanguard is a basement supper club, too, enough room for just 200 souls. It is shaped like a very slim isosceles triangle with a tiny stage at the pointy end. How Coltrane fit thirteen players on it in 1961, I’ve no idea.

      • We have a British friend who lives upstate. She picked us up from the Lower East Side and drove us to Bethel, site of the Woodstock Festival. It was autumn and the leaves were brown, and red and orange. It was nice to see the rural perspective. We walked over the Hudson at Poughskeepie. In Brooklyn we sat where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton once sat, an unforgettable view, minus the two towers. Strolling through Brooklyn we spotted Adam Driver while eating our ramen. So many connections to your own cultural experiences and interests.

  12. 27. Huck’s Tune – Bob Dylan

    It must be strange being a rock star. Frozen in aspic forever at such a tender age, fated to wear the leather trousers and shake the tambourine long after the tenets of regular decorum might permit.

    Where the basic human experience is all about growth, about taking your experiences and absorbing them into your character so that you are categorically not the same person at (say) 50 that you were at 18, the rock star is too often trapped in an endless pantomime, required to remind their audience endlessly of a youth long since evaporated.

    Bob Dylan has never much given the appearance of being particularly sensitive to the demands of his own audience. Whether it’s going electric, going Christian, an unrequested Christmas album, or simply a lack of willingness to play readily discernible live versions of his most popular songs, he has tended to plough a singular furrow, untroubled by the notion that the public must get what the public wants. And really, that’s a colossal part of his charm. That deep seated cussedness, that purity of purpose.

    I was comparatively new to Dylanology when he released Time Out Of Mind in 1997, but immediately fascinated nonetheless. This was the polar opposite of leather trousers, the polar opposite of any kind of attempt to reconnect with his 60s heyday. Dylan sounded about a hundred years old, weighed down by history and his own mortality. He sounded like a man ready to move on, in both the physical and rhetorical senses of the term. He was 56 years old.

    Looking back on it, Time Out Of Mind seemed to open a new chapter in Dylan’s work. After the comparative doldrums of the 80s and early 90s, it was as if he suddenly figured out how to be Dylan again, how to occupy that cultural monolith. The quality of the songs was strong, of course (Not Dark Yet would be another near miss for this list), and he benefited from Daniel Lanois’ woozy late night production, but it also felt like something shifted in his voice. Dylan had sounded old since his 20s, but this seemed the first occasion on which we heard proper Old Man Dylan, the man out of time, with the Mount Rushmore vocals.

    Seemingly reinvigorated, Dylan pressed on. He released the also excellent Love & Theft, and memorably provided Things Have Changed for the movie Wonder Boys, another song that leant on his new persona as perhaps the only one of the great rock stars to truly shed his own youth and embrace his age. To almost relish the passing of the decades rather than resisting them. I love this period of Dylan, this unusual late career left turn he took. The way it made so much sense for him, as if he was playing a role it had taken him all this time to grow into, but that had always been meant for him. The way it seemed to signal that there was no sense hanging on to who and what he once was, because who and what he once was had always been liquid, shifting. Dylan aged, and unlike so many others he revelled in the process: in fact, it fit him like a glove.

    In 2007 he wrote another song for another film, Huck’s Tune for the largely forgotten Lucky You. It’s not one of his better known efforts, and it took him 6 years to play it live, by which time he was into his 70s and showing no sign of slowing down. Built on a sweeping bucolic arrangement and some fairly gorgeous pedal steel, and concerning the sacrificing of love to chase an impossible dream, Huck’s Tune is my second favourite of all the many wonderful songs Bob Dylan has written.

    I like it when Dylan does straightforward, when he drops the artifice, leaves the cerebral at home and brings the heart. When he gives us songs that are pretty, rather than gnomic. Maybe that’s because I’m a simple man, or maybe it’s the inherent pathos in watching someone who has so often been either cryptic or outright acerbic sing something simple. In Huck’s Tune pretty lyrics go sliding by, none of them particularly meaningful, seemingly content to just stack one atop another without adding to a deeper meaning. Typically of this period, the lyrics don’t amount to much, and some of them are wince-inducing (“I’m laying in the sand/getting a sunshine tan”) but they resonate nonetheless. The song drifts along gently, and the sensation of listening to it is akin to watching a lazy river flow on by as the daylight fades around you.

    Huck’s Tune feels like an accumulated life; opinions changing from day to day, emotions flaring and fading. Dylan, of course, brings all his many eternities to the vocal, that sense of a man at closing time, looking back across his evening. There’s a strain in his voice, even when he’s singing the simplest of lines, an uncontrolled croak that reminds you of how singular his phrasing has always been. In the song’s most memorable moment he goes for extra emphasis on the line “nature’s voice makes my heart rejoice”, and seems to struggle to summit even that meagre hill.

    I ask myself: why love this Dylan song? He’s written so many better than it, so many more memorable tracks. Perhaps it’s the lovely opening lines: “Well I wandered alone/through a desert of stone/and I dreamt of my future wife/my sword’s in my hand and I’m next in command/in this version of death called life”, which take me back to my youth, and youthful wanting. Perhaps it’s the gorgeousness of the arrangement, or the way the track feels like a punctuation mark to his legacy: to have written all those masterpieces and then be able to give us something this slight, yet beautiful. This joyfully throwaway. But I know those aren’t the real reasons. Not really.

    My son was born the year Dylan first played Huck’s Tune live. He wasn’t named for this track, but for the titular character, who had been a childhood hero of mine.

    Mark Twain, that other great monolith of American cultural life, wrote in his autobiography of Tom Blankenship, the childhood friend in Hannibal, Missouri on whom he based Huck Finn: “In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any other boys.”

    I could think of no greater wish for any child of mine than a good heart, and perhaps a little of Huck’s twin capacity for mischief and insight, and so the name stuck. He was Huck before he was ever born.

    There’s a line in Huck’s Tune that I always come back to: “Nature’s voice makes my heart rejoice/play me the wild song of the wind”. It makes me think of my boy every time I hear it, of his incredible gentleness and sweetness of character, of his near elemental stubbornness. Of the way just the sight of him makes my heart sing. He has the inner steel of his namesake. He has the good heart, he has the gentle soul. He’s ten years old, and, as of the time of writing, all the things I could ever have wished him to be, and more besides.

    Huck’s Tune is the song that links the past to the present, and on into the future. It makes me think of my father, whom I once found so difficult, with all his proprietary grief and endless, charged silences. My father who introduced me to Bob Dylan, and with whom I was eventually able to bond over this music and the sheer greatness of Dylan’s best lyrics. It makes me think of myself, as a young man, of the click that occurred when this music became my music too. Of the role it’s played in my life as I’ve aged and changed, always there for me with something to say, some hitherto unrealised wisdom. And it makes me think of my son; the way its grace and beauty seems to reflect him perfectly in all his soulful splendour. It makes me think of the journey he too will go on, and of fathers and sons and the way things sometimes seem to work themselves out as they were always meant to. Of the way things move in circles.

    My son is, of course, too young for Bob Dylan. Too young to appreciate the inner worlds of Visions Of Johanna, the deep romanticism of Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands or the proud authority of My Back Pages. To know what it means that I would sing Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright to him and his sister at night when they were just babies, and too small to even notice. To understand that these are the songs I have used to make sense of my life, even in the moments when it seemed to make no sense at all. And when he gets old enough, I have no intention of introducing him to Bob Dylan, because I’m fairly sure that the music we bond over, if we ever bond over music, will be something else entirely, lead by him, and because that’s precisely how these things should work.

    Huck’s Tune is not the best Bob Dylan song, but of all the Bob Dylan songs it is to my mind the most moving, because it is so unusually tender, and so clearly possessed of easy grace. To me, it is the sound of loving your son, it is the feel of his hand in my own. In that simple line “play me the wild song of the wind” I see his face, hear his voice, and remember my own father as I do so, and in that curious symmetry I am reminded that there is a joy to watching life slide on by, and to celebrating all the very finest things that come your way in the process. There is a joy to age and all its precious rewards.

  14. I’d just like to say – most of the time I have no idea which artist or artiste Bingo is talking about but it is 1000% clear this is one of the most erudite, heartfelt and magnificently wonderful threads this here Forum has ever hosted . And the silence is deafening. You lot should be ashamed. Coldplay, Spangles and Fado …

    • Aw, cheers Lodestone. Honestly no need for comments here – I’m writing these for myself, and some of these songs are definitely an acquired taste. Do appreciate the kind words though 😘

  15. 26. Party Hard – Andrew W.K.

    Many of the songs on this list were love at first listen. Some, however, involved a lengthier and more tortured courtship. Party Hard is one of the great romances of my music listening life, and like many great romances, it began in unlikely circumstances, and with a curled lip.

    I saw Andrew W.K. before I ever heard a note of his music, the famous cover photo of I Get Wet, splashed across the NME. The sweat drenched hair, the gently furrowed brow, the defiant stare, the blood and viscera streaming from the nose. Dave Grohl famously described it as “the most beautiful photo of a man I have ever seen”, and he wasn’t wrong. The photo brought with it a quality unusual in male musicians, namely mystique. Andrew W.K looked oddly gamine, wounded and yet resilient – the long hair suggested Metal, but his image didn’t seem to comfortably code against any specific genre, and it made you wonder what sort of music this man could possibly be making to justify all that hype.

    As it turned out, the music he was making was not the radical, genre-smashing genius I’d initially hoped for. Instead, it sounded like Meatloaf playing old ABBA records at double speed, and was glossed with a maximalist, ultra-shiny production that left so little breathing space it may as well have laminated every song. I heard Party Hard and I was bemused by it. It jarred my expectations, it seemed unworthy and gauche. It seemed cheesy. It was not cool.

    And then some time passed, several years of the stuff, and I listened again and found a new charm in Party Hard and the album it came from, I Get Wet. All those songs about partying, the relentlessness of the music, its tremendous earnestness. The videos of large crowds going mental at the shows. Pitchfork’s scathing review, which contained one of my favourite descriptions of music ever written: “I Get Wet is an insidious beast, planting itself into the deepest instinctual recesses of your brainstem, where it instantly detonates in a visceral adrenal charge. There is suddenly no respect for proper behavior, just the urge to turn acrobatic flips and smash everything within a fifty-foot radius. You’re Genghis Khan in the San Dimas Sportmart somersaulting over Nike racks to the Slippery When Wet synth-metal of Beethoven’s Schmidt Music foray into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. And then you wake up the next morning, hazy-headed and groggy, humiliated by the preceding night’s incidents.”

    In time, I came to appreciate Andrew W.K on a new, but largely ironic, level: something to be chuckled about with friends, a relic of his time, a loveable bonehead who wrote songs for Jackass movies. And I heard him talk more about what he was trying to convey, how it wasn’t really about partying at all in the literal sense, but a full bodied approach to life, and that intrigued me.

    A decade after I Get Wet, a decade after our initial meet cute, I went with a friend to watch Andrew W. K play an anniversary show. The whole album, played in sequence. It turned out to be the best gig I’ve ever attended: an audience comprised largely of teenagers going absolutely mental to song after song about partying til you puke, Andrew playing a novelty guitar shaped like a slice of pizza, stage invasion after stage invasion. An absolute carnival of joy that left not a single person behind and that sent me floating out into the night on winged heels and flaming synapses, not to come back down for days. After it, I wrote that it was the first show I’d ever seen where there truly was no cool and uncool, no them and us, and I wondered why more live music couldn’t be this way.

    That night, the music made compete sense to me. Proper, fully formed, undeniable sense, as if the live performance had somehow babelfished the necessary translation right into my ear. Music about partying, played loud and straight, to receptive teenagers. Let’s all get together and have the best possible time. There might just be something in that.

    I saw Andrew W. K. live a few times after that. Acting as the frontman for his spiritual forebears the Ramones: a match made in heaven if ever there was one. Playing new albums and old. And at every gig, Party Hard was the one that brought the place down, the one that summed up what we were all there for. And he knew that, he played on it. I remember a night of absolute genius, when he literally lead the crowd in a countdown from 100 to 1 before playing the track we were all waiting for, a concept that had us laughing at its sheer stupidity in the 90s, but absolutely heaving with excitement and electric anticipation by the single digits. Party Hard was a party bomb, and we could never wait for it to drop.

    By this stage, I understood the song’s message. It wasn’t primarily about drinking, or drugs or any of the stuff you’d have assumed on its face. It was about whatever it is that you’re doing right now, whatever it is you’re bringing to the universe – doing that thing as hard and as passionately and as thoroughly as you possibly can. It was about giving good energy, and all of a sudden its philosophy, which had seemed so dumb at the outset, began to chime perfectly with my own. Either I was getting dumber or this song was getting smarter. Or maybe a little of both.

    And really, that should have been that. That oneness of thought and intention, coupled with the devastating live experience, would have been more than enough to seal my love for Party Hard. But there was one more twist to come.

    About five or six years after that first show, a dear friend arranged to sneak me into a relatively intimate press Q&A Andrew W.K. was running for his latest record, and I ended up having a drink or two with the great man. I told him about my experience at his gig, how impressed I’d been by its sheer inclusiveness. In return, he told me his story of going to a Butthole Surfers gig as an awkward teen, and feeling horrified when the band’s bassist suddenly and unaccountably flipped off the crowd, presumably in celebration of a moment of particularly potent musical genius.

    Uncertain of himself and his right to be there, Andrew interpreted the gesture as being directed solely at him, a personal rebuke to his intolerable presence – insufficiently cool for this band, an outlier in this crowd. He shrank back and stopped enjoying himself. He told me that the event had catalysed his eventual approach to live performance. He didn’t want anyone to feel what he’d felt that day. In fact, he wanted the precise opposite: we wanted to take every single person in the room with him, in whatever room he played to, every single time. His stage persona was the precise opposite of that extended middle digit, a bird assuredly left unflipped.

    I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that story. That in a world of posturing musicians, of us and them and sneering and critical disdain there’s this one oddball guy, out there in the same regulation white T-shirt and jeans every day, trying to make and play music that has nothing to do with style and everything to do with unity. Actively eschewing cool, because cool divides.

    Some time after that evening, I came across the following AWK quote, which seemed to sum it all up; “I didn’t want anyone to feel they had to act a certain way to ‘party. I’d had many life experiences that told me something about me was wrong, or I couldn’t be part of this club… all that crap. I hated being at a party and someone coming up and saying: ‘Why aren’t you drinking?’ ‘Why aren’t you dancing?’ So I thought, I’m gonna make a song telling people to party, but party however they want. I never dictated what people should specifically do.” And that’s when I got it; this is outsider music designed to make every single person feel inside.

    Party Hard is a call to arms. It is resolutely uncool, it sounds like Wyld Stallions and it has limited critical value. There’s something beautifully troglodyte about it, which can be offputting on first encounter. But a call to arms it remains, because the song attempts to do something quite noble: to send an electric jolt through the receptive listener and send them off to be themselves, only moreso, secure in the notion that being oneself is noble and just and maybe even a little epic. It’s the precise mid point between sports arena Rock and wherever it is you find your own self affirmation, and in its bludgeon of a riff and its demented repetition of the mantra “party hard” it succeeds in making life better in three short minutes.

    I’ve been told by people close enough to reliably deliver the judgment that I’m quite an intense person. I see the truth in it; not in my day to day demeanour, but in my restlessness and need to push. I don’t want to watch one movie, I want to watch five. I don’t want to go for a run, I want to run all night. I want to read all the books, and meet all the people and do whatever it is I’m doing in its most concentrated version. I want to fill my life with people and places and things and go to bed every night completely exhausted and knowing that I gave those 24 hours a chasing. In fact, I don’t really want to go to bed at all. Henry Rollins once said something that stuck with me: “No such thing as spare time. No such thing as free time. No such thing as down time. All you got is life time”. Amen to that, Henry. If you’re going to be spending it every day, may as well spend it well.

    I understand that it’s trite and daft, but when I listen to Party Hard I hear a kindred spirit. I recognise it’s a preposterous song and that its core message is ludicrous, but somewhere buried in that stoopid, vacuum-sealed riff is a pulse that I recognise from my own internal workings. From my own desire for more more more of life. Party Hard means something to me; it means that it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing – even if what you’re doing is playing a ridiculous song on a pizza shaped guitar – it matters how you go about doing it, the level of commitment and energy you bring. How you spend that life time.

    If you’d said all this to me the first time I listened to this song I’d have scoffed. Of course I would. It had caught me off guard, expecting something else, flat footed. But, like Harry meeting Sally, somehow the passage of time changed everything, wore down my barriers and now I don’t really care if it sounds ridiculous, if it’s cheesy and obvious and gauche. The heart wants what the heart wants.

    I absolutely bloody love Party Hard. Love it for its message, for its indefatigability (which, of course, I salute) and for its ongoing, resolute and determined uncoolness. Love it for the way it doesn’t so much begin as detonate. Love it for the journey I’ve been on with it. And yes of course, when it’s time to party I will always party hard. As should we all.

  17. 25. The Birth & Death Of The Day – Explosions In The Sky

    The first great miracle of music is that it allows you to see. That it informs, clarifies and elucidates aspects of a wider life beyond your own. That it enables you to stand, even if only for a fraction of a second, in the shoes of another human being. To get a sense of what that’s like. I don’t know how it is to be far too fabulous for heartbreak, but Mcalmont & Butler’s Yes gives me an inkling. I have no idea what it’s like to be a junkie, but I’m able to delude myself that Lou’s Heroin gives me the slightest taste of that awful squalor.

    The second great miracle of music is that it allows you to be seen. The warm buzz of recognition, the knowledge that someone else out there feels this thing you do, because they’ve had the good grace to parcel it up in a song and send it back to you. My own preposterous self-pity in the midst of heartbreak, lampooned, pitch-perfect by I Know It’s Over. The way Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers puts its thumb so squarely on the saccharine ache of parenthood. I remember hearing Arcade Fire’s Black Wave (Bad Vibration) for the first time, and my blood running cold in painful recognition as the line “nothing lasts forever/that’s the way it’s gotta be/there’s a great black wave in the middle of the sea/for me” seemed to crystallise my deepest and most abiding fears.

    A similar effect occurred the first time I ever heard The Birth & Death Of The Day, albeit emanating from a very different direction. Right from the start, the song seemed to mirror and amplify something categorical in my own brain chemistry, its slow builds and headlong charges instantly familiar, like returning to a shoreline you could map on the back of your hand. It’s a song that I listen to frequently and convince myself every single time, rightly or wrongly, that this is what it feels like to be me, and that it tells that story more accurately than words ever could.

    Explosions In The Sky were formed in Texas at the tail end of the 90s, originally under the less genre-indicative moniker of Breaker Morant. Their stock in trade from day one has been pretty, cyclical guitar pieces built on atmospherics and a sense of deep and plangent melancholy, as if they were channelling Nick Drake for the Post Rock crowd. They found early infamy with the release of their second album, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever, which released precisely a week before 9/11 – inauspicious timing if you’re named Explosions In The Sky and have an album track entitled “This Plane Will Crash Tomorrow”. Minor controversy flared and subsided.

    While the connection between the album and the collapse of the towers was, of course, completely incidental, it’s still difficult to properly wrap your head around the band’s subsequent appeal and success without some reference to the event. 9/11 created a demand among the young for comfort food, and Explosions In The Sky provided it, most notably with 2003’s The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, by common consensus their finest record, and certainly their most thematically consistent. The album seemed to denote a world that was simultaneously extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily brutal and extraordinarily fragile, for an audience who were mainly ticking the third of those boxes.

    The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place is a surprisingly warm record given the lack of human voices. When I first heard it, I heard immediately a distant echo of the final passages of Marquee Moon – the same slow unfurling of great beauty, the same careful balance of restraint and release, the same tightness between the band. That Verlaine guitar sound. Perhaps that familiarity made it an easy record to fall in love with, or perhaps it’s simply a record that a lot of people of approximately my age were falling in love with, because it is charming, and because in its openness we found the perfect blank canvas for the projection of our own hopes and fears.

    The Birth & Death Of The Day arrived four years later, opening the band’s fourth album, the underrated All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone. While I’d been a fan of Post Rock for many years, my ongoing complaint had been the genre’s tendency to deprioritise the drums in favour of seemingly endless and often aimless guitar noodling. To my mind, this track remedied that oversight: with its galloping, headlong sensibility it was blessed with exactly the sense of propulsion I’d been looking for. In its most bombastic moments it is possessed of an irresistible charge of the Light Brigade energy.

    Per its title, the song tracks the course of a single day, surveying its turmoils and serenities. In doing so, it also charts the course of a life from birth to death, its place in a greater cycle. It open with a sunrise that stirs and shimmers, a true let there be light moment. From there, the track lulls a little before settling into a series of gentle guitar figures which rise and pitch in turn, backed by a thudding heartbeat. Pretty and full of promise, it ebbs and flows gently down into a quieter period where the song almost falls away completely before the guitars slam back in and we begin the climb to the peak, a furious and joyous thrash.

    One of my favourite passages in all of music, the point where the drums truly kick in, the band lock on together and the track attains a frantic gallop, passing through successive squalls of guitar before exploding into open space is a simple enough piece of tension and release, but it works on me every time. It makes me want to take all my energies and explode them outwards every time. It makes me glad to be alive every time. The Birth & Death Of The Day’s crescendo seems to symbolise the peak of an existence, the deep joy of a life fully lived, before it descends into quietude, suggestive of both death and the promise of rebirth.

    The Birth & Death Of The Day arrived at an important moment in my own cycle. After years of feeling that I had constantly been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the trend suddenly reversed itself and things were finally coming to me easy, largely because I’d taken a breath or two and lowered my barriers enough for them to do so. I was making great friends, I had found love. My days were full of duty and my nights were full of socialising, leaving little space around the edges for self reflection, a state of being I’ve often found to be optimal: good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience, and all that. It was the start of 20 good years, after 15 poor ones, and I was acutely aware of my good fortune. The Birth & Death Of The Day caught me in that moment of small rapture, and captured the sense of explosive movement I was enjoying, that feeling of life building and building towards good things.

    That sense of movement wasn’t merely figurative. It was around this stage that I took up running, and discovered what would become one of the great balancing measures of my life. I had never been able to run previously without chasing something, or in pursuit of some game, but suddenly the penny dropped – I needed something to help slow my brain down after work and to counteract the effects of long hours spent at a desk, and nothing worked better than lacing up and heading out. It’s a practice I continue to this day, and I find that on long runs my mood invariably improves and I think more clearly and positively, delivering myself a little pep talk as I go.

    There’s a run near home that I’m very fond of. Down the pavements of our local high street, up the great hill to the village, past the pubs full of people and the nearby pond, out into the solitude of the woods. Running under a roof of branch and leaf, the trail rising and falling beneath my feet, down the great muddy slope and over the road into Richmond Park, where the track opens up suddenly and spectacularly, and you find yourself stopping to let deer cross your path and to marvel at the open vistas.

    On a Sunday evening if you time it just right you can chase the sun all the way along that run, so that it dips the treetops to perfection, trying to set fully before you can make it home. There have been a hundred times I’ve done that run, and many others like it, listening to this song, my pace rising and falling to its rhythms, and a hundred times I’ve felt that crescendo kick in and accelerated and accelerated, far beyond any sensible pacing, because The Birth & Death Of The Day is a song that reminds you how little time you have, that there’s a time to jog and a time to sprint, and that in those latter passages sprinting feels so incredibly natural and joyous, like it’s what you were put on this Earth to do.

    The Birth & Death Of The Day makes me think of those runs, and it makes me think of that period when, after all that interminable waiting, my life began to quicken and find its stride. When I suddenly felt the strength in my legs and kicked on, and good things followed. And in its various passages I discerned then and discern now something of the shape of my own being; of those long dark nights of the soul, those moments of quiet solitude, and their alternate extreme where joy arrived fast and explosive. Of the pleasure in moving quickly, of escaping gravity, of escaping introspection.

    Deep down, I know it’s all a fortune teller’s trick, that the great secret of this music is that it’s familiar enough to be intimate but unspecific enough to be general. That really it’s just a bunch of guys fiddling around with guitars and effects pedals until they hit on something that sounds appropriately stirring – U2 without the egotist. I know that I’m being manipulated by it. And yet, I willingly turn myself over to the manipulation every single time, and tell myself that this song is my song, that it sees me whole and offers up that great comfort: I understand.

    Because that’s the power of music, isn’t it? The power to make us feel a little less alone, to make us feel a little more capable of being understood, a little more capable of understanding ourselves. So I listen to The Birth & Death Of The Day on some great long run, and as I come up over a distant hillside, out of some distant woods, the sun hits my face and the world seems magical, and I quicken my pace, knowing that sometimes the illusion is enough. That by embracing the illusion we can be renewed.

  19. 24. La Bamba – Los Lobos

    When I think of La Bamba, I think of my Mother, first and foremost. Of how complicated our cultural inheritance can be, and of the messages and misunderstandings we pass down the line.

    Despite being fiercely proud of her Latin American identity, Mum did not bring her sons up speaking Spanish. My understanding is that this was a compromise measure, brokered partly due to the fact that my Father did not speak the language and had little desire to live in a house where everyone else spoke their own exclusionary code, and partly reflective of my having made my debut on the school playground mere months after Britain had concluded its famous conflict with Argentina. An inauspicious moment to flaunt one’s Argentinean heritage.

    Throughout childhood, the question of the language seemed to hang in the air: Mum never really spoke it at home, and the sense was that our inability to speak it at school would somehow camouflage us among the other kids. As if knowing less could protect us more. We were Latin American enough to have a house full of gaucho spurs and leather furnishings, to be constantly reminded that we were not “merely” British, and yet insufficiently Latin American to speak the mother tongue. A confusing state of being.

    When I was eight years old, Spanish finally found its way into the family home. La Bamba, the Ritchie Valens biopic, was topping the global box office, part of a wider 80s nostalgia for the assumed simplicity of the 1950s, and its theme song, a cover of the eponymous track by LA natives Los Lobos, topped the charts in the UK and numerous other countries. I remember it playing on the radio and Mum suddenly and unexpectedly singing along.

    I’d witnessed her speak Spanish before, on our trips back to the motherland and when relatives came to visit, but there was a simple pleasure to the way she sang that day, a liberation in the way she curled her tongue round the words, that seemed to reveal a hitherto hidden truth. There was a joy in the way she sang along, a release. The song seemed to connected her to her home, to her mysterious past. Later on, she would teach me those same words and what they meant, our first language lesson.

    The great truth of life as a second generation immigrant is that you are required to practice self-invention. Umbilically connected to a distant culture in which you have never lived, and which has almost certainly moved on since your family departed, you find yourself with one foot in an imagined cartoon of a life left behind, the other in a world in which your status is unclear. That lack of clarity can be disconcerting, but you can also view it as an opportunity: you are a child of nowhere, and your slate is clean. Normal rules do not apply, so who and what do you want to be? The answer, usually, is that when you’re young and uncertain what you really want is to be someone who belongs.

    I recall being in my mid 20s, several months into a stay in Buenos Aires, the land of my forebears. Finally getting a taste of this imagined Shangri La that had lurked in the shadows of my youth. I’d befriended a group of locals, had spent a bit of time with them, and on one memorable night out, in the wee small hours of the morning, one of them turned to me and proclaimed me one of them, a porteno: this was my spiritual home and I belonged there.

    And even while the words hung in the air, I felt that I might actually burst out crying, so tantalising was the notion of actually being from somewhere, of actually being one of the crowd, simple and uncomplicated. I was upset because I knew that while the statement was very kind, it wasn’t true, and also because it was my secret, unobtainable heart’s desire. To simply be from somewhere and part of something. Something simple and straightforward.

    Ritchie Valens must have understood a little about that conundrum. Born Richard Steven Valenzuela, a Mexican-American teenager who grew up in California as the son of a lower class family of farmhands, Valens spoke no Spanish, only the equally powerful language of Rock & Roll. The lack of Spanish language proficiency did not prevent him from adopting and electrifying La Bamba, a folk tune which developed organically in the Veracruz region of Mexico, and which had traditionally been used to soundtrack an intricate wedding dance in which the bride and groom attempted to tie a bow using only their feet (the title derives from “bambolear” – literally, “to sway”). The song lent itself to improvisation, with each singer adding their own flourishes and lyrics to suit the occasion of the performance: the US Library of Congress estimates there to be as many as a thousand documented verses.

    Valens version is slower and groovier than many of the early recordings, a Surf Rock record before Surf Rock ever existed. It was originally tucked away on the B-side of his single “Donna”, after his producer concluded “it was all in Spanish and I figured nobody was gonna play that”. But, of course, people did play La Bamba. It exploded in popularity and provided the peak of what would be Valens’ tragically meagre six month career before his untimely death.

    Thirty years later, of course, the song was resurrected in the wake of the movie after the Valens estate selected Los Lobos to provide a cover version. Ironically, it’s quite possible that the band had a deeper understanding of the material than the act they were covering. They spoke native Spanish for one thing, and were acknowledged masters of many varieties of Latin guitar music. Their version of La Bamba filled out the sound, beefing up the slight scratchiness of the Valens version while retaining its swing. Their clear appreciation of the song’s roots is evident in the way they look to reintegrate some of the original Folk elements, most notably the accordion which threads across the track, and the glorious picked guitar outro. Los Lobos had started out as a wedding band, and they understood better than most how to please the crowd.

    Los Lobos’ La Bamba is one of the all time great cover versions. It doesn’t massively reinvent the original, just imbues it with extra heft and a little more animus. It does what the Valens version does so well, and adds a little more besides, and accordingly it has largely supplanted its forebear as the song’s quintessential performance in the minds of a global audience. When most people think of La Bamba, they think of Ritchie Valens’ name and Los Lobos’ sound.

    I know of very few songs as nakedly joyous as La Bamba. It’s both a call to the dancefloor and a unifying message of common humanity – it doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do, it’s time to dance now, and all you really need is a little grace. Leave aside your cares and petty disputes and come be with us. Famously, in 2017 a neo-nazi rally in Tennesse was disrupted by counter-protestors playing music over the speakers, and the music was La Bamba. Because La Bamba strikes the perfect note: it’s not about hate or animosity, it’s about commonality. One of the most universal songs ever recorded, with an absolutely startling longevity.

    La Bamba has the distinction of containing what is quite probably my favourite Pop lyric of all time: “Yo no soy marinero/Soy capitan/Soy capitan/Soy capitan”. I’m not a sailor, I’m the captain. Jesus, what a beautiful sentiment, and what a familiar concept. I will not wait to be defined by others, I will not fret over how they perceive me – I will define myself, because I am the captain of this ship. Glorious, life-saving self-determination. It’s the line I shout the loudest every single time, because I believe it to my boots, and because it’s the idea that ultimately liberated me from all that confusion.

    I have sung and danced to La Bamba in a hundred rooms. It is a song I can never ignore, and whenever that familiar guitar line announces itself the same electric charge runs down my spine, because I know what’s coming. I think of my mother singing along, and what hearing a Spanish language song on the radio must have meant to her. I think of poor, doomed Ritchie Valens, defined forever by a song the language of which was never his own. I think of my own fractured cultural upbringing, of its many confusions and the wide spaces opened up by those confusions. I reflect on how when we’re all out on the dancefloor such trivialities as the language you speak don’t really seem to matter at all.

    A couple of years back, as the Covid lockdowns finally ground their way to a conclusion, I dutifully taught my kids the lyrics of La Bamba. Passed that small gesture of cultural inheritance on down the line. And then a few weeks later, lockdowns over, my parents came to visit for the first time in ages. And as we ate and drank and celebrated the end of the ordeal, as yet still unclear on the invisible damage it might have wrought, La Bamba came over the speakers, purely by chance. And without prompting my kids leaned against one another and sang along out loud, and my Mother looked at them, and something familiar passed across her face, and somewhere out there in the wider universe, I heard the distinct crunch and click of a circle becoming complete. Because the truth is that for some people culture isn’t something we inherit, it’s just one of the many raw materials from which an identity, a self, a life, is constructed. And it’s the process of that construction that defines us.

    • I remember the Valens record as a child in the sixties. I think it was on some kind of compilation. Compared to the Rock n Roll tracks, the drummer packed one helluva punch.

      Fabulous work once again. An autobiography in 100 songs. Everybody’s list is personal. You confront it head on and run with it far more than any other writer of lists I’ve ever read.

      • Ah, cheers Tigger. When I started doing this I basically figured I’d aim to find something vaguely interesting to say about each of the hundred songs, and that I’d try to be as honest as possible about the reasons I liked them.

        That latter mission statement has inevitably lead to a greater degree of autobiography than originally intended, but hopefully it at least reflects the way most (OK, some) people relate to the songs they love.

  21. 23. Television Rules The Nation/Crescendolls – Daft Punk.

    Daft Punk were an act who lent heavily on a created mythology throughout their career. More self-consciously than most, they developed a narrative which ran alongside the extraordinary music they produced, and which helped to inform and amplify the best aspects of that music. It’s a narrative which has become increasingly difficult to disentangle from Daft Punk’s actual records, a tale that’s impossible to ignore when explaining why this song is so high up this list. But that’s not a bad thing, because Daft Punk’s story has one of the greatest arcs in the history of recorded music, and certainly one of the most satisfying denouements.

    Before they were future-defining, globe straddling Pop-House robots, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were just another pair of kids looking to make music in their bedrooms. They formed a band while still at school, named it Darlin’ in tribute to a Beach Boys track, and produced an EP that sounded a little like Spacemen 3. The EP received a characteristically sneering review in the Melody Maker, which described their work as “daft, punky thrash”.

    Chastened, but unbowed, Thomas and Guy retreated to the bosom of the then-nascent Parisian warehouse rave scene, which fused classic Chicago House with audaciously time-stretched Disco and Soul samples. Then, three years later, they re-emerged in a secondary form, adopting the title Daft Punk in wry tribute to their earlier humbling, and released a debut album that was immediately recognised as one of the most audacious and frontier-expanding electronic records ever made.

    The hype around Homework arrived well in advance of the album itself. I recall trooping dutifully to the local Our Price on the morning of release to purchase a copy and translate it to cassette tape ahead of a visit to Essex University, my parents’ alma mater and the location of their meeting, later that same day. It says a lot that I can recall very little indeed about that visit to an institution I had notionally been considering attending: I can’t tell you what the university looked like, or the halls of residence, or even the bar. But I can tell you exactly where I was and more importantly how it felt as each of Homework’s many peaks played out across my headphones. Education of a sort was occurring, albeit not the education originally anticipated.

    The great joy of Homework was in how sparse and confusing it initially seemed. For a record that was generating such waves, some of the tracks felt skeletal, unfinished. The way that Daftendirekt seems to build and build without ever offering a release, the way that Fresh sounds as if it were recorded with an old Disco record playing in the next room along, the brutalism of Rock’n’Roll’s super harsh synth pattern. Homework sounded fascinating, but as if it were encoded in a language you couldn’t yet understand. It was aptly named, because it was an album that required work from the listener.

    But that work re-paid itself, as the genius of Homework lies partly in its adoption of unusual and occasionally abrasive sounds, sounds you would never have expected in club music of this sort, and partly in the biology lesson it was providing. Homework takes House music and splays it open across the operating table: tracks are built up and then deconstructed one element at a time: a single snare joined by a bass joined by a synth line and so on, before the process is reversed. All of the work that producers would normally try so hard to hide was set out squarely in front of you, an act of magic without any trace of sleight of hand. Recorded on primitive technology in a bedroom, Homework demonstrated just how much can be done when you understand a form of music inside out and upside down and are willing to play around with it. It was inspirational and frontier pushing, and it helped you understand.

    On first contact, the song that immediately came to mind as I listened to Homework again and again over the course of that day was James Brown’s Ain’t It Funky Now (Parts 1 & 2) – not coincidentally, the same song that first caused me to fall in love with James Brown. Ain’t It Funky Now stood out to me as a kid because of the way Brown and his immortal band built and unbuilt the track: the way the drum keeps the steady beat, while Brown calls out each element in turn to add their magic to the mix. The sense of tension, of waiting for the next element, and release when it arrived. Homework seemed to repeat that same formula: it took a form of music and brought you behind the curtain. It felt like sitting in on the bit you were never meant to see.

    While I was off falling in love with Homework on the Essex campus, other events were afoot. Da Funk, the album’s most accessible tune, but arguably atypical in its relatively conventional structuring, was percolating its way through the music listening community. It found its way into the Chemical Brothers’ club night set, which enabled it to cross over to the Indie and Rock communities, and in turn gave Daft Punk a breadth of reach few electronic acts had enjoyed previously, and enabled them to bring experimental House music to communities who had minimal previous exposure to that form. And it wasn’t just Indie that began to fall within their orbit: Da Funk was first conceived as a tribute to Warren G’s immortal Regulate, and is built off a riff that repurposes G-Funk’s low swing. Yet another instance where a previously insular genre begins to reach out to other, neighbouring, forms, and we all end up the richer for the adventure.

    Daft Punk toured Homework throughout 1997, playing slightly altered versions of the album’s various tracks. They were a strong live act, but their shows were still within the prior frame of reference: they evoked a happy, sweaty, adrenalized club night of the sort familiar to millions. A House act, first and foremost, as captured on the excellent Alive 1997, which sounds like the one of the better nights out of your life. They would not tour again for a decade.

    The band’s retreat back to the studio coincided with their decision to adopt the now iconic robot personas. The decision seemed a natural evolution – while they were clearly poised on the precipice of some form of stardom or infamy, they also valued their comparative anonymity. The robots facilitated the best of both worlds, rooting them squarely in the DJ/club night tradition of talent remaining comparatively faceless, while also creating an instantly recognisable public image which could be used to transcend genre borders. Daft Punk instantly became a difficult act to read: if they’d previously been young music lovers whose interest traversed widely from House to Indie to Noise Rock to Hip Hop, now they morphed into a new form redolent of precisely none of those scenes. Characteristically, the change came with a tall tale: “We did not choose to become robots”, said Bangalter. “There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09am on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots”. Why not, after all.

    Daft Punk’s first act as machines was to release what remains their most celebrated record. 2001’s Discovery draws on a far broader sonic palette than Homework, taking in lush Disco, Pop music, and even Soft Rock. The sound was warm and earnest, achieved by drafting into service archaic instruments such as the Wurlitzer keyboard and LinnDrum machine, and by sampling potentially unhip artists such as Barry Manilow and George Duke. In marked contrast to Homework, the songs almost universally deployed classic Pop structures and hooks: indeed, at one stage the intention was to release every song on Discovery as a single.

    With Discovery, Daft Punk threaded the impossible needly of producing music that was simultaneously for a wide public audience – One More Time gave them their first number one and is a strong contender for the greatest Pop track of the last quarter century – while also being tailor made for the ear of fellow artists. The album demonstrated that the band could deploy their genius in any direction, confidently stepping across genre boundaries and dragging into their orbit listeners who had not previously enjoyed electronic music. They were also savvy in the record’s marketing: in addition to their new robot personas, which enabled them a degree of Pop star recognition, they accompanied the release with the animated feature film Interstellar 5555, a large chunk of which was memorably played on Cartoon Network in a single night, leaving a lasting impression on a generation of American kids.

    Like all Daft Punk’s albums, Discovery was a Rosetta Stone. Bands based their guitar sound on it, Hip Hop producers stole ideas from the drums, and of course Kanye West – arguably near the height of his powers – lifted Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger almost wholesale to memorable effect. Daft Punk had conquered the world, and the world began to remake itself in their image.

    For the band’s next record, the robots decided to head in an entirely different direction. Discovery had taken two and a half years to build, its luxurious, detail-heavy ode to the joys of music constructed painstakingly over endless hours in the studio, resulting in an end product that was accessible and richly human. For 2005’s Human After All, Daft Punk headed in the precise opposite direction. Recording reportedly took 12 days, using just two drum machines, two guitars, one vocoder and an eight track, and when the record arrived it caused consternation. Acerbic and industrial sounding, the songs were regarded in some quarters as little more than demos, starting with a single idea and then ploughing it into the ground. Pitchfork trashed the release, called it “not just a failure but a heartbreaker”, and it’s true that HAA was in many senses a difficult album to love, and in some cases to listen to.

    Human After All is amongst my favourite of the Daft Punk studio albums. I enjoy its wilfulness and their refusal to wrest on their laurels and give the audience more of what it so obviously craved, which is to say: more Discovery. But I also feel that it’s a record which was perhaps even further ahead of its time and more defining of the future than either of its predecessors – Human After All introduced a US audience to the harsh, visceral, metal-infused sounds that would become integral to the forthcoming Blog House, American Dubstep and EDM scenes which gained so much traction in the decade following. Where Discovery wanted to be loved, HAA wanted to go hard. Negative as the critical response was, it can be seen as Year Zero for an awful lot of music that followed. But that Year Zero effect wasn’t achieved entirely by the record itself: Daft Punk had provided the materials, but now they needed to show the audience once more how to receive and assemble them.

    Daft Punk agreed to play the Coachella festival in 2006, breaking a near decade long absence from the live scene. No one had ever seen them play live in the robot personas, nobody had ever heard them actually perform a single note of Discovery, nobody had any idea what to expect. They were added late to the bill, playing the witching hour slot after Depeche Mode’s headline set, and immediately generated enormous intrigue. As the festival ostensibly began to wind down, 40,000 people showed up to watch them at a stage designed for 10,000 people, many of them those same kids who’d sat in wonder in front of Interstellar 555 just 5 years earlier, now all grown up and ready to party.

    The set Daft Punk played that night is broadly replicated in the live record Alive 2007, taped in Paris a year later, and from which Television Rules The Nation/Crescendolls is taken. It’s a set that takes tracks from each of the preceding three albums and mashes them together to utterly spectacular effect, unlocking and improving upon them. Relatively unremarkable tracks such as HAA’s Steam Machine are transformed into key elements in gigantic, stomping monsters which blend together all the House, Disco and Industrial elements of the band’s catalogue into a single, seamless whole. Daft Punk, sampling every element in real time, deploying their genius ability to repurpose old music to their own past and thereby enhancing it in almost every way imaginable. You listen to the record and it’s like watching Voltron form – each piece locked into position to create this towering mechanical leviathan, the shape and form of which you could never have discerned from its components.

    Famously, legendarily, Daft Punk destroyed Coachella in 2006, playing what is widely regarded as one of the greatest shows in modern festival history. The audience simply had no precedent for a live set like this. In addition to the music, which felt beamed from the future and which contained all the hits but not as you knew them, the pyramid light show deployed that night – the type of setting now entirely de rigeur for EDM acts playing live – was almost entirely novel, and the sight of two robot figures at its peak impassively detonating banger after banger was something for which no previous frame of reference was available. Their coldness, their aloofness, seemed to add to the mania in the crowd, their apparent lack of humanity seemed to offset the waves of joy unfolding before them. Everything made sense all at once.

    The show was a high risk gambit: played at perhaps the only true critical low point of their career and after so long out of the game, shrouded in such secrecy that even their own manager wasn’t permitted to see the stage set until shortly before the performance, and yet it succeeded on every imaginable level. Human After All was immediately reframed and better understood, the template was written in real time for all future EDM festival performances (not least in the LED arms race triggered by the set), and the flow of the music, the utterly perfect timing of its builds and drops, demonstrated categorically how this music should be played to such audiences. The crowd went completely wild, and by the time the dust settled Daft Punk’s legacy was sealed.

    When you listen to Alive 2007, you’re not hearing that Coachella set, but you’re hearing a close approximation, and you’re also hearing – in a sense – the end of Daft Punk. They never toured again after 2007: they had rewritten the rule book, but they didn’t stick around to play the game any further, instead leaving that to others. When you attend any large EDM show anywhere in the world, you will hear to this day elements of that show, whether in the distinct sounds used, the abrasion of the music or the dynamics of the set. Electronic music had, of course, existed long before 2006, but it had tended to play in its own space. Daft Punk changed all that at Coachella, presenting a stomping, triumphal sound that was capable of appealing to and uniting disparate style tribes, while also demonstrating that such shows could be a striking visual spectacle, full of personality.

    But what’s also striking is how beautifully the set ties together the previous studio albums, with one song flowing perfectly into the next, utterly cohesive even when that cohesion seems against all prior intuition. Around The World, for example, is a recognised classic in its own right, but when mixed with Harder, Better, Faster Stronger, another great song by itself, both songs are not only improved, but they fit together so hand in glove that you’re left with the impression that they were always designed to interoperate in this fashion.

    In fact, a huge part of the appeal of Alive 2007 is that it almost feels like this was an endgame planned from the start. Daft Punk reportedly recorded One More Time, a banger so indisputable that even a deaf person could immediately sense its merits, and then sat on it for two years before release to see if it felt “timeless”. Alive 2007 begs the question: was this a long con? Could they possibly have spent a decade carefully crafting and deploying these Lego pieces in the knowledge that they would fit together so perfectly when the precise moment arrived? Or were the raw materials irrelevant: could they achieve the same magic with almost anything? And which of those two possibilities is more alarming?

    The Daft Punk albums follow a beautiful, perfect arc. With Homework, they show you how a car engine works, taking it apart in front of you, turning it inside out, revving and stalling. With Discovery, they return having built the most beautiful and effective car engine you’ve ever seen, all chrome and reflective surfaces. With Human After All, they demonstrate that they can build a car engine out of almost anything and in tiny scale, using only the minimum source materials. And then with Alive 2007 they take all those previous engines, all those previous lessons, and smash them all together to somehow create the fastest, sleekest, most powerful sports car in motoring history.

    Alive 2007 is my favourite Daft Punk record, push come to shove, because I love the crowd noise. I love the cheers as each classic makes its entrance, the roar as the next pulverising beat drops. I love the moment in Television Rules The Nation/Crescendolls where the crowd briefly seems to be singing along, en masse, to a squelching synth line that really invites no singalong. But I also love Alive 2007 because there is no other cultural document like it: one of the most venerated and influential acts in popular music history, returning from a decade long stage absence, putting on a show that simultaneously makes sudden and complete sense of their own past, while simultaneously demonstrating a path forward into the future that so many major acts have followed since. Then packing up at the end and never playing live again. It’s Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, the Beatles’ rooftop concert and Dylan at the Manchester Free Trade Hall all rolled into one. Blows my mind, every time.

    I’ve chosen Television Rules The Nation/Crescendolls here for a few reasons. It’s the first song on the record which couples material from Discovery with material from Human After All and I still remember the Holy Shit moment of first encounter when I realised what was happening and couldn’t believe my ears. Two sources you would never, ever have imagined would work in union, two sources which the music press were still complaining were far too dissimilar, brought together so effortlessly and seamlessly it immediately felt strange they’d ever been apart. I get a buzz every time from the crowd roar that greets the titular sample starting, I love the immense, crushing beat drop and the way it segues between the tracks, the energy building and building. And, of course, I love it because it’s a track I share with my kids, that gets put on in the car at the highest volume humanly tolerable until the sheer manic energy it unleashes begins to make proper steering impossible.

    Daft Punk released one more proper studio album, 2013’s Random Access Memories, before shutting down the factory in 2021. I like Random Access Memories more than I love it: it feels like a loop back round to the start, to the act’s aspirations to be a “proper band”, all real instruments and respectful guest spots, its sound so lush and velvety as to be a little cloying in comparison to what came before. A very well earned lap of honour, but a lap of honour nonetheless. Notably, it was the first Daft Punk album that did not, as of the time of writing, signpost the future, merely spotlight the past. It was the first Daft Punk album that did not immediately feel like it could be the soundtrack to a brilliant, life changing, mind expanding club night. The first that felt truly built for home listening first and foremost.

    So, there’s a part of me that wishes they’d called it quits at the end of 2007, leaving behind that gorgeous, perfect arc. But then, looking back on the history of this band and their music, a thought returns: what if I simply haven’t understood Random Access Memories yet? What if some nugget of information, some future development, will recast it in an entirely new and unexpected light? And in the face of those questions, I am powerless but to sit back and accept that Daft Punk, who were always three steps ahead and seeing round corners, know better, and that it’s entirely possible that they may have one more lesson still to teach.

      • I love Daft Punk. Being of a different vintage to you, at first, I thought they were a poor imitation of Kraftwerk, whose own stunning Coachella appearance preceded theirs. Oddly, I started to appreciate them more once they embraced full robot. I love Alive, too, but the album I keep returning to is RAM. I agree it’s the least Daft Punk of all their albums, but the musicians are an absolute class apart, constantly rewarding repeated visits. Get Lucky is one of the best disco tracks ever released, and I do mean disco. It’s all the non-Daft Punk elements that make it so brilliant. I feel I’ve extracted all the juice out of all the others.

        Superb insightful piece, as always, Bingo.

        • Cheers! As was probably demonstrated above, they’re an act I could talk about endlessly. I also don’t think they’ve been written about anywhere near enough; their influence is everywhere felt and nowhere fully articulated, as far as I’m aware.

          I will probably come round to RAM one day, and I know it’s a lot of people’s favourite. I do have some love for Instant Crush and Fragments of Time ❤️

  23. I somehow missed Alive 2007 so I rectified that omission today. What an excellent record! I think I prefer it to both Homework and Discovery, which are too sterile for me.I almost laughed out loud at the crowd reaction after the drop in the opening track, although these moments are scattered throughout the record.

    The original Coachella appearance must have been a belter of a night.

    • Excellent – glad you enjoyed it.

      That album contains some of my favourite ever crowd noise, and the reaction to the drop that you’ve called out above is one of my favourite moments on any live album. Imagine being in the middle of that.

      • The first live album I listened to was Slade Alive! The crowd are wild, an integral part of the recording. It made me very eager to go and see bands live, which I did with great frequency for ten years. I thought all crowds would be like that.

        The most moving crowd experience I had was for Bob Marley And The Wailers. The listened Live! (at the Lyceum), captures the audience’s worship brilliantly. (No, I wasn’t at that particular gig.)

        I never saw Bueno Vista Social Club but the crowd noise At Carnegie Hall rivals The Walkers for adoration.

        I will add Nile Rodgers & Chic to the list. Their audience at Castlefields Bowl, Manchester, on 27th June 2018 was ecstatic. Not available on record.

        By contrast, I’ve listened to so many live jazz albums played to small, disinterested audiences, I am embarrassed on behalf of those fantastic musicians. There are exceptions, of course.

  24. 22. Bad Religion – Frank Ocean

    We begin in 1990. I’m in the back of my parents’ car, the location of so many of my great early musical experiences, being whisked through the night on our way home from visiting family friends. I don’t recall exactly who we were visiting, or what the rest of that day was like, what the conversation in the car concerned. But I do remember exactly how it felt. The coldness of the window against my cheek, the slow blur of the passing street lights, the passing high streets. The lazy exhaustion of a child too far from his bed.

    The strings kicked in on the radio like a warning klaxon: clear a path for emotional devastation, coming on through. A female voice joined, impossibly vulnerable, impossibly open hearted. My skin prickled as the track built and built, seemingly endlessly, before finally arriving at this almighty crescendo of pain and resolve: “All the flowers that you planted Mama/In the back yard/All died when you went away”. I sat on that back seat and I may as well have been entirely alone, frozen by those words, by that voice. That great peak.

    Music hits different when you’re a kid, before your teens, before cynicism. The right song, at the precise right moment, can take you clean off your feet: reveal to you in five minutes or less the depths of the human heart, hint that you too will shortly be capable of that great range of feeling. That’s the way I received Nothing Compares 2 U on that car journey: it took me aback, and I was torn between the sense that I must immediately comfort this singer, and the fear that whatever she was going through might be a standard issue component of adult life, to which I too would one day be exposed. The song hurt to listen to, and that made it endlessly fascinating, because I was still young enough to wonder what hurting felt like; not the pain of the scraped knee or vivid nightmare, the pain of the heart. The pain of adulthood.

    I was two decades older when I first heard Bad Religion, two decades more inured to life’s minor travesties, yet it sent me spinning back to that car journey all the same. I recognised the two songs as kindred spirits. They shared a structural similarity: the sparse backing of keyboards, drums and strings, the similar pacing, the way each track builds to a moment of vocal release. The performers with their matching shaved heads, the lyrics with their tales of loss and withholding. Bad Religion put me back in that car, against that cold glass once more. It placed me far from home.

    We open with a church organ, and immediately the mind jumps to another Prince song, to the point you find yourself waiting for a spoken word intro that will never come. “Dearly beloved…. We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…”. But the church organ here isn’t being deployed for aesthetic reasons, it isn’t being deployed to bring contrast and start the party. This church organ doesn’t promise good times, it promises a reckoning, and it’s being used as part of an allegory that will run through the song, and operate on multiple levels.

    Bad Religion is a song about repressed love and identity. The narrator, tortured and desperate to outrun his demons, sat in the cab of his cab pouring his heart out to the driver, but keeping a little back. He compares his doomed love to a cult from which he cannot escape, and the driver offers back an “allahu akbhar” in response. “I could never make him love me”, Frank counters.

    Six days before he released Bad Religion, Frank Ocean posted an open letter on Tumblr. “We’re all a bunch of golden million dollar babies”, it began. “My hope is that the babies born these days will inherit less of the bullshit than we did”. He proceeded to recount the story of falling in love with a male friend, who was either unwilling or unable to reciprocate. Having read that letter, it’s very difficult to listen to Bad Religion and conclude that its lyric could possibly be written about anything else. That the “I could never make him love me” could be about anyone else.

    There’s a lot going on here. Our narrator is talking to a Muslim cab driver about his lost love, and he’s doing so using the lexicon of religion, but he’s also reflecting on his own relationship to religion. Frank does not tell the cab driver the entirety of his secret, he offers him no Tumblr letter moment of clarity. Instead it’s just “I can’t tell you the truth about my disguise/I can’t trust no one”. Certainly no one religious. Bad Religion is a song about someone who can never love you back, because of a secret too heavy to bear, but it’s also about reflecting on faith, on recognising that the comfort of faith is not a door through which you can ever pass, because of all the available gods it seems that none can be relied upon to love you. It’s a song about sexuality, and the ways in which it can limit us, and force us to sublimate parts of ourselves.

    So that opening church organ is bittersweet, because there is no church for Frank, no proper avenue of confession, which is why he’s there on the back seat offering a partial confession to his taxi driver. Any port in a storm. And it’s what makes the lyric so clever; a moebius strip twisting back and forth between love and faith, equally stunted in each direction.

    But the world is full of clever songs. What draws me to Bad Religion and keeps me coming back is the sheer beauty of its execution. Like Nothing Compares 2 U, it’s a track that lives and dies on its vocal, and what a vocal this is, starting from what is essentially spoken word and building to that iconic wail of anguish, the final “never make him love me/no/no/ah”. Frank takes chances with his voice here. He shifts keys, he reaches for high notes that feel like they should be beyond him. He takes the chorus, the “Never make him love me/love me/love me/love/love me” around which the song revolves, and subtly tweaks his delivery so that the same echoing line begins as a lament and is twisted into a repeated plea.

    It’s a vocal that has little choice but to carry the day, because the production is so spare. Listen to the handclaps and how spaced out they are – so spaced out that you begin to wonder whether the next will ever arrive. The backing instrumentation here augments the mood, but does not set it, and it carries none of the song’s rhythm or melody, all of which is being delivered by the singer.

    Bad Religion makes great songwriting look so incredibly simple, which it probably is with talent like this. When you can write a line that feels as good to say out loud as “I’ve got three lives, balanced on my head like steak knives/I can’t tell you the truth about my disguise, I can’t trust no one”, and then sing it with such conviction. When you can just toss out a moment as instantly iconic as that cry of “If it brings me to my knees”, a cue up line that you almost can’t believe someone hadn’t already used in a classic Soul record somewhere. A line so good that feels like it must have fallen off the back of Otis Blue.

    But it’s not enough just to say it’s a great song and to categorise its many splendours. We’re near the top of this list now, so I’m forced to ask what’s the resonance? Is it simply that it reminds me of that first encounter with Nothing Compares? That it reminds me of being so intensely young and vulnerable? Because I don’t think that’s enough to explain it, taken in isolation.

    Bad Religion is one of my favourite songs of all time because in its verses I hear an echo of a former self, a self who felt he had to keep everything within to prevent the whole world from falling to pieces, albeit for different reasons. I am reminded of being struck mute about all the things that matter because I didn’t have the words for them yet, didn’t have the self knowledge to articulate them as they needed to be articulated. Because in its chorus I hear what has, if we’re being completely honest, been the main driving necessity of my adult life: that need for love. To be surrounded by people who will love me, and to recognise that love as being far more important than money, or power or any of life’s other trappings. I hear that desperate, echoed “love me/love me/love me/love me”, I find myself in it, and in turn I find comfort in knowing that my own call was answered, that I eventually found what I was looking for. That I need plead no more.

    There are lots of videos of Frank Ocean performing Bad Religion live. If you watch enough of them, you begin to discern a certain consistency. He always seems incognizant of the crowd, regardless of their proximity, singing the song as if he’s performing it to himself first and foremost. There’s always a moment when you find yourself wondering if he’ll hit that massive note near the end, and he always does so, seemingly with ease, attacking it every time. Usually, the crowd go wild when he does.

    Push come to shove, my favourite live performance of the song is Frank’s debut TV showing on Jimmy Fallon, backed by The Roots. The arrangement of the song shifts a little, the keyboard sounds a little more Casio. Frank plays around with his phrasing, he offers little, barely audible “hmph”s between the lines, he displays his effortless range. And then, right at the end of the song, something happens that is distinct from all the other performances of Bad Religion. Frank’s vocal drops away and is replaced by an orchestra section, by lush, sweeping strings soaring to the heavens. And you step back and watch them ascend up to the clouds, and as they do so you realise to your surprise that their beauty is not a patch on that magnificent voice. That whatever beauty they may now offer is already redundant.

    Bad Religion takes me back to that very first occasion when I learned of the capacity of music to wound. It takes me back through my own uncertainties and periods of quiet desperation, when I discovered the capacity of music to heal. And in its immortal, pulsing cry of “love me”, I hear the distillation into their simplest forms of a thousand other songs that I have held dear, and of my own life’s goal. To be surrounded by people who love me, and to know myself to be worthy of that gentle munificence. Because that’s about as close to a state of grace as real life, the life lived outside of songs, will ever allow. And because that’s where I’ve chosen to place my faith.

    • I worry about Frank. He seems so fragile to me, the similarity to Sinead particularly apt. He hasn’t released much since 2016 and virtually nothing at all since 2020. I hope he’s ok.

      I’m super excited for the top twenty now. I can’t wait to see what position you give to Charli.

      • Something seemed to shift with the death of his brother. He feels increasingly like one of those artists who is going to allow the accumulated momentum to dissipate entirely, but then if that’s what he needs then fair enough. He’s already written enough brilliant music.

        No Charli in the top 20, I’m afraid. I’ve probably had a slight bias here against very recent records, as it’s not entirely fair to judge the songs with which you’ve enjoyed a long term relationship against this Summer’s flings. I did enjoy Brat a lot though.

  25. 21. Tuned Mass Damper – El-P

    “You’re not promised tomorrow”. So runs the looped sample which repeats towards the end of Tuned Mass Damper, and which provides the cue for the track to kick up into a higher gear. I’ve thought a lot about that sample down the years, because in many ways it sums up its host song far better than anything I could possibly write below.

    Let’s spin all the way back to 1997, and to a moment of schism in Hip Hop. For as long as I’d been listening to this music, the good stuff had always been easy to find: it was bubbling its way to the top, and highly visible. Now, Hip Hop’s Silver Age was drawing to a close; Tupac and Biggie were dead, the Wu Tang had become mortal, Nas was struggling to follow up Illmatic, and in the empty space created new acts were rushing in to capitalise. Some of those acts were excellent – Camp Lo, Slum Village, Outkast – but they weren’t the ones getting the spotlight, because Rap music was moving into its shiny suit era, and in doing so it was leaving me behind.

    I’d started listening to this music when I was still in Primary School, but for the first time I found myself turned off by its direction of travel: a formula had been hit upon, and was now being milked. Bad Boy Records set the tone: grandiosity, conspicuous consumption, cash money and cars. For the first time, the music seemed a secondary concern. Puff Daddy’s I’ll Be Missing You felt a watershed moment as the genre finally crossed over entirely into the mainstream, the track forging a path which others would soon follow. Perhaps as a reaction to the heaviness of the years preceding, and to the early deaths of two of the scene’s main draws, Hip Hop swung back towards being party music, music for a good time, and that wasn’t the mood I was looking for.

    In the years that would follow, artists such as Jay-Z, Eminem and DMX defined the scene, toning down the shininess and bringing back some of the artistry, but none of those were ever my acts, not really. I was drifting off in another direction. As early as Summer 1998 I remember picking up a copy of the eponymous Jurassic 5 album, listening to Concrete Schoolyard over and over and wondering if this was a sign that I had reached a dead end; that all my enjoyment of this music would be in the form of throwbacks from here on out. Jaded already at 20 years old. A couple of months later, I stumbled upon a copy of 8 Steps To Perfection by Company Flow, and the love affair began anew.

    It took about 15 seconds for me to fall for 8 Steps. That soft open and then the beat drop. All that bass. It had a raw quality to it that I felt I hadn’t heard in a while, like I was listening to future music once again. Company Flow were a multi-racial l New York trio comprised of Jus, Mr Len and El-P (or “El Producto”, to use the full nomenclature). They had been releasing music on their own nascent label since they were teenagers, and their lyrics weren’t about cars or women or cash, but rather science fiction authors, anime and politics. Their label slogan, stamped across all their records, was “Independent as fuck”. At a time when Hip Hop was starting to feel parochial for the first time, they were exactly what I’d been waiting for.

    “I was obsessed with Philip K. Dick”, said El-P of this period. “Sort of those dystopic writers: the Orwells and the Bradburys and the Faulkners. That, and we were also watching animation and we were watching Holy Mountain. Crazy Japanimation shit. Just anything we could get our hands on… it was really just this garbage dump of everything we were thinking and everything we felt that was funny or fucked up, and we just tried to fit it into the scope of this real grimy, raw shit”. Company Flow were the real deal: bedroom kids who were exploding their own micro-culture outward, and having fun while doing it. They lived their values, they had no apparent interest in crossing over, and they made being young, bookish, and over-principled look good. In retrospect, they were ever so clearly the Hip Hop Fugazi.

    Company Flow made one truly great album, the immortal Funcrusher Plus, a follow up instrumental record, and then a handful of great singles, before calling it a day in 2001. But their impact was immense. Listening to them lead me on to Rawkus Records, to Lyricists Lounge and the Soundbombing compilations. To Backpack Rap, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Pharoahe Monch. To Medina Green’s immortal Crosstown Beef, one of my favourite Hip Hop records of all time. But more importantly, listening to them gave me back my faith in Hip Hop. That this was a form that had not yet said all it had to, that it could embrace new sounds and take on new subjects. On Last Good Sleep, El-P recounted his childhood experience of domestic abuse. On Patriotism, the band’s largely forgotten swansong opus, they delivered some of the fiercest political rhymes you’ll ever hear. They felt limitless, and they reminded you that all the walls that had been erected around the genre were fundamentally artificial.

    And then they were gone, way too soon, and I figured that was that. I was back in love with Hip Hop, but I’d probably never hear that specific great sound again, that cold mix of truth and dystopia.

    Tuned Mass Damper was released a year after Company Flow split, the lead off track for El-P’s debut solo record, Fantastic Damage. It remains to this day my most profound “oh shit” moment with this music. Fantastic Damage took the Company Flow formula and pushed it even further. The rhyme schemes are wonkier, the production is harsher and more visceral. It’s Sci-Fi Rap, and it sounds like it emanates from some future hell, its beats the sound of a mechanised boot stamping on a human face forever.

    Tuned Mass Damper opens with an ugly, lurching rhythm and a short choral snippet. Somewhere in there is a sample from Tubular Bells. It plugs a jack straight into the then prevalent post 9/11 apocalyptic paranoia that wasn’t being adequately addressed elsewhere, feeling like something faintly sentient and malevolent that’s about to chase you round a space station. A human scream of agony plays intermittently across the track. It’s hard, hard music at a time when music had been wrongfooted by events and was still in good times mode.

    I had waited a long time for Hip Hop lyrics that really tried. For a form so focused on words, it was striking how limited the vocabulary sometimes seemed to be in this period, but El-P paints here with a far wider palette, deploying a cut up lyrical style that recalls William Burroughs and (whisper it) Bug Powder Dust. Here’s how we open:

    “I took this photograph soaking wet
    After an 8-ball cataract broke a jazz bass fret
    The same touch to the chest of a young musician
    He wrote his own eulogy with cocaine hands”

    El-P called the track Tuned Mass Damper in tribute to the weight at the top of a skyscraper that slides depending on which way the wind is blowing. He felt that the concept might relate to the way we deal with trauma and grief. It’s a long way from “Put your number on this paper/cause I would love to date ya/holla at you when I come off tour”. Tuned Mass Damper felt like proof of concept: that you could use this music to talk about anything at all, that the sound of it didn’t have to be uniform and cookie cutter. Take your pick: “to some elected methodology of bare-knuckle compassion/a train wreck waiting to happen”, “you’re all teenage poets/martyrs without causes”, “my generation is beautiful coma/REM hold the bliss”, “as if the symmetry alone is a prescription to live”. This, for the first time in a long time, was properly experimental Hip Hop, in both sound and word. This, for the first time in a long time, was poetry.

    I can time stamp the precise moment Tuned Mass Damper blew my mind. One minute and forty five seconds in, the line “Motherfucker, did I sound abstract/I hope it sounded more confusing than that”. The cadence of classic Rap braggadocio married to the suggestion of deeper tides. A mission statement for the sound: I’m not trying to please and entertain you, I’m looking to unsettle you. This was music that could go anywhere, do anything: it was twitchy, and unpredictable. It had character. By the time we hit “My name is El-P, I produce and I rap too” I was a paid up believer. “Motherfucker, did I sound abstract” – god, it still makes me smile even now.

    El-P, of course, went on to great things. He headed up his own record label, Definitive Jux, which signed so many of my favourite artists of the next few years, and then became one half of Run The Jewels, taking everything he learned in those years after Co Flow, those caustic beats and rhymes, and varnishing it all just a little for a wider audience. And of course I cheered him on every step of the way, because that’s what we do for the artists who help us to rekindle the spark.

    But nothing ever sounded quite as monumental as Tuned Mass Damper ever again. Nothing so perfectly crystallised in me the belief that Hip Hop could be the most interesting and expansive music on the planet, sucking in reference points from far and wide to deliver something different and personal. No Hip Hop track every excited me so profoundly after this. The way the beat sounds so evil, the moment where the tempo flips and this thing that’s been chasing you suddenly speeds up. The way it closes out “Tuned Mass Damper, yeah baby that’s the shit”. It was like a visit from the Ghost of Hip Hop Future.

    Which brings us back to that sample. “You’re not promised tomorrow”, repeated over and over like a warning, a taunt an incitement. And it’s true, you never know what the next day will bring, but Tuned Mass Damper did offer me at least one certainty: that no matter how jaded you may become, no matter how much you may feel you’ve now heard it all, someone, somewhere out there will be producing new and brilliant music that will blow you away if you can just make the effort to go find it. It’s a song that changed the way I approached my listening, sending me off on the hunt, year after year, looking for that one thing that will blow the doors off and expand the horizons the way El-P did here. That will make me feel that same sense of palpable excitement. That will sound abstract.

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