Gus's Top 100 Bootlickin' Nonce Anthems
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- absolute cringe ari grass you up basic boy scout ted bundy coachella 2024 at the nonce hotel cum cult dad was a casual whistler fit mom! gandalf had to sell the home grandad was a cuck gus lord of darkness high school shooter memoires joanna newsom come to butthead jordan petersons gremlin child let the wrong 'un in no theory at the merch table! nonce upon a time pete doherty qpr plod pizarro was fastidiously kept in a bolivian tomb power bottom thems the rules spatial cathexis spots like pitchfork superstitious middle aged italian woman neurosis the deplorable product of craner's infamous fling these boots are made for lickin' undercover plod
sus
Moderator
(17/100) Muse, "Blackout"
(18/100) Radiohead, "No Surprises"
I used to spend a lot of my spare time making maps for a game called N Ninja, very simply platformer with elegant physics and a killer custom map maker. A community had sprung up around a oldschool forum much like this one—mixed age but probably between 13 and 30—and people made "map packs" which were basically like albums—collections of maps, which over the lifetime of the community had become increasingly conceptual, more and more conscientiously sequenced/themed. But it was an encounter with a Real Maker community, even an art community—people had extremely strong opinions, it was all very subjective and taste-based, the look and feel of the tileset (your map's landscape) mattered as much to these people as gameplay. The site's still up, you can see what some different maps styles are like.
I also got turned on to a lot of good music on the community IRC from users like Gloomp and PALEMOON and sidke. A lot of those music recs didn't grab me immediately, but I downloaded the albums and read and learned a bit about them, and seeded something. Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy, Xiu Xiu, Joanna Newsom's Ys. I think when people were bored on those IRC channels they argued about atheism and ethics? I was in middle school, my grasp on ethics was very rudimentary, and obvious I thought anyone who believed in God was a moron.
A guy who lived down the street, let's call him T, also played the games and we made some maps together earlier on. Mostly we were gchat buddies—I never got an AIM account, was a gchat man myself. Anyway T was really into general angsty depressive teen rock, and I picked up the vibe through osmosis, started listening to a lot of Radiohead and Radiohead-adjacent stuff—Muse, Coldplay, Air Traffic. I was opening taste floodgates, letting myself entertain the idea that maybe just liking to listen to a song made it worth listening to again—maybe even made it a good song. Entertaining the usual "art v junk food" dichotomies would've just kept me listening to more high culture orchestral stuff; it was blank slate or bust.
(18/100) Radiohead, "No Surprises"
I used to spend a lot of my spare time making maps for a game called N Ninja, very simply platformer with elegant physics and a killer custom map maker. A community had sprung up around a oldschool forum much like this one—mixed age but probably between 13 and 30—and people made "map packs" which were basically like albums—collections of maps, which over the lifetime of the community had become increasingly conceptual, more and more conscientiously sequenced/themed. But it was an encounter with a Real Maker community, even an art community—people had extremely strong opinions, it was all very subjective and taste-based, the look and feel of the tileset (your map's landscape) mattered as much to these people as gameplay. The site's still up, you can see what some different maps styles are like.
I also got turned on to a lot of good music on the community IRC from users like Gloomp and PALEMOON and sidke. A lot of those music recs didn't grab me immediately, but I downloaded the albums and read and learned a bit about them, and seeded something. Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy, Xiu Xiu, Joanna Newsom's Ys. I think when people were bored on those IRC channels they argued about atheism and ethics? I was in middle school, my grasp on ethics was very rudimentary, and obvious I thought anyone who believed in God was a moron.
A guy who lived down the street, let's call him T, also played the games and we made some maps together earlier on. Mostly we were gchat buddies—I never got an AIM account, was a gchat man myself. Anyway T was really into general angsty depressive teen rock, and I picked up the vibe through osmosis, started listening to a lot of Radiohead and Radiohead-adjacent stuff—Muse, Coldplay, Air Traffic. I was opening taste floodgates, letting myself entertain the idea that maybe just liking to listen to a song made it worth listening to again—maybe even made it a good song. Entertaining the usual "art v junk food" dichotomies would've just kept me listening to more high culture orchestral stuff; it was blank slate or bust.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I feel like some of the more interesting people to appear on here in my time have smashed the (then) prevailing orthodoxy for taste, or have been naysayers at least, whether that was because they shat on something we held holy or championed something we held smelly.
I'm not sure exactly what the idea with this thread is, it seems like an autobiography rather than a canon. Surely, surely, surely Stansuspended doesn't really believe that Fiona Apple cover is good?
sus
Moderator
What is a canon, if not a record of development? Surely you don't really believe that Plato is good?
Also Stan is somebody different. I'm Gus. That's why this thread is called Gus's Top 100 Bootlicking Nonce Anthems.
sus
Moderator
The biggest myth this board ever told is that the music which charted members' personal development happened to be world-historically transcendent and philosophically coherent on something like objective terms. Everyone's top 100 is an autobiography; mine is just told through the perspectives of many of my temporally diverse selves.
the problem with you engaging with Gus is that Gus actually has no room for the cringe, the detestable. there's no eurodance, emo, psytrance, power metal, ska punk, etc. Gus' music was credible when he was a teenager, then pitchfork realised we were right and they were wrong, but about 20 years too late. He has been left in the wilderness since.
It's a cannon that can be fantastical, but without being surreal as such. The emotion of munching a chocolate cake as black as satan's anus is foreign to him.
sus
Moderator
The drum n bass records will turn to dust in storage lockers. The YouTube uploads will expire, get taken down by algorithmic copyright detection. The culture will march on into a pop future that cares nothing for your values or your taste. Jungle will be looked back on like 8-bit chiptunes and JRPG soundtracks. No one will remember anything you hold dear. Nothing will survive.
sus
Moderator
All these cultural moments are in the past. Yours and mine alike. The generative mood and sensibility able to produce them is already almost extinct. There will be no more great composers of garage. The paper yellows and curls. All these things are behind us. All these things are turning to dust. We are custodians of memory, keepers of relics. For three hundred years the mummified body and blackened skin of Francisco Pizarro was fastidiously kept in a Bolivian tomb, in a Spanish Catholic church, only for recent DNA evidence to prove it wasn't him. There is no "vindication" there is only death.
sus
Moderator
These are the beautiful moments in my life. These are the perfect phenomenologies which snapped into focus for just a few seconds, perhaps a few times, and were gone. I will never be fourteen again, walking across an empty vineyard listening to the opening melody of "In My Life" for the very first time, crying in the early springtime air of 2009. I am indifferent to whether these tracks could or did trigger an analogous experience in other board members. I am not interested in pretending these moments didn't happen, or falsifying their precipitating cause, to pander to upset internet anons and their oh-so-precious, precarious canon. I will acknowledge them, and celebrate them, and I will let them pass, because that is what it means to be a custodian of extinction. Oh you who grip so tightly thirdform—a grip that protests, but only serves to expedite, the crumbling into dust.
sus
Moderator
Your obsession with "standards," your belittlement of all values and experiences beyond your own, is a violent hegemonizing impulse, an attempt to stamp out all the diversity of local ecologies and replace it with one species of perception and consciousness, your own. Nothing in this thread except a Radiohead cut has been remotely "Pitchfork approved," which you'd know if you'd read through—an error which betrays your lack of interest in possibly experiencing or understanding ecologies other than your own. Yours is a cookie-cutter impulse which tunnels into esotericism in order to deny its own rigid metal shape.
I mean, this is not a development which frightens me. It should be a development which frightens you though. What makes you think the algorithms will care for your angst?
I like Ibrahim Tatlises, Selda bağcan, asmahan, umm kulthum, googoosh. These cannot be erased by the algorithm. Their worldwide impact is simply too great.
so you are romantic then?
Correct, I am a centralist, not a punk or proto-punk like Ayn Rand. I thought we'd discussed this?