Gus's Top 100 Bootlickin' Nonce Anthems

[IdleRich]

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to H-maxx and burn through the entire, massive stash for a few months, see where I landed. I had this sorta sick desire, after seeing so many movie depictions, to see what withdrawals were like.

They were predictably terrible! Couldn't sleep for a week, wasn't happy for a month. Terrible terrible full body restless leg stuff. I started running to try to get dopamine and tire myself out. But I learned a lot.

I reckon that "sick desire" is more common than most would intuit. Had a few friends who really seemed to deliberately set about getting addicted.. also lots of friends who dabbled really carefully with loads of rules in place and said it would never happen to them but who ended up in exactly the same place so maybe that attitude wasn't really as harmful as all that when you think about it.

 

[thirdform]

I reckon that "sick desire" is more common than most would intuit. Had a few friends who really seemed to deliberately set about getting addicted.. also lots of friends who dabbled really carefully with loads of rules in place and said it would never happen to them but who ended up in exactly the same place so maybe that attitude wasn't really as harmful as all that when you think about it.

Is it true you can get smack in portugal like a cup of cola? apparently everyone goes fiendish for the stuff there. its why there's not portuguese gabber.

 

[IdleRich]

Is it true you can get smack in portugal like a cup of cola? apparently everyone goes fiendish for the stuff there. its why there's not portuguese gabber.

Not really... well... the history is a bit complicated in that it had a crazy epidemic in the 90s (worst in the world) which they got rid of by relaxing the rules and moving towards treatment etc so I guess back then it was exactly like a cup of cola - at least in terms of availability. But now it's really frowned on, almost no hipster types do it and those that do are looked down on... whereas when I was in London I had various friendship groups and in several of them pretty much every single person was totally on it. Part of why I needed to leave ultimately.

 

[sus]

what do you think was the causal relationship between legalization and it quickly becoming uncool?

 

[sus]

it doesn't have to be "x caused y" or "x didn't cause y" it can be complicated, complicated is good. how they obtruded and inflicted themselves on each another

 

[IdleRich]

what do you think was the causal relationship between legalization and it quickly becoming uncool?

No that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that a heroin epidemic brought the country to its knees and that that period is looked back on disapprovingly and is seen as so bad that heroin became completely taboo.

Legalisation (actually decriminalization) is what broke the stranglehold but I don't think it made it uncool, it's more that people fear a return to the time before that.

 

[sus]

I see so the same thing (the 90s epidemic) both caused the legalization and it becoming uncool

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah... that is my understanding, but only from what I've read. Epidemic was so bad that it gave the highly addictive killer drug a bad name.

I'm guessing it wasn't cool at the time... so many were hooked that the middle-class - that in the UK always block any kind of sensible drug policy - were desperate enough to try anything.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Didn't know that about Portugal but I did know Spain was really really bad for heroin around the same time too, must have been pretty much one and the same.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Might have started earlier in Spain, in the 80s. Cameron de la isla and loads of other artistic types were smackheads.

 

[thirdform]

Not really... well... the history is a bit complicated in that it had a crazy epidemic in the 90s (worst in the world) which they got rid of by relaxing the rules and moving towards treatment etc so I guess back then it was exactly like a cup of cola - at least in terms of availability. But now it's really frowned on, almost no hipster types do it and those that do are looked down on... whereas when I was in London I had various friendship groups and in several of them pretty much every single person was totally on it. Part of why I needed to leave ultimately.

sorry, i was being facetious. I know that, which is why I was asking the question as Luke makes you to be snorting gak off the backs of supermodels.

 

[sus]

This is not in my canon 100 but for posterity and the collective memory of our culture, I am including Snow Patrol "Chasing Cars"




Indispensable in understanding the psyche of a 13 y/o girl circa 2008

 

[sus]

A lot of these indie/alt type songs—e.g. "Chasing Cars"—are about a teenage boy & girl who create & live in their own lil world. They exit from &. promptly forget the adult world; they promise one another they'll never grow up, never become normies like their parents, etc. "Us against the world." Except that the newfound autonomy—the separation from parents and the responsibility for world-making, world-keeping, world-gardening that comes with it—turns the children into adults.

On that note,

(19/100) Arcade Fire, Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)

"When the snow buries our neighborhood / I'll dig a tunnel from my window to yours / You climb out of the chimney... And since there's no one else around / We let our hair grow long and forget all we used to know / Then we tried to name our babies / But we forgot all the names that we used to know / Then our skin grows thicker, from living out in the snow"

To people outside oughts indie, Arcade Fire's discography is probably just an undifferentiated pile of garbage. Fair enough. But to teens who grew up listening to & caring about oughts indie, following the band—believing in the band—was one of those disillusioning 90s-baby experiences like casting your first vote for Obama, or being a Google fanboy. You invested so much of yourself in this imagined ideal, then watched the object of your faith slowly sputter and die—be drained of its personality, become a shadow of its early promise, more and more generically corporate with each passing day. At this point, can anybody tell a difference between Arcade Fire and Coldplay?

But Funeral is gorgeous. It feels indescribably organic, here in that echoey upright piano, the tinny vocal compression, the growl of the guitar that prowls behind it. Somehow the machinic/electrical is made to feel biological, and the biological machine-like. I'm not going to persuade anyone who doesn't like kind of music to like this kind of music—but for me, at 14ish, this was ecstatic stimulus. This was religious music. It rose in ragged waves, was howled from hoarse lungs, a stream of pure pathos proclaiming the simultaneous terrible beauty of the world. I wanted something that felt as sprawling and epic and awe-inducing as a stadium anthem; I had many feelings but hadn't yet developed any rituals for exorcism. Funeral provided one.

 

[sus]

(Honorary mentions)

"Crown of Love"—my first positive encounter with disco (skip to 3:30 for the transition)




"Lenin"—my first encounter with socialism




"Cold Wind"—Got very into Arcade Fire my freshman and sophomore years of high school, spent a lot of time digging up and torrenting and ripping rarities from YouTube vids. There was an exchange kid from Brazil my sophomore year who was a big indie head, I remember feeling very proud that I could flash-drive share a buncha stuff he hadn't heard from those digs. This was the point at which I started following mp3 blogs, digging through for downloads, and yes, reading through the Pitchfork archive. Which will feature heavily in our plotline very soon, very soon—a blogspot called The Torture Garden, run by a guy named Shane, turned me onto Irish singer-songwriters like Villagers & Cathy Davey starting 2009/10ish?

 

[sus]

(19b/100) Arguably, this should've been my #19 instead of "Tunnels." But all the tracks on Funeral and Neon Bible I listened to endlessly—I think my last.fm account records 300ish plays of each album.

This, however, was the video that kickstarted my high school Arcade Fire obsession. I ripped the video and put it on my iPod and I watched it... repeatedly. I have no idea what it was about the performance that captivated me, but I cannot let Dissensus down. So I am going to go roll a big doobie and I am gonna watch and find out. That was approximately half of my life ago. The halfway mark. Maybe if I can figure this one thing out, I'll know where I came from and where I'm going...

 

[shakahislop]

To people outside oughts indie, Arcade Fire's discography is probably just an undifferentiated pile of garbage. Fair enough. But to teens who grew up listening to & caring about oughts indie, following the band—believing in the band—was one of those disillusioning 90s-baby experiences like casting your first vote for Obama, or being a Google fanboy. You invested so much of yourself in this imagined ideal, then watched the object of your faith slowly sputter and die—be drained of its personality, become a shadow of its early promise, more and more generically corporate with each passing day. At this point, can anybody tell a difference between Arcade Fire and Coldplay?

yeah dead on. i was never into arcade fire. but i do get that there was a load of people who found them relaly exciting at the start. people on the internet still go on about those tiny shows they did in london when the first album came out. people believed in them. it didn't resonate with me but i thought at the time a lot of people loved that thing of this mixed group of quirky not very cool boys and girls swapping instruments and that there were loads of them, totally filling up the stage like some kind of gang. there was a fake community thing to it, they were the community though, the audience was just an audience, but it looked like the promise that you could be part of something like that coz they seemed pretty normal, they didn't seem like lou reed or that remote rock star thing. a couple of mates loved all of that.

actually that quirkly gang thing was what put me off personally. there were some tunes on the first album i liked, that one that goes ALEXANDER MY OLDER BROTHER WENT OFF ON A GREAT ADVENTURE. i was 18 i think when i heard it and in retrospect it was the start of a whole stream of US indie that i could not get on with, it just seemed to appeal to a totally different set of emotional needs, sentiments, aesthetic judgements that had nothing to do with me. stuff like this and the shins and animal collective and so on almost feels like a celebration of weakness, it reminds me a bit of some of the neitzsche slave morality thing, people making sense and resentiment-ing how weak and subjugated they are. the 180 degree opposite of ruffness.

the corporatisation thing is exactly what happened. like all of those kind of things from the 00s the thing that people liked was so quickly subsumed into the standard music circuit. and it all came to nothing, it was all fake. all they did was use it to have a nice life making probably a lot of money from headlining festivals and doing big gigs. as you say everyone remotely interested in that kind of music has had that kind of experience by now. the other thing about this sort of dynamic in the 00s/10s is that the notion of selling out was defunct, there was no sense or vocabulary to describe this kind of process as a bad thing, the consensus sentiment about bands making a ton of money by selling you t-shirts and shit seats at the back of a stadium and ticketmaster fees etc etc was 'oh fair enough'.

 

[shakahislop]

the corporatisation thing is exactly what happened. like all of those kind of things from the 00s the thing that people liked was so quickly subsumed into the standard music circuit. and it all came to nothing, it was all fake. all they did was use it to have a nice life making probably a lot of money from headlining festivals and doing big gigs. as you say everyone remotely interested in that kind of music has had that kind of experience by now. the other thing about this sort of dynamic in the 00s/10s is that the notion of selling out was defunct, there was no sense or vocabulary to describe this kind of process as a bad thing, the consensus sentiment about bands making a ton of money by selling you t-shirts and shit seats at the back of a stadium and ticketmaster fees etc etc was 'oh fair enough'.

my equivelent is going to see neil young at the height of a neil young phase when i was 20, got all the CDs out the library one by one and ripped them, read a whole massive biography, was that perfect constellation of the tunes being old and good, the guy being a massive weirdo, a load of other people i knew of all ages liking him, my mum liking one of his albums, playing and singing cortez the killer with my mate from school in the fields, seeing he was playing somewhere small like hammersmith apollo or something in london, logging on at the ordained minute to a ticket site with his name next to Green Day and Michel McIntyre or whatever, seeing that they were 80 quid a ticket, going fuck it lets buy it anyway because you've got 30 seconds to decide because some cunts have decided you won't know the price until they go on sale and then you have no time to think about it before the tickets sell out, getting to the venue months later, seeing the hundred quid neil young branded leather jackets at the merch stand and then taking your allocated seat. the set was great. he still goes hard and i still love how he plays electric guitar. but what is there to believe in after that

 

[sus]

yeah dead on. i was never into arcade fire. but i do get that there was a load of people who found them relaly exciting at the start. people on the internet still go on about those tiny shows they did in london when the first album came out. people believed in them. it didn't resonate with me but i thought at the time a lot of people loved that thing of this mixed group of quirky not very cool boys and girls swapping instruments and that there were loads of them, totally filling up the stage like some kind of gang. there was a fake community thing to it, they were the community though, the audience was just an audience, but it looked like the promise that you could be part of something like that coz they seemed pretty normal, they didn't seem like lou reed or that remote rock star thing. a couple of mates loved all of that.

actually that quirkly gang thing was what put me off personally. there were some tunes on the first album i liked, that one that goes ALEXANDER MY OLDER BROTHER WENT OFF ON A GREAT ADVENTURE. i was 18 i think when i heard it and in retrospect it was the start of a whole stream of US indie that i could not get on with, it just seemed to appeal to a totally different set of emotional needs, sentiments, aesthetic judgements that had nothing to do with me. stuff like this and the shins and animal collective and so on almost feels like a celebration of weakness, it reminds me a bit of some of the neitzsche slave morality thing, people making sense and resentiment-ing how weak and subjugated they are. the 180 degree opposite of ruffness.

the corporatisation thing is exactly what happened. like all of those kind of things from the 00s the thing that people liked was so quickly subsumed into the standard music circuit. and it all came to nothing, it was all fake. all they did was use it to have a nice life making probably a lot of money from headlining festivals and doing big gigs. as you say everyone remotely interested in that kind of music has had that kind of experience by now. the other thing about this sort of dynamic in the 00s/10s is that the notion of selling out was defunct, there was no sense or vocabulary to describe this kind of process as a bad thing, the consensus sentiment about bands making a ton of money by selling you t-shirts and shit seats at the back of a stadium and ticketmaster fees etc etc was 'oh fair enough'.

Yes there were a few acts like that. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros were around then, seemed to be some kind of LA-based-but-nomadic, Manson-style-Hollywood-adjacent hippy art collective cum cult type deal. There was a non-trivial hippy contingent at my school. A lot of very cute flaxen haired girls, a minor stoner frisbee golf / guitar player group of boys. Surf-psych rock bands would come into town, play the local brewpub, everyone would go out and dance, definitely some of the rock'n'roll sex icon stuff happening with these very shaggy drug-rug-wearing Santa Cruz type dudes.

From the Wiki:

> Ebert began to write a book about a messianic figure named Edward Sharpe who was "sent down to Earth to kinda heal and save mankind, but he kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love." Ebert adopted the Sharpe persona as his alter ego.

> After meeting singer Jade Castrinos outside a Los Angeles cafe,[8] Ebert and Castrinos started writing music together, and became a part of the art and music collective The Masses, which was partially started by some seed money from actor Heath Ledger.[9] Their fledgling group eventually swelled to more than ten members, some of whom had been Alex's friends since he was young. In mid-2009, Ebert, Castrinos, and a group of musicians toured the country by bus as Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. The first show they played in 2009 was at the Marfa Film Festival in Marfa, Texas.[5] The band recorded their debut album, Up from Below, in Laurel Canyon.

Nowadays he runs a Substack and is IDW/Unity 2020 adjacent. From his citation of hauntology he appears to be a Mark Fisher reader: https://badguru.substack.com/p/anti-woke-and-the-oppression-compulsion

"Home" was the big hit that even suburban soccer moms got on their Pandora stations—it's the real whistley bo-jangle fiddly-dee-doo song? "Gee whiz, I love ol ma and pa" etcetera. But I'll confess to having a soft spot at that age for the simplicity of "Jade":

 

[sus]

The photo of that YT upload really checks all the boxes. Big golden field and sky, loose linens & silk shirts, cowboy and panama hats, accordian, acoustic guitar, sundress, banjo.

 

[sus]

This is what they looked like, this was the vibe