Here’s another Spotify playlist for you: everything available that I’ve given 8 or more too. No Beatles, and some other annoying omissions (“Hot Love”! “Rhythm Stick”!) but at least Lord Rockingham and the Pigeon are there.
The playlist will be updated as my marking generosity dictates.
Just gone through your spotify list of “8-or-mores”.
It is remarkable how much we agree on your chosen ones – couldn’t have picked a better list myself (shame that Spotify don’t have missing ones on your list).
Regrettably I am also 20 years older than you and you are in danger of being classified – like myself – as a boring old fart, well before your time. The majority of the songs you chose would just about appear in most peoples top 50 lists. No signs of “rebellious youth” there then.
But redemption for you is at hand! I’d love to see you give 8 or more to some of the next 500 or so tracks that got up a lot of peoples noses. E.G “Barbie Girl”, – or most of the no.1s from 1989 when you get to them (a true nadir of a year in the history of pop music).
Keep up the good work
Ottersteve
1989 a nadir? Gosh. Didn’t sound like it for me – PWL notwithstanding. I struggle with 2007, personally.
1989 was a pretty good year for music. Charts started out good and got progressively worse as the year went on. I’m a big PWL fan so the year was more than alright by me.
1999 was a bad old year as I recall, but maybe that was just for rock/indie, I wasn’t really into pop music at that stage.
Bad year for rock/indie? Pixies, Stone Roses, The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode all made their best records in this year. These were my salad days, by the time I hit 20 at the beginning of ’92 that’s when things were looking bleak whether it was pop or rock/indie.
Not ’89: ’99! Embrace, Travis, Stereophonics, a very young Coldplay: the year the post-Britpop bloat finally curdled so badly the movers and shakers started looking for rawer, brasher, scratchier sounds and a year later you have the whole garage-rock revival thing.
I was eight years old in ’89 and not much interested in music at all.
Well, every year mentioned but 2007 has had someone chime into support it, so I thought I’d mention the stuff from 2007 that I continue to listen to lots: Radiohead’s In Rainbows, The National’s Boxer, Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala, Feist’s The Reminder, Bat For Lashes’ Fur and Gold, Tegan and Sara’s The Con, LCD’s Sound of Silver, Winehouse’s Back To Black (released in 2006 but I didn’t hear it until 2007 and it was the year’s soundtrack that wasn’t), Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad.
I wasn’t paying attention to what songs, apart from Umbrella, were actually in the charts, but from the perspective of albums I actually ended up buying, 2007 seems competitive to me, at least not obviously a dreadful flat spot. [I’m not sure that such flat spots really exist (probably music’s too vast for that). When I look back to some period that felt that way at the time to me, it tends to be the case that I was experiencing the hangover from a certain scene I’d been into for a year or two (before it flamed out). It always turns out to be true that there was *lots* going on that I wasn’t aware of while I was into my scene (grunge or jungle or whatever) and then *that stuff* often flowered at exactly the point that struck me as so desolate.]