#uncool50

[manysmallhands]

#46: Solange - Cranes In The Sky

Released - Oct 5 2016

Highest UK chart position - Did not chart (UK Hip Hop/RnB chart - #29 )

Spotify streams to date - 130,496,166

First heard - bought LP for my brother, 2019

My brother was probably the person from whom I learned to take music (too) seriously, so it seems fitting that he should pop back in now for a late cameo. For his birthday in 2019, I was tasked with buying him Solange’s magnum opus A Seat at the Table on vinyl. Unprepared to hand it over without checking for warps, scratches, etc (it’s a hard life sometimes), I decided to give it a spin first. Soul is not something I’d really listened to much at that point, but ASATT is such an inventive, intriguing record that I was forced - no, forced - to pinch the digital files that came with it and carry on listening. This is, I guess, where I finally broke down my resistance to Soul and RnB, which then crossed over into more Hip Hop as well and finally opened the floodgates to all sorts of different things that I’d decided, largely out of ignorance, that I didn’t really like. As such, it’s an album that had an impact on me far beyond its actual contents.

Cranes in The Sky is its best known song and, tho i still think that it’s a great album all the way thru, there are few others on there that I love nearly so much. It’s a song about defeat: not in a final, winner takes all sense, but more the slow realisation that everything is a mess and, as much as you seek to distract yourself, there’s no escaping from it. While the cranes of the title are apparently mechanical cranes, a reference to the misery hanging over her, I’ve never managed to stop myself thinking of them as ungainly birds with a desperate need to fly away. 

All of its melancholy, resignation and stasis are right there in the introduction: that rhythmic tap of the drumsticks set against the calm, elegant strings seems to say everything already before the song has even begun. Yet for all the evocativeness of the music, it’s Solange’s vocal that dominates. There is no one moment that breaks me - if I’m in the right mood for it I’m a wreck all the way thru - but the part I come back to is where she admits “I’ll cry it away” and the response hits up immediately, “don’t you cry it baby!” , as Solange just carries on “away, away, away”, so serene but entirely done with it all. The only time she raises her voice is to sing the title, at which point the pressure seems to break thru a little, but it’s basically a song of quiet despair: a simple, dignified statement that this is not how life is meant to be lived. 

I think I used to believe that Soul was basically smooth music for wine bars but A Seat at the Table changed that. While much of the record is Not About Me by definition, the common humanity of it is powerful enough that I can understand something of where it comes from. More specifically, regarding Cranes In the Sky, I’ve known those feelings she sings about all too well.

[weaversweek]

Uncool50 - finding my place

Part of the #Uncool50 project, a sort-of autobiography told through the memories of pop singles. This installment covers the second half of the 2000s. Nothing from 2005 or 2006, by now my head had been turned by European hits and the anglophone stuff just wasn’t fun.

The theatre kid who made it. "Grace Kelly" came out of nowhere at the start of 2007, as flamboyant and ostentatious and unashamedly queer as anything. Mika sounds like Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen who was snatched from us far too soon.

The homophobes hated it. Of course the homophobes hated it, they cannot stand anything fun, colourful, honest. One review at the time said, "Like being held at gunpoint by Bonnie Langford", as if this was a bad thing!

This song is fun, it's catchy, it worms into your ears and is never going to leave. Might just be the greatest pop song of the decade. More power to Mika.

The greatest pop moment of the decade comes straight after the breakdown in "About you now". We hear the chorus line again – "can we bring yesterday back around?" But this time it's different – a little higher-pitched, a touch yelpy. And there's a gloriously discordant high tone, "coz I know how I feel about you now".

By this time, we're up to Sugababes 3.0 – Siobhan's long-gone, Mutya's been replaced by Amelle - but the songs still remain awesome. Dancey-electronica with a scuzzy overtone. And the video with the young man parkouring his way around south London, hopes to meet up with his date on the Southbank.

My long list of 300 songs had a lot of Sugababes – "Overload" and "Freak like me", "Too lost in you", "Ugly" and "Change" all featured. But none of them have this yelp of joy, that’s the clincher.

"This is the life", Amy MacDonald's defining hit. Breakthrough single "Mr rock and roll" had positioned Amy as a troubadour, sings songs about people's lives. She uses a few words to describe a scene, and whoosh – we're in it!

"This is the life" is a personal, probably autobiographical, song. "So you're sitting there with nothing to do, talking about Robert Riger and his motley crew". Life-affirming through its melancholy, drunken nights out and waiting in for friends and thinking both that this is excellent and this is terrible.

Number one for the year in Belgium, Netherlands; for some weeks in Austria and Czechia; top five in all civilised markets around the continent. And number 28 on Britain, because the playlisters and programmers in London are a complete waste of space and goodness knows who pays them. Amy's built a hugely successful career in Europe, and still makes top-drawer albums to this day.

So I started hanging out with a bunch of friends from the karaoke bar, and we went out to a maize maze, ears of corn up to eye level. Or for Caz, ears of corn over the top of her head. Caz managed to lose contact with the group, get lost, and had to be rescued by the tall stablehand.

We welcomed Anna into our friendship group, and she turned out to be the glue to hold us together, and we loved her dearly. "Bulletproof" by La Roux is one of many many songs from those years. This time, maybe, I'll be bulletproof.

[manysmallhands]

#25: Sleater Kinney - You're No Rock N Roll Fun

Released - May 2nd 2000

Highest UK Chart Position - #85

First Heard - Cheap cd, 2014

I wouldn’t have heard of Sleater Kinney the first time around, so by the time I bought All Hands On The Bad One nearly 15 years later, the context for this would have been long since past. However, pompous guitar bands fronted by Very Serious Men are as constant as a northern star and so I can’t say it took much effort to pick up the thread.

Sleater Kinney don’t need to prove that they can rock to anyone so going all out pop here is smart, a prime position from which to take a swipe at the lofty artistes of the indie scene. Corin ditches her trademark holler for an arch tunefulness and, while the guitars take the usual spidery post-punk route, the deceptively sweet harmonies and Janet’s double time drumming ultimately carry the day. In short, this song absolutely slaps. 

A few months after I bought this, the heroes reception that greeted SK’s return in 2014 illustrated a slightly changed picture in the indie world, where women are an increasingly strong and playful presence and things are better for it. But chauvinism remains a huge issue in the industry and so the message of You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun is always worth remembering: if yr too cool to think that women can rock, who the fuck do you think you are?

[manysmallhands]

#38: Tullycraft - Lost In Light Rotation

Released - 28th Jan 2013

Highest UK Chart Position - Did not chart

Spotify streams to date: 57,529

First heard - Fortuna Pop! website, 2013

“Twee” is perhaps the most contested and/or reviled word in the world of indiepop. Say it to fans and many of them will become defensive or angry. You might even make someone who likes the Sea Urchins mad - imagine that! For others, well, it’s just what it’s called, it’s tweepop, ultimately it’s no biggie. I don’t know if Tullycraft were the first band to “reclaim” the word for themselves but certainly they’ve made a career out of being an unapologetic embodiment of Twee, in all its wonders, contradictions and irritations. Some would claim that they were long past their prime by 2013 (the reviews for the Lost In Light Rotation album are almost uniformly “they have nothing new to offer” , as if that wasn’t the point): I would beg to differ. Lost In Light Rotation is my favourite Tullycraft song and it’s a good pick for this list as it deals with fandom, a thing that grows from a love of music but can become something else entirely.

One of indie music’s great enticements is “here’s this great thing that no one else knows about! It can be yours and you can feel special!”. Sean Tollefson’s dismissive line about people who “never took the time to learn the slang that we speak or the slogans on the T-shirts” understands this - it’s about learning those things and belonging to something, but also, it’s about knowing that you’re a better person for it. In my experience, people who like indiepop are generally extremely nice and welcoming and they exhibit not the least bit of snobbery around would-be fans (there aren’t enough of us to turn anyone away tbh). But an enticement of any scene is to feel like yr in the know and, in such a tiny and excruciatingly nerdy one as Twee (I may as well say it, this is Tullycraft after all), that hard won knowledge is the privilege of a tiny number of people, making it a super-exclusive club. It may be entirely irrelevant in the real world, but it’s perhaps the only thing we have in the face of everyone calling us a bunch of girly pricks (an insult we’d wear with pride, but an insult all the same).

Anyway, Lost In Light Rotation! A lot of indiepop revolves around someone with a floppy fringe bemoaning being dumped over a jangly guitar line: that’s the bad stuff. The best indiepop is always fun and that’s how Tullycraft go about it. The song has a zip to it from the word go, it’s all sudden shocks, snappy drum fills and Sean’s rapid fire delivery, getting right to the thrill of hearing THAT SONG on the radio and wearing THAT THING to the show, so that everyone knows that this is YOUR BAND, whether anyone else gives a shit or not. The communal chants are fun, the guitar hooks are surprisingly glossy (courtesy of a mix by big-shot producer Phil Ek), and the lyrics always pin down the “vacant need to be a part of something bigger still” at the heart of fandom, the desperation to be up with the scene and that sublime moment when the music hits and you get caught singing almost every word.

[manysmallhands]

#34: Warpaint - Undertow

Released - Sep 21, 2010  

Highest UK Chart Position - Did not chart (Indie chart - #30)

Spotify streams: 17,867,610

First Heard - Got the CD out of the library, 2014

There’s a big double pile of CDs next to my stereo and for years now a significant majority have been by women, either as lead vocalist or a dominant creative force, often both. It started to level out a bit once I started listening to more hip hop, but at the moment it still runs at about 2 women for every guy. And that guy is mad! He’s unhappy at being deprived of equal opportunities in my CD pile! But he’s just gonna have to suck it up cos it’s the best person for the job around here. A major part of it is that I like to hear women singing, but while my motives for liking an artist probably contain a complex mix of stuff that combine with the music itself, I think a significant element is the string of mediocre men pushed at me by indie rock tastemakers in the early 10s. As such, once I got access to the internet, I was determined to move my gaze elsewhere and women just appear to be better at this.  

Warpaint are one of my finds from this period but they were an oddity within those bands: their songs are much less immediate than most and they tend towards odd, shifting structures with subtle hooks, rather than instantly catchy melodies. They spin a good line about intuitively understanding each other’s playing cos they’re an all female act - and tbh I rolled my eyes a bit - but that feminine mystique thing is worked to great effect, creating a dense, powerful sound both musically and vocally. Imagewise, Warpaint come across as a cool all-girl gang and Undertow plays with that, its lyrics playing out as unnerving, witchy chants that are hard to break focus from. The low key dynamics of the song feel hugely claustrophobic: there’s a dark undercurrent that pulls you down, the “undertow” of the title I suppose. Occasionally there’s an attempt to escape from it, but we keep getting dragged back into ever murkier territory.

The big moment comes at the end, where the song cuts loose for the second time and Emily really lets go, singing “run, run, run, run”  over and again: her voice gains a new vulnerability as it finally separates from the group vocals, and then the strings rush in behind her, giving the song a kind of dam-burst moment. It’s the bit where I always break down: after 5 minutes of straining at the leash, there’s a sudden feeling of being able to take a breath, with all the limits finally dropping away. Warpaint would go on to make other great singles that were more in touch with their modern pop instincts, but Undertow is cool in every sense of the word: it’s a song that manages to sound commercial while being entirely its own thing, and it still feels hugely impressive all these years on. 

[manysmallhands]

#27: Amerie - 1 Thing

Released - 6th June 2005

Highest UK Chart Position - #4

First Heard - Curiosity on twitter, 2020

Long term illness meant that I basically didn’t listen to music thru most of the 00s: my brain wouldn’t process it and I’d end up feeling sick, so in the end it was best left alone. I say this not to elicit Little Nell-esque sympathy, but more to explain that, when i returned to a more serviceable state later on, I had large gaps in my musical knowledge that feel embarrassing now. For instance, I didn’t hear 1 Thing until maybe about 2020, when I saw a gif on twitter of a woman swishing her fur coat around, thought that she looked cool and wondered what was going on. I could plead infirmity but we all know it’s a poor excuse.

If I put 1 Thing on while I’m walking, I can’t help but get caught up in it: my gait adapts to the swing of the breakbeat, my body will start to be pulled around by forces beyond my control. This too is, of course, embarrassing and means that I have to reserve it for quiet times and walks around the back field, far from the mocking jibes of small children. But I would still say that this makes it the best kind of song: if something instantly impacts yr emotions to the point where you can’t actually walk properly, it’s clearly done something right. 

The break itself is amazing, a messy, clattering thing, full of space but with each beat inevitably falling just exactly where it needs to. However, it is, appropriately enough, just one 1 thing here and there are so many others, most significantly the way that each stab of the guitar sample lands exactly like a knock-out punch or, of course, Amerie’s star turn at the mic, elegant and brassy, singing that extraordinary looping chorus hook. If I’m a hip-hop novice (as previously stated), I’m still in my nappies regarding RnB, but some things can’t help but cross over because they’re undeniable and 1 Thing is just, erm, 1 of those things (ed - retire this pun, that’s 1 thing too many, etc)

[manysmallhands]

#30: The Go! Team - Doing It Right

Released - Sep 3rd 2007

Highest UK Chart Position - #55

First Heard - Radio, 2007

During 2006 and 7, I was managing to listen to some music every day and so I became a bit more engaged with what was going on. I have a big pile of albums that date from this period, but Doing It Right is the only song from these that was good enough to make the cut (my other picks from this time were things that i came to later on). While I’ve often stayed in musical comfort zones, this was perhaps the era where I cleaved most to whatever indie stuff was on the radio, and a lot of it feels, not so much bad, but certainly quite homogenous now. Doing It Right is an odd exception, a song that points towards where my music taste would eventually take me but in the most unusual of ways: a kind of unholy mash-up of indiepop and hip-hop. 

I once had an argument on the internet which I was widely perceived to have lost, where I argued that The Go! Team were basically a hip hop act. And while I can admit that this is, at best, an extremely narrow conclusion to have made based on a very small amount of evidence, I still think that, circa the Proof Of Youth LP, it’s actually got a lot going for it. Perhaps the best way to put it is that, if the less boring thing that the “Why Don’t You?” kids did one day was to go and record a hip hop tune, then it would have sounded something like this. 

Its vibe is one of absolute maximalism - it’s oversaturated with sound to the point where it consistently overloads the speakers - but for something so incredibly in yr face, it also has a kind of clumsy beauty about it. This contrast plays out in the clash between Ninja’s punchy positivity and Kaori’s more amateurish charms, or the luminous clatter which dominates the record vs the gentle, melodic touches that makes it so damn catchy. This is the hip-hop/indiepop thing that feels irreconcilable in my brain, but sounds so utterly natural on this single that I can’t imagine why no one else does it (maybe they do? Idk). I guess in a way it harks back to that kind of day-glo chart rap from the late 80s, stuff like Rebel MC or Wee Papa Girl Rappers, but it’s a comparison that bears so little close scrutiny that I feel dumb even thinking about it. Doing It Right is perhaps the only record that coasted right thru my indiepop period and has settled nicely into my semi-hiphop era now, and I still don’t know how or why it works. Goddamn it!

[manysmallhands]

#21: Pulp - Lipgloss

Released - Nov 15 1993

Highest UK Chart Position - #50

First Heard - His n Hers tape, 1994

Pulp’s His N’Hers was the sound of my 1994 holiday in Cornwall (money was no object) and I suspect that’s partly why Lipgloss feels so full of youthful energy to me. But it’s there in the music too and that chorus in particular, with its tension building stop-go dynamic and head-spinning blasts of colour, still feels very special. As ever tho, Jarvis is the main draw and he uses all his usual tricks here. The song’s basis is a kind of seedy glampop and he creates lyrics to match, mixing the sordid with the commonplace to sketch out a woman’s crushing rejection at the hands of her lover. But the play isn’t straightforward: it feels like he’s sending the situation up as much as staking out its tragedy, with his stage whispers and pop star yelps feeling intentionally overdone, and so we end up with the kind of kitchen-sink melodrama that a young Scott Walker would probably have recognised.

You could criticise it for its superficiality - it comes off a bit like a slightly grubby Jackie photostory - but, in the end, this is what makes Lipgloss so much fun. I can imagine this playing out in the most mundane of places, with the extremes of emotion meeting elements of dull reality - calling yr Dad on the phone, or running into someone when you look like shit. But it all feels slightly unreal too: while all the emotion is there - in Jarvis’s theatrics, or the unsubtle shifts to minor chords in the chorus - the ambiguity mentioned above gives things a lighter tone, which is mirrored in the thrilling sugar rush of the music. Later on, Jarvis would write “better” songs, where he combined that faded glamour with a greater depth to his characters, but in all honesty I don’t love them like i love Lipgloss. This could be because I’m an extremely shallow person (and tbf I’ll fully admit to that), but I comfort myself that Jarvis is too, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have written it.