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britesparc · 2 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #576

Top Ten Years for Music

Yeah I’m doing it again, and this was the hardest one to do. Because generally speaking I don’t really associate music with the year it came out. Almost all of the time I come to it a lot later – which is why there are hardly any recent years on this list. I’ll probably be into a half-dozen songs from 2022 in fifteen years.

Music, to me, was always a background thing. I never had a desire to seek it out or find out what I was into in the same way I’ve always wanted to know more about film. And as such, when I became a bit older, I felt very out of touch and ill-informed by what music was around. The first CDs I ever bought were soundtrack albums because I just didn’t know what bands I liked, and by then I was also infected by the teenage need to like the right bands. What if I accidentally bought something by someone who wasn’t cool? Or if I mentioned liking them but then exposed how I only liked them because I liked that one song of theirs that was in a Curly Wurly ad or something?

Despite this, we’re still going to see a whole lot of nostalgia on this list. Is it always the case that the music that really resonates is the music you listen to in your teenage years? Even if – like me – you weren’t going to concerts or buying tons of CDs, the music permeates your social consciousness from the radio, from hearing it played in stores, from seeing the artists on TV, and from your friends talking about it. I didn’t own a Blur CD until 1999 and I don’t think I’ve owned one by Oasis, but I could have explained the broad strokes of their music and their rivalry back when Country House and Roll With It released in the same week. So it all sticks and it becomes part of your DNA, the soundtrack to whatever dumb crap you were doing at the time.

Anyway, enough wallowing in the Our Price of history: let’s just look at the years of my life that I thought had the best music. And, yes, this is the most subjective because I think of all things, maybe music is the most subjective? So it’s stuff I liked. You don’t like it? Get your own blog, they’re free!

1984: yes! Seriously! 1984 continues to be one of the best years of all time. If it’s not enough that films like Terminator and shows like Transformers and comics like Turtles all came out, you’ve got the debut albums of both Bon Jovi and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – I mean, come on. Queen’s The Works gave us songs like Radio Ga Ga and I Want to Break Free. Prince made Purple Rain. Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A., for cryin’ out loud! Dancing in the Dark, people! We had Spinal Tap! And speaking of movies, Ghostbusters! I mean, can you imagine? Flippin’ ‘eck, what a year.

1997: it’s tough to single out one year from the nineties, because there’s a period – ’93-’98 really – that’s just chock-full of absolute iconic bangers for me. But this is probably tip-top. We’ve got one of Nick Cave’s best, most soulful albums, in Boatman’s Call, which features possibly my favourite song – Into My Arms. Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape, Radiohead’s OK Computer, Savage Garden’s, er, Savage Garden. Robbie Williams – love him or hate him – did release two of his best songs, Let Me Entertain You and Angels. And a personal favourite of mine was Del Amitri’s Don’t Come Home Too Soon, the best song ever about football.

2016: woah, we’re getting right up to date here! Can you believe it?! But it was a cracker, despite Trump and Brexit and everything else that was happening. Both Bowie and Leonard Cohen released their final albums, and in a way delivered their own epitaphs with Blackstar and especially You Want it Darker, the latter of which is an absolute masterpiece. “I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game”, for goodness’ sake. If you really want it dark, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree was haunting beautiful but also a wail of absolute grief; “They told us our gods would outlive us but they lied”. Slightly cheerier was Foreverland by Divine Comedy, with its propulsive revolutionary undertones and superheroic love songs. And rocketing right to the other end of the scale from all the mournful ballads was Lonely Island’s soundtrack to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Is Finest Girl the funniest song of all time?

1996: yep, back to the nineties, and back to the Bad Seeds (Murder Ballads, which includes Cave’s famous duet with Kylie) and back to Divine Comedy (Casanova). Almost defnining my mid-teens, we had the Manics’ Everything Must Go and Spiders by Space, as well as the debut album from the Aquabats. Probably one of the most seminal releases – certainly for me at the time – was the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, featuring possibly my favourite song of the year, the Cardigans’ Lovefool. What else? Well we had two other big debuts: the Spice Girls and Eminem. What more could you want?

1993: still in the nineties and it’s back to another perennial year for me: ’93, the year of Jurassic Park and, well, tons of other stuff. Check out m other lists. Anyway, musically we had Bat out of Hell 2, which was nice as I wasn’t born when the first one came out. He’d do anything for love, y’know, but he won’t do that. Radiohead’s Pablo Honey gave us Creep, my favourite of theirs, because I’m basic. Crash Test Dummies released Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, a weird delight. We also got 500 Miles, Loser by Beck, Insane in the Brain – which everyone my age was singing in 1993 – and sort of Whitney’s I Will Always Love You, which technically released at the end of ’92 but dominated the early part of the year and was ‘93’s biggest song.

1995: sticking with the mid-nineties and it’s another belter. Alright by Supergrass; These Days by Bon Jovi; the Foo Fighters’ eponymous debut; The Bends by Radiohead. I could go on. And I shall! One of my favourite albums, Different Class by Pulp, gave us some corking class-warfare ballads like Common People. And, yes, it was Britpop’s holy year, with the Blur/Oasis clash and the release of both What’s the Story (Morning Glory) and The Great Escape. Quite possibly my favourite song of the year – sorry, Jarvis – was Alanis Morrisette’s You Oughta Know from Jagged Little Pill, one hell of an angry tune and my generation’s equivalent to The Winner Takes it All. But with a bit more swearing.

1982: right back as far as we can go in my lifetime, really, and it all starts off so well. Madonna’s first album! Bloody hell! And Jacko’s Thriller! Scary stuff. That alone could get it rocketing up the charts, but we also have one of my favourite Bruce Springsteen songs, Highway Patrolman, even if (whisper it) I kinda prefer the Johnny Cash version. Also there was Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (spoiler alert: it’s 666), and Billy Joel’s Nylon Curtain, giving us tracks like Allentown and the phenomenal Goodnight Saigon. And – yes – Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.

1998: another all-round classic year – Half-Life came out and I started going out with my wife – and the music wasn’t bad either. Space’s Tin Planet featured The Ballad of Tom Jones; we had Torn, Bittersweet Symphony, and You’re Still the One, just a bunch of stone-cold hits. Evanescence’s debt album provided turn-of-the-millennium action movies with great songs to cut scenes to. The Divine Comedy’s Fin de Siècle had some of the tracks that really drew my attention to the band. The hilarious One Week was a fast-paced good-natured highlight of a song, but let’s wrap up by lifting a glass to a genius movie ballad, Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. I could stay awake just to hear them singing.

2002: another good year for Robbie, with probably – aw hell, definitely – his best album, Escapology, which has his two best songs (for me): Monsoon and Come Undone. Flight of the Conchords’ first album had so many all-time hilarious songs I don’t know where to begin. A Rush of Blood to the Head is my favourite Coldplay album, largely because of The Scientist. Avril Lavigne’s debut album was released, giving us both Complicated and Sk8ter Boi, and holy cats, can you get more millennial? But musically I have to say the year belongs to Johnny Cash and The Man Comes Around, an album full of incredible, emotional, resonant songs – including, of course, his cover of Hurt.

1994: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Let Love In gave us a lot of tremendous songs (including the haunting and disturbing two-part Do You Love Me) but really it should be known most for Red Right Hand, one of the biggest and most important songs of my life (I first heard in The X-Files!). Also there’s Green Day’s Basket Case, Blur’s Parklife (in both cases the first albums I had from both bands), and the biggest song of the year, Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around. It really was everywhere I go in ’94. Sticking with movies for a bit, two of the best soundtracks of my life: Pulp Fiction and The Lion King. Yes, musicals absolutely do count; maybe I should have tried to look them up in a bit more detail. Too late now!

I very, very nearly had 2006 in there at the end instead of another nineties number, but despite a few good tracks that year I ultimately decided I was letting the sheer cosmic weight of Arctic Monkeys’ debut lift the year up too high. I’ve always tried to find a good balanced spread when doing this and not stick a year in there just because there’s one or even two things I like, and ultimately the epoch-shifting excellence of I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor was not enough to champion the whole year. But I’m mentioning it now, in dispatches, so to speak, because it’s still probably the most exciting and impressive debut of my life.

#top ten #years #music #years for music #best years for music #1980s #1990s #meat loaf #madonna #nick cave #divine comedy

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