Last year I published my Top 30 Albums of 2010. I quite enjoyed that project and decided to do the same thing again this year and to make it a bit of a tradition each year.
For me 2011 was a fantastic year for music. Tons of new artists and some great new albums showing the old dogs can still learn a few new tricks.
Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely – it would change daily.
When I was young (in the sixties) my parents weren’t really in to music. But we had the radio on all the time. We listened to Easy Listening stations. This naturally drove me crazy. But it also embedded these songs in my head.
This BBC 4 documentary (below in six parts) is well worth watching if you’ve either never really heard of Easy Listening or if you (as I did) simply dismissed it as irrelevant.
I’ll let you in on a secret: If you’re going to do a “Best of…” list, wait until the year is over so you can see what everybody else thought was the best and add to your own list.
This is not cheating. No one can keep up with all the music, books, movies and what-not that we clever mammals produce each year. I keep a running list of my favourite albums and add and delete from that list as the year goes on. But then I see other people’s end-of-year lists and realize that I missed a ton of great stuff. So, while I completely ignore retrospective news stories and generally turn my nose up at “what’s going to happen next year” commentary, I find “Best of…” for media a great way to grow and learn.
So, having digested a ton of other people’s lists and thought about my own favourites from 2010, here are my top 30 albums for the year.
Note these are in alphabetical order. I could never rank these absolutely – it would change daily.
Not all punks were guys. Siouxsie Sioux was part of the Bromley Contingent along with Sid Vicious and Billy Idol and started a band called Siouxsie and The Banshees very early on. At the start I think the band was more a concept – a desire to be in a band rather than a band in fact.
But after a while they got the hang of it and became on of the few bands to move out of the early punk days and have successful careers as “punk” became “new wave”.
Hong Kong Garden was always my favourite from the early stuff:
Punk for me (I was a teen when it all started) was always very much about my generation. At the time I don’t think I noticed how incredibly young we all were.
Behold the zit-filled faces of The Undertones, looking like they had to ask their mums if it was okay to go out on a school night to shoot this video for Teenage Kicks:
And because the Internet is making everything instantly available, here’s footage of the band actually recording the song:
It’s quite incredible that what is arguably one of the best pop songs ever just happened to be used as an example of how records are made!
Yes, I do mean it when I say I think Teenage Kicks is one of the “best pop songs ever”. Who can argue with lyrics as unpretentious as this:
Are teenage dreams so hard to beat Everytime she walks down the street Another girl in the neighbourhood Wish she was mine, she looks so good
I wanna hold her wanna hold her tight Get teenage kicks right through the night
I’m gonna call her on the telephone Have her over ‘cos I’m all alone I need excitement oh I need it bad And its the best, I’ve ever had
I wanna hold her wanna hold her tight Get teenage kicks right through the night
I wanna hold her wanna hold her tight Get teenage kicks right through the night
I only saw The Undertones once, opening for The Clash but I’ve always had a soft spot for them.
For most people, the Sex Pistols were punk rock. We loved the Pistols but I never connected with them the way I did with The Ramones, or The Clash or even The Buzzcocks. The Pistols were one of the few influential bands of the time that I didn’t see live and I think that always made them a bit more of an abstraction for me. Punk was so much about the live experience it was harder to identify with a band you hadn’t seen live.
Now we would have seen the Pistols live had they come anywhere near Canada. Malcolm McLaren (“The Manager” as Johnny refers to him) was determined not to do anything by the books and booked the first (and only) US tour in the deep south, playing dive bars and honky tonks rather than hitting the major urban centres that had already established punk scenes.
Of all the classic punk songs, I think “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones is probably the most recognized song these days.
This footage was taken at CBGBs – the New York City dive where many of the NY punks got started.
I never got to see the Ramones at CBGBs but I was lucky enough to see them very early on at one of Toronto’s most famous dive bars – the El Mocambo.
The show was absolutely packed but we where there early enough to get a spot directly in front of the stage. So close we could see Joey’s face despite his eternal mop-top and downward glare.
Johnny dropped a pick at one point and I snapped it up. I’ve still got it in a box in the basement. Johnny knew a thing or two about posterity and was nice enough to have “RAMONES” inscribed on all his picks making for instant memorabilia.
It was tradition at Clash concerts in the early days that they would end shows with White Riot. Fans would storm the stage, all hell would break lose. While I think you can find better video of The Clash in action, this footage gives you a sense of the frenzy and chaos that was a Clash gig.
It’s amazing watching Joe Strummer just barely holding things together – at least for a little while.
Every now and then you stumble across an entire sub-culture you had no idea existed.
Today’s example is care of YouTube where a quick search on “Misheard Lyrics” gets you about 1200 very juvenile (and often very funny) animations of entire songs worth of misheard lyrics.
Interestingly enough, you don’t really have to know the original song to find these funny.
