Number 9 - "Britain is Sh*t", Selfish C*nt

Selfish Cunt, Martin Tomlinson and Patrick Constable

Britain is Shit - Selfish Cunt

No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper (2004)

A lot of bands were assigned the rather mutoid moniker of 'post-punk' over the course of the decade, and the term was almost already meaningless the minute it was uttered. As if anything could come post-music's nihilistic end...

But of course the music did continue, it just wasn't punk anymore.  To suggest that for instance Green Day have in the slightest relevance to or provenance from the original seventies genre is to render the original meaningless.

Maybe it's in the art of reducing punk to shallow symbolism, void of all its original significance, in drawing an equivalence between The Clash and playing your guitar quite loud with a safety pin on, in failing so completely to understand punk, that you evoke in the process a perfect nihilism. The act of neutering punk's most genuinely transgressive dimensions becomes in itself the most authentically punk act possible.

And it's the authenticity that was so frequently lacking in the things terms like 'post-punk' or 'new punk' or whatever permutations were applied to during the decade. Music that almost always seemed to veer more properly towards other genres - pop at one end of the spectrum, hardcore or even emo at the other.

There's only one act since the Pistols that have given us any sense that they are in any way inheritors of punk's wholesale aesthetic, political and musical mantle, and that act is Selfish Cunt.

 Yes, it's in part about the notoriously violent concerts, the beating up crowd members, the cancelled gigs, the bannings from venues, but it's also about the overtly nihilistic take on politics, it's about the aggressively sexualised cross dressing of Tomlinson (if Brian Molko and Iggy Pop ever spawned ...)

And it's about realising that THE most punk instrument in this day and age MUST be the drum machine. The quintessential enabler of so many musicians not even good enough to play with a bad band.

And it's about the lyric, the give-nary-a-shit vocal delivery, the utterly vicious pillorying of the middle classes, the political classes, the working class. It wants to kick the whole lot down, not because it has a better world in mind, just merely that it's run out of interest in this one. It's petulant, destructive, wanton, and throughly non-didactic.

Are you listening, Green Day?

Above is a little video I made for YouTube as this is kind of a hard one to stream. See below for more hot cross dressing action, from when we last encountered SC earlier in the countdown.

Numbers 125 - 101, "Jesus, etc."

So what's the point of it all? In an age when everything is fragmented and personalised to the nth degree, what's the point of trying to maintain a pantheon, a heirarchy, a 'Top Forty' anything?

We're all going to have umpteen variants of this same pantheon. What I've done here, in spite of the professed objectivity of my method, is produce a list that is irredeemably my own, and unavoidably incomplete. I can't have heard every song that would conceivably qualify for this last, and where that mightn't have mattered doing this for the eighties or nineties because the candidates at least for the upper echelons would be pretty incontrovertible.

But THE noughties artist? I laugh a little under my breath when I hear people debating Foals v Muse v ColdPlay v Franz Ferdinand. Most of these artists don't make this chart. By virtue of not being good enough to even be candidates. So the Pantheon, if it even vaguely exists is completely in dispute and completely individualised. Radiohead would probably be as close to a universal nomination as you could go.

And as we've seen, this process leads directly to a shifting in locus for any Pantheon from the trans-generic realm of "pop/rock" into the specifically genre-based R&B/club arena. So in this list we do hear quite a bit from Beyonce and Jay-Z, Alicia Keys and Kanye. Heck, I've even got the Sugababes in this installment.

The Sugababes - Lineup #638,742
Mutya/Keisha/Siobhan

Because you certainly earn credit in this reviewer's accounts for taking YOUR form, ANY form, no matter now hackneyed, outdated or conservative, and re-working that form to its artistic acme. Music today has a far broader and more significant social function than when the classical composers built its original pantheon.

As we've seen, the idea that music might be able to change the world in some monolithic manner might be dead, but our belief that developing new ways of seeing the world, of "innovating" (pardon me, I'm trying to be zeitgeisty) our entire outlook being central to humanity's future dies much harder.

And so I'll keep pumping this out, for it maps something far more significant and more resonant than an agreeable collection of sounds. It's the heartbeat of the ages.

125.	Dear Catastrophe Waitress	Belle and Sebastian	Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003)
124.	Rej	Âme	Rej (2006)
123.	Fuck the Poor	Selfish Cunt	No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper (2004)
122.	I Want To Die In The Hot Summer	I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness	I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness [EP] (2003)
121.	Jesus, Etc.	Wilco	From the Beginning (2007)
120.	My Little Brother	Art Brut	Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005)
119.	Cruiser	Red House Painters	Old Ramon (2001)
118.	Fix Up, Look Sharp	Dizzee Rascal	Boy In Da Corner ()
117.	Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole	Martha Wainwright	Martha Wainwright (2005)
116.	Young Folks	Peter Bjorn and John	Writer's Block (2006)
115.	Jerk It Out	The Caesars	39 Minutes Of Bliss (2003)
114.	Seven Nation Army	The White Stripes	Elephant (2003)
113.	Decent Days And Nights	The Futureheads	Burnout 3 : Takedown (2004)
112.	Daft Punk Is Playing At My House	LCD Soundsystem	LCD Soundsystem [Disc 1] (2005)
111.	Heartbeat And Sails	Augie March	Sunset Studies (2001)
110.	Slow Hands	Interpol	Antics (2004)
109.	Follow The Cops Back Home	Placebo	Meds (2006)
108.	Black Rainbow	St. Vincent	Actor (2009)
107.	Eli, The Barrow Boy	The Decemberists	Picaresque (2005)
106.	Two Weeks	Grizzly Bear	Veckatimest (2009)
105.	No One	Alicia Keys	As I Am (2007)
104.	Feel Good Inc.	Gorillaz	Dare (2005)
103.	Scarlet Fields	The Horrors	Primary Colours (2009)
102.	Push The Button	Sugababes	Change (2000)
101.	Waitin' For A Superman	The Flaming Lips	VOID [Video Overview In Deceleration] [Music] (2005)