Smellband Brett's YEAR END SONGS of the Year: TOP TEN

1. Ceelo Green - Fuck You
As a child watching defamatory cartoons I wondered when the day would come when a hit song would just be the phrase "Fuck You," albeit then I bet on a fantastical R. Kelly ballad about tender fucking love. Oh! Was it glorious when it was a topical anti-love song about the very contemporary issue of how collectively broke we are, both financially and morally. While not the best production I've ever heard, Cee-lo delivers an astounding performance of a very simple song with a direct, insightful message. Go slight amount of pathos!


2. The Move - Chinatown
While very obviously released only to me this year, this is what I wished music actually sounds like: insightful, angsty, and well arranged; wel produced counterpoint rock music. I COULD FIND A GOOD TIME GIRL IN CHINATOWN! CHINATOWWWWWWWWNN! DANCING IN MY SHOES!


3. Ruja - Dr. Noorman
I hadn't heard about the massive Estonian musical revolution against a communist Russian ban on musical instrument sales and other musical liberties, but this cry of prog passion from these esoteric masterminds. DOC-TOR! Rachmael promised to write a multi-installment series on the Eastern-European Cultural Revolutions, which he's been extensively researching for months but you know him: always Jillin!


4. Grateful Dead - Franklin's Tower
Hell, I had heard this song a long time ago and rationalized it away as just another noodle. Man, the world of Thomas Hart Cooking will really flavor your noodles. This song is about taking your time, doing things right, and surrendering to Jah and the mother's G-deyehead. You've got to Roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. If you get confused listen to the music play.


5. XTC - Roads Girdle the Globe
Wow, it must be a really slow year if songs Rachmael showed me a year ago are cracking the top five. Average song topics: Guys and girls, guys and guys, guys and money, guys and cars. This is a classic guys and cars smash. Also has the best bass playing I've heard this year. Boo contemporary music!


6. redaccted


7. Olivia Newton John - Magic
Believe you and me, Beyonce puts out a cover of this backed by the Manualist playing "Run to the Hills" and it would top this list. Olivia Newton John still probably tops my annual list of most fantacized about women for the 13th odd consecutive year (with a close second and third by one of the Bank Teller's at the branch in Olneyville and Anais Nin). Needless to say I was forced to watch Grease at nauseum growing up and I totally equate all feelings of affection with that horn sounding part in that song where they go "YOU'REDAONEDATAWANT! YOUR'EDAONEDATAWANY! OO-OO- OO-HONEY!"
over and over in my head, so when I saw this video where she was singing this somewhat psychotic song beckoning you to join the color wiccans the first thing that came to mind was that John Travolta must have been blackmailed into joining Scientology because the scientologists had discovered video footage of Travolta repeatedly punching John in the back of the head during intercourse. Where'd she get that crazy eye from? Who knows, right? You have to believe we are magic! Nothing can stand in our way!


8. Gorillaz - Melancholy Hill
Good song good job. This is the "Feel Good Inc." of Plastic Beach. The Gorillaz are a full blown media phenomenon that all my friends in the midwest seem to write off. Good synths always win the day. I guess Damon Albern is as topical as a British pop song writer you can get if you don't worship Radiohead.


9. Readacted


10. Yes - And You and I
In a year where I felt a hopeless, overwhelming feeling that culture was condemned to a bland post-modern music world of derivatives and style packages where everyone was embracing fantasy, I decided to jump on the band wagon. Until Rachmael showed me "Close to the Edge" the song, I had been lukewarm on Yes though I enjoyed a few of their earlier albums and most of their radio singles. I was reading an interview with Frank Zappa in a book of interviews and articles I keep in the bathroom (which I stole from Edan Wilbur which he found in a dumpster) and he was endlessly decrying mediocrity.

"Progressive Magazine (this is actual a Wisconsin libertarian rag and not a prog rock magazine): Do you think anything can be done to reverse the trend?

Frank Zappa: Perhaps. I tend to view the whole thing as a conspiracy. It is no accident that the public schools in the United States are pure shit. It is no accident that masses of drugs are available and openly used at all levels of society. In a way, the real business of government is the business of controlling the labor force. Social pressure is placed on people to become a certain type of individual, and then rewards are heaped on people who conform to that stereotype. Take the pop music business, for example. Look at the stereotypes held up by the media as great accomplishment. You see guys who are making millions of dollars and selling millions of units. And because they are making and selling millions they are stamped with the seal of approval, and it is the millions which make their work quality. Yet anyone can look at what is being done and say, "Jesus, I can do that!" You celebrate mediocrity, you get mediocrity. People who could have achieved more won't, because they know that all they have to do is be "that" and they too can sell millions and make millions and have people love them because they're merely mediocre. Few people who do anything excellent are ever heard of. You know why? Because excellence, pure excellence, terrifies the fuck out of Americans because they have been bred to appreciate the success of the mediocre. People don't like to be reminded that lurking somewhere there are people who can do some shit that you can't do. They can think a way you can't think, they can dance a way you can't dance. They are excellent. You aren't excellent. Most Americans aren't excellent, they're only OK. And so to keep them happy as a labor force, you say, "OK, let's take this mediocre chump," and we say, "He is terrific!" All the other mediocre chumps say, "Yeah, that's right and that gives me hope, because one day as mediocre and chumpish as I am I can..." It's smart labor relations. An MBA decision. That is the orientation of most entertainment, politics, and religion. So considering how firmly entrenched all that is right now, you think it's going to turn around? Not without a genetic mutation it's not!"

Yes' symphonic style rock orchestration peaked almost forty years ago yet most bands now in a post-modern egotistical haze embrace their inabilities and mediocrities as "style" or as "unimportant," yet the decline in music is exactly what it sounds like. You want crap: you get crap. Not knowing how to play guitar is exactly what it sounds like. Not knowing how to play drums is exactly what it sounds like. Not knowing how to play bass or keyboards or anything is exactly what it sounds like. Using automated sequencing and metaproccessing to create music is fundamentally what it sounds like. This is probably the only song to make me cry in the last few years and I have that terminal disease Zach Braff has in Garden States and the only way to cure it is self medicating Scrubs marathons until I come to terms that their are in fact hospitals in real life. Conclusively, there'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify; Political ends, as sad remains, will die. Reach out as forward tastes begin to enter you. Ooo, Booo!
I listened hard but could not see -
Life tempo change out and inside me.
The preacher trained in all to lose his name;
The teacher travels, asking to be shown the same. In the end, we'll agree, we'll accept, we'll immortalise.That the truth of the man maturing in his eyes, All complete in the sight of seeds of life with you. Coming quickly to terms of all expression laid, As a moment regained and regarded both the same, Emotion revealed as the ocean maid, A clearer future, morning, evening, nights with you.