#fearofmu21c

The Killers - When You Were Young

Released - Sept 18 2006

Highest chart position - #2

Spotify streams to date - 548,257,626

One of the things that I like about The Killers is that, while they’re undeniably a rock band, their sound is much more frothy than their image suggests; rooted in hooks and glamour, they come across as a kind of Duran Duran for the 00s. While their biggest pop bangers date from earlier on, When You Were Young remains for me their best single and a strong memory from 2006 is feeling the kind of ownership of it that you only get when yr fave is coming out of every radio speaker going. That said, I wasn’t so much in a rock mood when we did the Uncool50 last year and so surprisingly it ended up on the cutting room floor. But now we’re back, things are different and its time has finally come.

The lyrics follow a kind of idealised American romance and the song follows suit, mapping it out as a road trip of epic (and slightly ridiculous) proportions. It’s full of Springsteenesque imagery - “burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane” indeed - and the song itself has a similar momentum, each verse kicking on with ever greater intensity, each repetition of that indelible guitar hook hitting harder than before.

Twice more unto the breach, with a pair of singles both popular and quality. It's the #FearOfMu21c project, where we’re crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. This index post has all the entries.

"The fear" - Lily Allen

Daughter of Keith, sister of Alfie, Lily Allen might have been the most talented of them all. In a short hitmaking career (nine hits from 2006 to 2010, and a six-week revival in 2013), Lily showed she understood the young person's condition. The precarious life, take little pleasures when we can. Not so much a life of hedonism, but a life betrayed by the generations above.

"The fear" is a state-of-society capsule from 2009, written by Greg Kurstin and Lily Allen. "Life's about film stars and less about mothers. It's all about fast cars and cussing each other."

If the generation above had any sort of introspection, they'd ask themselves, "why do our children feel like this? Could we have done better?" But no, for the boomers and 50s kids, it's all "me me me me me", and they're still at it.

Grace Kelly - Mika

An ode to his insecurity, Mika puts on all sorts of different faces in an effort to impress someone. By the end of the song, he's learned that someone else has insecurities, and to have a little confidence in himself.

Written by Dan Warner, John Merchant, Jodi Marr, and Mika, this was the breakthrough single from early 2007, a slight return for vaudeville into the top five. The parent album, "Life in Cartoon Motion", was eye-poppingly bright, but the anglophone markets didn't like it when he went serious a few years later.

Mika has remained popular in France and Italy, where pop stars are allowed to have quality. He's done casting shows for major broadcasters, and a song competition in Turin.

The Mountain Goats - This Year (from Dilaudid EP)

Released - March 21 2005

Highest uk chart position - Did not chart

Spotify streams to date - 38,517,436

The Mountain Goats are a pick-up from the Peoples Pop polls, an artist who I kept hearing in small doses and thinking “that’s good, who’s that?” until eventually I brought myself listen to them at length and found out that yes, they are in fact very good indeed. Sadly, we have yet to put This Year to a vote and now - in the twilight of the polls - it’s starting to look like that may never happen. Which would be a great shame in my opinion, cos it’s one of their most popular tunes and with excellent reason. 

Like many of the best TMG songs, John Darnielle takes an unsettling scene (a drunken date followed by a family blow up) and turns it into something to draw strength from. There’s tension in the lyric, even through its more cheerful passages, but the general feeling of the song remains one of warmth and good spirits. The acoustic guitar has a dashing vibe to it; the tapped percussion recalls girl group handclaps; all of this emphasises a kind of joy rescued from the jaws of chaos, marked most clearly by its singalong chorus: “I am gonna make it thru this year if it kills me”. While “the scene ends badly as you might imagine” it’s almost impossible for me to listen to This Year without a broad smile on my face: if the sheer defiance of its mood doesn’t get to me then the wit of the lyrics never fails.

Released - June 30, 2023

Highest chart position - #1

Spotify streams to date - 546,650,197

As anyone who’s familiar with my bluesky account will know, I’ve started listening to the charts this year for the first time in an age. Vampire hit #1 in the week that I came back and, quite apart from it just being a cracking song, that event in itself opened up a sentimental vein in me which it’s been feeding off of ever since (does that make me a vampire too? I guess it probably does). It’s a bit of an anomaly on Olivia’s excellent Guts LP., a strange but compelling hybrid between a melodramatic ballad and a full-on pop banger. The earlier chart topper it reminds me of most is by another Olivia - Olivia Newton-John's Xanadu - with its wailed vocals and pulsing electronic unreality seating it comfortably within the traditions of early 80s disco drama. 

The lyric is one of ultimate betrayal - the story of an older lover who was only interested in what her fame could do for him - but the key to Vampire is that yr never not having fun. Olivia squares these competing elements remarkably well, with every drop of performative emotion wrung out in such a way that surely only a former High School Musical star could ever truly nail. Her vocal is full of wonderfully hammy gestures (the groaned “oooooh” in the middle of the second verse, the remarkable hollering step into the final “the way you sold me for parts!”) which feel almost pantomime-like in the way they play to the crowd but which never once compromise the powerful hurt at the song’s centre.

Lady Gaga - Bad Romance

Released - Oct 19 2009

Highest Chart Position - #1

Spotify streams to date - 1,031,224,746

Lady Gaga’s big era was completely swallowed up by illness for me so I can’t say for sure if I’d have liked her or not first time around, but I picked up The Fame Monster for a pound last year and since then I’ve been consistently drawn back to it. I think what struck me first about Bad Romance was the sheer violence with which it’s perpetrated. If you listen to it thru tinny headphones on an mp3 player (and as a 2009 release this is surely where it belongs), it is a punishing experience, much like being hit solidly around the head with a club for well over 4 minutes. But while some might think that’s a bad thing, they would in fact be wrong, because that unmitigated beating is actually central to its appeal (to me at least). 

Gaga sings about being “caught in a bad romance” but it’s clear from the start that she’s desperate to ensnare herself, going beyond desire into something wholly deranged. It is, I guess, a kind of emotional (and less off-putting) corollary to “I Like It Rough”, where the pain and the drama, rather than being an unpleasant byproduct, become the goal of the relationship itself. As she dementedly wails at the high point of the song, she really doesn’t want to be friends. 

Another pair for the #FearOfMu21c project, crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. An index post.

Summer girl - Haim

Trying to conjure up a bit of hope on a dark day, this soft jazz number features "doo-doo"s and a calm vocal. There's a lazy bassline, perhaps a bit too close to the wild side, and eventually a sax solo.

"Summer girl" was inspired by the time Danielle Haim's lover had a cancer diagnosis. She wrote, "I wanted to be his hope when he was feeling hopeless, so I kept singing these lines." But the song works without the back story, it's a light sorbet, the musical equivalent of a refreshing glass of Pimms in the heatwave.

The song's a bit different from earlier Haim work, less polished, more skittish, but keeping the harmonies and emotional intimacy that had become Haim's trademark. Written by Danielle, Alana, and Este Haim, their producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Rostam Batmanglij, and Lou Reed gets royalties for the fraction of "Walk on the wild side".

Turn off the light - Nelly Furtado

I could have picked any of a dozen singles by Nelly Furtado. The debut, "I'm like a bird", with soaring vocals. The whole "Loose" album, "Maneater" and "Promiscuous" and many more. "Big hoops" from the forgotten album Spirit Indestructible. Even "Forza" from Folklore - in retrospect, it sounds great next to other great fado and Portuguese songs.

"Turn off the light" gets my nod. Second single from "Whoa, Nelly!", it's a well-written song with a strong dance beat. Nelly had already turned ears for the mixture of sounds and textures; here, Nelly uses her lyrical prowess to make poetry from the mundane. The video features Nelly around the world, colourful and dark, wet and warm. Sounds a bit like a song by Edie Brickell? Not hearing it myself, but maybe that's swamp mud in my ears…

Another two for the #FearOfMu21c project, crowdsourcing the greatest singles of the 21st century. Here’s an index post.

"If you love someone" - The Veronicas

Gothpop twins Jessica and Lisa Origliasso have been making great music for most of the century. They've gone from power pop (4ever, All about us) through synth-dance (Untouched), and then into an era of molten Barbie poured into a crucible with black eyeliner. Or something like that.

"If you love someone" comes from The Veronicas' 2014 eponymous album, itself following five years of development hell and a transfer from Warner Brothers to Sony. There's anger on the album, most notably on the sarcastic "Did you miss me". The song's co-written by Lisa and Jessica, their regular collaborator Josh Katz, and songwriting powerhouse DNA Music.

And it's happy, upbeat, inclusive. A big giant hug for all the queers, all the misfits, all the people who don't quite fit into Normal Bread Society. Yes, it's a simple and universal emotion, expressed in an uncomplicated way. And sometimes, the simple stuff is just right.

"Sk8er boi" - Avril Lavigne

Speaking of simple concepts: "He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?"

Avril Lavigne splashed onto the scene in summer 2002, and snotty bratty mall-punks around the world found their eyes popping out on stalks. "Complicated" had an interesting video; "Sk8er boi" was the soundtrack to rebellion. A youthful, limited, acting out against the system rebellion.

Written by Avril with powerpop trio The Matrix, "Sk8er boi" tells of a doomed romance between a posh ballet superstar who spurns the advances of a snotty bratty skater boy. By concluding with the news that Avril gets with the skater, we're spared the problem of explaining a genderbent Mary Sue to 2002.

The song is a blast. Literally: it begins at high volume and doesn't stop. The lyric starts as simple, staccatto phrases - until it gets complex. There's plenty of music to be had - power pop chords, hook after hook, and Avril shows she can sing. But it's the energy that impresses - "Sk8er boi" sees the line between "milquetoast" and "too loud", dances along it, turns a few cartwheels, and ends by making an iconic hand gesture in our face.

It's one of Avril's signature songs, alongside "Complicated" and 2007's "Girlfriend" - all three made my longlist for this project.

The Ophelias - Lunar Rover

Released - July 2 2018

Ofc it didn't chart

Spotify streams to date - 116,732

One of the recurring features in this list has been to hear the opening bars of a song and suddenly find myself on the verge of bursting into tears. Sometimes it’s to do with nostalgia: Lunar Rover reminds me of the summer of 2018, a time when my life appeared to have changed for the better, and that’s definitely part of how charged it is for me. But a lot of it comes from hearing a song that’s already destroyed me time and again. Again, that is something that I get from Lunar Rover.

In essence it’s a bittersweet love song, where regret after a break up can’t mask the oppressive nature of the relationship. But despite the depth of feeling at its heart, Lunar Rover always sounds cool and deliberate: from Spencer Peppet’s immaculately precise phrasing to the clipped swirl of violins that runs thru the chorus, there’s a crisp commercial vibe here that masks some of the more uncomfortable contents. Lyrically, the song’s ambiguity is tied up in a number of striking lines - “you are a light to me and I keep you around”  is one of my favourites in the entire list - as it moves from romance to desperation and back again in little more than the blink of an eye.