"UK GARAGE, MY ARSE!" '50 Ways The Alternative Nation is Fighting Back' 13th anniversary POLL

some OK stuff in this list http://tinyurl.com/pv7b4qg
but the avalanches were terrible

RUN!

Why were they so excited about a solo career from a member of Three Colours Red in 2000?

Even at the time it was obvious that this was an atrocious period for guitar pop.

I never got why the NME/MM took the side of 3 Colours Red over The WIldhearts.

They were exactly the same.

no they weren't

ruh roh Matt

Melody Maker End Of Year Critic Lists - 2000

Albums

1. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
2. Coldplay – Parachutes
3. Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour Of The Bewilderbeast
4. Primal Scream – Exterminator
5. Radiohead – Kid A
6. Manson – Little Kix
7. Pj Harvey – Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
8. Elastica – The Menace
9. Limp Bizkit – Chocolate Starfish
10. JJ72 – JJ72
11. Doves – Lost Souls
12. Granddaddy – The Sophtware Slump
13. Idlewild – 100 Broken Windows
14. Embrace – Drawn From Memory
15. At The Drive-In – Relationship Of Command
16. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Madonna
17. The Dandy Warhols – Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
18. Queens Of The Stone Age – Rated R
19. Teenage Fanclub – Howdy!
20. Belle And Sebastian – Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant
21. Fatboy Slim – Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars
22. Sigur Ros – Agaetis Byrjun
23. The Delgados – The Great Eastern
24. Super Furry Animals – Mwng
25. Black Box Recorder – The Facts Of Life
26. The Webb Brothers – Maroon
27. Placebo – Black Market Music
28. Yo La Tengo – And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
29. The Offspring – Conspiracy Of One
30. Lambchop – Nixon
31. Eels – Daisies Of The Galaxy
32. Marilyn Manson – Holywood….
33. Roni Size Reprazent – In The Mode
34. Baby Bird – Bugged
35. Madonna – Music
36. Daphne And Celeste – We Didn’t Say That
37. Asian Dub Foundation – Community Music
38. Six By Seven – The Closer You Get
39. Oasis – Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
40. Brassy – Got It Made
41. Crashland – Glued
42. Cypress Hill – Skull And Bones
43. Kylie Minogue – Light Years
44. Soulwax – Much Againset Everyone’s Advice
45. The Vandals – Look What I Almost Stepped In
46. Sleater-Kinney – All Hands On The Bad One
47. The Go-Betweens – The Friends Of Rachael Worth
48. Nofx – Pump Up The Valuum
49. Green Day – Warning
50. Deftones – White Pony

Singles

1. Spiller – Groovejet
2. Eminem – Stan
3. Coldplay – Yellow
4. The Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch
5. Eminem – The Real Slim Shady
6. Primal Scream – Accelerator
7. Limp Bizkit – Take A Look Around
8. Mint Royal – Don’t Falter
9. Queens Of The Stone Age – Feelgood Hit Of The Summer
10. Blink 182 – All The Small Things
11. Sisqo – Thong Song
12. Eminem – The Way I Am
13. Death In Vegas – Aisha
14. Daphne And Celeste – Ugly
15. Manson – I Can Only Disappoint U
16. Doves – The Cedar Room
17. Black Box Recorder – The Facts Of Life
18. Manic Street Preachers – Masses Against The Classes
19. Primal Scream – Kill All Hippies
20. Blur – Music Is My Radar
21. Belle And Sebastian – Legal Man
22. Idlewild – Actually It’s Darkness
23. The Offspring – Original Prankster
24. At The Drive-In – One Armed Scissor
25. Madonna – Music
26. PJ Harvey – Good Fortune
27. Cypress Hill – Rock Superstar
28. All Saints – Pure Shores
29. JJ72 – October Swimmer
30. Coldplay – Trouble
31. Sugarbabes – Overload
32. Daphne & Celeste – Ooh Stick You
33. Limp Bizkit – My Generation
34. Placebo – Slave To The Wage
35. Queens Of The Stone Age – The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret
36. Fatboy Slim – Sunset [Bird Of Prey]
37. Kylie Minogue – Spinning Around
38. Dr Dre – Still Dre
39. Moloko – The Time Is Now
40. King Adora – Bionic
41. Travis – Coming Around
42. Dr Dre – Forget About Dre
43. Babybird – Out Of Sight
44. Idlewild – Those Wooden Ideas
45. Doves – Catch The Sun
46. Britney Spears – Oops!! She Did It Again!
47. Muse – Muscle Museum
48. The Dandy Warhols – Bohemian Like You
49. Outkast – Bob
50. Oasis – Go Let It Out

MM did like Idlewild in 2000 nakh.

Genuine lol at the Thong Song at #11 there. Way to fight back dudes.

loving dog latin's trollingly misunderstanding schoolkids

annoyed to discover that that Laverne solo track actually appeared on a CD, and that it was this

b) when i was a hipster teen reading the music press i felt like i was sitting in at the grown-ups table. obv there's a lot of subjectivity here but its hard to believe that kids reading crap like this didn't feel pandered to

this was punishingly obvious at the time, the desperation of Sutherland* feeling out of touch and constantly trying to second-guess what a non-existent amorphous group comprising The Kids would be into, and suck up to them in advance. terrified of their own aging and irrelevance.

*DYS

xpost Did a piece about Sub Pop recently, and Steve Turner of Mudhoney cited the YoYos to exemplify all that was wrong with late-90s Sub Pop.

From my pov this is definitely the time I stopped reading the music press. Obviously there were other factors at play - the Internet, the fact I was over 18 etc - but until then I remember mags like select, mm, nme being genuinely fun to read. Select became dreadful in this era too - endless irrelevant Oasis front covers, it wasn't the same. I felt like I was being SOLD to for the first time. Maybe I was just older and wiser or maybe the music press just went shit. Or both, who knows..

this is probably the most amazing list i've ever read

Less Than Jake and a host of punk heroes do it for the kids. Take note, Placebo et al!

15. CHRIS McCORMACK - He’s back! Grand Theft Audio thankfully great, former 3 Colours Red hero Chris as barmy as ever.

man i was worried he wasn't as barmy as he used to be

i stopped reading the weekly music press the week my first child arrived in the world at the end of 96 (louise werner was on the cover of the nme - felt that it was a good time to break the bond).
hence i had no idea re this era of MM.
clearly i didn't miss much .

(louise werner was on the cover of the nme - felt that it was a good time to break the bond)

I remember an amazing MM issue with Wener on the cover, and three ALMOST-IDENTICAL photos of her side-by-side on the center spread, with the same hand on hips pose and light-on-gorm mouth open, just with a minutely different cast of the hips.

Obviously the photo editor was aghast at her uselessness as a subject and decided to make a subtle silent protest

8. LONDON'S TRASH CLUB- Revitalising indie clubs with style and eclecticism.

was that simon price?

Price was Stay Beautiful. I went to that once.

Grandaddy were my favourite band c.2000 + I really liked Black Box Recorder but I also owned the Brassy album.

IIRC Trash was Erol Alkan and was all electroclash + Kate Moss + 'sleazy glamour'; Stay Beautiful I don't really remember what it's 'thing' was but probably all Manics + Bowie + really obvious token northern soul record once an hour.

There's not a whole lot of Stay Beautiful/post-romo/Placebo type stuff on this list with the exception of King Adora.

Hadn't Simon Price left MM under a cloud not long before this?

Stay Beautiful #1 took place on Wed 10 Jan 2001 according to the Stay Beautiful website.

I guess ‘LITTLE KIX’ is another example of this sort of stuff that made it onto the list.

Hadn't Simon Price left MM under a cloud not long before this?

He tweeted earlier

Simon Price ‏@simon_price01 3h

Basically, MM 2000: "Enough of these black people, with their exciting and futuristic pop! We must fight back with Toploader and Travis!"

Simon Price ‏@simon_price01 3h

I left Melody Maker in 1997, with the escape route of a contract to write a Manics book. Looking at that list, I couldn't be more grateful.

Simon Price ‏@simon_price01 3h

Some of the things on that MM list are genuinely great, and don't deserve to be tarnished by association with Mark's Kampf. But the rest...

THE MUSIC WE PLAY

WE PLAY: DIRTY SLEAZY GLAM AND GLITTER ROCK // ANGSTY BOY-MUSIC AND SHOUTY GRRL-MUSIC // HI-VOLTAGE ELECTRO AND FUCKED-UP DISCO // '77 PUNK AND ALTERNATIVE ANTHEMS // …AND A FLASH DASH OF POP TRASH
Not a lot of black people on the Stay Beautiful playlist either, to be honest:

by which we mean things like...

Adam And The Ants * Babes In Toyland * Bikini Kill * Blondie * David Bowie * Kate Bush* Buzzcocks * The Cramps * The Cure * Daisy Chainsaw * The Damned * Dead Or Alive * Dresden Dolls * Duran Duran * Fischerspooner * Gogol Bordello * Goldfrapp * The Gossip * Guns N' fckn' Roses * Hedwig And The Angry Inch * Hole * Horrorpops * Huggy Bear * IAMX * Iggy Pop * Interpol * Jack Off Jill * Joan Jett * Joy Division * Kenickie * King Adora * Kiss * Kylie * Lady Gaga * Ladytron * Le Tigre * Manic Street Preachers * Marilyn Manson * Mansun * Mindless Self Indulgence * Minty * Motley Crue * New York Dolls * Nine Inch Nails * Party Monster * Peaches * Pink Grease * Pixies * Placebo * Prince * Public Image Ltd * Pulp * Queen Adreena * Rachel Stamp * Ramones * Robots In Disguise * The Rolling Stones * Roxy Music * The Runaways * Shangri-La’s * Sex Pistols * Shampoo * Siouxsie And The Banshees * Patti Smith * The Smiths * Soft Cell * Sparks * Gwen Stefani * The Stooges * Suede * The Sweet * T. Rex * T.A.T.U. * Velvet Goldmine * Patrick Wolf * Yeah Yeah Yeahs * X-Ray Spex, etc (you get the idea)

I like Simon Price though, if the 2000 era Melody Maker had chosen to base itself on that canon I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

instead it covered nu-metal

Not a lot of black people on the Stay Beautiful playlist either, to be honest:

I regretted writing that as soon as I posted it, it seems like such a crass thing to say. It just seemed odd that Price was complaining about the Sutherland era MM/that list not covering black artists when the Stay Beautiful playlist is just as white, but obvs there's a difference between a weekly music magazine and a clubnight you put on covering a particular kind of music, and Price wasn't advertising Stay Beautiful with posters of a Craig David on the bog or rhetoric about reclaiming the charts for 'our music' so it's not really the same thing. Also, I realise that white people using 'black artists' as ammunition to score points against white people is dangerous territory (not that I was trying to score points against Price, basically I'm sorry for saying stupid things is my point.

Contender for most thoughtful and self aware post ever on ILX. Suggest ban.

whatever happened to craig david anyway? lighthouse family and david grey were huge for 1 album and disappeared to (the mm alt nation stuff just disappeared)

I'm fairly sure Bo" Selecta! killed Craig David's career.

I'm voting for 46. DUM DUMS- Taking the boy bands on at their own game. And winning.

http://chartarchive.org/a/dum+dums

They really were winning with those chart positions.

yeah Bo Selecta didn't help him none.

He changed his image so he no longer resembled the puppet

What's amusing me about the Stay Beautiful playlist is that I genuinely thought it was an original early-00s playlist until I saw Lady Gaga in the middle as the one concession to the last decade.

Although if I had a bottomless pit of money and even less self-awareness (and I long every day for both) I would start my own club night with a suspiciously pre-2005 playlist with even less popular appeal than Rachel Stamp apparently have in 2013, so Price is still ahead of me there

oh man if i ran my own club night there wd be about 12 people in there but it wd be the best

That was pretty much what happened with mine.

in retrospect bo selecta was pretty shockingly explicitly racist

it certainly wasn't funny

Funnily enough circa the time of this very MM issue I was very tangentially involved with a group of people running a club night, which clutched at every micro-hype going including some of the ones on this list in a desperate bid not to get kicked out for something more profitable, and still only got 12 people through the door. So I was thinking of figures closer to the 0 mark, but yeah.

Any Brightonians know how well attended Stay Beautiful is these days? (It seems there is one on tonight but don't go just to report back. Ugh, have I been tricked into street-teaming?)

in my limited provincial experience tho (and i have no idea how things work in the bigger cities) running anything like a viable club night involves playing the same obvious demeaning shite week in week out to crowds of music-hating twats who are terrified of anything they don't know

students you mean? or "normal" people?

students probly worse but make up more of the market

I would have thought the more um "meatmarket" clubs made up most of the nightclub market.

esp in provincial towns

if you're suggesting that students and meatmarket clubs are mutually exclusive then this is very offtm, certainly in my experience

oh i wasnt

meatmarkets with different music

Oh the glory days when ILM/Freaky Trigger/Poptimism was on a mission.

there's not many meatmarket clubs per se round here, late pub opening has blurred the lines and the old school clubs are gone - maybe a couple just the other side of the river - but the few functioning nightclubs are catering to a studentish crowd on the whole. also the line between students and any young people in the 18-25 bracket is v. blurry except at the extreme end of the underclasses

on the other hand, the last time i passed thru Wakefield it was like a National Trust heritage site for the 80s

also i probably wasn't clear about the crushing repetition of the playlists - i got no ish with the pop/dance/r'n'b nights, it's the more studenty "another chance to hear the indie canon from 1980 on" shite that crushes the soul