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Beast of Burden
33. Mary Jane Girls, All Night Long

The GTA games, and Vice City in particular, shaped the tastes of an entire generation. I don't think you see the fetishisation of the 80s you get online these days without millions of teenagers growing up on that game.

This almost made my last 100.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
London and New York were rivals for the best music in the world in 94 and 95. London just pipped it in 94, New York just pipped it in 95.
 

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I think a lot of the effect was to grab it at the time, it really sounded incredible in context, even with the exceptionally high standards of hip hop in 1995, which eclipsed jungle in the same year despite London’s world-beating triumph in 1994 (which was also a peak year for hip hop).
Yeah, I got to it in maybe 06/07 and it was just this 'classic album' I'd heard of in the kind of lists which name checked Daydream Nation by that point.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Here’s a fact for you: Jude Rogers was in the same A-Level English class as me in Gorseinon College in 1995-6. She was much smarter than me, and made it to Oxford on straight As and like me obsessed with music. But she was a devotee of the NME, her taste narrowed into a limited but genuine love for Britpop. She once scoffed out loud at me as I entered a lesson, “it’s the return of the Mac!”

Of course, she went on to become a Guardian music writer.
 

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Beast of Burden
There was also a short period of time where I was very friendly with the girlfriend of the boss of Sarah Records, despite my allergy to indie music.
 

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36. Loski, Famlee

Burial does this thing in his later material where he takes traditionally lo-fi sounds like radio static and smoothes them off with EQ and filter sweeps. There's something about it that really gets me, like when the spoon goes through chocolate mousse and leaves a clean yet bubbled texture. It conjures up all these images and associations; smoke blown into a glass, the ghost shark, stealth bombers.

This tune doesn't have the same skip to it some of the other drill stuff does. It lumbers a bit like dubstep did, but there's a tension and release throughout which gives it a bit of a bounce and stops it being too plodding whilst also swerving some of the claustrophobia that comes with the stuff like Moscow Lightwork that never loosens its grip.

 

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37. Infiniti, Game One

This is the kind of thing I was getting at when I made the thread on electricity a while back. It's the sound of coursing power lines. The sound of energy. There's a caustic edge to it, a prickliness. It's just about contained, but could burn through and start spitting like a cobra at any moment. Spengler's proton stream.

 

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39. Public Image Ltd, The Order of Death

I like quite a few PiL songs, but this one's been absolutely rinsed since hearing it in Richard Stanley's Hardware a couple of years ago. The film itself wasn't great - Lemmy's cameo's so wooden it's midly amusing and there are a couple of moments - but being introduced to this more than made up for it. One of those situations where they must've known they'd struck gold. That synth/bass combo's perfection.

 

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41. The Rolling Stones, Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)

One of the few British skating companies with some clout when I was a teenager was a company called Blueprint. It was nice having something like that around as the bulk of the industry was, and probably still is, American and there’s always going to be some distance there. Anyway, Blueprint put out this big, double-disc vid in the mid-’00s called Lost and Found and this was one of the songs on it. Paul Shier skated to it. I wasn’t that taken with his actual skating at the time, but loved the feel of that section and this tune so much I ended up watching it over and over.

Somewhat topical, given the ongoing protests in the US too.

The police in New York City
They chased a boy right through the park
In a case of mistaken identity
They put a bullet through his heart

Heartbreakers with your forty four
I wanna tear your world apart
You heartbreaker with your forty four
I wanna tear your world apart


 
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