Was Music Better Ten Years Ago?
Don’t look back in anger
Hey, does anybody remember The Big Pink? One moment they were the Next Big Thing, and then… we hardly heard of them (except when Nikki Minaj sampled them a couple of years later).
Or how about the Ting Tings and their maddeningly catchy indie-pop? There wasn’t a party where “Shut Up And Let Me Go” or “That’s Not My Name” wouldn’t pop up at some point, in what was really too much of a good thing. It was only one example of indie bands latching on to Blondie’s mix of pop and punk.
Indie rockers were moving in droves to Blondie-land, and we were such snobs that we dismissed them wholesale. Thus we didn’t truly appreciate “Heavy Cross” by Gossip for what it was worth. But that was not our worst offence.
We really shunned Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Heads Will Roll” as a ploy to remain hip and significant by going Blondie. The now-classic A-Trak remix that somehow goes straight to the core of the song’s greatness was not yet a thing, but we’ve been dancing to it non-stop since then.
We’re ashamed to admit it, but back then we snubbed Lady Gaga’s now-classic “Bad Romance“. To be fair we were on board with her awesomeness pretty quickly afterwards, putting her Beyoncé collaboration “Telephone” on the following year’s list. Still a pop masterpiece, it’s probably the best Gaga has done till this day (and let’s not even talk about “Shallow”… we will definitely not regret ignoring that!)
And we somehow missed Charlotte Gainsbourg’s amazing collaboration with Beck, “Heaven Can Wait“. It came out too close to the end of the year and we latched onto it a few weeks too late, so it fell between the cracks and never appeared on a year’s roundup. We still think the song and the album it came from are bona-fide classics. The effortless cool of our two protagonists amongst the arty weirdness that happens in the video just confirms their iconic status.
A special shout out for the most annoyingly entertaining single of that year, Helmut Fritz’ “Ca M’Enérve!” A huge hit in French-speaking countries, it was guaranteed to fill any dancefloor. A thought as well to the enduring “Ooh La La” by Goldfrapp.
If we had to list our Top Eleven Songs of 2009 today, they’d look something like this:
Noize Annoyz 