Bands of the Decade continued (Chris' 15-11)

Graham continued his countdown and let it slip that Death Cab for Cutie would be higher on his list. Then again, he let his Canadian bias get in the way already so I’m expecting to see Celine Dion ruin his credibility when he gets to the top 5. Enough about Graham’s music, he’s my bands of the decade continuance.

15. The Dandy Warhols
Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia would make my top 10 albums of the decade. It’s pop, it’s grunge, it’s mellow. It’s a roller coaster of awesomeness. They followed that up with Welcome to the Monkey House which has the uber-catchy dance-rock song “We Used to be Friends” and the tongue-in-check “The Last High.” I guess I’m slipping in my old age, but I didn’t realize The Dandys had so many albums come out this decade. I’ll have to check the others out, although I already know that Odditorium of the Warlords is fair. Bonus points for this band being in the spectacular documentary DiG! Here’s one of the best songs of the decade.



14. Badly Drawn Boy
Aka Damon Grough who plays music like he’s the British love-child of Elliott Smith and Ben Folds, minus the heroin addiction and sarcasm. Badly Drawn Boy has clever pop music that’s heavy on piano and serious enough without being depressing. He’s had 5 albums in the decade with Have You Fed the Fish being the best. Listen to this and thank me later.



13. Foo Fighters
I know Graham will have the Foos in his top 10 and most likely his top 5. I’m completely okay with this. They’re a great band. I know what I’m getting with the Foo Fighters every time they release an album. It’s going to have some hard rock songs, some catchy riffs and lyrics and one or two mellow acoustic songs. It’s a good formula that’s been working and they’re easily one of the best live bands out there. I’ve only got one problem with this band. “Everlong” is so awesome and nothing else they do comes close. They’re judged against themselves and they fail. It’s an impossible test to pass considering music doesn’t mean as much to me or carry the same importance as it did when I was in my late teens. I’m not sure if it’s the same for everyone. Regardless, 13 is as high as I could get for this band this decade. It’s still top 15 guys! Here’s my favorite Foo Fighters song of the decade from a show I was at:



12. Pete Yorn
I’m not as down on good ole’ Pete as Graham is. Then again, I haven’t listed to any of his duet album with Scarlett Johansson. All I know about Pete Yorn is this: I like him. I know that his last 2 albums aren’t as good as his first 2, but they still hold up. I really like “Paradise Cove” from his album earlier this year. There’s nothing wrong with mellowing out when you get older Graham, come on.



11. Red Hot Chili Peppers
My argument against the Foo Fighters is that they peaked with “Everlong” and every song is held to that standard. My argument for the Red Hot Chili Peppers is that they’ve progressed immensely from their early ‘90s post-punk/funk/alternative days. I can easily say that their best albums are their last three (two of them this decade).

The Decade in Music - Part 1a.

I originally proposed to Graham about 5 months ago that we get a jump on the “best of the decade” thing that’s going to happen and list our favorite new bands of the decade. Naturally, we procrastinated and I ended up deleting my original list. So what does Graham do over Thanksgiving? He proposes we do our top 20 bands of the decade. How novel.

Since Graham gave his back-story on the differences between 2000 and 2009 in his life, here’s mine. On the cusp of 2000, I was living in my first apartment, had just finished my 1st semester of college with a 4.0 and was kinda hoping YK2 turned the world into Mad Max. Now, I’m married, have 2 college degrees and still kinda wish Y2k turned the world into Mad Max.

Before I get into my top 20 bands of the decade, here’s who just missed the cut.

I really like some of these bands but if they only have 1 album that’s good, or great, I can’t call them a band of the decade. I’m sure they’ll be hurt. These bands include: Vampire Weekend, Evan Dando, Justin Clayton, Bloc Party and MGMT.

If the majority of your music in the decade was released after you died, then you missed the cut as well. I’m talking about Elliott Smith. I guess I shouldn’t say “he missed the cut,” huh?

A few bands get an incomplete cause I need to listen to them more: Earlimart, Wolf Parade and Of Montreal.

Lastly, these guys put out some good music but nothing I would put in the “amazing” category: Sam Roberts, Phantom Planet, Weezer, Mando Diao and Silversun Pickups. Weezer is one of my favorites but The Red Album is so bad that I have to penalize them.

20. The Hives
When making out this list I try and remember how good the music was one it first came out and not just how it sounds now. The Hives were the garage band du jour that I jumped on, as opposed to The White Stripes. Plus, bonus points for The Hives being one of the best live shows I’ve seen.


19. Coldplay
It’s pretty cool to dislike Coldplay these days. It’s not that hard considering Chris Martin turned out to be a nut and they push Apple more than Justin Long. But how can they not be a band of the decade? They’re absolutely huge and it’s because Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head were solid. Plus, this song still holds up. It’s even better cause it shows how nutty Chris Martin is.


18. The Flaming Lips
I really like The Flaming Lips simply because most of their early music is terrible. After loving The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi I went back and listed to their earlier stuff and was amazed at how bad it was. It’s night and day. Anyway, I’d put Yoshimi in the top 10 of the decade and At War With the Mystics is decent. Plus, The Flaming Lips did some of the best covers of the decade as well (Radiohead, Kylie Minogue, Queen).


17. Nada Surf
Easily the most underrated band of the decade. They’re on the cusp of popularity mostly because they were a one hit wonder in the ‘90s. I don’t even know what made me buy Let Go but it’s on of my favorite albums start to finish. There isn’t a weak link in there. It’s a great winter album too, pretty mellow, not too depressing. Their last album was pretty average, but The Weight is a Gift is pretty good as well.


16. Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service
If I can’t include Ben Gibbard’s side project, Postal Service, then they wouldn’t make the cut. Death Cab is pretty good. Other than Transatlanticism, everything else seems to be pretty normal. But the Postal Service album, Give Up, is one of the best of the decade. Here’s my favorite:


I'm guessing Graham will throw out his next 5 and we'll go from there.

The Decade in Music - Part 1

10 years ago, I was making $22,000 a year as a small-town newspaper reporter while living alone in a studio apartment. In the intervening 10 years I got a job in the NBA, moved with that team to Memphis, got married, had a kid, moved to Portland, bought a house, and became an extraordinary Wii Mario Kart player.

Now that’s a decade.

With the aughts coming to an end, it’s time to look back, specifically to the music. In my triumphant return to sporadic blogging, I will spend the next few weeks counting down the 20 best artists of the decade, in increments of five at a time.

A few caveats: there will be no rap or country on this list. I don’t like either genre and I’m not throwing in Jay-Z or Keith Urban just to make it look like I have a wide array of music tastes. Also, there was a time I was much more invested in music, knew all the up-and-coming indie bands and moaned years later when they got big. But now I’m not really in a position to stay up until 3 a.m. listening to five new CDs, while dissecting the lyrics and liner notes. So this won’t exactly be the hippest list, but that’s what happens when you become old and lame.

With that out of the way, on to the list:

Honorable mentions:

These bands were in the running for this prestigious list, but ultimately got squeezed out: Weezer, Josh Ritter, U2 (only for All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and nothing since), The Decemberists, Phoenix (It took a while, but 1901 really grew on me, and Lisztomania is also very good. Nice breakout performance), Franz Ferdinand (their eponymous debut is terrific, everything since has been a desperate attempt to recapture that magic), the Shout Out Louds and Modest Mouse.

#20: MGMT
There weren’t many songs that were more fun in the decade than Time to Pretend. A hopelessly catchy danceable song skewering celebrities who become train wrecks since they have the world at their feet and don’t know what to do with it. Also, my bet is that Lindsay Lohan has no idea the song is meant to be ironic.



#19: …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

I’d caught on to these guys after hearing Relative Ways off their Source Tags and Codes album, and eagerly bought their follow up, Worlds Apart. It was a decent album with a few standouts, including a song called The Rest Will Follow. It was an enjoyable enough album, then a few weeks after its release they were on Letterman, and did The Rest Will Follow live.

And they blew the fucking roof off.



To this day this remains my favorite late night performance of all-time, especially when punctuated with Paul Shaffer's "Whoa!" at the end of the performance. And more importantly, the strength of that performance, along with their song Source Tags and Codes being used in a tremendous Friday Night Lights scene, gets them #19 on my list.

#18: Explosions in the Sky
Hey, speaking of Friday Night Lights…The preferred band of the best television show of the decade (that’s right) gets in at #18.

In 1999, when I still liked Limp Bizkit (I don’t want to talk about it), if you’d told me in 10 years I’d be digging a band doing sweeping 12-minute songs with no singing, I would have told you that’d be as likely as a pro sports team moving to Memphis.

But here they are. And really, is it even possible not to like these guys? A lot of bands write songs that are anthemic, but how many write songs that are epic? This is epic music. Every time I hear it, I feel like I can lift the nearest car. This is big music, this is music they should be using in the climactic scenes of movies. So how is it that only the producers of the Friday Night Lights movie and tv show have figured this out?

You know what, I don’t care. Check out The Birth and Death of the Day and tell me you don’t get a chill:



#17: Green Day
Talk about a career progression. They went from writing snarky two-minute punk/pop songs to writing the anthemic (there’s that word again) American Idiot album. And that was a hell of an album, especially when you consider the best song is a sprawling multi-part, nine-minute opus that encapsulates modern disaffected teenagers. So yeah, they came a long way from All By Myself.



#16: Bloc Party
They’d be much higher on this list had they not completely botched their second album. Still, you can’t take away the greatness of Silent Alarm. That album jumps from anger to outrage to fun to earnest and rarely hits a false note.

I don’t know what it says about me that my favorite song is a straight forward love song that contains exactly 59 words, but here you go (and Here We Are):

Ole Miss-Tennessee preview, er, sorta

Your morals and personal code aren’t written down on a list and followed each day. They’re developed over time. Sometimes you don’t even know how you feel about a subject until a line in the sand is drawn and you have to pick a side. For me, that day is today. I have to pick who to cheer for in the Tennessee-Ole Miss football game.

Living in the South means that you have to pay attention to college football. If you have balls, I mean. I can’t be totally invested in college football for the following reasons:

1. The outcome of most games is easy to predict. The talent discrepancy between the haves and have-nots is the difference in 95% of the games.
2. There is no prevalent fantasy game that revolves around college football.
3. My alma mater, the University of Memphis, sucks.

Regardless, football is football and I watch. Since, as mentioned above, I live in the South and my alma mater sucks, I spend the majority of my time cheering against teams. It’s fun and it’s easy. My two favorite teams to hate are Tennessee and Ole Miss. But today, my plan of cheering against these guys is ruined. They play each other. What’s a half-hearted pessimist to do. Let’s break down the pros and cons of each school and figure out who in the hell to cheer for.

The Cities

Knoxville looks like a glorified truck stop. I hate it. I don’t know how it’s scientifically possible but everywhere you walk is up a hill. The only redeeming part of Knoxville is that I once saw a Krystal-eating contest there. This is both awesome and pathetic when talking about a city’s most redeeming quality.

Oxford, it’s quaint, it’s got some trees and Hardees, so yeah, it’s alright. I can see the value in this place, if, and only if, every Ole Miss graduate didn’t talk about Oxford like it was the location of God’s orgasm during creation.

Winner: Oxford

The Coaches

Lane Kiffin is a brash, arrogant SOB. However, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t done anything to deserve this. I’m pretty sure the only thing he’s done to date is get fired by Al Davis and be proud of losing games in a somewhat competitive fashion.

Houston Nutt is the ideal Ole Miss coach. He looks like the type of guy that would get shot by Dick Cheney while hunting, which is what Ole Miss fans are looking for.

Winner: Houston Nutt

The Teams

Tennessee players commit armed robbery with pellet guns.

Ole Miss players can’t read (see the last paragraph here) and steal from hotel rooms.

Winner: Lawyers

The Cheer

Rocky Top Tennessee is hands down the worst song to ever be created. I’d rather be stuck in the Branch Davidian Compound and be forced to hear “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” about 3,000 times before I hear Rocky Top again.

Hotty Toddy is a drunken rant. I can accept this. However, to hear the same drunken rant 272 times before you enter the football stadium is one too many. The good news is that you don’t have to hear the chant that much during the game since Ole Miss usually sucks and the fans have nothing to cheer for.

Winner: No one

The Fans

This is really what I care about. I don’t really want Tennessee or Ole Miss to lose because I care about the actual players or coaching staff. I’ve come into contact with too many of their fans and it brings me joy to think about these people experiencing loss.

Tennessee fans on the east side of the state are mostly hillbilly conservative clichés that bleed orange and white, drink moonshine, beat their wife, sleep with their cousin and vote for the white guy, er, Republican. (I can’t really vouch for any of this since I’ve been to Knoxville a total of 3 times and hung out with friends from the suburbs, but I don’t mind writing about stereotypes.) Tennessee fans here in Memphis drive me nuts. Most of them attended Tennessee for 1-2 semesters, drank a lot of beer, failed their classes and had their parents make them come home. They then went to the University of Memphis but proudly remain UT fans, you know, cause they spent a total of 4 months there and all. Drives me nuts. Then again, you have these other people who, for some unbeknownst reason, cheer for Tennessee in football and then the University of Memphis in basketball. They’re frontrunners. I can’t stand this either. Look buddy, pick a school and cheer for them. It’s not that hard. People don’t cheer for Ohio State basketball and Michigan football. Ugh.

Ole Miss males all have haircuts like this. It’s amazing. Seriously, go to Oxford on a Saturday and you’ll see 10,000 20-40 year old dudes with this haircut. It’s almost like they are genetically predetermined to go to Ole Miss. These guys generally drink way too much, invented date-rape, wear shirts and ties to football games and vote for the white guy, er, Republican. They hate every other SEC school and constantly have an inflated sense of their team. Every preaseason they talk about how bad ass their team is, although most years they end up somewhere between 3-7 and 7-3. I’ll give them credit for one thing: they don’t cheer for Memphis basketball. Thank God.

Winner: No one

So it looks like the final score is in favor of Ole Miss by a margin of 2-0-3. However, I just remember that I picked Tennessee in my work pool, so screw it, I’ll cheer for anything that gives me a chance at money. Go Vols. I just threw up in my mouth.


Chris

Rockin the Suburbs Book Preview Continued

A while back I gave a preview of my coffee table book idea, "Homoerotic Sports Pictures." Here's the second preview:


Does this guy ever live this picture down? I bet his friends made t-shirts out of it.


What are the chances he's saying, "You smell good?"


He's not allowed with 20 feet of a school yet he can ref wrestling matches?


Europeans are weird.


As far as homoerotic sports pictures go, this is the Mona Lisa.


Now that's what I call going for the ball, zing!


No wonder this is Graham's favorite sport.


This is the opposite of how I'd celebrate something.


The Lakers are always screwing someone over, aren't they?


This gives no meaning to "taking a charge."


Chris

We're still too lazy to write so here's another video

I want to make a video like this about Memphis, you know, if actual work wasn't involved.

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

YouTube Friday

It's a little early, but happy Friday. If you didn't know why they called him Rampage, here's a good clip why.





Chris

The Rant

I wouldn’t say that RTS is back, but we’re on the right track. What better way to bring 30-something white men together than to complain about inane things that matter not? (PS: I’m 29, but it’s easier just to round up).

I was watching Wayne’s World last night on Fuse and there was a commercial for Fuse music programming. The ad said something along the lines of, “Check out Fuse’s new music experience every Friday at midnight, featuring music videos, news and tour information for hot bands such as Paramore and Cold War Kids and classics like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.” Now this is a show I have to watch. They’re going to give me news and tour information about Nirvana? Holy hell.

I watched the most recent The Office this morning from my DVR. There was a special mayor election in Memphis Thursday night when the recording took place. During the entire episode of The Office I had to watch half of the TV devoted to updated results. First, the guy that won was winning in a landslide. Do I really need a scrolling update to see that someone went from being up 50,000 votes to being up 55,000 votes over a 30 minute span? Also, do I really need to see EVERY candidate’s result. Thanks for telling me that Joe Crazy currently has 13 votes. I really need this update. And while we’re here, I think I could get at least 100 votes for mayor. Who in the hell are these people running and getting 13 votes? Lastly, why does local news impose itself? I should start a morning news update podcast or weblog and here’s how it would go: Murder, Car Jacking, Corrupt Local Government, Memphis Tigers, Memphis Grizzlies, School Violence, Weather.Done.

Pictures like this make me feel better about my high school experience.

I was watching college football today and ABC was counting down the top 30 plays of the last 30 years. #21 was the infamous Colorado 5th down play against Missouri to win the game. Really, an official’s error that cost a team a chance at a national upset is what you would consider one of the best plays of the last 30 years? I would say that’s one of the worst 30 plays. And while we’re here, how did AP voters continue to vote for Colorado as a top team when they had to have 5 downs to win a game? Couldn’t you just rank them as the 10th best team for the rest of the year to balance that out? And yes, I’m ranting about something that happened almost 20 years ago.

What is up with ad men these days? First, Keystone Light is advertising that their beer is “smooth.” Is this really the road you want to go down Keystone, talking about how smooth your beer is? Why don’t you just say, “Hell, it’s cheap and it’ll get you drunk.” And Macy’s was adverting about their low everyday prices and then showed some crappy sweater for $40. Yes, I’m ranting about cheap beer and Macy’s at the same time. Both companies should be ashamed.

And this is why Graham and I blog together. While I was compiling my rant about lame advertisements, Graham emailed me this gem.

So Portland has been granted an MLS expansion team for the 2011 season, pending a new stadium. Anyway, last week they unveiled a new marketing campaign that reads like this: "Barcelona, Milan, Liverpool, Madrid, Portland. We're finally on the world's pitch".Are you fing kidding me? I'm sorry, did the MLS suddenly merge with the European premier leagues? I know I don't follow soccer, but that seems like the kind of thing I would have heard about. Seriously, that ad is just infuriating. If there were any truth to it, it would read:"Columbus. Kansas City. Salt Lake City. Portland. We're finally among the mid-level cities trying hard to be major league." And you know what else I hate about soccer? When North America tries to import European teams. Don't call it a pitch, it's an f-ing field. Stop it, MLS. Just stop it.


Chris and Graham

Our 1 Year Anniversary....time for a break

How do you define laziness? How about 2 guys that can't maintain a steady blogging schedule because they have too much football, basketball, hockey and TV to keep up with. Yep, that's us. We're taking a break.


Chris & Graham

YouTube Friday

I love how dated this video is, not just the Vanilla Ice joke, but back when Jim Carrey wasn't uber-famous and still cutting edge. Also, where does In Living Colour rank on sketch comedies? Third behind SNL and Chappelle Show?





Chris