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In the beginning, there was Punk. (Ok, it wasn’t the beginning, but it is for this story.) Punk came along because Rock had become fat and lazy. But it didn’t last - The Sex Pistols imploded and Blondie hit the big time. There was some nifty Post-Punk stuff going on, but it got all a bit icky as the 80s progressed. Guitar-ish music hit a funk and was taken over by the fun-lovin’ 80s pop charts. But, huzzah! - there was this new-fangled music they called Rap, or The Hip-Hop. And it was good. And there was Grunge and, following the demise of The One They Called Kurt Cobain, Britpop. They were good, too, but short-lived and everything after it became a sad copy of stolen sounds. In the States, Rock bands were increasingly bloated versions of Nirvana and Pearl Jam until they eventually became Staind and Nickleback. In the UK, S Club Seven and Atomic Kitten took over and anyone with a guitar went into hiding.

But there was still Hip-Hop, so teenagers with ears still had something great to listen to. There was Missy Elliot, and The Fugees (for a little while), and Busta Rhymes, and Outkast, and Mos Def, and the Wu-Tang Clan, and The Roots. Most of those guys are still around, but now they’re considered some sort of Alternative Hip-Hop. They used to be Top 40.

There seems to be some sort of see-saw thing that goes on with Rock and Hip-Hop. For the first time since Britpop fizzled out, Rock is interesting again - and, whether you’re fans or not, we have The Strokes and The White Stripes to thank for it. But while Rock is up, Hip-Hop is down - in a major way. (I’m speaking of Popular/Chart music here. I know there’s always good underground stuff to be found, in any genre.) Who exactly is going to save Popular Hip-Hop now? 50 Cent? The Game? Even Eminem is getting tired. And don’t even get me started on The Black Eyed Peas.

Hip-Hop all sounds the same now, and it’s all ass. There was once a time when it was good to sound different.

“Nowadays everybody tries to copy what the hot style is. There are guys out there that are like Frankensteins, this kind of ghoulish pastiche of Jay-Z and Biggie and Nas and whoever else they feel they need to sound like to get paid,” said writer/historian Brian Coleman. “In the ’80s you’d get laughed off the stage for copying someone else’s style. That was considered heresy.”
(qtd. in “Remembering The Golden Age Of Hip-Hop”)

Personally, I blame Ja Rule. He started the whole skinny-R&B-singer-chorus thing, and now it’s all anyone does, song after song after song.

I stopped listening to Hip-Hop after The Strokes and The White Stripes changed everything, but not because I stopped liking it. It stopped being good.

But I’ve rediscovered The Beat. Everybody’s already blogged their asses off about this, but we should all have copies of both Dizzee Rascal albums, and of M.I.A.’s Arular (which got robbed at the Mercury Awards).

And it’s not just hip-hop beats that are blasting out of my stereo right now. You should all go pick up the Cut Copy’s Bright Like Neon Love - it’s like the 80s, only better. And I was lucky enough to get a copy of The Infadels’ We Are Not The Infadels a few weeks ago, and I’ve been playing in non-stop ever since. It was officially released this week - if you know what’s good for you, you’ll go out right now and get yourself a copy. The Infadels do funk-punk not unlike The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem, but with a lot more punch and more consistent quality. (I love about half of both The Rapture’s and LCD Soundsystem’s efforts, but get a little bored with the other halves.) If you don’t believe me, check out “Love Like Semtex” and “Topboy”, two songs that are already on my Best Of 2006 list.

I sure did miss The Beat.

Here are a few more lists of good stuff from 2005, brought to you by the (entire) staff of 100b. The entries are in no particular order, they’re just things we thought were great and deserved mention.

Concerts Of The Year:

Fine, we lied. The rest of these lists aren’t ranked, but this was definitely The Show Of The Year. From the moment the ’secret’ Strokes tour was announced, 100b obsessed over getting tickets. We never actually imagined that we would. It took 7 hours standing in the freezing cold and a lot of hope, but we did it. And it was more than worth the trouble. We saw The Strokes in 2003 at Amsterdam’s Heineken Music Hall, a venue over 9 times bigger than the Melkweg’s small hall, and it was fantastic. But this show - it blew away all memories of that dumb ole 2003 show. We’d never been part of anything that was such an event. We read the reports from the other shows - the “VIPs” filling the venues, rather than the fans who were willing to stand in line all night. But that didn’t seem to be the case in Amsterdam, the crowd appearing to be at least 90% actual fans. The intense anticipation and excitement of the audience, combined with The Strokes insanely energetic performance made this the single best night of the whole damn year.

Oh, and it was fun to see that loser from MTV (Holland) get told off by The Strokes’ enormous security guy for filming without permission. Tee hee.

We managed to agree on which shows belonged on this list, just not on the order. (Which should explain why we haven’t ranked them.) 100b goes to a lot of concerts (we go see just about anyone who passes through these parts), but these are the ones that really left us speechless. There’s no real need to go into why - you should just go check them out for yourself and you’ll see what we’re talking about.

Tracks Of The Year:

Bright Eyes, “When The President Talks To God”
Kanye West, “Golddigga”
Devendra Banhart, “I Feel Just Like A Child”
Gwen Stefani, “Hollaback”
Eels, “Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)”
Kaiser Chiefs, “I Predict A Riot”
Arctic Monkeys, “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”
M.I.A., “Bucky Done Gun”
The Go! Team, “Ladyflash”
Babyshambles, “Fuck Forever”
LCD Soundsystem, “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”
Weezer, “Beverly Hills”

(Video and/or audio are available for all these tracks via the links provided.)

This should really be called the Tracks Of The Year That Aren’t Already Covered By Our Best Albums Lists list. Mostly, they’re just really great songs - great pop, great rap, great indie, great funky hippie folk. If you made a CD (or playlist, for those Pod people out there), it would be one hell of a mix. I personally would like to give some special attention to Bright Eyes’ “When The President Talks To God”. As insane as it will sound to some people outside of the States (or not from the States), recording this song was a really brave and gutsy thing for Conor Oberst to do. (Not to mention singing it on nationwide television.) A lot of entertainment industry folk have spoken out about the Bush administration, but barely anyone has dared to be this blunt. Most of the recent protest songs hide behind vague concepts like peace and freedom. They make you feel good to be on the same side, but when the anger drips off Conor Oberst’s voice, he makes you feel like it’s actually worth trying to change things.

Honorable Mention Albums:

•  Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Howl
•  The Boy Least Likely To, The Best Party Ever
•  Kaiser Chiefs, Employment
•  Babyshambles, (First) ½ of Down In Albion
•  The A-Sides, Hello, Hello

These are just some albums that are definitely worth your time, but didn’t quite make it into either of our lists for one reason or another.

So we conclude our list of lists celebrating the brilliant music given to us all in 2005. And it begins again, with (hopefully) another year of exciting new music to discover in 2006.

Watching Night Of The Living Dead the other day, this amazing thing was noticed by (unfortunately) not me, but my brother:

Coincidence, or not?

•   15. The Magic Numbers, The Magic Numbers
•   14. Beck, Guero
•   13. Ryan Adams, Jacksonville City Nights
•   12. Bright Eyes, Digital Ash In A Digital Urn
•   11. Bloc Party, Silent Alarm
•   10. Bright Eyes, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
•   9. The Cribs, The New Fellas
•   8. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
•   7. Maximo Park, A Certain Trigger
•   6. Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better
•   5. Wolf Parade, Apologies To The Queen Mary
•   4. The Rakes, Capture/Release
•   3. The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan
•   2. Brakes, Give Blood
•   1. Arcade Fire, Funeral

2005 was a year of ups and downs for some new bands: one moment your band is the hottest thing on the block, the next it’s just that little bit trendier to hate you (see Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Bloc Party, to name a few). It was amusing to witness some of the music critic’s schizophrenia at first, but after a while it got mighty annoying. It made me question what I wanted out of an album. Well, I thought long and hard about it and the only thing I could come up with was: “It must not suck”. So it is quite safe to say that this list is totally, 100 percent free of suckage.

Picking the albums I wanted on the list was not the problem, putting them in a particular order was the pickle. It was hard. I mean heartbreakingly hard. I don’t ever wanna do this again … until next year. Now, after a bajillion revisions, I’m still not sure I got it right. I wasn’t sure how to rate one band I love over the other. How do you measure the degrees in appreciation?? I decided to pick the albums I keep going back to and/or the ones that moved me the most. Well, here they are, these are the albums that moved me to dance, cry, laugh or nod my head vigorously in 2005. Oh poop. I just changed it again …

I love them all for different reasons: For their originality, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wolf Parade, Brakes and Arcade Fire were the bands that really surprised me. Or the way they transform guitar music into a celebration of being young like The Rakes and The Cribs do so well. Or for the unchanging – unless it’s for the better - quality and constant creativity Ryan Adams, Beck, The White Stripes and Bright Eyes give us. Or the way Bloc Party, Maximo Park and Franz Ferdinand make me want to get down and boogie reminiscent of the dance scene in The Breakfast Club. Or just for being able to make me grin in the street like an idiot with headphones, which is what The Magic Numbers and The A-Sides (who didn’t make the list but are still worth mentioning) did for me.

•   15. Beck, Guero
•   14. Maximo Park, A Certain Trigger
•   13. Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better
•   12. Ryan Adams, 29
•   11. Black Wire, Black Wire
•   10. Brakes, Give Blood
•   9. The Magic Numbers, The Magic Numbers
•   8. Bright Eyes, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
•   7. Bloc Party, Silent Alarm
•   6. Arcade Fire, Funeral
•   5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
•   4. The Cribs, The New Fellas
•   3. Bright Eyes, Digital Ash In A Digital Urn
•   2. The Rakes, Capture/Release
•   1. The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan

You know, I tried to write a little bit about each of these albums - I suppose I was trying to describe them for people who haven’t heard them - but no matter what I wrote, it just didn’t sound like me. The thing is, you don’t really need me to describe them for you. That’s what album reviews are for, and you can find those anywhere.

I picked these albums as my Best Of 2005 because I love them, because they surprised me, because - after other albums have been released and I’ve checked those out - these are the albums I kept coming back to. I chose The White Stripes because their creativity knows no bounds; because everything they do is fresh and new and different from what came before. I picked The Rakes because they’re spokesmen for the everyday goings-on of our generation. Bright Eyes deserves two spots because these albums contain some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever heard; no matter how often I listen to them, they give me goosebumps every time. I love the Cribs because they feel like a sloppy, chaotic Friday night out and they play from their guts. I chose Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, and Bloc Party because they don’t sound like anyone else and they all deserve even more hype than they’ve already gotten. The Magic Numbers sing from the rooftops; Brakes mix up just about every genre there is in under 40 minutes; Black Wire makes pop music for the apocalypse. Ryan Adams’ 29 is his most breathtaking album since Heartbreaker. I picked Franz Ferdinand because they dared to do mix things up on their second album and Maximo Park because A Certain Trigger gets better with every listen. And Beck because he’s just so damn funky. These are the albums that were the soundtrack to my year and the albums I will continue to listen to for a very, very long time.

(Pretty please go to amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, HMV, insound, Rough Trade or somewhere else that you like to shop and buy these albums.)