Last week, when I wrote about listicles, I forgot a non-print, but still big and obvious, agent of the format’s spread: cable television. The televised countdown goes back to the ’50s, when longstanding radio favorite Your Hit Parade counted down the Top 7 or Top 10 (depending on the season) songs of the week, as performed by an in-house band and singers. Then rock and roll happened, and bye-bye house bands. This begat the record hop (e.g. American Bandstand and Soul Train and, in the U.K., Top of the Pops), followed by video, which just before MTV led to the syndicated America’s Top 10 and Solid Gold, each using different chart data and methodology to deliver the week’s Top 10. MTV did some of that, too. It also spawned VH1, which started out MOR but soon found its footing when it adopted a campier, retro approach, becoming Nick at Nite to MTV’s Nickelodeon. Which mean, wouldn’t you know, tons and tons of countdowns of the all-time Top 100 thisses or thats.

The one the channel ran last week actually had me a little bit excited, in part because I had no real idea how it would shake out: 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs, which ran in five installments. Maybe I would have figured the outcome had I allowed myself to guess, but between having absolutely no time to myself lately and wanting to keep my responses fresh, I watched all of it cold.

VH1’s 10 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs (as aired Friday, October 3)
1. Public Enemy, “Fight the Power” (Def Jam, 1989)
2. Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill, 1979)
3. Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” (Death Row, 1993)
4. Run-D.M.C., “Walk This Way” (Profile, 1986)
5. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5, “The Message” (Sugarhill, 1982)
6. N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton” (Ruthless, 1988)
7. The Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy” (Bad Boy, 1994)
8. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Gin and Juice” (Death Row, 1993)
9. Salt-n-Pepa, “Push It” (Next Plateau, 1986)
10. Kurtis Blow, “The Breaks” (Mercury, 1980)

(You can find the entire list at Stereogum.)

That’s a Top 10 I would never have guessed—“The Breaks” at No. 10? “Push It” at No. 9?—-and yet, reading it, I'm not surprised at all. Of course Public Enemy is No. 1: watching in order, I kept expecting “911 Is Joke” to pop up somewhere on the chart’s bottom half. That was the big one on MTV, right? That seemed to determine a few selections: No. 6, with its Symbolic Video; No. 38, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” which makes every part of my body cringe; and No. 25, MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” whose talking-head segments seemed the most genuinely strained, as opposed to I-can’t-think-of-anything-to-say-help times 20 strained.

My guesses for the Top 10 mostly took place as the show reached the 30s. That’s one pleasure of this sort of thing: you get to play along. The game was tipped at the top of the final episode when its first selection, Kanye West ft. Jamie Foxx’s “Gold Digger,” prompted the arrival of Chuck D, almost nowhere to be seen in four prior episodes despite his obvious place as one of the most historically attuned rap pros. Surely he could be quotable about Hammer—whom Chuck D has always paid respect to in interviews—and his old tour-mates the Beastie Boys. Their entry—No. 27, “Hold It Now, Hit It”—was not a big hit at the time but has remained an enduring cult favorite, something the producers clearly did a lot of to balance out all that MTV.

Me, I’d wondered if the Beasties might not appear on the second episode, when 3rd Bass and House of Pain placed 70th (“Pop Goes the Weasel”) and 66th (“Jump Around”), respectively. If that sounds overly cynical, I’ll just say I figured they might make the list twice, along with others of their golden-era Def Jam ilk and maybe Jay-Z. (“Hard Knock Life” at No. 11?! Not “Big Pimpin’” or “99 Problems” or even “Izzo”? Come on!) The first episode made me especially suspicious of the way the numbers were running. The list was advertised as having been voted for by viewers, who must have been voting in very controlled patterns to place together three consecutive house/disco-inflected jams: Jungle Brothers’ “What ‘U’ Waitin’ ‘4’,” Wyclef Jean ft. Refugee All Stars', “We Tryin’ to Stay Alive,” and Heavy D. & the Boyz’ “Now That We’ve Found Love," Nos. 88 to 86. Come on, guys.

Aside from the usual wan jokes and “hey, I know the words of this very popular chorus too!” talking-head stuff, the clips and artist bios were rather more endearing here than on most of VH1’s 100-best-whatever fare. And more poignant: if you’re looking for a drinking game, wait till VH1 runs this as a marathon and swallow one shot for each time announcer Fab 5 Freddy mentions “the hip-hop nostalgia circuit.” You don’t even have to know the list to figure out who’s on it: Sir Mix-a-Lot (No. 17, “Baby Got Back”); Young MC (No. 47, “Bust a Move”); Tone-Loc (No. 39, “Wild Thing”); Arrested Development (No. 78, “Tennessee”); P.M. Dawn (No. 81, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”); Digital Underground (No. 29, “The Humpty Dance”); and 2 Live Crew (No. 83, “Me So Horny”), for starters.

It’s the old school, though, that got to me. (“Old school” has acquired too many meanings for its own good, so let me state clearly that I’m talking about artists who preceded Run-D.M.C.) Spoonie Gee (No. 65, “Love Rap”) walking around New York, head shaved, with a splendid orange-and-brown button-down, or J.J. Fad (No. 72, “Supersonic”) reminiscing about their younger selves, were somehow more poignant than their constantly touring descendants. And of course the Funky 4 + 1, creators of No. 41 (see what they did there?), “That’s the Joint,” still my favorite single of all time. Knowing that Sha Rock, the group’s female MC, does hip-hop bus tours—as does Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers (No. 77, “Cold Crush Brothers at the Dixie")—makes me want to do something touristy for once in my life. And hearing the group discuss their disappointment at never having made an album gave a little gravity to a show that needed it.

RD: Being largely a writer for print, what is your stance on blogs?

AP: I read a ton of blogs, every day. I think the onus is really on print magazines to step up the game. They’ve got to do stuff blogs can’t or won’t or don’t want to do – long, thoughtfully researched articles with lots of access that take months to write – in order to stay alive. But they just keep printing … lists.

I only wish I'd been able to put it that succinctly, and not just because I've wasted entirely too many hours of my life working on magazine listicles. And I haven't even contributed to that many! A couple were actually quite enjoyable; more often, they've mostly left me puzzled as to why I, or anyone else, was even bothering.

How did this come to happen? As far as I can tell, the progression goes something like this. In 1987, celebrating its 20th anniversary, Rolling Stone published a list of the Top 100 albums released during its lifetime. The issue wasn't the first time such a list was presented to the public—ten years earlier, Paul Gambaccini published Rock Critics' Choice, a listing of the 200 best LPs as judged by a consortium of writers and DJs, and followed it with a 100-strong sequel in 1987. Both Gambaccini lists and the RS one were led by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The RS list obviously did well enough to spawn a follow-up one year later, of the Top 100 singles from 1963-88. (No. 1: the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction.") A year after that, to celebrate the decade just about to end, RS polished up another Top 100 issue, this time of the best albums of the '80s. (No. 1: the Clash's London Calling, issued in the U.K. late in 1979 but not out in America until January 1980.) The 1988 singles list prompted ripostes from Spin (which defiantly named the barely-year-old "It Takes Two" by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock the greatest single of all time) and the Village Voice (whose Barry Walters picked as his all-time chart topper "Heartbeat," by Taana Gardner); and in 1989, Dave Marsh published The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, which put Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" in pole position.

At this point, lists of these sort still had some kind of canon-building cachet. As both Marsh and Walters made explicit in their write-ups (and Spin, which presented its singles list without comment, implied), the late '80s were a period when both the idea of the Great Single and the actual single itself were more or less up for grabs. The 7-inch was dying out from the major labels' end; the cassingle and CD5 were still in embryonic stages; and the MP3 wasn't even an idea, much less a game-changing reality. Likewise, a decade of 12-inch vinyl, remixed or not, had rewired the idea that three minutes and out was the model and definition of great singledom—the primary tension between the RS and Spin/Voice lists is between '60s 7-inch and '80s 12-inch aesthetics. (There's some of both types on all three lists, as well as Marsh's, but the guiding sensibilities are what I'm referring to here.)

But as the '90s marched on, listicles began to take on their own life, particularly in England, where glossy monthlies began to rely on Top 100 albums lists to prop up sales when Britpop fizzled—especially since their basic appeal was to either casual fans (as with Q) or, more plainly, to nostalgic fans of scenes and times gone by (Mojo and Uncut). In these hands, a canon that had once been held up to scrutiny and argument became locked in place. And when the American version of Q, Blender, began in 2001, its mandate of a listicle a month rammed home the notion that (a) lists sell and (b) the more obviously predictable they are, the more obviously predictable the squabbling about them will be.

As we've seen entirely too often both in print and online, patting the reader on the head can be good for business. Just look at Digg's music page, cluttered with listicles ("Top 10 Most Artistic Album Covers"; "5 Things You Need To Know About The Accordion"; "5 Most Pointless Solo Albums of All Time"). And it's not hard to see the listicle's brand of "instant content" as a building block for the least sensible aspects of Web development, in particular the current state of Atlanta-based city-weekly mini-conglomerate Creative Loafing, which on Monday declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As Atlanta Magazine's Steve Fennessy reports, CL publisher Ben Eason, who last year bought the Washington, D.C. City Paper and the Chicago Reader, has a solution: not just more Web-based stuff, but something a lot more along the lines of the Chicago office of the Huffington Post, which is owned by a rich person who doesn't pay the site's writers, and which in Chicago employs one person who does no actual writing or editing. I'll let Maura have this one: "If everyone's aggregating content, who is going to PRODUCE IT?" The idea seems to be that once the particulars are fixed, it'll produce itself, over and over again, in an endless loop. Creative Loafing, indeed.

Writer's Workshop [Hidden Track]

The post is specifically about dance music, as is Ronan's wont; I suspect he's talking even more specifically about Resident Advisor's 2.0 (out of 5) review of SIS's "Trompeta"—a track Fitzgerald has blogged enthusiastically about—which concerns itself largely with the record's hype cycle. (There are lots of span classes in the post but no actual links.) Yet read the following paragraph and tell me he isn't talking about rock or hip-hop or every other music Web folks tend to check for:

This reactive reviewing seems to lend itself to world weariness too easily. People are pretending they’re so in the scene that they hear others talking about a big hit record everywhere they go, when actually all this tells you is they probably spend all day on the Internet! I should know! If people could say “I’m sick of HEARING this record” that’d be interesting, but it seems they’re more sick of hearing about it.

Obviously, "scene" is important in hip-hop or indie/alt-rock especially, as well as in dance music, but it's the internet part that's that matters here. The small pond takes on the aspects of a universe was never unique to the Web, as anyone who's ever identified themselves as part of a not-online subculture will happily explain. But the instant-expert rate is higher now, and so is the burnout rate, and while I realize I go on about this almost every week I slip into my guest chair, these are both good things to guard against even if you're not being paid to share your thoughts about music online or elsewhere. "Hype" won't kill us all, but it may just make us sillier—and right now, it's safe to say that's the last thing anyone needs.

Please [House Is a Feeling]

• “The point isn't that Lewis needs to stick to dirty jokes and jaunty twang (though country seems her natural milieu). There's more than enough likeable, listenable material on Acid Tongue, yet the effect is nonetheless equivalent to Tiger Woods trying to conquer the mini-golf circuit. In these straitjacketed settings, Lewis' considerable strengths as a lyricist and performer just aren't given sufficient room to fully emerge.” (Pitchfork)

• “On the gospel-country title track, she is a wary but hopeful romantic: ‘We were unlucky in love/But I'd do it all again.’ And on the stirring, string-swamped ‘Trying My Best to Love You,’ she compares her love to angels' wings, diamonds and crystal, taking the measure of happiness in the same way she has always dissected discontentment: ferociously.” (Rolling Stone)

• “Lewis excels in moments of sincere repose, even if she's less invested in them nowadays. Her version of country has always had a Hollywood tinge, but now it's overshadowing her indie underdog soul.” (Spin)

• “Acid Tongue is at its best—as on the standout title track—when Lewis keeps her voice and songwriting as unforced and natural as the recording, grounding the album's many digressions with the heartfelt enthusiasm of a singer who's exactly where she wants to be.” (AV Club)

The album: The Perfect Beats Vol. 2 (1998), the second of four simultaneously issued volumes of, as the subtitle puts it, "New York Electro Hip-Hop + Underground Dance Classics 1980-1985."

Classic material: Back in 1998, Tommy Boy Records decided to celebrate its deep roots with a pair of four-CD collections. The Tommy Boy's Greatest Beats series was your basic label comp, but The Perfect Beats was something else: a strongly chosen and sequenced argument for the early '80s NYC club the Funhouse as locus of much of the decade's strongest dance music. The second volume is the creme de la creme: hits from Shannon and New Order, club classics from Liquid Liquid and Chaka Khan, superbly programmed into one of the CD era's greatest various-artist collections.

Highlights: On a collection with no bad tracks, this can be hard to choose. I'll stick with three: Dominatrix's "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight," Strafe's "Set It Off," and ESG's "Moody" retain their original grit and stylishness, and can still get bodies moving like nobody's business.

Why it's out of print: Let us loose our standard refrain yet again: Licensing is a bitch, isn't it? Multiple artists, four volumes—who has that kind of time anymore?

Chances it will return to print: I wouldn't put money on this happening; still, maybe at some point some enterprising "label" will put all four volumes of the series on a single DVD of MP3s and audio files, a la similar collections of Ultimate Breaks & Beats and Streetsounds Electro.

Cost for a used copy: Amazon Marketplace has used copies from $18.49. I recently bypassed the chance (several times) to repurchase one from a nearby shop for $25, and I'm sorry I didn't.

Fabric 05: Pure Science (July 2002)
How about that: an almost featureless album I enjoy almost mindlessly, as pure sound. This probably sounds as "2002" as it's possible to, an especially impressive trick given that filter-heavy, electro-kissed, "wet percussion"-drenched house is all it is, for 13 tracks, all of them by Pure Science (a.k.a. Phivos [Phil] Sebastiane, per Discogs entry). So yes, Villalobos was beaten to it. (More than once, but we'll get to that.) The shapes shift but the textures remain the same; why mess with a good sound? Which is almost all this is. Which, for me, is enough.

The truth is the friends I stayed with and I didn't see that many shows. I arrived Friday evening, a whole day after festivities had begun. (It was supposed to be Friday afternoon, but Amtrak ran into a freighter-line block that lasted nearly an hour.) Unlike the enclosed space of a Bumbershoot or the closely-clustered venues of a South by Southwest or the still-to-come Decibel Festival in Seattle, MFNW is spread out all over town, and while Portland isn't humongous, the venues can still take some trekking to.

MFNW works the way a lot of the better festivals do: Most of the acts are local or regional, with a couple bigger-named national headliners. In MFNW's case, these were Vampire Weekend, Les Savy Fav, and TV on the Radio. Since I'd caught the first two at Seattle's Capitol Hill Block Party in July and (still) have no interest in the latter, I was fine with missing them. Besides, I saw two bands that easily matched LSF's intensity, and in one case surpassed it in stagecraft. I didn't believe it, either, till I saw it.

It is somewhat surprising Monotonix hasn't been mentioned on Idolator before. They're from Israel, they have great hair and mustaches and taste in short shorts, and at the grungy punk club Satyricon, they made LSF's hyperactive, performance-minded frontman Tim Harrington look like that chick from Project Runway who got eliminated for mistaking Laura Ingalls Wilder's dress sense for surrealism. Monotonix set up on the floor in front of the stage—OK, fine so far, if not groundbreaking. The moment I realized something ridiculous was taking place was probably when the industrial-sized Rubbermaid bin started being thrown around overhead; things got more outlandish from there. Midway through the set (about a half-hour, which was perfect; any longer would have been too much, even for them), they ran full-steam ahead out to the front of the venue and kept it going on the sidewalk. The singer climbed a tree, mooned us several times, and made sure each time to spread his ass cheeks open for an even better view. The drummer sat on a floor tom and was hoisted into the air by audience members, who also held aloft his snare and cymbals; he didn't miss a beat. After that, everything else felt faintly anticlimactic.

Nevertheless, the next night in the same venue my friends and I were very impressed by Fucked Up's headline performance. Given that my introduction to the band wasn't any of their early hardcore records but last year's mammoth, 14-and-a-half-minute single "Year of the Pig," and that the advance MP3 from their Matador debut, "No Epiphany," is, singer Pink Eyes' guttural roar aside, pure psychedelic bliss-out. But hardcore is what they lean on live, and for good reason. With three guitarists slop would be barely noticeable. There's none of that here: every musician is locked in, razor sharp. And Pink Eyes has mad charisma, throwing a ragged life-sized doll into the pit to be tossed around. ("Fuck it!" urged one of the band as it whipped through the air.) A glorious noise, and a good ending for an enjoyable weekend.

Stubbs skewers his targets so cheerfully it throws the premature jadedness of most current Web-based music writing into ultra-sharp relief, and he's irresistibly funny, especially when he quotes reader poetry. (My .sig of choice these days is "Oh flowers, flowers / you are so flowery / as you drip in the rain / that is so showery.") It's hard to imagine someone writing this today. Comments boxes (hi, guys!) have replaced the letter to the editor with immediate-impression "TL;DR" wankery; back then, you had to commit to voicing your displeasure with a magazine or newspaper. Not to get too golden-age on you, but today, it's hard not to miss this kind of thing.

"Dear Backlash," [Archived Music Press]

Anna Fielding of 17 Dots describes Maestro as "a celebrity reality show where a selection of newsreaders, comedians etc competed against one another to be the best conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra." As a non-classical listener this in itself isn't an automatic in for me, but as a Project Runway/Top Chef fan, the possibilities are immediately apparent. Obviously, the Ego Trip shows have taken the contest format in entertaining directions music-wise, but the idea of Americans working their way into orchestral pieces—and us seeing them do it—is certainly appealing in the sense that much of what's great about ProjRun and Top Chef is the age-old truth that there is huge inherent entertainment value in watching people make something tangible with their hands. If nothing else, a conductor certainly works with her hands.

At the top of this post is a clip featuring drum & bass producer/DJ Goldie. Below is one featuring Blur's Alex James. Seriously, America, wouldn't you rather see a Yanked-up version of this than another season of Top Design?

[HT: 17 Dots]

Fabric 04: Tony Humphries (May 2002)
Humphries is widely referred to as "the godfather of the New Jersey sound," meaning he plays house with deep roots in the Paradise Garage: jazzy, R&B-rooted, heavily American with occasional strays into Euro territory—in this case, Dub Taylor's "I Can't (You Know)," which in its lightly arty way aspires to be included in the mixes of DJs like Humphries. But it's the "jazzy" that gets in my way here: Humphries' selections have a few too many prancing Rhodes keyboard vamps to suit me. Added to the anonymous divas and tasteful envelope filters, even when done well, as on Soldiers of Twilight's "Drive On" or Mimmo M. ft. Sandy's "I Miss You (Air-Knee's Jazz to Face Mix)," they make something rather bland.

FabricLive 04: Deadly Avenger (June 2002)
You know, maybe I'm not so fascinated anymore by AV8 Records-style hip-hop cut-up tracks. Just sayin'.

Five years ago, when Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons issued their first singles collection w/optional bonus disc, it had a sense of occasion: ten years of records, a brand name that seemed a bit dated but still had a loyal following. Now, two middling-if-they're-lucky additional albums down the road (one of which, last year's We Are the Night, was inexplicably treated as a major comeback by the U.K. press), the Chems treat us to more of the same, but less, if you know what I mean. Nine of Brotherhood's 14 songs were among the 13 on Singles 93-03—by which I mean the single-disc versions. (Each title's bonus disc is completely different; the new comp features the ten-part "Electronic Battle Weapon" tracks.) Apparently, there are people who would prefer to hear that lousy Q-Tip collaboration over classics like "Song to the Siren" and "The Private Psychedelic Reel," and those people are going to be made very, very happy by Brotherhood.


Still, competing best-ofs separated by only an album or two continue to fascinate me. What are some of your favorite such redundancies, either as objects of contemplation or actual objects? Answers, as always, in the comments.

I decided to do this entirely by numbers. Of the remaining five AOTY winners for the decade (meaning 1971-1980; all dates are the year the Grammy is given, not the year of album release), four were by artists who weren't otherwise nominated during the span. Sorry, Carole King (1972, Tapestry) and Fleetwood Mac (1978, Rumours) and the Bee Gees et. al. (1979, Saturday Night Fever). Now, if we were going to open things out a bit, the short answer would be easy: Billy Joel, who won in 1980 for 52nd Street and was then subsequently nominated four more (1981, Glass Houses; 1983, The Nylon Curtain; 1984, An Innocent Man; 1994, River of Dreams).

Within the decade, however, two artists are in the clear lead. Elton John had not two, but three nominations during the '70s, though he never won (1971, Elton John; 1975 Caribou; 1976, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy). And George Harrison won once (1973, The Concert for Bangla Desh) and was nominated earlier (1972, All Things Must Pass). Still, it's hard to see either winning, mainly because they're both English and I'm going to hazard a wild guess that a United States Library of Congress award is reserved for Americans. (Though John's longtime Atlanta residency might qualify him.)

The other Brits who've been mentioned more than once for AOTY aren't exactly recording artists, per se. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical Jesus Christ Superstar was nominated twice in a row, in 1972 and 1973, for the Broadway cast recording and the film soundtrack. I'd love to root for this to win the award next year, only that would be dishonest, because I have absolutely no patience for such nonsense once it reaches my eardrum. Of course, you could say that three of the other dual-nominees made records that basically sounded the same, too: James Taylor (1971, Sweet Baby James; 1977, JT); Chicago (1971, Chicago; 1977, Chicago X); and the Carpenters (1971, Close to You; 1972, The Carpenters). As for the Eagles (1976, One of These Nights; 1978, Hotel California), the Gershwin may yet come their way, but probably not for a while.

Library of Congress to honor Stevie Wonder [AP]

Though Prince seems to have bowdlerized "D.M.S.R." in his concerts since becoming a Jehovah's Witness, the relationship of pop music to sex, love, physical movement, and the body rarely stays hidden very long. For this year's Pop Conference we invite presentations, addressing any period or style of music, that bring erotic and sensual issues to the forefront and connect them to political and aesthetic concerns. Rock and roll has long congratulated itself on riding the Big Beat over all sanctimonious opposition, but can we take our sense of these archetypal struggles somewhere beyond, say, Footloose?

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

* Languages of desire and union in pop: the relationship of ballads, tenderness, and couplehood to carnality and the commerce of bodies.
* Dancing and dance crazes as forces in pop history and the dancefloor as a particularly charged space of friction, play, and unsettling possibility.
* Pop passion as a conduit for capitalism, modernization, and transnational flows, but also local scenes, community formation, and religion.
* How the pop body is marked by, and marks out, race, gender, nationality, class, and region; music as a means for bodies sharing space.
* Music and the negotiation of sexual norms: sonic fetishism, erotics of pain and disorder, representations of beauty and ugliness.
* Social media and D.M.S.R. A YouTube answer video as a kind of love letter; the libidinal economy of music-sharing communities and Web 2.0 culture.
* Scandal and excess: the pop urge to take it to the limit; celebrity culture and indie puritanism; humor and hyperbole.
* Voice, gesture, and other modalities of embodiment and disembodiment.
* The diva figure, with all the complexity/trouble/pleasure that term carries.
* The many musical iterations of what a German Jewish immigrant, arrived at the dawn of modern pop, called "Makin' Whoopee."

Makin' whoopee, indeed. The Conference is always a good time, and any excuse to visit Seattle is a good one. Can't wait to see what gets accepted. (And yes, I am working on my own proposal right now.)

Call for Proposals: 2009 Pop Conference [EMP]

When does a genre reach its breaking point? At which step does it fold into history, no one wanting to touch it, until a re-introduction makes it eligible for lost-classic status? I wonder this about jungle a lot lately. I think I already did back when people thought it was a fad, or when the coffee-table thing came around, or whenever trudgestep exerted its all-powerful hand. Trip-hop will never die because you can dress it in all sorts of nicknames: it's a masterstroke in that way. Jungle you can't, not even when you call it "drum and bass." But surely, I figured, people would remember jungle for its mid-'90s tumult, a breathtaking explosion of sonic creativity, and leave alone the past decade's overarching sense of "whatever."

Needless to say, I've mostly been wrong so far. I actually like the more recent stuff when I encounter it, which has been more often lately than it has in a decade, thanks to the BBC Radio 1 Top 30 Independent Singles, about which I've written here before. But this isn't about those songs, but some older ones, and about the very different perspectives they offer on the style—different from each other, and different from mine, meaning not stuck in the past as I am.

Well, that's not strictly true. The first can't be, by design, since everything on it is more than a decade old, and the magazine I found it in nearly as old. Near the end of 1999, the Los Angeles dance-culture magazine Urb put together a series of lists of its top recordings of the decade: the Top 100 albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... on top) and eight separate lists for singles, with hip-hop, house, and techno each getting a Top 25 and jungle, trance, abstract, breakbeat, and experimental each got a Top 10; all were listed alphabetically by artist. Here's Urb's Top 10 Jungle Singles of the '90s:

1. 4 Hero, "Universal Love" (Talkin' Loud, 1994)
2. LTJ Bukem, "Music" (Good Looking, 1993)
3. Jonny L, "Piper" (XL, 1997)
4. Krust, "Warhead" (XL, 1997)
5. Nasty Habits, "Shadowboxing" (31, 1996)
6. Omni Trio, "Living for the Future" (Moving Shadow, 1994)
7. PFM, "One and Only" (Good Looking, 1995)
8. Shy FX & UK Apachi, "Original Nuttah" (S.O.U.R., 1994)
9. Roni Size, "It's a Jazz Thing" (Full Cycle, 1994)
10. Trace, "Mutant Revisited" (No U-Turn, 1996)

I'd seen this list when it was first published—I'm an obvious mark for this sort of thing, and in 1999 I was still doing a lot of clubbing—but had forgotten about it until the end of May, when I made Portland, Ore., the last stop of a month-long road trip via Amtrak and found a copy at a used bookshop heavy on magazine back issues downtown.

Reading that jungle list again, I had a peculiar response: it seemed too American. By which I mean that while all those songs were as often well known as tracks from crossover albums—the kind American listeners discovered the music through—as they were as singles-unto-themselves. Having listened to them again a few times, I was clearly overreacting. Call it identification panic—just because I can ID the albums and comps many of them first reached me doesn't mean they weren't chosen as singles-qua-singles. And call it clinging to a golden age, because the Urb editors got a few of the songs' release dates wrong, skewing the list to 1996-97 on sight, which is the period where things started moving slower. Looking at it with the dates fixed (thanks, Discogs), it's heaviest on 1994, a glorious year for the stuff, with the pre-'93 stuff left for the breakbeat Top 10.

Nevertheless, I have my after-the-fact cavils. I like all the tracks at least some, but the harder, darker stuff here leaves me coldest, particularly "Mutant Revisited" and "Warhead." These are clearly classics, but both records, especially "Warhead," with its wowing low end and hard one-TWO beat, points the way to the shape of boredom to come, and it's hard not to hear them that way. "Living for the Future" is a very good record that I'll never love nearly as much as "Renegade Snares (Foul Play V.I.P. Remix)" or (especially) "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)."

Cavils are cavils, though, and what I'm most surprised (and gratified) by is how charming much of the more futurist aspects are, even if they've acquired a layer of kitsch now that we're living in the actual future and not the one where ambient drum & bass would take us away like Calgon. I remember vividly the first time I heard LTJ Bukem's "Music," because I hated it. It was precisely the kind of softheaded pap I hated about the dreamier end of the post-rave spectrum; I wanted to be wowed loudly then. Today I think it's remarkable, and for most of the same reasons. You ever see smoke going through laser ring, that weird glassy wisp of green light? The implacable loop at the center of "Music" is the audio version. Back then, this sounded like a bad idea. Today its soupy-eyed idea of the endless tomorrow seems touching, somehow, the way only old science fiction that shows its age can be.

A more recent list is a little wider in its outreach. KMag used to be called Knowledge; it's a monthly devoted entirely to drum and bass, almost always packaged with a cover-mount mix CD. The July issue was its 100th, and in addition to a career spanning mix by Blame (quite nice, this), KMag asked its readers to send in their Top 5 D&B tracks ever for an overall Top 100. Tallied up, this is what the Top 10 looks like:

1. Fresh & Maldini )E|B( [a.k.a. Bad Company], "The Nine" (BC, 1998)
2. Goldie, "Inner City Life" (FFRR, 1994)
3. Konflict, "Messiah" (Renegade Hardware, 2005)
4. Roni Size/Reprazent, "Brown Paper Bag" (Talkin Loud, 1997)
5. DJ Marky & XRS ft. Stamina, "LK" (V, 2002)
6. D-Bridge & Vegas, "True Romance" (Metalheadz, 2004)
7. Omni Trio, "Renegade Snares" (Moving Shadow, 1994)
8. Ed Rush & Optical, "Gas Mask/Bacteria" (Virus, 1999)
9. LTJ Bukem, "Horizons" (Good Looking, 1995)
10. Shy FX & UK Apachi, "Original Nuttah" (S.O.U.R., 1994)

Given my biases, I should like this list less than I do the Urb one. But I might actually prefer it as a list, if not music. KMag's records aren't better overall, but they present a more interesting dynamic range. Not just because they cover a longer span, either: the Urb list seemed to circle around its era without quite tying it together, while KMag's features items that defined their particular mini-epochs, whether or not I care about them as epochs. (Hello, Bad Company.) I definitely prefer Kmag's Roni Size and Omni Trio selections to those of Urb, which nabbed the far better Bukem track. (Though you could argue that "Horizons," with its Maya Angelou sample—from the Clinton inaugural, how '90s-nostalgic can you get?—and new-age-for-real ambience is more representative of jungle's oceanic tendencies than "Music.") But maybe it's just that this one provides me more of an education. I'll never care for this stuff the way I once did, but it's nice to know it's still around and still moving, whatever its direction.

As if on cue, Cole's band hit their spots and began to play an ominous groove that, as passing critic Andrew Matson noted, "sounds like it should be in a Michael Bay movie." But when the singer appears everything improves: the two backing singers are doing light choreography, the grooves bump nicely, and Cole herself is having a hell of a time, despite the seemingly ad hoc nature of the performance. "We can do whatever you like," she says to her band as they figure out which song to play third. Whatever they were doing for that half-hour, it wasn't writing a set list.

"How many of you watch the reality show on BET?" Cole asks her faithful; about half the kids (it's mostly kids) thronging near the stage raise their arms. She then dedicates a verse of Prince's "When Doves Cry" to her late mother. "Let It Go" ends things well enough (though the backing vocals sound completely canned), if early—a half-hour only, as opposed to the 45 minutes she's on the schedule for. (Question: does every modern R&B act's bassist also play a Korg onstage now?) That short set may have had to do with the fact that Cole was, de facto, opening for T.I., whom I skipped, though I did hear one priceless quote after the fact: apparently one of T.I.'s crew came out, looked at the large crowd, and said something to the effect of, "Damn! This is like Woodstock or something."

I headed next to the Northwest Stage, where local jazz ruled the day. It kind of ruled my day, too. I caught the tail third of Matt Jorgensen + 451, a Seattle troupe named for its drummer, and it sounded terrific—good jazz often does outdoors on a sunny day. The group (Jorgensen, keyboardist Ryan Burns, bassist Phil Sparks, saxophonist Mark Taylor) have recorded several far-from-reverent classic-rock covers as well, and they brought trumpeter Thomas Marriott up to end things with a superb "Tomorrow Never Knows" (you can download the 2002 studio version from eMusic and/or Amazon).

I settled into the very back, top row of the Leo K. Theater for the panel discussion between comics artists Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, and Ivan Brunetti. Brunetti introduced the other two like a nervous fan, which he professed to be, rather charmingly, and Clowes was as deadpan and funny as you'd expect: he and Tomine met, he said, through "an online dating service," and he'd been surprised to discover that the younger artist "was in high school, stealing my work." The overall discussion was lively, if a little nuts-and-boltsy.

I took off after a half-hour to see Forro in the Dark, though I didn't exactly see them: as with Estelle the day before, I placed myself on the lawn behind the stage, where everything sounded better and I didn't have to watch anyone hippie-dance. I'd heard forro before I latched onto the New York group's 2006 debut album, and their major elimination—accordion—recasts the sound nicely, giving it a hard low end that nevertheless dances. Afterward, with time to kill, I walked to the nearby Flatstock exhibit. What do you know: one of the exhibitors was Burlesque Design, a Minneapolis firm whose membership got its start by publishing the great Life Sucks Die.

LSD was a late-'90s Twin Cities graffiti 'zine that in retrospect looks like the prototype for Vice, particularly the "Things You May Have Slept On" reviews section. (On Slum Village: "Hey, you know what? I just realized that Slum Village came out eight years ago, but they were called The Nonce. Except back then, they had something interesting to say, and their beats were fresh. But nobody remembers The Nonce, cuz they didn't wear vintage leather coats and stylish hats.") Anyway, the Burlesque table had five back issues of LSD for five bucks each, and I snapped them up. Bumbershoot nostalgia: it's not just for main stage headliners!

Back to the Northwest Stage for the Tiptons Sax Quartet: Amy Denio, Jessica Lurie, Sue Orfield, and Tina Richerson, accompanied by drummer Chris Stromquist. (The group is named for Billy Tipton, the jazz player—piano, sax—who lived and worked as a man.) The group sang a fair amount, and while it was pleasant enough, it was mere warm-up for the playing, which was constantly rich and robust, especially in unison, which was often. Finally, some friends and I made our way to the Black Keys, in the stadium, opening for Stone Temple Pilots. Pleasant enough, but not compelling enough to stick around for—sorry, Brother Ali.

I feel less thrilled about Bumbershoot this year—less than I ever have. I'm hardly alone: this is the weakest lineup the festival has put up in quite some time. Some of it is clearly due to the exorbitant number of competing festivals that occur earlier in the summer, both locally (Seattle has festivals like it has grey days) and nationally, to thin the available touring pool. But seriously, Stone Temple Pilots as your big-name headliner? Them? Are the '00s really so bad that we're actually nostalgic for this shit? I dunno, man.

In any event, so little about the lineup excites me this year that I figure I'm in decent shape just wandering about and seeing what happens. Saturday, the first day, worked out fairly well, though by the end of the day I'd already circled shows I wanted to catch the next two. Still, the "unmapped" aspect seems to apply, if only because what I saw on Saturday (early warning: not much) was consistently stuff I'd never have seen outside of this festival.

For example, I never go to see comedy, yet I try to see at least one comedy show every Bumbershoot. This isn't easy, because the comedy lines are typically bigger than any but those for the main stage, and for good reason: the festival has a great reputation among comedians and the booking is subsequently top notch.

I got into the Intiman in time for the beginning of Jessi Klein's routine: very raunchy, but only intermittently funny. T.J. Miller was sillier and more entertaining, doing good physical stuff (hand motions rather than full-body), and comfortably riffing on the audience. Then local comic Nick Thune emerged in a white '70s wedding-rental suit and acoustic guitar, which he strummed as he mock-deadpanned lines like, "Dear Britney: I won. Love, Christina Aguilera," and "LiveSavers only work if you're a diabetic." The comedy-show crowd seemed slightly younger than last year, or maybe I'm just slightly older.

I'd thought to see Lucinda Williams before going to the comedy stage instead, and in the middle of Miller's set I got a text from my friend Robert: "Lucinda covered AC/DC!" When we met at the Center House (the grounds' indoor food court) to rest up before Estelle, it turns out Williams had played "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)" along with a couple other covers when her show fell ten minutes short and her band had run out of new songs. Robert, his wife Jacki, and I compared notes: to their eye, Bumbershoot was becoming younger overall. "There are fewer hippies every year," Jacki said—no hacky-sack, less hula-hooping, less tie-dye.

We were way in back for Estelle, rendering the British R&B singer even tinier than she is already. "Enthusiastic" is a word I too often fall back on when writing about live music, that's meant to indicate that the performer was energetic and that I appreciated it. So, Estelle was enthusiastic. The usual faults of first-time touring singer-with-backup were evident: too much hype man, too much banter, a drummer playing the same hackneyed fills I hear at almost every R&B/hip-hop show with a live drummer playing alongside programmed material. But the sound got a lot better when I relocated to the lawn directly behind the stage, and at one point, while standing in line for corn on the cob, I actually heard a 14-year-old girl (at most) use the word "grody" for the first time since I attended Richfield Intermediate School.

Estelle is the kind of artist I might not go out of my way to see live, but it was really good to see her at Bumbershoot. The same is true of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, the recently married singer-songwriters. I believe their show at Ballard's roots-music shrine, the Tractor Tavern, was good (and I certainly like the venue), but even if I hadn't planned to see them here, this is exactly the kind of show I like seeing at Bumberhoot: amped-up front-porch feel with what happens to be a big handful of great songs.

The couple each switched effectively from acoustic to electric to bass to keyboards, from lead to rhythm, from frontperson to accompanist. The songs got laughs, like Rigby's "It's Not Safe to Go Outside" (inspired by Marathon Man, featuring lines like, "Now I'm on the run from Dustin Hoffman") and "Men in Sandals" (during which everyone started staring at each other's footwear). Their banter got laughs, particularly Eric's rant about "fanny-ass cunts who walk out saying, 'It's not music.' Well, we never said it was!" And everyone sang along with Eric's "Whole Wide World" (and a few afterward to the real finale, "Take the K.A.S.H."). Earlier he sang a 1986 song, "Someone Must Have Nailed Us Together." Good job, Someone.

[Photo via Bumbershoot]

FabricLive 03: DJ Hype (April 2002)
Hated most of this the first time through: drum and bass at its deepest moment of impasse, to my ears, and impossible to care about at this late date. But with time it makes more sense: not Bad Company's nightmares on wax (with bongos) so much as when DJ Zinc makes everything sound aquatic and colorful, or when Moving Fusion bends its snarfing, sinister low-end into shapes that riff rather than unfurl, or when Brockie & Ed Solo filter soundtrack horns so they sound like they're passing like signs on the freeway, or when Hype himself scratches up a storm on "True Playaz Style." I'll never care about this stuff the way I do its predecessors, but if you do there's a lot worse you can do.

I realize this is a lot to ask. For a lot of twentysomething writers/bloggers/scene-types, "alternative" is, it would seem, a forbidden word, because it's so closely tied to a specific era—the post-Nevermind major-label gold rush that for a brief, shining moment saturated the country with Better Than Ezra clones, as radio stations switched over to "modern rock" formats by the gross, and its lumbering-on-and-on-and-on aftermath, so adroitly covered here by Al Shipley. Believe me, I understand the pain that having come of age on this stuff can cause, especially when you look back at the damage it did for an entire generation's taste in hip-hop. (I'll never forget the razzing I endured at a restaurant job for once suggesting that the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head was maybe not hip-hop's all-time gold standard.) In this day and age, "alternative" doesn't mean Nirvana or Sonic Youth; it means Staind and Creed, and what self-respecting member of the Williamsburg Archipelago would dare identify herself with such a thing? (Especially since the nostalgia re-appropriation wagon hasn't reached the era of Lollapalooza Mk. I saturation quite yet.)

The thing is, "indie" isn't working anymore. If anything, it has more specific and limiting baggage than "alternative." Sure, you can ask how music that's supposed to be an alternative to the mainstream keeps that status once it goes mainstream, but calling something on a major label "indie" is some fourth-level-of-hell stage of kidding yourself, in a far more concrete way. (We'll leave England out of the argument for the time being, since anything with guitars, it seems, is considered "indie" over there, meaning Coldplay is or was indie, a delusion no one in America has ever bothered with, thank the fucking lord.) The other week, when I asked for everyone's least favorite alternative rock hit, almost everyone responded with something from the '90s. I was kind of hoping someone would rep for Fleet Foxes or Vampire Weekend or something, but it was a kind of unspoken code: "alternative" means '90s, "indie" means '00s. And never the twain shall meet, apparently.

For obvious reasons this is delusional, just as it is for today's youn'uns to sneer derisively at Fatboy Slim but eat up Justice. (Same principle, different costume, and besides, Fatboy's On the Floor at the Boutique wipes the floor with Justice's much-downloaded Fabric-reject mix, as it does with all but a handful of commercially-released DJ sets.) But I'll leave that argument for later. If nothing else, reclaiming language as left for dead as "alternative" not only points up a continuum that's still going (if not evolving, exactly), it's exactly what the more po-faced fans of this stuff deserve: taking Conor Oberst's lyrics seriously is just as much a you-get-what-you-pay-for proposition as buying Sponge albums was back in the proverbial day. So embrace your real heritage, kids. After all, if the most clueless of the current crop of downloaders-without-portfolio are any indication, the next group (which will likely have heard even more and have even less of a context to discuss it in) really won't know the difference anyway, for all the semantical gatekeeping in the world.