TOP TEN

HI here are the top ten videos that when I was 15 I would have killed for youtube to have existed because back then the only way to see music videos was on TV, and these hardly ever came on. This is also basically a "top ten songs that created Fucked Up" list.

1 BEOWULF "2 Cents"
This is far from the best Beowulf song, who are far from the best Venice-Area-Skate-Trash band, which is far from the best subgenre of hardcore-punk which is far from the number 1 top kind of music of all time, but seeing this video when I was 15 made me crazy and I'm pretty sure I only actually saw it once. Watching it now gives me weird feelings, because it's pretty bad, and I never even saw the movie Tank Girl (or Beowulf, if you are wondering)


2 THE SUPERSUCKERS "Creepy Jackalope Eye"
The opening song to what is still one of my favourite albums ever. Again, another video that I only saw once, something that drove me crazy in a very subtle way all through high-school, as I paced the halls not knowing I was suffering from video-withdrawal. I had 90 minute tape that had this album on it four times, because it was so short it could fit on a side twice. I would spend my lunch hours listening to "La Mano Cornuda" on my walkman 3 times non-stop, not talking to anyone. The Supersuckers are still around, I know because we saw them on a flier in Germany a few months ago (they were opening up for Thin Lizzy), and I'm not sure how good they are now, but this record still stands up and 15 years later still goes on my ipod sometimes. So legit that when I first heard them, I a) actually thought "cowpunk" was a real genre and b) got pissed a bit at Americas Funniest Home Videos, because they used to do a skit involving a Jackalope, and I thought they were ripping off the Supersuckers.


3 THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS "Hurdy Gurdy Man/Who Was in my Bed Last Night"
One time I stayed home from school sick in grade 6 or 7 (whatever year it was that Beck got famous) with a cold or whatever, and it was one of the most important days of my life, in one of the lamest/cliched ways possible. I spend almost the entire day watching music videos on my parents bed because even back then a lot of the late-afternoon and primetime scheduling on Much Music wasn't videos, or if it was, it was top 30 countdowns, or video specials or whatever, stuff I wasn't really interested in. During the day, I would realize, would be "videoflow" where they would just play hours and hours of videos non-stop, and if you watched it long enough you could start seeing genre-patterns, in that they would play 3 French Canadian bands in a row, or like two rap videos back to back. If there is ever a documentary made about Fucked Up ("if" ie "when") you can be this will be the opening scene - there I was laying under the sheets getting very warm after being there watching shit videos and Jerry Springer (the upstairs tv had a quick-view button that made it easier to watch 2 things at once, the downstairs tv didn't, plus it was colder) and Hurdy-Gurdy Man comes on and blows my mind. There was a scene in it with a belly button close up. It was gross and amazing and I mostly just couldn't believe I was watching it on TV, something that I knew to be programmed by real and respectable adults who had real jobs and probably wore suits and basically made careers making sure the world "butthole" didn't get aimed at a 15 year old at 3 in the afternoon on a weekday. The song isn't really even that good (I didn't realize it was a cover until it was too late) so that's why I added the 2nd song, which actually is great, to which I displayed withdrawal symptoms to similar to the ones described above. Anyhow, I guess my learning brain felt it was on the cusp of a very important discovery at the moment, like the fact I was able to see the video at all was making me the holder of some rarefied priviledged information, while my compatriots were at school just learning math or like how to "play by the rules", and here I was getting a clear view through the butthole of the world.


4 SONIC YOUTH "Kool Thing"
So here is the next part of the story. The next video they played was this song. And I'll be honest - I don't even like Sonic Youth, and not because they kind of made fun of us one time, this is not some revisionist trip. When I was a kid I liked things way more straight forward and standard in terms of music but also haircuts and fashion, and even in 1994 they seemed too old to be playing in a punk band, but whatever - this video came on and knocked me out, literally, because after watching these two videos in a row, I got out of bed to get a drink and actually fainted and almost fell down an entire flight of stairs. When I came to (what turned out to be) 30 seconds later, I felt like I was living in a new world of endless possibilities and I immediately broke up my band "The Beavers" and stared the band "Discord".


5 MINISTRY "Jesus Built my Hot Rod"
Sorry about the ad at the start of this video (if you are watching it - if you aren't, sorry I'm wasting your time with this pretentious blog and that you got kicked out of the Brooklyn Vegan comments section and got stuck here). Anyhow, I think this is the fastest song of all time? After I saw this I tried really hard to get into industrial music, but because I lived closer to a shitty mall than a good one, most of the music I had access to came from Sunrise Records (where i bought Insteds "Bonds of Friendship on cassette when I was 14 and passed on a Dangerhouse comp) and a flea market that only opened on weekends in the bottom of the shitty mall (although I did somehow find both the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth records I was looking for there, in another precious moment of formative alchemy) it was hard finding anything of substance. I managed to get a Skinny Puppy tape, which very quickly ended my fascination. But this song is great. I dug the entire album this came off, very influenced by the ambiguous artwork and everything. In fact you can probably start putting the pieces together now, since 2 other videos from this list are very similar to this one.
No Embedding Allowed

6 LUNACHICKS "PS Hell"
I swear to god I saw a video for this song once on TV, but now I can't find an actually video of it on youtube, just this live version. I got really into the dirtier-grungier end of grunge (the part that they showed videos for anyways), and a lot of female bands - Lunachicks, L7, Babes in Toyland, which probably explains why now out band got girl in it. The 2nd show I ever went to was the first warped tour, and I remember skipping Civ to get food so that we wouldn't miss L7 (who were great). This song is crazy and reminds me a lot of one of those early NOFX videos that is hilarious where they just ham infront of a green-screen for 3 minutes.


7 FAITH NO MORE "Another Body Murdered"
I guess this song probably got played a lot, but I don't remember seeing it very much. I think I had this record, but now I can't remember. Our engineer for our new record this time told me he's basing our guitar sound now on Faith No More, so I guess David Comes to Life is gonna sound pretty funky.


8 SOPHIE B HAWKINS "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover"
I'm pretty sure this song invented emo, along with Fast Cars by Tracy Chapman. This song got played like every 25 minutes on tv, but it still wasn't enough back then.


9 L7 "Pretend We're Dead"
Another song that basically never came on, but maybe that's because when it was released I was still listening to Tears for Fears and Bananarama. I had a neighbor once that was a real Mountie, but he had porn in his apartment, and wore a "Smell the Magic" shirt on the reg, which blew my mind all over the back yard. L7 - cop rock.


10 SOUNDGARDEN "Rusty Cage"
Basically this is the best grunge song. We actually tried to include this in the set when we did all grunge covers a few months ago, but it was just too hard to learn. The guitar intro for this is like learning Stravinsky or something. It's hard to write seriously about Soundgarten now after so many years of Chris Cornell with a soulpatch and doing Bond songs and all that, but then you watch live videos of this song where their stage set up is just huge amps and barbed wire, and there's CC playing this song with one hand on the guitar and singing at the same time - you gotta respect what they're doing. This song made me mental when it came on.



Right, so there is the 2010 top ten list. Might not be that current, but it's a lot better than last years.