Just in time for Weekend 2, here are my thoughts on the best and worst of Coachella 2012 (Weekend 1):
TOP 5 ACTS AT COACHELLA 2011
Nostaliga as a force seems to grow more powerful with every passing year. It has always existed. I remember the Stray Cats aping Elvis Presley while we ate at 50’s diners growing up. But it seems like ripping off the past has sped up recently. Vanity Fair pointed the trend out in fashion. The author of a book called Retromania made the same argument for music. Mark Harris at Entertainment Weekly lamented that sequels and remakes are almost all studios make now (9 of the top 10 films last year qualified as one or the other). Unless they become Super Bowl commercials instead. And even gaming is jumping in as Halo and other games get a reboot.
What’s weird is that the Internet is getting left out of this trend.
No, we didn’t forget. Just some techincal difficulties adding it to Denuology over the holiday.
It’s our fifth year doing this and we’ve noticed a few things different this year: more dancing tunes, more hip hop, more saxophone solos (!), fewer female singers and waaay more profanity and sexually explicit lyrics. Not sure why but that’s how 2011 turned out. Before the list, here come the rules:
+ All songs are listed in reverse order because that is the only real way to do a list. Any of you with any sense of drama will listen to the whole thing from 100 slowly building up to number 1, at which point you will practically be bursting with excitement.
+ These are tracks, not necessarily singles. Covers qualify as well though I usually only include ones that are markedly different than the originals (and are good).
+ I only have one song per artist because the list is way cooler that way. Having 12 My Morning Jacket tracks in the Top 100 feels pretty anticlimactic. Everybody gets a shot this way.
+ They were all released in 2011on either an album or as a single. Sometimes the album came out last year but it was released as a single this year (or vice versa). That is a loophole I happily exploit.
+ If I’m wrong about the release date of something, blame Wikipedia, Amazon, and various music blogs.
Rather than put in links for every song this year, I’ve built out the list as playlists on both Rhapsody and Spotify. You can only find 85 of the songs on Rhapsody and 87 on Spotify. I’ve noted in the comments for each song which aren’t available on playlists and those have links. Or just jump around and pull them all up on YouTube. Whatever you do, the list takes about six hours all the way through so call in sick and enjoy!
It’s a quest that has been afoot since the web got 2.0’d and, in my opinion, can be split into 3 waves. Fan sites and MySpace helped change the game of music online in the first wave of social music sites. Suddenly there was a chance to comment on your favorite music with fellow fans, reach artists more directly and possibly even help shape who makes it big. Internet radio was just coming on the scene and you could easily hear programmers with much broader tastes than the evil overlords at Clear Channel Corp Inc. Radio looked like it was in trouble.
Here’s what I thought about Coachella this year, broken down into convenient list form:
TOP 5 ACTS AT COACHELLA 2011
