Sweeping The Nation Covermount 11: Dancing About Architecture Part 2

So in our last post we investigated those who love this musical life. But as we should know - we do read comment boxes, after all - not all music is equally celebrated. Here's another 21 songs of varying levels of scorn and satire, these less enamoured with other artists, other scenes or indeed the whole of pop culture.


Dancing About Architecture Part 2


Mitch Benn & The Distractions - Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now
Surely the only song to explore the scansion possibilities of the name Thirteen Senses, the prolific musical comedian and Radio 4 stalwart manque hits satirical soundalike nail firmly on post-Barron Knights head.

Misty's Big Adventure - Fashion Parade
Meanwhile the Birmingham jazz-pop-madness octet trained their sights in 2006 on the new guitar bands. Might have been better timed had they or someone tackled the new guitar bands now, you have to think in the back of your mind.

The Fall - A Past Gone Mad (Peel session)
"Why is Pete Gabriel always following us?" Of course, Mark E is an old hand at such carpet bombing ways. What Ian McShane did to upset him remains unclear, but the disdain for retro shines through as much as it ever does with mid-90s Fall/Smith.

XTC - Funk Pop A Roll
Here's what Andy Partridge does - he writes a song about disposable pop and the management thereof that does nothing except infect your inner ear, and then puts it in the casing of a hook-laden pop earworm.

Denim - Middle Of The Road
The ever inscrutable Lawrence constructs glam as a method by which to critique all other music in the negative, interpolating Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep as he goes.

The Arctic Monkeys - Fake Tales Of San Francisco (original version from Five Minutes With Arctic Monkeys EP)
Yeah, the Arctic Monkeys. Got a problem with that? Certainly Alex Turner had a problem with the Sheffield scenesters in the New Rock Revolution age. Have a look at its entry on SongMeanings should you ever find yourself in too good a mood.

Television Personalities - Part Time Punks
The Guardian printed a slightly bizarre story in 2005 alleging without actually coming up with evidence or reasoning that Dan Treacy of the TVPs secretly wrote the Arctics' songs. At the time he was barely able to control his own affairs, let alone a number one band's.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?
Another taking on the enemy's sound from the pen of Vivian Stanshall, according to the first reissue's sleevenotes "about the horrors of rich white singers, having to dress down to sing the blues".

The Kinks - The Moneygoround
From 1970's cumbersomely titled Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround Part One, at a time when Ray Davies had issues with what he was getting and how he'd been treated by the industry.

Frank Zappa - Who Needs The Peace Corps?
From Zappa's Sgt Pepper society skewering We're Only In It For The Money, the iconoclastic hero to Vaclav Havel takes on the hippie ideal, the stress on the latter word.

John Lennon - How Do You Sleep?
And so we reach inexorably for Lennon's 1971 attack on his former writing partner (which also features George Harrison's slide guitar), although Lennon would later claim that much of it is about himself as much as Paul.

Syd Barrett - Bob Dylan Blues
Barrett, especially in his condition, was a man rarely given to public outbursts, but this long lost track only unearthed this decade for a reissue project seems to take a poke at Dylan's activism and pretensions, although apparently Barrett was a fan.

The Indelicates - We Hate The Kids
Brighton really-a-quintet-but-essentially-just-a-duo are mates of but also the mirror image in a way of Art Brut - they've got tons of literate culture-cauterising songs like this, albeit none so directly titled.

The Smiths - Paint A Vulgar Picture
There's a song on the Indelicates' forthcoming album called If Jeff Buckley Had Lived, and this from Strangeways Here We Come is kind of related, being Morrissey's swipe at posthumous repackaging and profiting.

Pet Shop Boys - How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?
Oh, they may look innocent with their hats and YBA associates, but they wound Bono up something rotten with both their When The Streets Had No Name cover and its single flipside, a comment on world saving pop stars.

Black Box Recorder - Being Number One
Well, it's a lucky dip as far as Luke Haines' career is concerned but the Haines-Moore-Nixey triumverate slipped the lead into the velvet glove, not least on this sarcastic view from inside the Pop Idol malestrom.

Helen Love - Long Live The UK Music Scene
Steadfastly refusing to be swept away by Cool Britannia, the Ramones obsessed postmodern popette utilised among others the name of Steven Wells, who with his image might have professed to like this kind of thing were he not trying so hard.

Mikrofisch - The Kids Are All Shite
And bringing that song's sentiments right up to date, a Hamburg/London duo with a bass, a keyboard, a drum machine and an opinion.

Teen Anthems - I Hate Oasis (And I Hate The Beatles)
And taking that song's sentiments back ten years to Porthcawl bouncy pop nihilist John William Davies, who somehow got this to become a Radio 1 breakfast show record of the week (under Mark & Lard's stewardship, inevitably)

Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine - Lenny And Terrence
Jim Bob produced the Indelicates track back there, and here he and Fruitbat adopt an industrial fodderstompf taking Messrs Kravitz and Trent D'Arby as AOR wicker men, the latter an odd choice for 1993.

The Jesus & Mary Chain - I Hate Rock 'N' Roll
And where better to finish than Jim and William Reid, rock icons in their heads who took hating everyone else to fresh heights by hating each other and everyone else in their band at any one time.