Tom's Top 100 singles list

My tastes did undergo a pretty big shift soon after I finished the list but I still like all but a handful of the records on it. It does reflect the transitory notion of taste, yes, which is why I don't promote it any more cos a new reader coming to the site would get an idea of what I was about not what I am about.

But mostly it's the personal stuff. Last weekend my girlfriend was going through her old photos and found a picture taken from when she was ill a few years ago. I thought she looked great in the picture but she was saying, no, look at my eyes in it, can't you tell tell I'm really ill, and I couldn't at all. So for me the list - as a snapshot of taste - is kind of like that. It's not any of the contents, it's just that I look at it and think "I wasn't well" even if nobody else could see that.

(Actually after Graham posted the link I went and looked at it again for the first time in ages and while I didn't read any of it I did enjoy remembering hearing and writing about most of the singles so "disown" might be a bit strong.)

For ppl who weren't reading FT at the time and for whatever reason care about this, context: the list was published kind of in weblog style, one entry written at a time, one a day, at the end of 1999 and leading up to Christmas. It was sort of a farewell to the 90s and to my life in the 90s as well as being popcrit.

Just finished reading it, and loved every last line- there's nothing quite like the joy of a list comprised almost entirely of stuff I'd never even heard of, with copious good reasons why I should have, too- I still have so much to learn....

Slappable moments:

"Well, just as the Pope requires two proven miracles to canonise a Saint, so we must identify two miraculous moments in a pop song before we can bestow perfection upon it."

"the unbearable lightness of g-ing"

Did I really write the latter? It's grebt!

(immense battle of will)

OK, sorry, bed. I have 3 more pub nights this week after all.

The statement that if Tom was to do it over, "...baby one more time" would be No.1 == Dud.

But also important was that it didn't seem like there was any reason I couldn't have done the same. It was clearly the work of someone who loved music (much the same music as myself) and wanted to explain and explore why. A knowledge of chord changes or a subscription to Mojo was obviously not necessary. It may well be that I don't have the talent for it, or that it will continue to take too long to get something passable together, but there's no reason not to try. Tom == Sex Pistols.

The Britney Spears remark I was reacting to appears to be a conflation of two posts, one of which mentions that a regret of yours is that you didn't put the track high in the list. I don't like that idea.

Not just because I think "...One More Time" is unworthy: I'd have no problem with _a_ list that had Jumpin' Jumpin' in the number one spot, for example. But I don't think either of them would be right in _that_ list: It's clearly a 100 tracks with a definite viewpoint. It's by someone and although you may no longer get on with who it's by, sticking stuff you like now into it seems like bad sympathetic magic at best. Nothing wrong with putting it in a list that you'd rewrite today. Which is the opposite of what I said above. Hum.