Real life rock

ArtForum, Dec, 1996 by Jon Savage

1 THE BEATLES: "Tomorrow Never Knows" (from Anthology II: Capitol). The Anthology project - time-released throughout the year - is a fascinating exercise in mass-market archaeology which, it being 1996, means that it upends history: Beatles remix and redux. Less frantic and effect-laden than the released master, but always dominated by that Ringo heartbeat, this "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a startling time-capsule, swooning and droning in a manner that suggests that the Beatles might have heard the Velvet Underground: together with John Cale's contemporaneous feedback/improv masterpiece, "Loop," "Tomorrow Never Knows" marks the year 1966 as the moment when pop began to move out of linear to looped time.

2 SPRING HEEL JACK: "Midwest" (from 68 Million Shades: Island/Trade 2). Now fully established as a musical genre, as opposed to a specific subculture, Drum N'Bass has insinuated itself as a broadcaster of the contemporary perception: Poised between two very different rhythms and meters - the half-speed of that massive, dub reggae bass and the hyperspeed of time-stretched, breakbeat percussion - it teaches us how to live in several time scales at once. An ambient instrumental, "Midwest" is also a classic travel record: repeated themes ebb and flow over seven minutes, shifting phase like the hypnotic repetitions you get on a freeway. And always, at the bottom, the British fascination with America: its sense of space, embodied here by a high synthesizer note, sustained over the chatter of drum and bass like a vista of far-off mountains.

3 PERE UBU: "Street Waves" (from Datapanik in Year Zero: Geffen 5-CD box set). Pere Ubu is a great American group and this is one of their finest moments: a rock song so inclusive and prophetic that it hasn't been superseded, twenty years after it was recorded. Nothing sounded like this 45 when it first appeared in 1976: at once psychedelic and aggressive, "Street Waves" breaks right down to loping drums, the sinuous, melodic bass lines that would have such an impact on Brit groups like Joy Division, and Allen Ravenstine's dirty synthesizer blasts - as powerful as the north wind speeding in from Lake Erie. Together with its flip, "My Dark Ages" and other 45s like "Heart of Darkness" (also collected here), "Street Waves" crystallized an influential aesthetic: evoking at once the terrors and beauties of Cleveland's industrial legacy, it dared to suggest that the decayed inner city could be a beautiful place in which to live, and even have fun.

4 LOBE: "Placebo" (from Lobe: Swim/Dutch East India Trading Company). This album from Aberdeen's Ian Hartley is an electronic trip such as could only have been produced this year, within a market large enough to sustain a record as resolutely within its own world as this. "Placebo" begins with a drone, before settling into a midpaced, ambient pulse, with three or four different textures phasing up and down. At three minutes, the track breaks down into a single organ figure, building back up with the bass and a gorgeous countermelody which rides the track out: at once romantic and meditative, ambiguously narcotic, "Placebo" embodies the possibilities of pure electronic composition.

5 SUPER FURRY ANIMALS: "The Man Don't Give a Fuck" (Creation). The problem with much white guitar music is its pomposity (the certainty that only rock contains real meaning), its seductive machismo (young men responding to the power of amplification), and its techno-fear. This apparent throwaway - a UK B-side until copyright problems delayed its release until later this year - is a perfect corrective: beginning with a short, plaintive verse in Welsh-accented English ("There's nothing much to do/Except to sit and rot in front of televisions/Staring back at me/Just waiting for the microwaves/To mushroom to the sea"), Super Furry Animals sample, loop and synth-layer Steely Dan's famous whine in "Showbiz Kids" ("they don't give a fuck about anyone else") over several minutes into an explicit, witty, perfectly punk antiauthority chant.

6 PET SHOP BOYS: "The Truck-Driver and His Mate" (Parlophone). Bilingual is a great album but this song, tucked away on a B-side, is this year's Pet moment: a response to the transcendent guitar surges of Oasis' UK number one, "Some Might Say." Featuring precise but affectionate lyrics, "The Truck-Driver and His Mate" has a guitar-driven, wordless-vocal chorus that sounds like an orgasm, underscoring this gleeful tale of straight-acting gay men: the song is both an object fantasy and a sly critique of the male-bonded world of Britpop. Rarely have the Pet Shop Boys sounded like they're having more fun, by doing exactly what they're not supposed to do: rock.

7 A.S.R. FEATURING SHELLEY P: "I'll Trance You There" (from Best of Trance: Low Price Music 4-CD compilation). One feature of this year has been the proliferation in the UK of budget dance music mixes and compilations, with the rate of creativity and production in this area during the last five years so intense that it's possible to discover time capsules from even the recent past. This is one such delight: twelve minutes of ebb and flow, with a sampled, breathy female vocal testifying, exhorting, and chanting over Terry Riley drones, relentless gay disco bass figures, and synth-flute melodies, affirming Trance as the true inheritor of the psychedelic mantle.