1. Sex

2. Smack

3. Suicide

4. Jesus

5. Beer

6. Sex

7. Suicide

8. Being born French

9. Beer

10.

Back to #1? Try...

THE REPLACEMENTS -- Tim (1985)

The above, now with added tunes®. Wants to be the best pop record ever made. Pretty much succeeds. Also functions as epoch-fucking dissertation on what it is to be angry and young and not 'into metal'. More buskers should set up, play this album from beginning to end, pack up and leave. I'd donate.

ART OF FIGHTING -- Second Storey (2004)

Boyish; autumnal; wiiistful. Quiet guitar gets loud; gets quiet again. Dude sings prettier melodies than you'll hear anywhere else this year. Guarantee holds even if you listen to THE MONKEES at all in the next few months. It strikes me that smarmy well-dressed gits like current rock-crit darlings THE KILLERS are the panoramically sickening opposite of everything that ART OF FIGHTING stand for (nothing, incidentally; they're too shy). Coyness can indeed stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to, but at least you won't look like a twat. And you'll have better songs...

Soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT (2003)

BEETHOVEN's 'Für Elise' and the 'Moonlight' sonata -- along with his 5th symphony, possibly the most hideously cliché representatives of the classical canon: they're cliché for a reason, of course -- chiefly because every audience since their inception has been insidiously compelled to hum along and generally enjoy themselves. Which makes them the perfect soundtrack to the flabbergasting inanity and even more flabbergasting sublimity of teenage-ness smashing up against each other. Best film since DONNIE DARKO, incidentally. Or maybe SWEET SIXTEEN. Yeah, I like being young and sad and beautiful--or wishing I was--to catchy melodies.

BRITNEY SPEARS -- Everytime, In The Zone (2003)

Because we've all dreamed of making a shirtless Stephen Dorff so mad that he throws furniture.

© Reuben Ham

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