End of year 2017; morbidly late and in pieces (50–26)
Hello readers, welcome to my end-of-year list, something I actually manage to write roughly every 5 years.
There are no real rules except these are the rules:
- One song per artist except if I choose to bend the rules in some convoluted fashion.
- Song must probably have been released in some format in the past year.
- It’s not what I think is coolest or best sums up 2017 because subjectivity is more fun. This is my favourites (or something) from the year.
- Deal with it.
And god so help me, it’s gonna be 50 songs this time after the fiasco that was last year’s attempt at 100. Warning: this year has been a bit dark and inevitably so is writing about it.
Here is the playlist so you can sing along etc.
50. Martin Solveig ft. Ina Wroldson — Places
I started off this year working for Radio 1. Actually that’s not true, I think I might have been working for Radio 2 on a project about love songs but that sounds less cool and was actually an acutely painful way to spend Valentine’s Day while getting a divorce so let’s concentrate on the Radio 1 bit.
Anyway, so there I am working for Radio 1 — god, this feels like decades ago. I can’t believe this song’s actually from this year, I had to check. Was the first part of this year real? What was I doing?
Listening to this song, I think. It’s ostensibly a love song but delivered in despair — When I’m not with you, I’m not me/Nothing ever feels good. That the person Ina Wroldson is singing about is obviously the happy place doesn’t sound like something she’s thrilled about, when I’m not with you/I’m not in control of what I do — it’s not tender, although it has an edge of pleading, a mournful note about loss of self. Which is relatable, as a 2017 opener.
49. Litany — Flaws
So much of the music I’ve listened to this year has been found from Spotify’s well-trained suggestion mechanism, which years of careful listening has precision-targeted to only play me certain sorts of mournful electropop.
This obviously falls into that category. It’s one of those songs that sticks in my head sometimes, makes me play it repeatedly; the start is so barely-there, such a weak-willed murmur of a thing (I’m expecting a new low for me/so I’m going home) and then just before the chorus, it rallies and tightens, stiffens its spine with the bit that evolves through it;
all of this stuff will break me
(don’t break me)
hold on, all of this stuff will break me
2017 has involved a lot of stuff that would break me. The me at the start could not have dealt with the end, for all her above-average resilience. Me and Katie have talked a lot this year about where we were last year, which was a much better place than we’d been months previously but god, I know this isn’t at all exceptional but 2017 has been really hard. Really extraordinary, too but god, when does it stop?
January 1st, 2017 saw me and Katie a little hungover in the Dog & Bell, Deptford, helping some very drunk people with their pub quiz answers and accidentally being given a mystery shot of rum. We wandered home, to the boats we live(d) on and were just putting a pizza in the oven when the fuckawful club/schnitzel restaurant (I know, I know) next door to the creek started up its speakers and we realised that their final night was going to be a bad one.
We went round to have a word, no longer bothering to even call Lewisham noise services seeing as they’d done naff all to help and somehow ended up in a standoff where we were literally turning the speakers down by standing next to them, drinking the pub’s beer for free, until 7am. After which the party continued but we retired to the boat to drink whiskey and eat the cold pizza we’d started cooking about fifteen hours previous, a move best described as ‘the act of two people who have lost their fucking minds.’
That seems like a fitting start to a year that has repeatedly involved ludicrous amounts of danger, some largely sought out, some entirely related to having a massive breakdown and some ambient to getting into my fucking home. And then all the existential threats like Brexit and deciding I probably wasn’t ever going to love anyone ever again and the summer of being so unwelcome where I lived that I ate nothing but supermarket meal deals for about three months, worked every single day and tried to work out when I was going to care enough about how much of a mess I was to cry or something.
By the third chorus, all of this stuff will break me sounds like a threat, don’t break me is angry not pleading, hold on, all of this stuff will break me the growled declaration of the hero making the final move. Shit’s still bad but so are you.
48. Little Mix — Dear Lover
God, who doesn’t love Little Mix? Wrongthinking people. Anyway, I know Glory Days came out in 2016 but this narrowly pipped its way in as a single release or a bonus track or something and my mild guilt about that is probably why it’s down so low.
This is a song about being a bit of a lothario and also a romantic desperate — it’s got shades, narratively, of Bat Out Of Hell in that the promise is that whichever of Little Mix is taking you to bed to sensually rub the edge off all the loneliness of 2017 is sure as heck gone when the morning comes.
Obviously there’s a lot of me that’s just massively pleased by the fact this is a young girl group singing the line dear lover/i’m incapable of saving your heart this time/but if you wanna/I’ll be your hero for just tonight. It’s aware and tender and cocky, the little bit of love left to give up being shared as a one-time-only proposition.
It shouldn’t be impressive that Little Mix’s songs are about women as well-rounded, main character people but well, sadly it is and I am so glad that they do. This is a pure girl group song; it’s feminine and light and pretty, seductive and emotive and it’s about shagging someone so they — or maybe both of you — can get through this heap-of-shit life with a bit of comfort.
And with all the control lying with Little Mix — the lover wants them to commit, they just want a night with some human contact. There’s an apology for that and a full acknowledgement of it and it’s so straightforward and unjudgemental about itself. Which is something sometimes you need to hear, even if you’re woke enough to at least pretend you’re not faintly appalled by the number of people you’ve shagged this year.
48. Zak Abel ft. Maleek Berry — Unstable
I quite liked this when I first heard it, enough that it got onto my end of year list potentials playlist pretty early, stuck in my head from some play it got on 1Xtra but it at least made the final cut because of looping it on a bus in Montenegro.
I do a lot of travel, a lot of it on my own and for reasons of budget, a lot of it seems to be on buses, which are also just one of the only real ways to get around Montenegro if you don’t have a car. In this instance, I was going from Podgorica to Kotor, without data roaming on my phone and had just found out the fanfic I’d thought I’d loaded to read on the four hour journey hadn’t.
Which is pretty ok because actually the somewhat-hair-raising views down the mountain roads are pretty spectacular and meant I was paying an unusual amount of attention to what I was listening to, which was this. A lively, charming, bubbly and sweet ode to really fucking up a relationship.
The affection with with I know, I know, I know, I know — you deserve better is delivered, going into the chorus, is truly wonderful. As a total hot mess who screws up every relationship I have, this is obviously highly relatable content but the fact it’s done with such despairing, danceable good humour is what I truly love about it — like so much of the music I’ve looped this year, it’s a sad song masquerading as perfectly normal and well, what a very 2017 mood that is.
47. Charli XCX ft ABRA — Drugs
This, on the other hand, is a love song masquerading as threat. I keep thinking I don’t really like it and then getting re-hypnotised by the fake-snarl of baby you the love of my life.
It’s love-as-pathology, which isn’t really the kind you want unless you’re in one of those moods where that’s exactly what you want and this year has had a fair amount of that. And it’s all an act anyway because the heart of the song is a really sweet crush or like, new relationship energy where you’re just a bit obsessed with someone and trying to make it sound cool and hard cus like, feelings are for people with less good jackets.
46. Niall Horan — Slow Hands
When a still-at-Radio-1-colleague said there was a new Niall Horan single I glibly quipped ‘spoiler: it is not a banger.’ More fool me for my attempt at being an internet edgelord, however, because improbable though it may be, this is a fucking banger.
It’s a shuffling, sweaty, sweet song about when you properly want to shag someone absolutely loads. Niall is not really someone who can do, like, straight-up, tear-your-clothes-off sexy but this is proper ‘when you look over at yr boyfriend and he’s wearing that sweater you really fancy him in and rrrrr’ sexy.
Of course, like everyone else, I am mostly obsessed with the sweat dripping out of my dirty laundry line. Even as a very sweaty person, I have rarely if ever had my laundry actually drip and definitely not in the way it evokes, which is the whole pile leaking onto the carpet like it’s just seen that shot of Chris Evans in Infinity War.
45. Hey Violet — Hoodie
I heard this song in Iceland, shivering on the rooftop of a bar I’d gone to to escape some teenage Australians experiencing joy in the kitchen of the hostel I was trying desperately to sleep off jet lag in. My hands were numb, my jacket was in no way thick enough to withstand the ghostly beaks of puffins, carried on the Arctic winds that killed them and I was in absolutely no kind of mood for this shit. Nevertheless, I was instantly like ‘what the fuck is this saccharine nonsense, I must shazam it immediately?’
It’s a slightly chuggy punkish pop ditty about stealing a former significant other’s hoodie, refusing to give it back and being a gross creep with it. It’s unbelievably cute, (it makes me think about you/so I wear it when I sleep) yet contains one of the most relatably disgusting lines I’ve ever heard (I’m still rockin’ your hoodie/and chewing on the strings) and is a self-conscious livejournal entry of a wallow in broken hearted modernity.
I have never really been much of a hoodie-stealer but wearing someone else’s clothes is a ridiculously intimate thing, sometimes and I did find myself hugging a pyjama top in bed the other day because it smelt of them. Obviously I am only saying that because I assume everyone stopped reading already and expect anyone who did get this far not to embarrass me by implying I am capable of feelings, please.
44. Lorde — Supercut
The Lorde album is very good. It is dark and painful and as full of the eponymous melodrama as it should be. I don’t need to tell you this, unless you’ve somehow landed on this list with absolutely no cultural context for popular music in 2017 whatsoever.
I got divorced in 2017. It’s the fucking worst. I have been through some shit that hurt a lot and I think getting divorced may be the single most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It’s sort of a cross between being publicly shamed and personally shredded, the relationship you declared to everyone was going to work forever pulling itself apart and leaving bits of you in it, all the shame of having failed someone and the endless fucking loss and the way everyone seems to feel like they can own a piece of it.
We both make content for a living; this is about the glossy version, the jokes, the reel you’d put out to explain what happened. I have brooded on it constantly.
43. WIlkinson — Wash Away
This reminds me totally of Monaco — I listened to it on repeat all the way to Monte Carlo, going there for the ePrix. It soundtracked every beach bar, a huge song at the time.
It’s cheesy and basic as fuck and essentially a load of cheap tricks stuck together that work very well — either on a beach in Nice watching the sun go down or pegging it through Luton airport trying to jump wheelie suitcases so you can get back to your office job on time. It’s artificial and constructed and means nothing but it does it with such style it’s almost like feelings.
It sounds like a spell you cast for a European beach holiday. It’s not smart or difficult and guess what fuckers? It doesn’t have to be — some things can just be pleasant and also contain enough ‘mildly gets you excited’ trickery to pep you up a bit and get you through a summer of working non-stop.
42. DJDS, Khalid, Empress Of — Why Don’t You Come On
This was playing in the shop I discovered in the Stratford Centre where you can buy Boohoo stuff discounted, when you’re having a ballgown-related emergency and need things fast. I shazam’ed it and it’s somehow made it into this list.
I think I may have been feeling slightly sappy at the time or at least had several pints because I’m not totally sure this lives up to making it into my end-of-year but on the other hand, I haven’t chucked it out either so sucker up, Hazel and write something about it.
It’s a very British track, switching between cool and hopelessly not so — Empress Of is the sort of wispy, spooky pop I love and here she’s very much the centre of the melody. It’s cautiously optimistic but in a sort of “hopefully this will only suck a lot” way — love might be harder than it used to be/but you keep holding on.
42. HAERTS — The Way
This year I’ve listened to a hell of a lot of sad, semi-queer pop about feelings that falls into a broad comfort zone of ‘kinda a bit like Fleetwood Mac I guess.’
I was obsessed with Wings by HAERTS in 2014, the last year I managed to actually finish writing my end of year list. This isn’t quite that good — or at least, I keep thinking it isn’t and then it does wonderful swirling things and the toll of the chorus makes my heart lurch. It’s about the heroics of drowning, which obviously so far so 2018.
It’s a big big of rolling fields gothic Americana, grinding out its own hopes and dreams. It’s swishy dresses and broken farm equipment artfully arranged to no purpose, it’s sadness having become a redundant emotion because it’s so obvious.Hold me in your arms/hold me to the end of time — cus it’s coming and perhaps all that’s left here at the end are some pragmatic comforts.
40. Ships — Where We Are
This song is fairly eh to be honest, it’s gained an enduring place in my end of year list and heart because it’s the sort of thing that comes up on a playlist and you’re like ‘oh hey this, this is the unexpected pesto in my otherwise mediocre baguette.’
2017 has, it has been widely agreed, been a fucking horrible year full of cruelties and crises so on such unimaginably severe scales, macro and micro, that it’s painful to think about a future.
Spoiler: that’s cus the future is immediate. There’s no actual line we draw at the end of this year, the rubble doesn’t clear that simply, the international, social and personal infrastructure remains an earphones-tangle that we’re going to have to somehow find the strength to, shaky-fingered, unwind. And then probably replace all the bits of.
It’s what’s most horrifying about bad times, to me — they don’t just stop happening, they become different and stranger and maybe even harder in the reconstruction, rather than the rapid-fire heat of the moment where immediacy frequently trumps the discipline of sorting shit out. This too shall pass but then there’s the work of putting something back together when you’re at your least able to do so.
On this bleak note, let’s talk about the fact an economic study I can’t find anymore that I read in like 2006 said that popular music becomes more rhythmically even during moments of political and economic instability. Makes sense — who wants to listen to fucking acid jazz when the challenge of opening your bank statement is quite enough mental stimulation for a meltdown?
I used to spend a lot of time at work listening to ‘current pop music’ (or well, the Radio 1 playlist) and it’s kind of dramatically noticeable that what people want is music with an even tempo. Streaming kept Drake’s amazingly bland One Dance at the number one spot for 15 weeks in 2016 — endless looping of a song with a rhythm so subtle and even it’s hard to believe it’s billed as a ‘banger’ but which has remained the disco at 2017’s panic.
Anyway; songs with even rhythms; it’s what I fucking want, too — more on this as we progress but this has been a year for skirting the edge of a nervous breakdown with the scream-snatching velocity and skill of a motorbike racer on a volcanic ridge. There’s nothing brave about presenting a challenge to a wounded beast as it totters on the edge of falling over and most people don’t seek predation in their listening.
On the other hand, there is considerable skill and affection in offering comfort to someone in the direst of circumstances. Sometimes soothing pap is actually the antiseptic in the wound that stops it festering.
This is that pap and if you bitch at me about listening to things that make my brain feel nice you can fuck right off.
39. Alok & Matthieu Koss — Big Jet Plane
‘Felipe Massa’s Instagram story’ was not somewhere I expected to find any new music this year. Which was why, when he featured this, I actually looked it up. It does something a bit generically electronic-music-that-isn’t-quite-commercial-dance-in-the-2010s and, let us be real, the lyrics are fucking dire.
However, as you may be able to gather from the above, 2017 involved quite a lot of The Anxiety, for me. I am not sure even which flight it was but at some point, with the sort of reserved subtletly I normally hold back for being absolutely shitfaced, I snuggled my face into the headrest of whatever plane I was on, concentrated on not crying and listening to this on loop until the urge to scream a lot subsided.
(For context: I am a freelance motorsport journalist and as such spend my entire life on budget flights, which is actually completely fine but leaves me with troubling amounts of time where my phone is on airplane mode and Thinking About Things can happen)
Essentially, this is soothing white noise to me. Am I putting ‘soothing white noise’ into the things I have most enjoyed hearing in 2017? Yes, I am. Fuck off.
38. Kesha — Praying
This is the opposite of soothing white noise. It deserves to be far higher but I keep being unable to listen to it. When I was making the playlist for this list, I had to skip it every time because this song is too raw for my scrubbed-out heart to be able to cope with, this year.
There are quite a lot of things that have happened — or well, mostly things that I’ve done, I guess — in the past year or so that I can basically only function by emotionally avoiding most of the time. Which I’m aware is massively unhealthy and there’s no real excuse for not doing anything about it other than that I haven’t had time, along with things like the massive hole in my tooth where a filling fell out in 2016 and various other Blatantly You Should Have Fixed This, You Horrible Wreck.
Of course, some things are way harder to fix than others. I lived on a boat during 2017; she was not a good boat — she lacked, for instance, a door or central heating or plumbing or storage space or …I mean, for fuck’s sake, I spent most of last year sleeping next to a bucket I’d jury-rigged to a piece of insulation at 3am before a flight to Marrakesh.
Should I have put the globetrotting on hold long enough to just fucking move house and sort things out? Sure. But unfortunately getting six flights a month was the only thing that was keeping hold of the keys to the mental cage I’d locked the wolverines in, trying to outrun my own head so obviously it would be rejected as too obviously blunt in an Adam Sandler movie.
And anyway it had always all just been kind of temporary, before we sorted out the divorce and then I’d really fix things, of course. Like when my ex-husband moved out of our old flat and I suddenly realised I had a tonne more crap I needed to put in my boat and nowhere safe or dry to keep it and the brutal metaphor of the state of one’s vessel for the state of one’s head is like living in some kind of house of mirrors where everything’s just your own depression reflected back at you while what you think you look like splinters and repeats and smears.
Spoilers: I didn’t sort fuck-all out, mates. I couldn’t save my marriage, or C, or myself.
This song has an obviously hugely important place in Kesha’s story in 2017 — it’s powerful because it’s redemptive, it does the rousingly gigantic thing that I think Lady Gaga was probably hoping she could do with Joanna and it it is full of emotive dignity, quiet power and an ability to finally express these emotions.
I didn’t have any of that. It didn’t, like, inspire me — when I listen to this song, it’s to brood on being the person who absolutely has not sorted themself out, where Kesha has. I don’t have anyone to be angry at — or forgive — other than myself and I’m not ready to do at least half of that, yet, definitely still at the fallen on your knees stage.
And obviously it’s an invocation for herself, an affirmation, a howl of defiance and all kinds of things I recognise, if I was just those stumbling baby steps further through the process.
Really, it’s obviously not about me at all — in the year of #MeToo, this is a glorious, powerful cry that’s exactly as outraged as it should be that it has to be made. It’s all very well being brave but you shouldn’t have to and to be able to do it so articulately and with such dignity is something no one wants to aspire to or admire because it’s a cumulation of pain but it is, undeniably, heroic. Shriek on, crystal warrior.
37. Tiesto — Ten Seconds Before Sunrise (Moska remix)
Look guys, I had a lot of formative musical experiences in the 90s. This is just big and dumb and it sounds exciting and slightly adrenaline-sexy-glamourous and it’s quite good for running through an airport late at night hoping you’re gonna make your connection. I have no interest hearing it in a club but it’s great earphones-dance, all velocity and rhythm.
36. Carly Rae Jepsen — Cut To The Feeling
Can I write about this song or am I too sour? Oh, 2017 picked up towards the end — I almost certainly can.
Feeling things has been really difficult, this year. Like, I mean other than ‘numbly, impotently furious’ or whatever. I don’t think that’s just me having crushing depression or at least if it was, everyone I know is also crushingly depressed. Which I guess is a possibility but still: everything just seemed to be a little tougher even on the ‘reacting to how tough this is’ front.’
Definitely, feeling joy has been hard. I’m quite a giggly person, despite looking kinda stern and like… there hasn’t been a lot of that this year, has there?
This song is ebullient brilliance, over-glittered and frantic and forceful but it’s not the moment you actually feel it, it’s battering manically on the rocket-proof glass you need to get through to get there. It’s crafting a chorus that paints the picture of what it wants without it happening.
That’s not a failing, that’s incredible — the ability to make a song about wanting to have an emotion that both conjures the specifics of it and doesn’t break the glass is a compositional skill off the charts. It’s the desperation itself — the desire to get through all this hideous anaesthetic and be in a position where you can feel something without digging it, sludgy, out of the frozen, miserable tundra of 2017.
Obviously, as a Formula E journalist (where we have a paddock club called EMOTION because of course we do) the take me to emotion/I want to go all the way bit massively amuses me and I’m not even remotely sorry.
35. The Chainsmokers — Don’t Say
The Chainsmokers’ album is all killer, no filler. Every single track is an absolute banger I’d be totally happy to see get to number one — and I used to be the person who tweeted the official UK charts (badly) so believe me I have both listened to a lot of Chainsmokers songs and reviewed the content that might get there in 2017.
(In Bucharest, in February, I turned to my friend Katie and regretfully informed her we had to leave the bar we were in because they were playing Shape Of You by Ed Sheeran and I was not there for that)
Memories: Do Not Open is a very 2017 album. It is the sound of fuckboys discovering feelings — their own and others — and consequences. It is the gormless, privilege-dripping, dim awareness that human interactions aren’t a series of decision branches you can game to make things happen. It’s a dawning complexity in a million little, stupid details — from stolen mattresses to this, where Emily Warren sighs, sneers and spoonfeeds her way to a borderline adult conversation about what you’ve fucked up this time, son.
It’s not an elegant thing. It’s a song that looks good in sweatpants sitting low on its hips with a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon at 2am. It’s a song that thinks a lot about bacon but, like, low carb turkey bacon. It thinks a lot about Insta mindfulness memes, without irony. Actually it’s started a special side insta for inspo.
Emily Warren did all that when she was 14, not 28 and so the tension of the song knowingly owning itself remains — and the central conceit, of “don’t say you’re human,” white cis dudebros because y’know, functionally no you are not in the same human struggle as anyone else and yet. And yet. Here we are having sex with you. Honestly.
Here we are fucking them. Honestly.
34. Starley — Call On Me (Ryan Ribeck remix)
This should be way higher but I am a little bit guiltily convinced it actually first charted, let alone got released, in 2016 so have like, played myself into putting it in but I’m not proud of it.
This is, specifically, the Ryan Ribeck remix. I’m pretty sure Spotify Hipster Boyfriend recommendations brought it to my attention. The original is great, of course — all the sweetness and affection of something that doesn’t need to be so stridently pitch-shifted but my dudes, I am not a sweet and affectionate person, I am the kind of girl who would probably look better in armour.
Tuned up with the remix, this becomes a sort of …battle cry is wrong but definitely something rousing and passionate about how fucking much you wanna just like, care about a person and be there for them. I am so incredibly down with that as a strategic goal 2k1anything.
People I really love have had horrifyingly shit years this year — I mean, the whole fucking world has but proximity gives you a greater understanding of the specifics of the pain and I spend a lot of time wanting to defiantly howl ‘FUCK OFF, YOU BASTARD, I WILL NOT LET YOU HAVE THEM’ at the universe in general. Do I like to imagine I would do this in a sort of bifrost-lurid disco vortex, shiny-eyed with feels? Yes, because that sounds ludicrously aesthetic.
33. Tinashe — Flame
Some songs end up on this list because they are just really good; this is one of them. This could’ve come in any year and frankly I don’t relate to it at all, it’s just a proper banger.
It’s a little stoic — oh, maybe it does have a touch of the 2017 to it really — and gentle in its commitment rather than all the burning need and desperation elsewhere. Tinashe just wants to know you’re still down to fuck. It’s all been a bit shit lately and maybe you’ve got some stuff to work on but will you just come over here and get naked?
Or maybe like, cuddle a bit at the very least — it’s not actually a very sexy song, it’s about wanting to be hugged to someone and put your head on their shoulder and get told the argument is over even if it’s not. Oh fuck, it’s all this year really innit.
32. Joker — Fantasy
The scene: I am in Stansted airport, exploring a newer and grimmer section than even I have previously. I am off to Podgorica, where I will have an exciting time with the Montenegrin mafia of which more very shortly.
It’s March and I’m still really fragile. I think one of my friends has just stopped speaking to me for reasons, I suspect, related to me playing with their romantic feelings and they’re right because I’m a piece of shit — but it feels horrible and I am at a little bit of a loose end about why I am going to Podgorica and what I am doing.
(A project about what happens to cities after the cessation of communist town planning, although the mafia-related anecdotes are better really)
My friend Miles, who is a top lad, DMs me on Twitter asking if I want to hear a load of hysterical gregorian dubstep clanking bollocks that’s so over the top it practically turns itself over. Fucking do I? Hell yeah.
I managed to get it to download before I got the plane and oh, god, I really love this. It’s so naff — so absurd, so full of itself. If I was a wrestler this would absolutely be my entrance music. I don’t have any words for how ridiculous it is and it makes me laugh, almost with embarrassment about how seriously it seems to be taking itself were it not for the fact it clearly knows itself and how ludicrous it is; an admirable quality in anything but especially staggeringly absurd EDM.
I have chosen to believe it is the soundtrack to Druid Mechanics.
That Montenegrin mafia anecdote because it’s a good’un:
On my last night in Podgorica, I took myself out for some excellent squid dinner and was like, pottering around the centre of town a bit before I went back to my guesthouse. I had clocked pretty early during my time there that there was way too much money in Montenegro for the amount of industry and we all know what that means. I’m a little several-wines-down and in the mood to poke around.
Unfortunately, the skies open in the way they only really do in the mountains. You know, like standing under a really good drench showerhead except it’s everywhere and you can’t see and you’ve got all your clothes on.
I blunder blindly into the nearest open doorway, which turns out to be a little bar. The waitress speaks a little English, which is unusual in Montenegro where I’ve been mostly managing to half-ass conversations in Russian and the little bits of generic Slavic I remember, so I figure I’ll settle in for a drink and wait for the sky to stop flushing itself.
The waitress invites me over to the table the staff are drinking at and I can just about follow enough of the conversation that this seems a good opportunity to interact with some Montenegrins and Learn Stuff. Approximately 0 seconds in, I realise that it really is an interesting opportunity as a discussion about the fact I should come and stay at one of the guy’s holiday apartment in Cetinj makes it increasingly apparent that I am talking to some varietal of the mob.
Everyone keeps referring to the dude at the end of the table, an appropriately large and forbidding guy in his 50s, as The Boss. Which is… unusual for a restaurant that also acts as the base for a taxi company. I finish my wine and think that perhaps this has been interesting enough and I will leave now, which is when it begins to become substantially more interesting.
An important note here is that obviously I fuck off by myself all the time and that I knew exactly how risky the situation was and had multiple strategies for getting out of it. This is not a traumatic anecdote. It was a little more dangerous a situation than I’d necessarily been expecting but I am the kind of emotionally stunted bellend who enjoys a little high-stakes scrape every now and then or else my brain goes wrong in other ways.
Anyhoo, so it turns out that the boss would very much like me to stay and I am not allowed to pay for my drinks. Fine then, been in worse situations than ‘having to have another glass of lovely Montenegrin wine.’ But I do start thinking perhaps I should get out.
The Boss doesn’t speak English, so we are getting by in Russian. My Russian is fucking dreadful and to be honest, so is his so the level of coherency to the conversation is close to nil — however, I very much get the jist, through the international nonverbal language of these things, that he totally wants to fuck me.
In Western Europe, if I try really hard and like go to the gym and sort my hair out and put on a nice dress, I can probably get up to like a 6/10 by general societal standards on a seriously good day. That’s ok, I’m a writer not a model and I have enough people who fancy me for whatever reason to not be that arsed what wider society thinks. Except that oh, I have tasted society thinking I am properly the definition of banging and it’s ‘whenever I go to the Balkans.’
I’ve got that, like, dark haired, big-eyed, unconservatively dressed for the region thing going on and a lot of vampiness and my Ukrainian Kate Bush Tribute Act shit hits the spot. So I’m not actually all that wigged out by The Boss’ advances but am now strategising about how to avoid them because even I think fucking the mob is a bad idea too far.
( We’ll come back to later in this list but one of the most important things about surviving a high-risk lifestyle is that there is a balance between ‘bad ideas’ and ‘mortal peril’ that needs striking and especially when they’re often the only options to choose from)
The Boss is keen that I should enjoy more drinks and food and then that I will be coming back with him. I am trying to find out more information about exactly how run by the mob Podgorica is, it’s all to mutual benefit currently. When the police arrive at the bar and I’m told not to worry, it’s just an inspection.
I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly worrying — partly because I’m on about my sixth glass of wine and partly because I have bigger and more present problems. I do get a bit worried when the police hand The Boss a load of money. It’s roughly after this point that the guns come out, just ambiently on the table, like.
If you’ve ever been sitting at a table where someone is counting the money handed over to them by cops while other people clean guns, you’ll know the not-exactly-fear but just healthy, pragmatic concern that I was feeling. I don’t want to get into a taxi — because this guy owns at least some of the taxis — and I don’t think I can outrun anyone so I’m going to have to outthink them.
Obviously, I got out of it because I’m writing this but I’m like ‘hoo boy, pretty clear that not going along with what the boss wants may have consequences up to and including death’ so I’m like, furiously strategising a smooth route out. At this point the wine is being served by a young dude who speaks a smattering of English and who I realise is somehow The Boss’ younger brother and can thus get away with anything because The Boss is like, properly protective of and/or sweet on him
Reader: I saw a strategy. Which is the story of how I copped off with one of the junior members of the Montenegrin mafia in order to get out with a surprisingly in-depth knowledge of said organisation and no bloodshed.
Anyway we’re all friends on Facebook now.
31. Wretch 32, Kojo Funds — Tell Me
The start of this sounds like The Boy Is Mine by Brandy and Monica and I am so fucking easy to play, you guys.
30. Courage & Lao Ra — Wild At Heart
I kept putting this in and taking this out of this list. It’s definitely the Fleetwood Mac type of thing I’ve been into this year.
To lightly plagiarise my friend Marc, why is literally the only thing I want to do “listen to sad, soothing sounds and feel things through the insulation?” Actually it’s not even what I want to do, which is probably more cut to the feeling — it’s just that there have been repeated moments this year where it’s all I can do.
This is probably the wankiest end of that but something about the trilling chug under the chorus constantly drags me back into its self-mythologising melancholy, a state I certainly recognise.
29. Tóni Braxton — Coping (Disco Killerz remix)
I swan around a lot drinking wine and wearing fabulous ballgowns and being generally camply extra in a big way. I spent too many drunk evenings singing Mariah Carey on my boat, given its extremely inadequate sound proofing. I’m a great big diva and I got a divorce this year, of course I need a poppers o’clock Toni Braxton remix in here.
What is it about the enormous diva bangers that hits such a strong emotional note? Nothing held back at all — the almost throwaway, bridge into pre chorus, I hate to think you’re smiling with somebody else/and I know you’ll never love me again.
I’m not a jealous person. At least, romantically it’s just not something I really experience but god — I know you’ll never love me again is such an adrenaline shot of pain. It’s the truth you don’t want, that things are too damaged for them to be able to care about you that way, whatever happened — that you fucked it up so badly. At my worst moments, I brood darkly on it — the rest of the time I lock it up and refuse to think of the moments I literally can’t process.
But hey I’m still almost OK as a normal human. I’m like… I’m managing to almost convince people I’m ok for about the first few hours they meet me. Not that the divorce is what did that, it’s more that’s what did the divorce but… God. There have been a lot of times I’ve smiled and pretended I’m cool with situations I am so very not and some of dealing with this has been learning to try to say that. Not very well, obviously.
It is difficult to stop being a hot mess. And this song is not about stopping being a hot mess at all, it’s the broken, grieving cry of how much of a hot mess you are and how much effort goes into not falling apart or letting it spill out all the time while you’re simultaneously desperate for someone to notice what a heroic effort you’re putting into that, even if you’re also fucking up continuously.
Toni and Babyface’s ‘Love, Marriage & Divorce’ is one of the most emotionally brutal, unwaveringly grown up break-up albums ever made. It’s spectacular, a simple sit-down and explanation of what the fuck just went wrong, nothing sugarcoated including the desperate urge to take it all back.
Coping, especially the massive disco remix, is more of a proper Braxton banger in that it gets ludicrously over the top within the first few seconds and drags it’s Pinot Grigio-damp ass onto the dancefloor to show you, messily, what you are missing; which is uh, you know, not necessarily stuff you miss but doesn’t mean the survival isn’t laudable.
And it hurts/really hurts/and I’m still coping — I mean, manifestly not on some levels but sometimes just feeling lots of pain, in ways that aren’t necessarily socially acceptable as you don’t just tragically retire to your boudoir to languish, is something that’s socially unacceptable. Like sad ass anthems about having your heart shredded to pieces, set to a bumping disco rhythm that are really best appreciated after whatever emotional modifiers you use to lower your inhibitions about thinking about this stuff.
It’s a big, arms-in-the-air therapy session, a perfect 3:30 of admitting how badly all of this hurts you and that self-validation of ‘I’m still coping’. Braxton’s entire career has been emotibangers and this works the genre with effortless, brutal catharsis.
28. Cold War Kids — So Tied Up
I almost can’t believe this came out in 2017, it feels like at least three thousand years since I first heard it. I’m pretty sure I was still working at 6 Music at the time and it somehow snuck in. I can’t remember hearing that much from Cold War Kids, honestly, since I reviewed Hang Me Up To Dry for the Singles Jukebox back in the Stylus days, I think.
They’re not a band I’d naturally gravitate to except that their brand of pop has turned so closely to the grim — opposites attract — you’re self-absorbed/and I’m superficial.
Like so many things I’ve loved in 2017, this song is the sound of a vicious breakup. Which is weird because mine wasn’t really but then the emotions can be more savage than the situation ever is.
This is bitter, savvy and self-critical. It’s also witty as heck, the deconstruction in the boy/girl song brutally anatomical in the way these things shake out best. From The Chain to the Postal Service to N-Dubz, a little raking over coals is so much better with two.
27. Rationale — Loving Life
I feel like I should have way more to write about this song than I do. Maybe it’s just that it’s relatively happy and that’s not a big mood currently.
Rationale’s aching, emotionally involved soul is evocative and immersive and everything anything that swirls the music like a fork in the linguine of your mind should be. It makes you feel a little like you’ve been through a feels laundry, like you’re on service wash at the breakdownmat and the water won’t drain from the drum but it’s making such beautiful patterns.
Like that, this is overwhelming — you show me too much — it’s painful in its bliss, as much as it is deathly sweet, beautifully emoted. And also a complete fucking banger.
26. Lost Frequencies — Here With You
This song makes me so angry about how well it plays me. If anything has ever misused dynamic effects to make me fuck with it this heavily before then, well, it probably made a previous end-of-year list.
Am I angry, reader, at the drop at 0:43 when it suddenly says it’s getting serious? Yes I am. Am I angry at the squelch-strut of 1:08 when it gets down to business and says its not just here with you but kinda mad and it’s gonna punch anyone who tries to fuck with you. Am I angry but fucking with it? Yes, yes I am. I am deeply emotionally fucking with it.
The violins fuck with me harder than a house piano underlay to a shag carpet. the little panicky wind-ups into belching stomp catch me and grab me. It’s clever tricks that cathartically evoke raw emotion but then there’s entire schools of psychology dedicated to that. Sitting up late during an undelightful moment it fits gloriously — everybody hurts/and there’s enough of giving — the kind of exhausted moment of realisation that does no one any good anyway, just makes you want to throw a sword at the sea at the utter, wanking pointlessness of things.
Which is all very well. But then the arrogant honk of the horns kicks in. And that says you’re getting through this any way you know goddamned how, with or without dignity. How, err, annually relevant.
TBC with 25–1 c. 2023.
