#14 - Nancy Boy - Placebo

Possibly the most important song on this mixtape as one of my all time favourites soundtracking my college years, a time which saw me being able to move on from being the small fat kid who got beat up everyday at school partly because of my place in the social order but also because I ran my mouth all the time and seemed to relish in the choas of pissing the wrong people off. Regardless college meanwhile was the place were you got to celebrate your quirks and more importantly find the tribes which represented yourself which for myself was the skater punks, movie nerds and horror junkies.

It was seeing the the MTV bumper "Verebrae" which sampled the song which not only introduced me to the song, but also in many ways painted out the path I wanted to follow. To be the kid with the big headphones following thier own path....the chipped nail paint never happened.

A key track for the band as the band's forth single it became a suprise hit entering the charts at #4 and pushing the album from #40 to #5 though the boy photographed for it's cover would claim that it ruined his life attempting to sue the band in 2012 compared to the kid who was the baby on the cover of Nirvana's "Nevermind" who admited he used it as a way to pick up girls.

For a song which was fuel for so much change in my own world view the song also looks at change as lead singer Brain Molko explained

"People who think it's fashionable to be gay-guys who think that because some of my best friends are gay that they are going to try it out because they are in a milieu where it's cool, but they haven't actually had the desire themselves. In the song, I'm questioning people's reasons for sleeping with someone of the same sex. In the same way that heroin is very hip today, being bisexual seems to be very chic." It's an exploration into somebody's misogyny yet heartfelt. It's angry, nasty, insulting and completely politically incorrect."

To this extent you could put the song next to The BloodHound Gang's "I Wish I was Queer So I Could Get Chicks" but at the time these lyrics went completly over my head as the refrences to drugs, sex, gender confusion and bisexuality were instead lost in the noisescape the band create here as like so much music I tend to focus more on the sound than the words, but even viewed in this way there are devious lines like "Eyeholes in a paper bag/greatest lay I ever had" which only add to the song.

The video directed by Howard Greenhalgh who blurred Drummer Steve Hewitt's face due to him still being under contact to another band while having the band look like they are playing in a Clive Barker disco with the combination of disemboded limbs, spikes and melded bodies which while lacking the budget Greenhalgh would have no doubt have liked to run with for this surreal vision still creates one which melds with song taking you on a journey from wondering what the hell your watching to an almost strange sense of acceptance once it's finished as Greenhalgh brings his approach of drawing from the song lyrics to create this memorable video.

Greenhalgh while a name which might not leap out as the most recognisable despite his work promently featuring throughout the 90's would also create videos for the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, Muse and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" which won him a reader's choice award for best video by Spin magazine.

While the band might care about the song for years excluding it from thier sets, it's still one of my favourites of their backcatalogue and while I might not still be the same rebel without a clue I was in my college days it still taps into a good place whenever I hear it.
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#13 - Sex and Candy - Marcy Playground

One of the great aspects of mixtape trading is discovering new music and certainly that is the case with this track which came up as a spotify recommendation.

Featuring a sound reminisant of Nirvana this would be the band's only hit song thanks largely to heavy radioplay though clearly not here in the UK were we didn't get our first alternative station until the early 00's having to scape by on four hours of "specialist programing" each week thrown onto the late night schedule of Radio 1. It was here that you'd also find the legendry John Peel whose drive to push new music was never truly recognised by the station until his crushing passing from a heart attack in 2004. To this date no other DJ with perhaps of Jo Whiley has discovered as many bands as he did thanks to his attitude of just playing anything he thought sounded good.  

Taking it's title from a phrase uttered by lead singer John Wozniak's college girlfriend's roommate after she walked in on them having sex remarking that the room smelt like Sex and Candy but then this is a song which features such phrases as double cherry pie, disco superfly, disco lemonade and platform double-suede none of which I have any clue what they are, but then when you have droning vocals mixed with some catchy rifts you can get away with alot.

The video directed by Jamie Caliri who also directed Eels, "Your Lucky Day in Hell and Cypress Hill's "Boom Biddy Bye Bye (Fugees Remix)" who he would also provide the cover art for "Temples of Boom". His work can also be found in the credits sequences for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and the much underappricated Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

On a fun side note Wozniak's father, a developmental psychologist, analyzed the video in Freudian term which he saw as a representation of a wet dream. Adding to this cited that the hole Wozniak's head was in represented the womb, the spider Wozniak's loss of innocence (which he is both afraid of and drawn to), and the puddle at the end of the video to be a symbol for semen.....personally the idea of spiders crawling towards my head is just a whole lot of nightmare fuel, while I guess the guys harassing the dresser are just really clumsy movers. 

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#10 - Bug City - The Presidents of the United States of America

While there might be a number of people who wrote PUSA off as that one hit wonder band with a random affection for Peaches really will have missed out on some great track / random musical daydreams. Over the course of six albums crafting songs about Kitty, Chicky, Angry Tiki Gods and a dune buggy driving spiderman all while crafting a sound which really makes you want to hire them to play your Barbeque.

Sadly disolving in the summer of 2015 with lead singer / bass player Chris Bellew stating that it was due to the band members being "Old People Now" but they leave in thier wake a host of great music still worth discovering with thier two self titled volumes being well worthy of a place in your record collection.

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#9 - Army - Ben Folds Five

Tapping into the same slacker / nerd culture as the Flaming Lips and Weezer (before it became the Rivers show) Ben Folds Five walk that tightrope between the kind of emotion driven and thoughful material that Folds would focus on with his solo efforts while at the same time playing the slackers hanging out, being dumped (Song For The Dumped) and even on one occastion being too short (one angry dwarf and 200 solemn faces).

Ben Folds best viewed as the Elton John for the MTV generation knows that the piano is not limited to one kind of song and instead like the aforementioned Elton John and Billy Joel puts it front and centre even if on occastion it sounds more like he's attacking the keys and only making his first song book "Learn to Play Piano With Ben Folds" all he more humerous as nobody plays piano like he does.

This track I first stumbled across when it was used for the end titles of the fantastic "Nirvana: The Band, The Show" and since then it's become one of those songs I can just keep on repeat and it never gets old with the video perfectly highlighting the lyrics of the song with it's use of changing scenery and theatre flats in a style reminisant of Michell Gondry though no details seemingly exsist about who directed it only making it more of a curiosity amongst 90's music videos.

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#8 - Criminal - Fiona Apple

For whatever reason Fiona Apple has always remained just under the radar especially since she proved herself unwilling to play by the rules laid out for Female artists especially in the 90's memorably stating during her 1997 MTV Awards acceptance speech as she collected her moonman at the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist

"This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life—wait a second—you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself" 

The video directed by Mark Romanek marked him as a talent to watch as he joined the likes of Spike Jonze and David Fincher as music video visionaries as they pushed the concept beyond it's traditional concept. Apple meanwhile was branded an "Underfed Calvin Klein model" and critised for taping into "Heroin Chic" leading her to distance herself from the video, later re-evaluating her stance for Romanek's "Directors Label" retrospective stating "I like it.....we can be friends again"

#6 - Lord Only Knows - Beck

Originally I had another Beck track in mind for today's selection but this eventually won out as it matched more of my caffine deprived mood.

Taken from Hit and miss "Odelay" an album though which ultimatly defined his cut and paste style after struggling to break away from the One hit wonder branding of "Loser" this album really came to define the anything goes randomness that is Beck's style here using subtle samples of "Lookout For Lucy - Mike Millius" and "When It Comes - Edgar Winter" for this fusion of blues and country.

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