Huge announcement: We are hereby switching over to Angelfire and changing the name of the blog to "Official Money Plane Fan Page" and the format will be laid out basically like this.
We couldn't think of anything good this year:
40. Vanity "Anticlimax"
39. Hum "Waves"
38. Rolling Blackouts CF "Cars In Space"
37. I Don't Know How But They Found Me "Leave Me Alone" 36. The 1975 "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)"
35. Fu Manchu "Takin' It To The Streets"
34. Sorry "Rosie"
33. Bullion "We Had A Good Time"
32. Mister Goblin "Punk Band"
31. CCR Headcleaner "Half A Tooth"
30. RMR "Rascal"
29. Turnstile x Mall Grab "I Wanna Be Blind" / Turnstile x Mall Grab "The Real Thing"
28. Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou "Into Being"
27. Flo Milli "May I"
26. Badbadnotgood & MF Doom "The Chocolate Conquistadors"
25. Ringo Deathstarr "Just Like You"
24. Thundercat "Dragonball Durag"
23. Dua Lipa "Future Nostalgia"
22. Wednesday "Fate Is..." 21. Surface to Air Missive "Trouble Is"
In these challenging times, we know things can all feel uncertain -- all things except for the 2020 Joey Lawrence vehicle Money Plane starring Edge and Kelsey Grammar in his career defining roll as Darius Grouch The Third, also known as The Rumble.
Our message of hope is simply this: Money Plane was voted the #1 defining cultural moment of 2020 with bipartisan support. An alternate name for this listicle could have been "All 100 Tracks From The Soundtrack To Money Plane Ranked From Least Best To Most Best" except that would be unfair since all 100 of these songs mean so much to us in these trying times when the distance between us has grown. But that's ok because the Money Plane soundtrack scored every record-breaking chart achievement throughout 2020, including the longest running #1 album on the Billboard "Social 50." TikTok users have universally declared Money Plane to be more relevant than Billie Eilish's baggy skater pants that she bought from the Poshmark store run by the costume designer for LL Cool J's "Doin' It" video (1996).
Here are all 100 songs, especially numbers 20 through 1. The others are on a different post.
20. Narrow Head "Stuttering Stanley" / Narrow Head "Night Tryst"
The curse of the "Volume 1" (or "Part 1") is all too real, especially in the world of rock. When an artist releases an album with "Volume 1" or "Part 1" in the title, they're making a promise to themselves and the world to follow it up with something -- ANYTHING. But all too often, the wait never ends.
Lil Peep's Come Over When I'm Sober, Pt 1 was arguably the most tragic. (He died 3 months later. Pt 2 was compiled by his estate and released posthumously.)
George Michael had one of these -- Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. Who knows what happened with the follow up?
The Hall & Oates hits collection Rock 'n Soul Part 1 never had an official follow up either.
There's probably a lot more, but those are the first ones that come to mind.
Ween's Shinola Vol. 1 (2005) is probably our favorite of these -- a collection of re-recordings and remixes pulled throughout Ween's dauntingly extensive back catalog of unreleased demo collections and fan-only cassettes (like 1999's Craters Of The Sac or 2011's Caesar.)
We were largely immersed in the lore of Ween enough that by 2005, we realized that even with file-sharing services and a multitude of fan resources, it was pretty much impossible to locate at least 100 of their non-album-tracks in files that did not sound like garbage.
So with this in mind, we hugely respect that Ween opted to go deeper than simply re-packaging stuff like "Mango Woman" and "Skycruiser."
In the summer of 2004, someone tipped us on "Gabrielle." At the time, it was a 56kbps Chocolate and Cheese era mp3, but we could tell it would sound huge in hifi. And then we forgot about it. We also forgot about most of Craters Of The Sac.
We recall not having a whole lot of prior notification that they were working on the Shinola series. It just kinda showed up on the Chocodog website one day, in the midst of a zone of spontaneous self-released Ween collections like All Request Live.
We're pretty sure it arrived in the mail less than a week after we ordered it -- a day or two earlier than its release date, on a Friday afternoon. We had to leave the house at 7:30AM the next day to play a wedding in upstate NY so we grabbed our new Ween CD and packed a huge bowl for the ride. We spent most of the next 36 hours in an absolute haze and somehow ended up spending the night in Montreal. The border patrol uncharacteristically let us through in both directions without passports although we have almost no memory of this happening. Shinola is a great memories album for moments when our memory was not working so well.
We also recently noted Emily Lazar's mastering credit, who we now recognize among the mastering legends of the 2000s. At the time, her most popular credits included Destiny's Child's Christmas album and David Bowie's Heathen. So this helps explains why this version of "Tastes Good On Th' Bun" sounds like the Godzilla of Pure Guava demos.
Anyway, the point of this post is: Ween people stopped holding their breath for Shinola Vol. 2 years ago and will frequently share their dream tracklistings, which too often include tracks that have already seen an official release like the outstanding "The Beacon Light" from the soundtrack of The X-Files movie or the instantly classic "The Rainbow" from South Park's "Chef Aid" comp. We love these tracks, but we feel like their inclusion breaks the rules just a bit. In other instances, fans will go just a bit hog wild on track selection, filling up a double or triple CD set worth of music.
The thing we appreciated the most about Shinola was that it wasn't an easy "greatest hits of the non-album-tracks." It was so much more than this - a carefully curated entirely fresh hifi Ween experience. Again, we were tipped on "Gabrielle," but it didn't sound quite like this version.
I don't think we tried this before, but we're gonna have a go at our dream Shinola follow-up using the parameters laid out for volume 1:
No b-sides or soundtrack songs
Pulled from fan-only tapes and unreleased demos
Enough music for a 1 LP vinyl
In our version, both sides are a few minutes too long for vinyl, so we should probably remove two songs, but it's too hard to choose right now.
Side A (27:31)
1. "Mr. Mocha" (2:16)
2. "Makin' Love In The Gravy" (3:15)
3. "She'll Just Get You" (4:41)
4. "Put Your Boobs On" (2:14)
5. "Koko" (3:30)
6. "Cornbread Red" (4:02)
7. "Love Will Conquer All" (4:30)
8. "Shalom Absalom" (2:56)
Side B (27:59)
9. "I Was Nothing" (4:30)
10. "Hello Johnny" (3:56)
11. "Kim Smoltz" (4:43)
12. "Ambrosia Parsley" (4:38)
13. "That Man (From The Flatland)" (4:59)
14. "Does It Turn You On?" (5:15)
Ween - The B-Sides (1992-2005)
1. I'm Fat (1992)
2. Ode To Rene (1993)
3. I Smoke Some Grass (Really Really High) (1993)
4. Mango Woman (1993)
5. Puertorican Power (Part 1 and 2) (1993)
6. Skycruiser (1993)
7. Cover It With Gas And Set It On Fire (1993)
8. Now I'm Freaking Out (1994)
9. Bakersfield (1994)
10. There's A Pig (1995)
11. Vallejo (1995)
12. I'll Miss You (1996)
13. Sweet Texas Fire (1996)
14. So Long Jerry (1996)
15. The Beacon Light (1998)
16. The Rainbow (1998)
17. Cornbread Red (2000)
18. Who Dat? (2000)
19. Mountains And Buffalo (2003)
20. Dirty Money (2005)
Focusing on the positives, right? Is that what we're supposed to be doing?
We'll probably whip up a Hot Mix 2020 sometime soon, but New Shit Radars are faster so let's just do this instead.
This month's New Shit Radar is sponsored by the 2020 blockbuster Money Plane starring Kelsey Grammar, Joey Lawrance, and Edge -- who incidentally also won the 2021 Royal Rumble. Incidentally, Kelsey Grammar's character in Money Plane (for unknown reasons) refers to himself as "The Rumble," which means that Edge conquered The Rumble twice in the past year, which is probably a first in the history of humanity. So we supposed it's been a good few months for Edge.
Sedona Loves The Sea Machine
Before Sedona rebranded as a band, her ultra-earwormy cosplay of Madonna's first album was almost definitely one of the best songs from the past 24 months that seemingly no one has heard or talked about.
This horrible trend of dope music getting buried by music writers is beyond old. But that Phoebe Bridgers tho -- her bland unmemorable "rock" is entirely worth encompassing an entire halfweek of CIA-planted Twitter debate. Totally worthy.
We're happy to report that Sedona's new track is dope as fuck, and if the intro is any indication, she apparently loves the Sea Machine pedal as much as we do.
Heele Will Drop New Heat Next Week
The new track is called "A New Friend" and it's coming your way a week from today! In the meantime, enjoy their latest:
Phife Dawg Lives On, New Album Coming Soon
Posthumous Phife Dawg album will be arriving later this Spring. We kinda love the new track "Nutshell Part 2" -- although whenever we hear Busta Rhymes' old-guy-swag, it gives us the same feeling we had watching Keanu in Bill and Ted 3. Try to smile a little bit more in your middle age, fellas. It's not that bad.
Potty Mouth Is Back With Some Non-Album-Track Fire
"Let Go" is their latest. We like the weird synths in this one.
We Like A Non-Weezer Song That's Currently Charting On Billboard Alt Rock Radio Airplay
This is actually huge news since we hated every song that placed in the Billboard Alternative Songs Year End chart with the exception of the admittedly decent "Bloody Valentine" by Machine Gun Kelly. (And if we were forced to choose another at gunpoint, "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)" by The 1975 isn't the most unfortunate thing we've ever heard although that's really pushing it.)
The non-Weezer single that we like is from the unfortunately named I Don't Know How But They Found Me, a two-piece led by the guitarist who replaced Ryan Ross when he left Panic At The Disco in 2009. Accordingly, it reminds us of a bunch of hi-fi alternative radio songs from 2008-2009 -- the era of La Roux's "Bulletproof" and Passion Pit and 3Oh!3 and MGMT and that band who wasn't bad but for some bizarre reason decided it would be a good idea to name themselves Black Kids.
Due to its odd 2009-non-throwback nature, it helped us realize that label consolidation and Youtube and SiriusXM and Spotify and poptimism and American Idol and "music journalists having the final say on the revised canon" have done wonders as far as guiding music to the point where literally nothing is willing to change and charting music sounds exactly the same as it did in the late 2000s. By early 2001, the world was already fully immersed in the first era of "80s nostalgia capitalism," and nothing remotely close to that equivalent is occurring in 2021. Because nothing has changed at all -- long term or short term. Four months from now, the same songs will be charting in roughly the same positions. Four years from now, the same artists will be charting with different songs in the same positions. And yea, this is obviously unsustainable, unless the music business wants to die. In which case, they're doing a tremendous job of self-sabotage.
Anyway, we'll probably place this one somewhere in the Hot Mix 2020 and we can complain more when the time arrives. We're just surprised that labels and promoters are still willing to invest in singles that are actually memorable upon the first listen. And hey, they even have a Bandcamp:
Melvins Have A Weird New Song Called "Fuck You" And Jon Anderson From Yes Has A New Song Called "Go Screw Yourself"
Songs like these are the ones that make the most sense right now. We're happy anyone else gets it.
New Teenage Wrist Album Is Good
We were hoping they would continue sounding like Live's Throwing Copper LP (see 2016's "Stoned Alone") but they have upgraded their sound n stuff and it's good.
After Hours Top 20 Most Played -- Week Of February 8th
For once, here's a chart that doesn't entirely suck. Tell your friends all about it:
TASTE MY KIDS is a digital newsletter compiling recommendations for a happier and healthier existence, most often in the form of "best-of" lists, youtube posts, album or movie reviews, and various scribblings. We lived on Geocities starting in August 2000. In January 2009, times got tough and posts were on hiatus until a new host could be located. Geocities eventually died anyway, and now we live on blogspot. True story.
