Amanda’s Best of the Best of the Decade

#1
Number 1 – Goldfrapp
Album: Supernature
Year: 2005
It might seem to good to be true, children, that my favorite song of the Aughts could be entitled “Number 1.”  But let me put your fears to rest straight off the bat: no, I did not organize the list this way just to be cute.  Although it is sort of cute, no?  (For humor points, however, I would’ve been better served picking something called “Dead Fuckin’ Last,” I guess)

The excellent Larry Rose of KEXP is responsible for this post, for it was he who popped my “Number 1″ cherry on a damp, chilly November Sunday.  Mr. Rose, who crafts some of the more perfect sets (seriously, the man has a Gift when it comes to putting songs together) on the radio today, played it back to back with this song and I had one of those moments.  Perhaps you know of what I speak: once in a blue moon, we are offered an experience that is the perfect realization of all our ideas concerning that kind of experience.  Only a handful of times in my young life have I been treated to this sensation.  (1) Upon seeing The Royal Tenenbaums sitting in the balcony of The Neptune Theater (surely a movie theater Wes Anderson could get behind) I thought, “Oh.  This is the movie I have been waiting for my entire life.  Every time I have sat down to watch a film until now was in search of this, and every time I view a film in the future will be in pursuit of this one.  It was made for me.”  (2) Upon emerging from the bowels of the Underground onto Gray’s Inn Road on my first trip to London and thinking, “Oh.  Well here I am.  This is the future of my adult life: London.”  (3) While reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall and finding out that all I ever wanted in a

The Raw Shark Texts: If you only ever read one more book, it should be this one.

book was the unlikely combination of calligrams, Casablanca references, pop semiotics, dry British humor, a system for the classification of conceptual zoology, and a romantic subplot.  It is coincidentally this novel that I was reading when (4) the opening strains of “Number 1″ pulled me like a siren call from my bedroom to teach me that this was the song I’d been waiting to love ever since I’d swooned over “Buddy Holly” at the tender age of eleven and found there might be something to this pop music shit after all.  Seriously guys, “Number 1″ is The Best Sex of My Life of song.  It has become mythical.  I never – I mean NEVER – skip it when it comes on shuffle.  It’s been on (approx., okay?) one out of every five mix CDs I’ve made since 2005.  I get the same feeling when I listen to it that I get when I walk across a bridge, which is to say, filled with enough euphoria to make a big smile regardless of how many people will think I’m batshit crazy for doing so.  I mean, it soars in the most unabashed of major keys, has rays of west-sinking synths that become a messianic sunset over a rough, driving beat and infectious handclap.  Listen and you are moving faster, flying higher and headed toward something better than when it’s not playing.  Even Fred Falke and Alan Braxe, collaborative kings of the skyrocketing remix, couldn’t make this shit more triumphant.

I’d heard Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory’s band before.  Felt Mountain – which is not even debatably a better work than Supernature – had been on frequent rotation (literally, as I was still using a portable CD player at this point) for several years.  But I had forgotten to check back in with them, completely overlooking the 2003 release of Black Cherry. And indeed, it would never have occurred to me to get reacquainted with Goldfrapp, as “eighties-influenced” “electropop” and “club bangers” were keywords I skipped over without even thinking about it.  This was, after all, the fall I spent listening to Xiu Xiu, The Books and Okkervil River (also Cloud Cult, but ugh, such revulsion for them now).  Aside from the previous summer’s Annie obsession, my interest in anything that could be purposed in any kind of traditional sense for the dance floor didn’t even reach my radar.  The dancey stuff I did like had all been accidental discoveries up until then.

Hey Amanda, aren’t you, like, a remix blogger now?  Doesn’t dance music make you all weak in the knees and mushy inside? Indeed.  And I also used to hate female vocalists.  And Wilco.  I used to hate Wilco.  (Neither here nor there, I know, but just goes to show how we change.)

So thank you, Larry Rose, for playing “The Village” first.  Because I like New Order and I was enjoying my novel and therefore disinclined to get up and put on a mix CD with Cloud Cult or something on it and for these innocuous reasons I now have Goldfrapp to love.

More of me on Goldfrapp here.