Hippy Johnny

Oh man. That'll teach me. Start deriding one critic without a proper appraisal of their work and they'll come back and bite you on the ass. I still think the title of Garry Mulholland's 261 Greatest Albums Since... is crap irony (like most irony) but man...he's got me. Ignore the fact he's way too hung up on the holy trinity of Bowie, Pop and, um, Massive Attack - and also that he sees fit to pass over It's Alive!, just catch this passage on the original Modern Lovers album.

"Warners had signed a rock band who'd written the first great songs about what a piece of shit rock was. Not rock'n'roll, that beautiful, urgent, furious, lovelorn, direct, animal, groove-heavy, panicky grasp for Now that had changed the world infinitely for the better. But rock, that fake blues, self-pitying, white, dishonest, flashy, grooveless, blokeish, reactionary and self-absorbed bunch of jiveass corporate soft-porn that had had the roll removed and replaced with suck-my-dick misogyny and misanthropy."

And he's got me yearning to hear the 1977 Congos album in a way I haven't yearned since...whenever. I think I better shifty on over to Drowned On Sound and beg them to take my appraisal of The Modern Lovers down.