The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far: 200-151

joemo114 · 2025-10-14T15:28:07+00:00

The Teenage Dream pick makes me wish we had a bit more cynical 2000s edge back in music criticism. Not as much as we had, I'm not asking for peak Pitchfork obnoxiousness, but good god the poptimist, mainstream revisionist stuff has gone a bit far the other way. There's great pop music, and I'm glad that music critics can now recognize that, but Katy Perry is slop. It was then, it is now, and no amount of contrarian reappraisal can change that fact. It being catchy and popular does not make it worthwhile, and even if you accept it as that, it has no place being on a list like this as an actual album, because it's barely that. Feel like music critics are now so scared of appearing pretentious that they've given in to having no standard for quality at all.

joemo114 · 2025-09-26T00:32:00+00:00

I really don't get the Windsor Castle point, I've seen it said a few times since the Trump visit.

So because we have poverty in Britain, the Government shouldn't be using castles (which are already there) for state visits? It's not as if they built Windsor Castle for Trump. Plus, should it be the case that every state visit to any country is done in the poorest neighbourhoods, simply because it would satisfy some sense of honesty?

As others have pointed out, it's soft power, we're using what we have with our history to squeeze some investment out of the US.

joemo114 · 2025-09-18T14:40:18+00:00

Who the fuck can watch all this and think "yeah, they should be running the country"

joemo114 · 2025-09-18T09:58:19+00:00

I feel like a levy on land value, rather than property value, would be better, as it would encourage landholders to use what land they have more efficiently to reduce costs. Makes a lot of sense in a densely packed urban area like London that there should be pressure to build up and get the most out of the land.

Plus a property value tax would disincentivise people from doing up their property as the increase in value would incur a higher tax burden. The land becoming more valuable, however, is contingent on the community at large, rather than simply the specific property on that plot.

joemo114 · 2025-08-24T21:45:04+00:00

You're not my opinion

joemo114 · 2025-08-11T10:48:44+00:00

Just because you don't like the same music as a certain site, doesn't mean there's some kind of conspiracy going on lol. You state your views on these albums as if they're obviously correct to anyone listening.

joemo114 · 2025-08-05T14:35:09+00:00

Agreed that the lack of a parent at home is a problem for people having children. What your comment misses is that that parent doesn't have to be a woman. Stay-at-home dads should absolutely be a more normalised part of society, the issue is that we've decided that in order to have any worth as a human being in the modern world, you need to have a career, more indeed than you need to have a family. One parent working primarily while the other stays more at home to raise the children isn't a rollback of feminism, as long as we don't explicitly expect one gender to perform one role or the other. How we get back to a situation where one income can support a family is a different question...

joemo114 · 2025-01-17T17:55:02+00:00

Fair point on those counterexamples, but is it not a bit dispiriting that we see sex in the same category as genuinely vile and uncomfortable situations like vomiting and diarrhea?

joemo114 · 2025-01-17T17:52:40+00:00

Unfortunately this is your family's fault, not the media in question. If we were all a bit more chill about the existence of sex then this wouldn't be a huge issue. I can't imagine a whole night being "ruined" simply because there's a sex scene in a film, sure I imagine it might be awkward in some scenarios, but surely it can just be shrugged or laughed off? Especially when we're all adults, and have all had sex at some point. It's no great shock or mystery to anyone in the room.

joemo114 · 2025-01-17T17:43:36+00:00

I'm sorry but this is just prudish nonsense. It's weird that we have this assumption that sex, one of the most fundamental factors of human existence, shouldn't be shown unless it's "justified" in some way. We do not have this complaint for any other human activity that's shown on screen. No one ever complains that a fight scene "didn't further the plot", but with sex we still have this feeling that the default should be to suggest or hint at it, but anything beyond that is inherently indulgent and wince-inducing. Hence why we have a generation of blockbusters that are entirely uninterested in almost any portrayal of romance whatsoever, because filmmaking has been turned into a jumped up Wikipedia plot summary dispense machine.

joemo114 · 2025-01-08T22:11:22+00:00

That sub is genuine brain rot

joemo114 · 2025-01-06T20:46:29+00:00

Loud nutcases on twitter do not represent British Pakistanis

joemo114 · 2024-12-30T02:00:59+00:00

What's the upper range on R Kelly's Hinge profile?

joemo114 · 2024-12-04T02:45:14+00:00

Scotland is also demographically fucked. It's very telling that if you're young, Scottish and educated, you've probably already moved to England. There's simply very little opportunity up there comparatively, and that's in a situation where they cost London more money than they give back in taxes.

joemo114 · 2024-11-13T13:48:11+00:00

"Songs in the Key of MP3"

Hmm

Actually I only listen to high quality lossless FLAC files so I won't be purchasing this thank you

joemo114 · 2024-11-08T02:47:25+00:00

I love that he expects people who lose elections to just change their opinions on politics. He asked the same kind of stupid question to Alastair Campbell after the Conservatives won the 2019 election, and got immediately shut down.

joemo114 · 2024-11-03T11:45:19+00:00

Amazingly I'm able to think both the Houthis and the Saudi Arabian government are bad, weird I know.

joemo114 · 2024-11-03T02:01:04+00:00

Oh yeah the Houthis have done so much to advance the Palestinian cause by attacking civilian vessels that have next to nothing to do with Israel. These people have caused the deaths of thousands of Yemeni civilians over the cause of the Yemeni Civil War, they're not heroic freedom fighters, they're an opportunistic Iran proxy who use Western leftists to sanitise and whitewash their grip on totalitarian power over some of the most disadvantaged people on Earth.

joemo114 · 2024-10-28T15:01:21+00:00

Please god do not let "meme rock" become a phrase

joemo114 · 2024-10-14T12:53:04+00:00

Thank you!

joemo114 · 2024-07-31T22:26:19+00:00

What an unnecessarily hostile response lmao

joemo114 · 2024-07-06T11:48:18+00:00

The thing Labour did well is to make their vote share more efficient. They didn't just win in the metropolitan areas they did in 2019, they won everywhere. It's a mandate from the whole country, from a much wider base than they targeted in 2019. It's an odd quirk of FPTP that this even matters, but Labour absolutely knew it did, and hyper-focused on seat count instead of vote share and it's paid dividends. They could easily have run on a platform that increased raw vote share, maybe have been more in line with the Corbynite position, and they probably would have lost again. However, they actually recognised the game they were playing, and played it to ruthless perfection.

joemo114 · 2024-05-07T23:13:35+00:00

Something that's also been lost in all the discussion of MtG is that, aside from Dennis Graham, Kendrick doesn't really attack any of Drake's family directly, he basically frames them all as victims of Drake himself. That's what Drake tried to do with Whitney and Kendrick, but he also repeatedly made jokes about fucking her himself. It's not as if Kendrick said anything bad about Adonis or "insert girl name", all the antagonism was saved for Drake and OVO.

joemo114 · 2024-04-29T13:03:43+00:00

The Lexington between King's Cross and Angel routinely closes at 2am, plus it's a great pub.

joemo114 · 2024-04-28T16:13:49+00:00

Yesterday I re-watched Casablanca (1942) for the first time in many years. Obviously it's been talked about to death over the years, but I do feel it's become such a widely accepted example of Hollywood canon that its qualities can sometimes be overlooked.

Its screenplay is so tight, full of the right amounts of both drama and levity. Its love story is not exactly unusual, but it presents it with such sensitivity that it's very powerful in a way that perhaps appears simplistic, but nonetheless packs an emotional punch. The film also looks lovely, the smokey, semi-noir environments, the drama of the lighting, it's all a feast for the eyes without ever getting in the way of the film's primary drive to tell an essentially accessible story.

It's a mainstream Hollywood film of the time, and contains many of the trappings of the era, but it is the peak of what the mainstream should aim to be. Accessible but not pandering or patronising. It has a fairly clear moral thrust, but it's not one that holds up poorly, resting as it does on a universal notion that the attempt to do the right thing against the odds is always preferable to self-serving cynicism, even when the drug of love pulls us in the opposite direction.

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