Happy Mondays "Pills 'n Thrills and Bellyaches" [1990]

The Manchester rave scene produced easily the most boringly repetitive dance music of all time, and the pathetically atonal Happy Mondays were at the top of the slag heap. (Clearly, no rock sub-genre more desperately needed all the drugs they took.) On "Pills 'n Thrills and Bellyaches" they pulverize their two-chord vamps into snortable dust (that turns out to be mostly dirt) while Shaun Ryder neither can sing nor rap nor generate anything comprehensible but still makes a lot of noise with his fart-gun of a voice. And I don't care if he's so far whacked out he's beyond control -- even that chickenshit felon Jim Morrison could manage to carry a tune at least as far as the end of the stage, and he was blotto 24-7. Overall, Happy Mondays are a sort of hybrid between indie suckmeisters Dinosaur Jr and pastey whiteboy approximations of James Brown grooves. As progenitors of the "Madchester" scene, it may be the first time in history a musical style's barriers to entry consisted of an actual hole in the ground. Thus, stumbling into the marketplace were plenty of other joke-of-a-bands, like the Stone Roses and Charlatans UK. Key here is probably that these bands aren't from anywhere you could call worldly; Manchester is in the middle of fucking nowhere, and sheep make horrible music critics -- especially ones who take a lot of ex.