songs that were on the FIFA soundtracks, songs that should have been, songs I mention elsewhere in the post, all in one playlist!
Time for another Sprezzatura Sob Story(TM)! Not as sad as the last one, I promise. I never had a games console when I was a younger. I didn't even have a computer until I was ten, and a proper Internet connection until I was twelve. This means I am noticeably awful at all of the traditional Boy Things like FIFA and COD. I didn't even play Mario until I was maybe thirteen at my dad's girlfriend's house in Friern Barnet.
The point of this is I didn't have these key experiences and yet I still think I could quite easily define for you the genre of FIFAcore. This is not a genre that either Wikipedia or Allmusic would recognise, but I think among people roughly my age you could definitely put together a list of "FIFAcore" artists. Though I never actually played the game, save for brief trouncings at mate's houses, I came to what I think of the key artists of FIFAcore in other ways, essentially. I saw the first band I truly fell in love with, Kings of Leon, on MTV Rocks one day.
If you don't know, MTV Rocks was an MTV offshoot (duh) that basically only played indie music. It was part of a weird sort of specialisation from the pre-streaming era where good old-fashioned MTV ONLY played reality TV shows like Jersey Shore and Catfish: The TV Show, and things like MTV Rocks (FIFAcore), MTV Base (""""urban"""") and MTV Dance (unts unts music) played nothing but music with no human intervention. The "shows" were parades of music videos with titles like Biggest! Hottest! Loudest!, Hits from the Brits!, and Kasabian vs Killers vs Kings of Leon!. It's also where I discovered two bands I would class as my favourite at different points, Bombay Bicycle Club and Deftones. It is a relic of a different era, an era where you couldn't just watch whatever videos you wanted on YouTube, the brief period between the advent of cable and the primacy of the Internet (at proper speeds, never forget how shite dialup was, man) that we call the 2000s.
I first heard Foals because my nan got scammed into buying a posh phone at phones4u (she does this about once a year and never learns, poor dear) that came with two songs loaded: 'Cassius' and 'Dead and Gone' by T.I and Justin Timberlake. What a different path my life could've taken if I'd gotten into pop-rap instead of borderline mathy agitpop. Wise elders (my dad's gf's daughter and her boyfriend, thank you Shelley and Sebastian) (what a confusing parenthesis, I'm sorry) bought me 'Hot Fuss' and 'Employment' one Christmas - potentially the same Christmas they let me play on their GameCube, I don't remember.
So how do I know that KoL, the Killers, the Kaiser Chiefs, et al are FIFAcore? YouTube, actually. In amongst the unending "[x, where x is the number of people that disliked the video] people have brain damage", "like if you HATE Justin Bieber!!!!!", and "Bob is building an army to fight Google Buzz or Google+ or whatever failed social networking site they were trying at the time," posts, were a lot of post that went like "FIFA '04 soundtrack!!!!". Skating games were good for this too, especially when I got from Foals, through Yannis' old band The Edmund Fitzgerald, into proper math rock and post-hardcore. It wasn't just YouTube, though. It feels like at every party I have been to (all seven), someone will put a song on the queue and someone else will say "Oh, I know that from FIFA." Even last week we were talking about FIFA songs in the aforementioned album chat, which prompted me to take this proper look at the phenom.
And so I think I have a solid grasp on the kind of music on the FIFA soundtracks. But when I write articles like this, I am proven wrong. Labels didn't completely screw themselves in the mid-90s, and not every football player in this country under twenty-two has a double barrelled surname. So what I intend to do, in the spirit of inspired music writing work like Then That's What They Called Music and Radio Friendly Unit Shifters, is go through each soundtrack and highlight what I find. Maybe it WILL be all Bloc Party and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club like I expect. Maybe it'll all be grime, or it'll suddenly segue into dubstep in 2010, or maybe FIFA never actually had a soundtrack and all those YouTube comments and partygoers were lying to me. Let's find out!
FIFA International Soccer and FIFA '95
The first FIFA game didn't have "music" in the way that I've been talking about with these contemporary hits. It has specially composed menu music, which kinda bangs, but is not what I mean. Same goes for FIFA '95. Indeed, we don't get non-composed, outside music until...FIFA 98 Road to World Cup Soundtrack
Six songs on this soundtrack, four of which are by the electronic act The Crystal Method. I'm not anything approaching an expert on "electronica", which you can tell because I refer to it as electronica, but big beat, the kind of stuff that Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, and these lot were putting out around the turn of the millenium, feels perfect for FIFA, because it's big, dumb, loud and makes putting five past your mate feel like the climax to a c.2000 heist movie or something. I personally hate this shit but I completely get the appeal.
There's one song from a group called Electric Skychurch. Wikipedia refer to them as "acid trance". Call me a rockist if you will but I shan't be listening to that.
The sixth and final song on the soundtrack is one I am intimately familiar with, and I'd wager you are too: it's "Song 2" by Blur. Song 2 is another perfect choice because it's just as big dumb and loud as any big beat song. This isn't "polite character studies of Middle Englanders" Blur, this is "wtf I love America now" Blur, and it's great.
FIFA 99
God this is gonna be a slog. I want to make clear I'm not listening to every song on every soundtrack; that's doable at the moment, when there's six to a soundtrack, but when it gets to, like, the present day and they have forty or so on there I absolutely cannot be arsed. Anyway, as foretold we get some Fatboy Slim this time: "The Rockerfeller Skank", aka "the one that goes 'check it out now, funk soul brothers'". I predict we also get some kind of Moby song, the Chemical Brothers, and "Flat Beat" by Mr. Oizo. I promise I haven't looked ahead if I'm right.
We are also treated to a song by 'Danmass' called "Gotta Learn (Dub Pistols Sick Junkie Remix)". The song repeatedly informs us that it "looks like a lotta suckers gotta learn the hard way". I think the sucker may be me, for attempting this. This, and the other three songs contained on this soundtrack, all sound exactly like each other, i.e., like shit. I can't wait until we get to the Hives or whatever. At least Lionrock, the other band on here, turn a ska song into breakbeat, which let me pretend I was listening to ska instead of this wank.
FIFA 2000
Okay, in addition to our usual smattering of big beat, we've got a couple interesting songs here. Firstly, "Sell Out" by Reel Big Fish, which is, of course, both a relic of the time when ska punk was the Next Big Thing and the time when you could actually sell out and make money. Now the best you can hope for is Apple use your song in a commercial for the iPhone 12, but advertcore is a separate genre that we don't have time to get into here (I vow to do it at some point; SOMEONE needs to acknowledge the influence American Authors had on the music of the past ten years).
We've also got a Robbie Williams song here, "It's Only Us". Now, I am slightly too young to properly remember when Robbie Williams was the biggest popstar in the country around the turn of the millenium - my cultural history begins with Busted, Girls Aloud circa 'What Will The Neighbours Say?', and this weird-ass Eurotrash that did numbers on the UK charts one year - but I quite frankly love this song. It's a power pop banger with a bitchin' organ solo. Swear down, if Teenage Fanclub or Sloan had written this you would've gotten all sorts of dumbass nerds that care about "songwriting chops" and who have never talked to a girl telling you it was the best song of all time. It's me, by the way, I'm dumbass nerds. This song is great.
FIFA '01
There's Moby! "Bodyrock," which I can honestly say I have never heard. Sounds exactly like all this music, B-tier Led Zep riff stolen from some more interesting band, repetitive MCing stolen from some more interesting rapper, smoosh it all together with an Amen Break or two and you're sorted!There's a remix of a band called Curve here, from Lunatic Calm, who also featured on FIFA2000 (and member Simon Shackleton featured on '99 as 'Elite Force.') Curve are a band I'm familiar with due to their inclusion of various shoegaze "charts" that filtered from /mu/ into the wider musicsphere over time. I always thought their music skewed a bit too heavy on the Republica and a bit too light on the Ride, and this remix manages to turn them into... the exact same big beat as everything else. I honestly think this might be the worst genre of all time, lads. I listened to it for two minutes, went to the toilet to recover, came back after what felt like an age, and the "song" was still happening. The rattle of the cymbals in my tinny Philips headphones lying on my desk was akin to a thousand nails on a chalkboard. At least their wiki says they were purposely aiming for industrial; it sure as fuck feels like I'm being hammered. I want to make clear that in addition to hating this style of music these groups are an utter pain to write about interestingly. Every fucker thinks he's Aphex Twin or something, using like eighteen different aliases and shrouding their painfully boring lives in secrecy. No one cares, Simon. Learn a chord. Arse.
Two songs by Utah Saints, who are also a big beat band. Not listening. A song by "indietronica" group Grand Theft Audio, who sound like they heard "The Chemicals Between Us" by Bush and thought "you could make a religion out of this, or at least sell a thousand records!" Got a third of the way through. Appalling. Some band called The Source with a song that is just the riff from "My Favourite Game" by the Cardigans ripped from its context (a quality song) and placed in a new one (a shit song). Do yourself a favour and go listen to the Cardigans instead.
FIFA '02
List of artists on here that I Googled, saw the word "electronic", and avoided: Schiller; Vitae; Conjure One; The Edison Factor; DJ Sandy vs Housetrap; Gouryella; Issi Noho; Cirrus.List of artists on here that I had to click on the song to find out they were the same old shit because their dumb aliases are ungooglable: R4; BT.
List of artists on here that I had to Google because I wasn't sure it was who I thought: Tiesto. He's existed for twenty-five years! Who knew! He was also in Gouryella. Why can't you lot stick to ONE stupid name per artist?
List of actual good artists on here: Gorillaz. 19-2000, which isn't my favourite, but is a welcome respite from the rest of this drivel. Thank you Damon for saving me, as you did in 1998.
FIFA '03
Some more interesting things happen here. We've got "Bigger and Better" by Spotrunnaz, who are a Swedish rap group. It's not very good at all, but it's also not big beat, so I am eternally grateful to Malmo. We have 'Dy-na-mi-tee' by the eponymous Ms Dynamite, which I had not heard since I was five, and which still slaps. She reminds me of Lauryn Hill here, in demeanor, not necessarily in sound. Imagine if she'd started a Fugees-esque group with her younger brother Akala and some next third wheel? This country would be so fucking woke by now. I guarantee the 2011 riots wouldn't have happened. I can't imagine playing football to this, though. It's a vibe - as in it's literally a vibraphone-led beat - and not particularly conducive to hardcore GAMING like Fatboy Slim."Complicated" by Avril Lavigne! This sure is a lot of Girl Music for a franchise that was content to be the musical equivalent of an anabolic steroid injection the past five years. Oh, wait. The song hadn't actually loaded yet. It's a big beat remix. It doesn't work in the slightest. I'm actually going to commit seppuku. I've had enough. Feel like PURE shit just want Avril to tell me life's like this tbqh
Final track listed is "You Held The World In Your Arms Tonight" by Idlewild. We are getting closer to what I'd consider 'FIFAcore' here, though in my opinion FIFAcore is a post-Strokes, and more importantly post-Libertines demarcation. These guys are the exactly the kind of post-grunge second rate Travis schlock that Carl and Pete were destined to slay. Music is just as much about the narrative as it is the sound in my opinion, regardless of other people's feelings on context, and this does not have either the urgency of something like Bloc Party, nor the effortless cool of Franz Ferdinand. It's just a bit shit and a bit overproduced and a bit dull.
FIFA '04
And just like that, we're there! Around a year on (FIFA comes out the autumn BEFORE the year in the title, so these songs are from 2003 or earlier) from the Return of the Rock boom perpetuated by bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes, FIFA starts putting rock songs on its soundtracks in a much bigger way. This is helped by the fact that there's a lot more songs on here. We've gone from six in the 90s, to ten before, to thirty-one here! I must highlight what is perhaps the quintessential FIFAcore song, "Jerk It Out" by The Caeasars. I have never heard this song in a non-sporting context. It's the kind of the thing they'd play in a stadium before the game starts, the kind of thing they'd use to preview Tottenham vs Newcastle on Match of the Day 2, and the kind of thing that fits perfectly on a FIFA soundtrack. There's another song with an organ riff that like this, I think by the Charlatans, that's similarly used. They both slap. We got L.S.F. by Kasabian, who are a Peak FIFAcore band. I think THAT Serge Pizzorno goal in Soccer Aid is the most FIFAcore thing to ever happen, even though it's not 100% musical.There's some other good illustrative songs here. The Dandy Warhols give us "We Used To Be Friends," which is fine, but mostly just makes me think about the time when "Bohemian Like You" used to be the soundtrack to the football phone-in show 6-0-6, back in the good old days. There's a Raveonettes song from when they were the Next Great Hope for people that think music peaked with the opening drum beat of 'Just Like Honey'. My darling Kings of Leon make what I assume is their first appearance of many with "Red Morning Light," a classic from their coke'd up days. Even Radiohead get on here, with "Myxomatosis", which I guess kinda sounds like the White Stripes if the only thing you notice about the White Stripes is the octave pedal. Oh and The Welsh Nonce Band That I Won't Dignify With An Actual Namedrop are on here. Yikes, FIFA. Do. Better.
You also start to see FIFAcore build a lineage. This year's legacy entries are the Stone Roses ("Fool's Gold" which is my least favourite), who I love because they trick FIFAboys into listening to what is essentially twee pop ("Song For My Sugar-Spun Sister" is the kind of title that would make Talulah Gosh go "are you fucking sure?"), and The Jam, with A Town Called Malice. These are both British bands, and heavily lauded, influential ones at that. Whereas the big beat of the past few editions feels horribly dated now, with this edition, FIFA soundtracks have placed themselves in a tradition - will they stick with it? Let's read on!
FIFA '05
Something I didn't mention in the last edition is there's a lot more songs that aren't in English now, following the expansion (thirty-eight songs this time out). Of course soccer is adored everywhere except America, so this makes sense. "We like it too!" No you don't, leave us alone and go play your sports that no other country can be arsed with, Yanks. My overarching narrative about FIFAcore being an English phenomenon is obviously false. I just don't think I have much enlightening to say about the vast majority of those songs.In any case, this edition sucks a lot harder than the last. On the banger front we have "Take Your Mama" by Scissor Sisters, effortlessly skirting the boundary of Too Girly To Be On Here. "Tell Her Tonight" by Franz Ferdinand is a weird choice, considering it wasn't a single or anything, but it's good enough. There's a fun little Flogging Molly mosh/jig, a new wave song by a Swedish band called the Sounds whose singer I have fallen in love with, and YOUR FIT BUT MY GOD DON'T YOU KNOW IT by The Streets. I can't believe we let a Brummie be famous for that long, in all honesty. It's not like he hides it behind sick riffs like Ozzy either. Tune, though. There are a couple of remixes and edits here that I won't bother with, obviously. That leaves thirty other boring songs, unfortunately. No old songs here, either.
FIFA '06
Embrace suck. But importantly for this discussion, they suck in the same way they did back in 1999. Something I was expecting to write about in more detail is the New Rock Revolution of the early 2000s and the aftermath thereof, but looking through these tracklists, very few of those bands actually made proper inroads. Embrace are the kind of band that The Libertines (I'm honestly really disappointed they didn't show up) should've killed dead, the way Nirvana theoretically killed Quiet Riot, or Whitesnake, or Ratt, or whoever we are. Of course FIFA isn't the best way to determine musical success, but the New Rock Revolution feels like the first time that NME and co. failed, but didn't acknowledge they failed. Britpop worked, of course, and so did Nirvana across the pond, and punk obviously shook things up in '77, but when the hype machine got behind something like, say, romo, and it didn't catch on, those bands were dropped like molten stones (c.f. Gay Dad, above). This time the music press intelligensia said "You guys all love this shit now!", the music buying public said "eh" and continued to listen to Staind or Travis or whatever they'd been listening to before, but NME et al didn't drop the narrative. This is just my opinion, but this gap between what actually mattered to people and what mattered to magazines would only widen as the decade, and indeed the millenium, progressed. Of course Melody Maker and SPIN have never known what 'normal' people listen to, but they'd never whiffed on the "alternative" scene like this before too."Black And White Town" by Doves is a great, great song, and the video captures the aesthetic of mid-2000s Britain - which is what I'm really writing about here, you think I give a shit about some video game - incredibly perfectly, from the new builds and the fenced in multi-sport concrete park thingy to the kid in his room, avoiding his bunk bed as he kicks at a punching bag in the Arsenal away kit from the year they left Highbury. Phoneboxes. Abandoned trollies. Union Jacks. It's all so specific.
"Be My Enemy" by the Departure is a wonderful slice of FIFAcore, all clanging Editors-y guitar fragments and fiercely regional accents oversinging. There was a wonderful article about the Courteeners' regional appeal that I will never be able to find that made me see them in a whole new light, and this time period is perfect for bands like Kasabian (Leicester), this lot (Northampton), the Enemy (Coventry), Maximo Park (toon), Arctic Monkeys (Sheffield), and so on that retained a certain locality as they climbed the charts (to different extents, obviously - I'd never heard of the Departure before now).
London band Dogs serve up the solid "London Bridge." London band the Rakes serve up the considerably less solid "Strasbourg" ("oi lads, wot if we made a song with a name like that there munich by editors that's just come out, except the song is shit?"). LCD Soundsystem ("Daft Punk Is Playing At My House") are a bit cerebral, a bit snobby-indie for a collection like this. But Jamiroquai ("Feels Just Like It Should") and Damian Marley ("Welcome To Jamrock") go down well. We also get some low-tier Hard-Fi in "Gotta Reason", which is sad when they have much better songs and fit the aesthetic of FIFAcore so well as a group.
The two most perfect choices are "Helicopter" by Bloc Party, and "Lyla" by Oasis. "Helicopter" is a frenetic, over-the-top, sung-shouted romp and the exact song where I was first informed that FIFA had songs, on YouTube, as I explained. It is one of the few songs by a "big" postpunk band on these soundtracks so far. "Lyla" is, of course, Oasis deep into their inessential period. It's of a piece with "The Hindu Times" and "The Shock Of The Lightning" in that they were all first singles from Oasis albums that made people think they were 'back', rubbing their hands with Rio Ferdinand-esque glee, before the actual albums arrived and they were shit. It is, however, important that Oasis were introduced into FIFAcore. They're incredibly important to a vast swathe of the country, and their unashamed Manchester City fandom before City were at all good gives them legitimacy in this context. In fact, it seems like Guigsy actually quit the band because he cared about football more than bass guitar. What fourteen-year-old, holed up in his room, spending hours trying to get Henry to Cruyff turn just so, can't relate to that?
FIFA '07
"Civil Sin" by Boy Kill Boy falls right in that sweet spot between "Munich" and "Mr. Brightside"."New York Minute" by Mobile hits a similar spot. Surferosa prove that girls can rip off early 80s new wave too on "Uniform". It seems that by 2006 (remember, autumn before the year on the cover) there were enough smaller bands aping Interpol and them lot for FIFA to save dosh and licence their music instead. I really wonder how much The Jam and the Stone Roses cost them in 2003.
I really hate this song "Dear Scene I Wish I Was Deaf". It's a blatant Fall Out Boy ripoff in intent, of course - "this ain't a "scene" it's a goddamned arms race" - but the music is saccharine "power" pop that's decidedly light on the power. If you're gonna call out lazy hipsters, for the love of God put some balls into the music. Don't lay the chorus harmonies on so thick that Phil Spector would tell you to tone it down a smidge. Even "This Ain't A Scene..." has some spikiness, some guts to it, but the platonic ideal of this song is "Your New Aesthetic" by Jimmy Eat World, full of chugging palm mutes and replete with a noisy breakdown INSTEAD of a chorus. Fuck you, "Nightmare Of You". That's a shit bandname too.
Liège-based Malibu Stacy sound concerningly like the missing link between Weezer and The World Is... on "Los Angeles," taking the cheesy synth sound of "Tired Of Sex" and marrying it to some weird tempo changes and urgent gang vocals. The Pinker Tones make an appearance with "The Million Colour Revolution." They're a band that my friend (hi Alex!) has mentioned before based on their appearance here, and I have to be honest, this is not how I expected them to sound. Pinker Tones makes me think Weezer but this is all synth sweeps, bongos and scratches, and Prince-esque falsetto. They did say "Revolution" to be fair, that's my bad.
The first single from The Feeling, "Sewn", is on here. I had forgotten the Feeling existed but I feel like for a little while between "Fill My Little World" and "Join With Us" they were quite popular? I don't know, I was eight and had not yet developed this Patrick Bateman-esque obsession with what was popular and what wasn't. It says on their Wikipedia that at their first gig they covered Slayer. This does not come across in their original compositions.
Ah, you know what's a tune? "Love Generation" by Bob Sinclar and some Jamaican guy. That should definitely be on one of these soundtracks. Oh, it was even used for the draws to the 2006 World Cup! That's a big missed opportunity, FIFA '07.
"Supermassive Black Hole" by Muse makes an appearance here to remind me that they didn't abruptly go pop on The 2nd Law, they just stopped making GOOD pop around then. This song is great, like Prince covering "Myxomatosis". There's a Seu Jorge song on here, who is probably the only foreign artist I've recognised so far. His contribution, "Tive Razão (I Was Right)" is a lovely slice of modern samba. Sure enough, every comment on the YouTube video is some variation on "remember FIFA '07?" both in Brazilian Portuguese and English. I hope this prompted some English FIFA kids to get into música popular Brasileira. I also really hope there were kids in Belo Horizonte that were absolutely fucking obsessed with the Departure and dreamed of going to Northampton one day. Angelique Kidjo is also on here, who I'm also vaguely familiar with because she covered all of Remain In Light a couple years back, and her song "Wele Wele" is an upbeat Afro-Brazilian number.
FIFA '08
We kick off with Robyn album track "Bum Like You", which is a fucking genius move. This song is about how Robyn is inexplicably attracted to this useless bloke ("My favourite thing to do is wasting my time with a bum like you"), promising to make him pie and accept his numerous, numerous flaws. Robyn is being the Platonic idea of the Girl Who Will Sit And Look Interested While You Play FIFA In Silence, and the soundtrack clearly knows this. A mopey Travis song follows close behind. It's shit."Direct Hit" by Art Brut is next. Another one of my friends swears by this band (hi, Nathan!) and off the strength of this single I understand why. This is from their second album, which clearly had a bit more thought put into it than the first - they even called it It's A Bit Complicated to acknowledge that fact. "Don't Give Up" by the Noisettes. I forgot the Noisettes were originally an edgy, bluesy, raw band. I'm a big fan of their single "Wild Young Hearts", and it feels like "Don't Upset The Rhythm" and "Never Forget You" (which is so classic sounding I assumed it was a cover) combined soundtracked 90% of all adverts in 2009, but this early single is a much different vibe. Shingai even screams! Madness (hold that thought).
The Hoosiers aren't actually from Indiana. They're from England, they just went to Indiana on, appropriately enough, a "soccer" scholarship. "Goodbye Mr A" is another perfect song in the power pop one hit wonder tradition. There were quite a few songs in this tradition around 2007. "No Tomorrow" by Orson springs to mind, as does "Fascination" by Alphabeat (goddamn these Scandi girls, they do it to me every time), and, to return to the FIFA '07 soundtrack, "Monster" by The Automatic. We all know this song, we all know it's sick. What else can I say about it? The keyboardist was secretly the glue holding it all together, check him out on this Kanye cover:
There's a Madness song here for some reason ("Sorry")? It has two rappers guesting on it?? One of the rappers (Sway) says to the other (Baby Blue) "I thought you was a Madness fan... you're acting like a big girl's blouse!" Ridiculous. Executive meddling is a (heh) madness, you know.
I decided to give "Solta O Frango" by Bonde do Role a try because I know 'frango' means chicken em Portuguese and chicken is good. I have no idea how to describe this song. Turns out 'solta o frango' LITERALLY means drop the chicken, but idiomatically means "go crazy". It's a dancey tune with minimal synths that somehow reminds me of the Ting Tings? Would go down well at a party.
Maximo Park represent for the postpunk bands, who have otherwise all but disappeared, with "The Unshockable". Santogold (Santigold? depends), whose first album is well underrated in my opinion, also contributes "You'll Find A Way", which draws from reggae and post punk in equal measure, and is fucking sick. Ah shit, remember The Ordinary Boys? "Boys Will Be Boys" firstly wishes it was "You'll Find A Way," and secondly should absolutely be on a FIFA soundtrack.
This soundtrack finishes up with the inescapable "Young Folks" by Peter, Bjorn, and John. "Make a house a home", and dat. You ever listen to any Peter, Bjorn, and John other than this? They're alright!
This FIFA has the most songs available (50) until 2018. In 2009 we cut back down to 41.
FIFA '09
"1ne" by Italian post punk band Caesar Palace has a filthy bassline and a big, big chorus. We're off to a good start. There's a remix of Chromeo's "Bonafide Lovin'", which I recently listened to at the behest of the Chat Where We Talk About Albums. Another solid party choice if you are the type that goes outside (circumstances permitting). The Kissaway Trail signpost a new path for popular indie on "61". Yes, there's the big tremolo guitar sound that had been a key since "NYC" came out in '02, but these guys also sound like they've been listening to a lot of Iron and Wine, early My Morning Jacket (compare the drumbeat on "61" to that of "The Bear"), and a then-new group called Fleet Foxes. Ladies and gentlemen, we are at the precipice of the New Folk Revolution, which also means we're dangerously close to having to listen to Mumford and Sons."Black And Gold" by Sam Sparro was on a compilation album (imagine explaining the concept, or point, of a compilation album to an eight year old now) I asked for that SAME Christmas I was gifted my music taste and taught how to jump on mushrooms (it was honestly formative - I also learned to play "Girl On The Platform Smile" by ear on a ukelele someone else had been gifted, and I got my first phone! I listened to the various ringtones incessantly, "Swimming" being a favourite). The album was called Anthems '09. The first CD was current hits, so that meant Sam Sparro, but also "Human" by The Killers, "Electric Feel" by MGMT, "Take Her Back" by The Pigeon Detectives, and "Acrylic" by the Courteeners. The second disc was 'classics' like Goodbye Mr A, I Wanna Be Adored, Bohemian Like You, and Club Foot. I think Anthems '09 may be the definitive FIFAcore artefact, especially because it was less laddy than you'd expect. It also featured tunes from Ladyhawke ("My Delerium", which is Peak Match Of The Day 2 music), Amy Winehouse, and Duffy.
Kasabian do feature on this year's soundtrack too, with "Fast Fuse", which I'd never heard except as the Russell Howard's Good News theme. Duffy too, with "Mercy". I quite miss this period, when every girl singer wanted to be Dusty Springfield. The streets won't forget Joss Stone, and they absolutely will never forget "The Promise" by Girls Aloud. A remix of "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You" by Black Kids, which is a legitimate tune from the incredibly short lived period where random blogs held as much sway as the Grauniad and the NME. This felt like a brief democratisation, a reaction to that gap I mentioned earlier, teens taking to their communication tools to say, "no, this is what we like!" But then Black Kids completely flopped it, and so did Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, so who knows, really.
"Olympic Airways" by Foals! I love Antidotes and I don't think anything they've done since comes close. They mellowed out way too much in the 2010s. Remix of "Ready For The Floor," which did not need remixed at all. More Pinker Tones, this time "The Whistling Song." Cute little song. The Script - who also appeared on Anthems '09 - with "The End Where I Begin". I don't remember this song but it's just as shit as everything else they did. Anyone else feel like the Script are being memory holed? They were legitimately everywhere when I was like twelve. The singer (Danny????) was even the "rock" judge on The Voice! Where are they now? The Heavy, the "How You Like Me Now?" band with a song that isn't "How You Like Me Now" and is therefore pointless ("That Kind Of Man"). "Untouched" by The Veronicas is a barrage, with its stuttered vocals, and backing track of a string quartet fighting a Killers-eque guitar-and-keys bridge and much-too-heavy chorus. It sounds like they put all popular music from the past five years in a blender and honestly it almost works? Impressively crazy.
FIFA '10
Only ten to go, folks! Let's start with "Daylight" by Matt and Kim, which isn't FIFAcore (too girly) but is perfect iPod-advert-core. Look how young and happy they are in the video! Don't you want to be that too? Buy our shit!German band The Whitest Boy Alive contribute "1517", which sounds like an analog "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". The Enemy do finally arrive, with "Be Somebody" from their second album. The Enemy strike me as playing whatever the British equivalent of "heartland rock" is - Coventry is literally the most central city in the country as well - a cheeky bit of the Jam's social commentary, a smidgen of Gallagher sneer, big, big, guitar sounds, and all the Dark Fruits it is legally allowed to drink. I don't like this song but I get why everyone in that arena looks so happy to see them. Clearly this means something to people. This is essential FIFAcore.
There's a Major Lazer song ("Hold The Line"), featuring Santogold, that's a cute litte relic of when they were a band championed by indie blogs rather than a band with one of the most famous producers in the world. Metric ("Gold Guns Girls") are the only holdout from the new wave revivalists. There's another Peter Bjorn and John song. Passion Pit give us "Moth's Wings", and I'll be honest, I thought these guys were the Temper Trap, so I was gonna complain about this song not being "Sweet Disposition", but they're not the Temper Trap, so I guess it just sucks on its own merits. *hears Merriweather Post Pavilion once*-ass band. This year sucked.
FIFA '11
*More* The Pinker Tones ("Sampleame")? This one isn't even good! Is Sepp Blatter these guys' dad or some shit? Late period Linkin Park ("Blackout")? God, why? More Chromeo, unremixed this time ("Don't Turn Your Lights On"). Passable 80s throwback like all the rest of their music. Dum Dum Girls are here (with "It Only Takes One Night") to remind you, as FIFA does once every five years or so, that noise pop is a thing. Remember the Raveonettes? Weren't those the days? I wish Glasvesgas had come up, "Daddy's Gone" (also on Anthems '09) is some quality Jesus and Mary Chain worship."I Can Talk" by Two Door Cinema Club is the only song here that I can honestly say I'm familiar with. It's TDCC at their danciest and least "guitar-y", if that makes sense, and it's like the most boring song on Tourist History. I wonder how these songs are picked. Like I said earlier, licencing fees or whatever must play a part, but what else goes into it? I gather that Yeasayer that are really important to a millenial of a certain vintage, and this ("O.N.E.") makes a bit of sense. They like African music like Vampire Weekend, but they took it in a poppier, funkier direction here, whereas VW exercise the restraint you expect from Ivy Leaguers. Gorillaz with some dead song, "Rhinestone Eyes."
Black Keys contribute "Tighten Up." Here's how some people feel about that.
Read this for a proper appraisal of the Black Keys and their place in modern music. Snobby cunts like me don't like them, and that's exactly the point. You think about people like Frankie Cosmos and Clairo and their start in the 'biz', and tell me the Black Keys don't deserve your respect. That "Winners' History of Rock and Roll" I linked is really good. Hyden explains eloquently what I've been clumsily getting at all article. "As radio bands like Linkin Park struggled to stay on the air as the number of rock stations shrank in the late ’00s, the music press began focusing disproportionately on rock groups that seemed to be a lot more popular than they actually were. In the parlance of the Winners’ History, “elitist taste” rock moved to fill the void left by rapidly diminishing “mass taste” rock." That's the story of these soundtracks since 2002. There are a dwindling number of Big Rock Tunes on here because there was a dwindling number of Big Rock Bands and Big Rock Stations to play them on.Thinking about how much I hate the band The Black Keys because they gave us another generation of Rock n Roll guys and all their music is good for is playing during the climax of a Red Lobster commercial when they pour liquid butter over a pile of endless shrimp in slow motion— ben (@bitch_updates) April 14, 2020
Kiss, another Hyden-appointed Winner, are a band that no one critically respects (this critic/public gap didn't spring up in 2002, I'm just saying critics stopped caring in 2002), but they are well beloved because they went to parts of America no one else went to and put on a fucking show. Hyden says of the Black Keys contemporaries: "Like other popular-ish indie bands, Grizzly Bear sells out midsize theaters in large cities and elicits blank stares every place else. It is a group that appears to have little or no concept of what a beer-chugging, Middle American audience might want out of a rock record." Transfer that to England. The most important music scene of the 1970s here was not punk, like books would have you believe, but pub rock. Pub rock bands played in pubs, duh, and played simple, fast, and hard. The Sex Pistols WISH they were Dr. Feelgood. These bands set up a network of small-to-medium sized venues across Southern England that the punk bands were later able to take advantage of, and Dr. Feelgood singer/harmonica player/menace Lee Brilleaux lent Nick Lowe £400 to start Stiff Records, who later signed the Damned, Elvis Costello, the Pogues, and, holy fuck, The Enemy!
Skip to the modern day, the past ten years, and think about how many posh, critically adored indie bands would register to the average consumer. Very few, if any. Maybe the 1975 (who are from a posh town in Chesire, who are incredibly pretentious, and who I fucking hate)? How many bands like Black Midi (who I think are fine) or even King Krule (who is my favourite artist) ever go to Leicester or Coventry or Northampton? Very few, if any. Well, Kasabian did. The Enemy did. The Departure did. Fuck Black Midi, and pay respect to the Black Keys. The only artist I can think of, that's desperately triyng to make art for the people, for the masses, as opposed to for Peckham and Shoreditch, is Sam Fender, and if he doesn't get on a FIFA soundtrack in the next couple of years the world has gone to pot.
FIFA '12
Remember when this was about songs that featured on FIFA soundtracks? Remember big beat? I'm sorry I went off on one last year, but the songs are just getting really boring. We're deep into the death of rock radio, and NME are on their last legs. The last bands they'd push, bands like Palma Violets and Swim Deep, probably don't feature here. What does is songs by Grouplove (the band with the "take me to your best friends house, I loved you then, and I love you now", but not that song, so who cares), Portugal. The Man before they proper sold out last year proving they could always write a good pop song ("Got It All"), the Ting Tings ("Hands") and TV On The Radio ("Will Do") long after they were relevant, even MORE Kasabian ("Switchblade Smiles", which I think makes the most capped rock band in FIFA history - a lot of the electronic artists from earlier had multiple songs under multiple aliases feature), and a couple bands I expected to feature a lot earlier. The Hives gives us "Thousand Answers," which is definitely a Hives song, and Glasvegas actually do turn up, with "The World is Yours" which is a solid entry.The only song from this soundtrack that I properly like is "Wrecking Bar (Ra Ra Ra)" by the Vaccines. The Vaccines are maybe the last band to get from critical darling to (momentarily) actually popular off the strength of things like the NME. Sam Fender gets on Radio 1, but he isn't particularly acclaimed (which is wrong), and the 1975 are shit so I refuse to acknowledge they went to number 1. I don't think it's a coincidence that Wreckin' Bar is essentially a Dr. Feelgood song. Doused in reverb, yes. Featuring some lyrics in French, yes. But the structure of that song is the three chords you're allowed to use in proper rhythm and blues, very short verses, and a shredding solo. It's just an updated "Lights Out", and I love it.
FIFA '13
I am really struggling, lads. I'm beginning to remember why I spent all of like 2013 to 2017 not listening to any popular music from the present day. This honestly upsets me more than the big beat because at least that's just Good, But Emphatically Not For Me. This stuff is creatively lacking, musically boring, and worse still, the only shit available on this entire soundtrack.We're talking Bastille. Fitz And The Tantrums. Imagine Dragons at their iPod commercial best ("On Top Of The World", replete with Lumineersian "hey"s). Walk The Moon. Bloc Party, Band Of Horses and the Enemy in the year of our lord Two Thousand And Twelve??? "Club Foot" is on here at least.We also get songs from Wretch 32 and Flo Rida, which feels like the first acknowledgement on the part of FIFA that Black British people like football too. Seriously, there's not been any grime, and barely any hip-hop. I wonder if that will change as things progress.
FIFA '14
There's absolutely nothing here worth talking about because I've already talked about half these bands. Bloc Party, Grouplove, Vampire Weekend, Foals, The 1975, Portugal. The Man (their rise to top wasn't as sudden as I thought, the narrative in my head was "weird psych, weird psych, weird psych, OOH I'M A REBEL JUST FOR KICKS NOW" but clearly not), Wretch 32. I haven't talked about Crystal Fighters but they're just European Grouplove, and none of the songs they've had have been "The Plage" (you know it, truss) so, again, what's the fucking point? I guess "Love Me Again" by John Newman was a thing at the time, but who cares? I listened to the American Authors song, "Hit It", just to check if they were as bad as I thought. They are. No wonder the Courteeners have been the biggest band in the country the past ten years if this is their WORLDWIDE competition. Next year, please.FIFA '15
There's a song called "Brasil" (by Santé Les Amis) but it's not the World Cup Song Brasil, immediately following the World Cup? These fuckwits, man. More Foster The People and The Kooks. More Kasabian and The Ting Tings. "Crystal Ball" by Death From Above 1979 is a nice throwback to songs like "1ne" by Caesar Palace and even "Supermassive Black Hole" from back when these soundtracks were good, with its driving bassline and general menacing vibe. American Authors couldn't intimidate a deer if their fucking lives depended on it. Milky Chance serve up "Down By The River", which is just, fucking, awful. "Mess is Mine" by Vance Joy, which Nathan will hate me for hating, but there's just nothing fucking happening, love. How can you call Prefab Sprout "unbuttered bread" yet adore this man? Make it make sense!Oh hey, Doja Cat guesting on a song (Elliphant's "Purple Light") five years before "Say So" blew up on TikTok and three years before "Bitch I'm A Cow"! They couldn't even be arsed to put her in the video. You hate to see it, folks. "My Type" by Saint Motel, which is literally just the NOWtv song. You cannot hear it as anything else other than advert fodder, it's just not possible. Aviici (RIP). tUnE-yArDs produce "Water Fountain". I read a tweet one time that said if tUnE-yArDs had come out like four years later, the lady would've been done for cultural appropriation. I don't think that's true, they did it to VW in 2008, if they were gonna cancel her they would've done it. The real problem here is this song fucking sucks and is incredibly annoying. Cancel them for that.
FIFA '16
Raury! There was a couple months in 2015 there where They were trying really hard to make Raury A Thing but the music just wasn't there. Swim Deep finally arrive with a song called "One Great Song And I Could Change The World". That title is much too easy to dunk on so I will just say it's not a very good song.@alshipley Also Raury being a camp counselor masquerading as a rapper. "Hey young dudes, lets all go rafting down the rapids!"— The Lord Sabre Bennett (@CrowleyHead) June 4, 2015
Kygo, who is the worst artist to ever exist, makes an appearance("ID") . X Ambassadors, who are a poor man's American Authors, collab with Skylar Grey on "Cannonball" to predictably generic and boring results. More mellow Foals. More Bastille. More John Newman even though they already used his only song. Nothing But Thieves, who are a band I'd heard of but never listened to. "Trip Switch" hasn't convinced me to delve deeper, I'm afraid. Years & Years exist now ("Gold (FIFA edit)"). Hooray, I guess. Unknown Mortal Orchestra inject a bit of interest into proceedings ("Can't Keep Checking My Phone"), but the best song on this dire collection is "Distant Past" by Everything Everything. I think EE could've been the post-Vaccines big band if they wanted. They write interesting songs, but they know how to keep things just catchy enough and just poppy enough to straddle the increasingly blurry "indie"/"pop" border line. However, they followed their muse into sounding like late Talk Talk, and now we have the 1975 instead. Fantastic.
FIFA '17
The biggest FIFA soundtrack of them all, and maybe that's the problem. Back in 2000 the ratio of shit to good was about the same, but there were eight songs in total. I could've listened to all of them if I chose. This has fifty-one songs. The second Beck song to feature in a row. The Two Door Cinema club song where they went fully disco. EVEN MORE KASABIAN AND GROUPLOVE. Bastille and Kygo. Jack Garratt shows up for some reason but not with "Worry." Is "Worry" even Jack Garratt? I get confused. |
| Kasabian and Grouplove are the Messi and Ronaldo of FIFA soundtracks. |
Two songs worth talking about here. "Isombard" by Declan McKenna is a throwback to c.2006 indie, and a good one at that. I maintain that him going on Jools Holland (which is where I first saw him because I am not cool, plus that whole "don't pay attention to modern music" thing) with a t-shirt that said "Give 16-year-olds the vote!" was cool even though it probably wasn't.
"Postpone" by Catfish and the Bottlemen is similar, honestly. I don't like Catfish but this is fine, and more importantly, I see why it would be popular with people who aren't me. There's infinitely more bite to this than any Years and Years or X Ambassadors, not that that's an achievement, but it's not confrontational and tuneless like a lot of the bands that have come up recently. I have seen Shame live, for example, and it's an experience, and the energy is there, but the songs really, really aren't, with the exception of "One Rizla" (which would sit very nicely on a FIFA soundtrack from the good old days). Catfish at least sometimes attempt to write songs, even if they're not very good.
Jack Garratt, Tom Walker, and Rag and Bone Man are the same person— san vicente guaita fan account (@volvicstorm98) February 20, 2019
FIFA '18
Grime! Well, not "grime" but UK hip hop, anyway. Sneakbo and Giggs collab on "Active" and what a welcome reprieve from modern "rock" this is. If you ever wonder why posh boys from Godalming wanting to rebel listen to UK rap and not rock just listen to Catfish and Giggs one after the other. There's no competition, and this isn't even hard, hard shit.alt-J long past the point of relevance or artistic merit ("Deadcrush"). "Feels Like Summer" by Weezer. I saw those dweebs the year Pacific Daydream came out and the dip in energy the moment they stopped playing shit from Blue and Pinkerton and played this wank must have been soulcrushing for poor Rivers. He just wants the cool kids to like him, poor dear. They never will, honey. Us nerds are all you have.
"Star Roving" by Slowdive? Wasn't expecting that, but it kind of makes sense. It's a more upbeat Slowdive tune and you could just vibe out to it. Again, I have friends that like Django Django, Lorde, and Superorganism, but I've never listened. The thing with Lorde is I blame her for the blah-ification of pop in the mid-decade, as everyone tried to crib her disaffected, unimpressed style. When there's ONE pop song about how modern pop sucks, it's a relief. When they're all like that, you are trapped in a self-referential hell where not even pop music likes pop music. Eventually I will get over that dislike and learn to love Lorde like everyone else, but that's not happening in the context of a much-too-long article about songs from FIFA soundtracks.
Avelino's "Energy" allows me to talk for probably the last time in this article, about the New Musical Express. They stopped printing the magazine in 2018, and moved entirely online. One of the last things they did print was a list of artists they expected to make it in 2018. Some, like Tom Grennan (whose "Found What I've Been Looking For" is on this year's soundtrack too) and Yungblud, did end up kicking on and getting somewhere over the past couple years, but some, like Avelino, have been noticeably absent. This song is a weird one. The beat's very avant-garde and spiky and dissonant, when most UK rap from the past few years has been low-end focused and dark (a lot of it is in Phrygian if you know music shit). This is absolutely not the production I would've gone for on my "pop smash", if you see what I mean. It has Stormzy AND Skepta on it, and was featured on FIFA, and yet I've never heard of it? If you have THE two (I'd argue) biggest rappers in the country on your song and you still can't get word of mouth out to be more famous than Thomas fucking Grennan, you got a problem. That really sums it up with the NME. They stopped being able to kingmake at the turn of the millenium and everything they tried fell embarrasingly flat no matter what they did. Sad!
FIFA '19
Courtney Barnett ("City Looks Pretty")! Nice! ANOTHER song called "Feels Like Summer", this time from erstwhile popstar and current avant-garde provocateur Childish Gambino. King of the North Bugzy Malone makes this soundtrack with "Ordinary People", which is a sad 'started from the bottom' number with guitars in the beat and that. "you should see me in a crown" is just as shocking as the first time I heard it, probably two years ago. "Sorcererz" by Gorillaz, which isn't a song I recognise, but is perfectly fine.And there he is, my Next Great Hope, my New Rock Revolution, Sam Fender, with "Play God". I have a vested interest in this boy succeeding. I saw him in Lancaster Library in 2017 before he blew up and he signed my shirt so I am in the MONEY if he gets properly big. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I saw him that day and thought he was perfect. The set felt a bit 'wispy', for want of a better word. The songs deserved more muscle than the band was giving them at the time. It was too much late Foals, all texture and "vibe", and not enough directness and urgency. His début fixes that completely, in my opinion. "Play God" is the song on there that's most "texture"-y but in any case that chorus is so simple and will absolutely get stuck in your head. Here's to his songs featuring on these for years to come.
FIFA '20
I think it's clear, from reading this, that "FIFAcore" isn't really a genre, and if it was, it no longer exists. I never even attempted to define it, did I? I'm certainly not going to now. It has guitars in, and the bands are normally English, but beyond that there's no overarching similarities between the acts I think of when someone says "FIFA", and there's even fewer similarities between the acts that really do appear on these soundtracks. There is one guitar band I've heard of on this soundtrack. I may as well give the song a listen.Like all the best FIFAcore songs, "The Runner" by Foals has a sick distorted bassline. Like most of the songs from the past ten years, it's a bit dull otherwise. Elsewhere, the soundtrack retreats fully into the global vague pop sounds that have been all the rage the past couple of years, which makes perfect sense because football is a global game. We got music from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Rayners Lane-via-India, and Oxford-via-Greece, and it all sounds roughly the same.
I have nothing else to say. This new soundtrack, with its Tierra Whack and its Ttrruuces, BJ the Chicago Kid, and Judah & The Lion, is emphatically Not For Me. We're back to where we were in 1999. Rock was given one final chance to rule the airwaves and we gave the pop world the Departure. It was never gonna be enough. It makes sense that pop is gonna be our enemy again. It's easier that way. Enjoy the playlist!
On What Constitutes Fifacore >>>>> Download Now
ReplyDelete>>>>> Download Full
On What Constitutes Fifacore >>>>> Download LINK
>>>>> Download Now
On What Constitutes Fifacore >>>>> Download Full
>>>>> Download LINK fR