Best of the Decade #6: The Libertines

I didn't realize until I made this list, but I spent a goodly amount of time rocking hard in the '00s. And by hard I mean hard, baby. Underneath my staid personality, apparently, lay a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. A coiled spring. A powderkeg of reckless abandon cleverly disguised as a suburban middle aged doofus. Thunder in a teapot, man, a permanent tidal wave in a notion of dynamite.

Or something like that.

Here we are at #6 on the Best of the Decade, Up the Bracket, and I'm chair dancing and head nodding my way into what passes for a frenzy in this cubicle. Combining punk smashery with that peculiar brand of English melodicism places, for this listener, the Libertines in the chain of great Brit-rockers, from the early Who and Kinks to the Buzzcocks and Jam to these guys to -- what? The Arctic Monkeys first album? That's about as close as I've gotten since the Libertines split.

The Libertines' first album proffered, like the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls before them, a manifesto that required no further comment (even though they made one anyway). The poppy chord progressions are proof that they weren't the slopmeisters that they'd have you believe. They also weren't afraid to swing a little (on "Begging," for instance) or even come over a little McCartneyesque, as on the cheekily acoustic "Radio America."

But it's the bracing rockers that will make this a fixture in my player for years to come. Songs such as "Vertigo," "Horrorshow," and "The Boy Looked at Johnny" kept a worn-down 30something guy from giving up on the rock in 2002, and I expect it will be a similarly potent tonic in 2032.

The Boy Looked At Johnny.mp3