Blur were awesome in their day. Never forget this.

Was a solid six years before I found out that Graham Coxon sings nearly half of this song, and not Damon Albarn.

In US, outside of Britpop-loving scum like me, Blur was basically known only as the "WOO-HOO!" band b/c that song popped up in so many commercials. But "Song 2" was written as an intentional parody of idiot hard rock. Too successful, b/c it's actually fun.

If you're a product of the UK "Cool Britannia"/NuLab '90s, then you celebrate Blur for LPs like MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH and PARK LIFE and GREAT ESCAPE. All are fine records! But really they didn't peak until they got into Pavement with the 1997 S/T record.

PARK LIFE is the band that made Blur a UK icon, just like DIFFERENT CLASS did for Pulp. But even though there are a ton of famous songs and singles on it, the best one is the one whose title sounds like a particulrly unfortunate pimple on your upper lip:

That little Graham Coxon guitar break on "Badhead" - nothing flashy about it, just writerly stuff, pure and beautiful. That's Coxon at his best, and that's Blur at their best. PARKLIFE: it holds up!

THE GREAT ESCAPE is easily one of the most truly "mid '90s London let's all vote for Tony Blair and get high in Ibiza on holiday" UK rock albums, and Blur doesn't like it for that reason: a bit self-parodic. But c'mon, this song is still funny as f***,

"He's reading Balzac, knocking back Prozac" is a couplet for the ages.

Blur were special for the UK in that they could really bring off a sweeping ballad in a way that only Suede among their peers could really match. This is a wonderful ode to anomie and ennui.

"The Universal" is rather clearly the "Damon Albarn has been reading his Huxley" song in the Blur discography. Still great regardless.

Albarn and Coxon really tapped into something in the mid-'90s sense of relative affluence and Neil Postman-like anomie that only Radiohead also understood. And no better than on Coxon's greatest song:

Remember when missing children's faces were put on the side of your weekly milk carton? Well that, one of the greatest music videos of the era, is the milk carton getting up and deciding to go find Graham Coxon himself. Just delightful, and the song is a ripper.

13 (Blur's last truly great record) is so wildly diverse. You've got gospel on "Tender," slow sad laments like "No Distance Left To Run," angular postpunk anthems like "Coffee + TV," and...well, Damon Albarn losing his girl to the Rolling Stones:

13 is such an utterly fearless record, it very much predicted what Radiohead would do on KID A a year later. It gives absolutely zero fucks and succeeds by just ploughing its own unique furrow.

Whoops! A tweep just reminded me that I did an entire two-hour-long Blur thread and somehow failed to post a link to this song, which will get you through some of the hardest, nastiest times of your life. A masterpiece:

No matter where you are, or Where You Are (and there's a difference), if things are bad remember that...this is a low, but it won't hurt you. Take the hit and get back up and look around for people to help you. Goodnight.