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Last week, while writing about Kerrang's annual lists of "greatest albums", I strayed as far as The Rolling Stone's list of the top 500 songs of all time.  My initial reaction was boredom, followed by disbelief and a hint of anger.  Let's call it frustration, actually: anger is surely too extreme a response.

But still...  Look at it.  Does anything grab you?  I mean, apart from the fact the Rolling Stone's top 500 songs starts with Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", with the number two being by the Rolling Stones.  I'm not certain that they're entirely focussing on the music here, nor am I sure that the voting system supposedly involved really threw up such serendipitous results.

The real story is that this list was clearly made by boomers.  They liked music from the 50's to the 70's.  They even liked some of the stuff their kids played to them in the 80's  But since then, well, it's just a racket, isn't it?  And that dance and hip-hop nonsense will never last: just a flash in the pan.

So in the top 200 songs you have five tracks from the 1990s.  There are only three songs from the last five years.  Three out of five hundred?!?  Two of those are from Eminem, clearly satisfying the "new music" and hip-hop quotas in one (the other is Hey Ya by Outkast.  The five chosen from the 90's in the top 200 are informative in themselves: REM's Losing My Religion, U2's One, Sinead O'Connor's cover of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and Beck's Loser.  These are just the type of songs you'd see on the iPod of a fat, late-middle-aged A&R man from RCA, althuogh he'd usually skip Beck when it came on in shuffle mode at the gym.

So it is that you find September Gurls by Big Star; One Fine Day by the Chiffons;It's Your Thing by the Isley Brothers and dozens more tracks now usually available in compilations advertised on daytime television with the words "remember, Greatest Easy listening Hits volumes one to nine are not available in the shops."  But you'll be hard-pushed to find anything from the alternative scene beyond token entries for the Smiths, The Cure and the Pixies.  Nor should you go looking for rap outside Eminem or the easier "soul" stuff like R. Kelly.  I'm not Green Day's biggest fan, but they have several singles that could hold their own in there.  Faith No More should have at least one single in the list, probably From Out of Nowhere or Epic.  The failure to include any one of a number of hits by Cypress Hill is shocking.  If the Foo Fighters were too recent for the compilers, surely Iron Maiden were not.  Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing is surely a better candidate than Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy.  Pearl Jam's Jeremy might just about be considered worth an entry, whereas Sly and the Family Stone's Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) might arguably struggle to justify its place.

Most glaring of all, The Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight, Tonight isn't there.  Nor are any of their other tracks.  And surely The Pogues merit a place.  Even the Americo-centric Rolling Stone panel must have heard of The Fairytale of New York?

And if you think that i am being deliberately obscurantist and pretentious, then how about this: why are there no songs from the Spice Girls, probably the most influential "band" of their decade?  I hate them, and I admit that the influence in question was horrible to the point of malignance - a hundred manufactured bands - but it was great pop, nonetheless.  And no worse or more commercial than the equally manufactured Motown pop that dominates large portions of the "official" list.

Put it this way: I imagine that Jeremy Clarkson, the man whose enthusiasm for well-pressed jeans and a bubble perm almost single-handedly destroyed the place of denim in the UK in the 90s, would happily admit to owning 450 - at a minimum - of these tracks.  Insert your own mid-life crisis-afflicted national celebrity here.

MUDflation is fun

Edward Castranova asks, at Terra Nova (with a follow up from Nick Yee), if inflation is fun. Specifically, within the frame of the MMORPG. He also closes by mentioning that getting rid of inflation in games worlds would be "eminently doable".

OK, imaginary world economics are not going to be popular stuff, so I'll keep it short. To counter the second point, while getting rid of MUDflation may well be rather easy, doing so without creating deflation through liquidity issues would be a lot harder.  You can't just take a world like Star Wars Galaxies and put a simple cap on the narrow-measure money (cash) being created through game functions like missions.  People are creating wealth all the time: taking less valuable commodities like resources (and time... oh so much time) and crafting lightsabers.  You would have to match money supply to the rate of increase of real wealth, or else the very best you can get is Japanese economy.  The fact that players always want to keep a certain, very substantial, amount "in the bank" is a key deflationary pressure here, too.

Castranova, of all people, clearly knows this very, very well, thus the question (even if terrifyingly few of those posting in the responses are aware of it).  And the answer, as he aludes to, is "yes, a dose of inflation is fun in a MUD".  Players want to see that they are much richer this month than last.  If everyone is always to be substantially ahead in cash terms, that means cash is going to have to be worth less.  Players may grumble about rising prices, but if that can be solved by a couple of hours at the mission terminal then they will care an awful lot less than if liquidity is the problem.

The Deified Kurt Cobain

I have long been conducting a gruelling campaign, based on the premise that Nevermind has been the subject of a broad campaign of musico-historical revisionism, aimed at elevating it to the status of Masterpiece.  Of Turning Point.  Of Magnum Opus.

Far be it from me to appear not to like it.  It was a great album.  A Great Album, indeed.  Undoubtedly influential.  I have listened to it so often that I need to give it a break on occasion.  But now it is discussed as if it gave birth to all that came after.  To hear bands on MTV2 discuss it, one would think that grunge and alternative metal, in 1991, sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Cobain.  One would also imagine that it was instantly recognised as being the founding document of a new way in metal.  Nobody with a taste for the genre will admit to thinking otherwise, any sooner than they would admit to disliking The Pixies, or finding the Velvet Underground "a bit too arty".

The premature death of a famous and undoubtedly influential artist like Cobain always leads to hagiography and exaggeration.  Contemporary album sales of Doors records were modest.  But by the time Oliver Stone made his bloated tribute to Jim Morrison(Denis Leary thereupon: "I'm drunk, I'm nobody, I'm drunk, I'm famous, I'm drunk, I'm dead"), everyone was wistfully remembering those days spent dropping acid and listening to Riders on the Storm in a San Francisco commune.  Sid Vicious was a talentless pretty boy with a taste for heroin and a penchant for wife-beating.  But dying elevated him to the outer sphere of deities.

It can even work later in a fading career.  John Lennon in The Beatles was the real deal: half of the greatest and most prodigious song-writing partnership pop has ever known (keep your Bacharachs, and even your Pet Sounds).  But by the time he dies he'd wasted years on dreadful, dreadful music.  Imagine is an awful song, for all that A Perfect Circle managed to reveal its potential to be something better through the simple expedient of changing such minor details as the key, the instrumentation and the tune.  Woman is worse yet, and made none the better for being about Yoko Ono.  But a few .38 calibre slugs changed all that: number ones all round (keeping the far superior Vienna by Ultravox off the top spot, into the bargain).

And of course, it's not just music: Brando was ten times the actor James Dean ever was, but he had the foolishness to get old and fat instead of dying to remain forever pretty.

Anyway. Nirvana: The Myths

• Myth number one: "Nirvana re-invented rock, and gave birth to alternative rock and grunge."  No.  This is not true.  I could moan on about Mudhoney and Sonic Youth and the Pixies and lots of esoteric stuff, but just take a look at Kerrang magazine's contemporary albums of the year lists at http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/kerrang.html for mainstream progenitors: Nevermind was two years after Faith No More's The Real Thing.  Over the previous three years Jane's Addiction had released nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual.  Mother Love Bone, Atom Seed and The Almighty had already been around, and in the same year as Nevermind emerged, so did Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.
• Myth number two: "ah, but Nevermind was so good that it made an impact those other bands never did."  No.  Look at that list.Nirvana is sitting there at number four for the year, as voted by readers.  Alice in Chains (with far from their best or most accessible album) are not far behind.  Soundgarden, you will notice, are at number 2, beaten only by one of Metallica's best albums (the eponymous Metallica).  People liked alternative metal already.  The idea that Nevermind lifted the scales from their eyes and changed rock forever came after Cobain died.
• Myth number three: "time told on that one: Nevermind was simply the best album."  Bzzzt.  Wrong...  For once, the readers of Kerrang were spot on.  Nevermind was not the best album of all time, nor was it even the best album that year.  It was unlucky to be beaten by Mind Funk.  I admit.  That was a real House Party 2 vs E.T. mismatch.  But Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger deserved its place.  And 1994's Superunknown vies with Faith No More's Angel Dust for the position of finest flowering of the genre.

Don't get me wrong: I too like to think that King Kurt I is not dead, but instead sleeps under a hill, waiting for music's hour of need so that he can once again emerge and rule, saving us from Genesis.  But read the reviews of In Utero, then look at the difference in writing about Cobain post-mortem.  From "tired and uninspired" to "genius who changed the face of music" in two easy barrels.

Cricket, Wellington and Waterloo

My uncle forwarded me a question from a friend today at work: "at 18:30 on 18 June 1815 - if offered, would Wellington have 'taken the light'?"

This probably qualifies as counterfactual history, in as much as the umpires at Waterloo did not, to the best of our knowledge, offer Wellington the light.  And counterfactual history is, as always, a delight.  The question is even better because of the way it is couched.  Cricket has the image of being the least warlike of sports (in the absence of "legitimate leg side theory").  More than that, there is a curious, poetic beauty about the idea of being "offered the light" (a phrase which, for me, ranks alongside being "invited to follow-on": a genteel way of describing being forced to face the depths of one's humiliating situation).

My only argument with the terms of the question would be that the answer is a little obvious for the time given.  By half past six, the Prussians had arrived on the battlefield and drawn off the young guard; Ney had exhausted much of the French cavalry in pointless mass charges unsupported by the other arms; and Napoleon had squandered much of his reserve in bloody failure against Hougomont.  More than that, it was at five or so that the Old Guard was repulsed in their charge.

More difficult to judge, perhaps, would be an offer of the light at 16:00 or so.  At that point, Ney's charges have occurred.  Hougomont has done its work to the French reserves, but at terrible cost to the defenders.  It may yet fall, and expose the British flank.  On top of this, la Haye Sainte on the other flank is falling to the French; both Young and Old Guards are intact and uncommitted; the Heavy Brigade is mauled; the Dutch-Belgian Brigade has withdrawn; Picton, the reserve on that flank, is badly mauled; and several regiments on the forward slope of the Anglo-Allied position have effectively ceased to exist as fighting units.

The situation looks much more grim at this point.  More than that, the bulk of Wellington's army (except the flanks) was unengaged at that point, and could be withdrawn in fair order, towards a source of hardened veterans of the peninsular war - effectively an opportunity to take the light.  The commander is the older Wellington of Toulouse, not that of Assaye (when he forded a river on a flank march, then frontally attacked his enemy when they changed their disposition).  At Fuentes de Onoro he had shown his willingness to accept an inconclusive result in order to fight another day, and Salamanca was a battle that almost didn't happen, after Wellington had earlier decided to withdraw on strategic grounds.  Wellington's army had to remain in being: a severe defeat might yet have driven the Prussians back to the Rhineland (as Gneisenau had planned) and might indeed have inflicted serious damage upon the coalition.

But, as at Salamanca, Wellington saw a tactical opportunity that outweighed the advantages of relying purely on his strategic resources.  His opinion of Napoleon had fallen after the disasterous cavalry attacks ("the man's nothing but a pounder"): he didn't know that those were the work of Ney.  He also must have known that the delay in the start of the French artillery attack until 11:35 was more than he could hope to gain again, and would have suspected, surely, that the resulting state of the ground had precluded horse-artillery adequately supporting Ney in his Quixotic efforts (although Ney himself needed no help from the weather).  And Grouchy's detached corps might appear if Napoleon was given time to regroup.

Most of all, Wellington seems to have sincerely believed that Blucher would rally and re-appear.  This was, on the face of it, hugely unlikely: the Prussians had been soundly defeated and should be retreating in poor order.  But Wellington had faith that they would appear, and gambled his army upon them doing so.  What is more, had he retired prematurely, leaving the field with the possibility that the Prussians would appear as promised and face the entire French army, he would have been harshly treated.  After Ney's charges, by about 4.30PM. he is reported as saying 'The battle is mine; and if the Prussians arrive soon, there will be an end of the war.' (reported by Captain Gronow).

Perhaps he also shared Napoleon's view that the result of a retreat would inevitably be that each of the Prussian and Anglo-Allied armies would be forced to fall back upon their lines of supply: the former to the east, the latter to the north.  This had been Napoleon's habitual method throughout over 15 years: concentrate your forces at the vital point, and separate those of your enemy before dealing with each from a central position.

So no.  I think Wellington had his battlefield, was happy with it and was, by late afternoon, confident that he would at least hold the field until nightfall.  But he may, indeed, have been playing for the draw at that point.

On (not) first looking into Taylor's Origins...