This week, Pieces missed the last set of the longest and tensest Wimbledon final ever, but we’re not bitter. We’ll just make sure that if Roger Federer or Andy Roddick ever come to a Pieces gig, they leave before we play our last 3 songs. We know it wasn’t their fault. But someone has to pay…

In a week where all kinds of events have forced us to reconsider the merits of past achievements and figures, the idea of critical reassessment has loomed large. As the world watched Federer become the first man to win 15 tennis majors, we were bombarded with commentators, pundits and former players telling us that he’s now without a doubt the greatest player ever to grace the game. All well and good, and statistically sound I suppose, but imagine how Rod Laver, who was in the crowd on Sunday to watch Federer and until the end of that match had the title of ‘Best Ever’ in the palm of his hand, must feel. In the space of a couple of break points, his achievements shift from the pinnacle of on-court dominance to the second-tier, where the Great players fight for the right to polish Federer’s tennis shoes. Even if you don’t care about tennis at all (which, as everyone knows and accepts, not many of us do except for 3 weeks of strawberry-and-cream love-in in summer), you have to feel sorry for the guy. Once someone’s come along to top your trophy count, all you’re left with is the die-hards to fight your corner on the grounds that ‘the game was different then’.

The same can happen retro-actively, bizarrely. It usually disguises itself as nostalgia, like when (god forbid…) you’re forced to sit through a TopTen Best Ever Selling Mega Smash Hit Saturday Night TV ITV3 Filler show, and the last things to appear are from years and years ago and are championed by people saying ‘they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore’. They’re doing the same thing as the tennis commentators, only in reverse: once you’ve found a set of criteria to judge something on, you can raise the best performer above everything else and treat it as if there’s no need to pay any attention to anything other than ‘the winner’.

You would expect this trend to run pretty strongly through music, given that we as humans do tend to get over-excited about most things in this way. Just think about the glut of magazine articles devoted to reviews of ‘criminally underrated’ albums, or ‘lost gems’, or, even better, ‘[Terrible Album X], [Artist X]’s true career high’. (Check out this painful example). All set up in tandem with the unconscious drive we all have to plot the ‘development’ or ‘progression’ of music, even of an individual band, in a single linear direction like a story with a beginning, middle and projected end. Of course it doesn’t really happen like that – although people like Pete Frame create brilliant, fascinating pieces of art based on this idea, and www.bandtoband.com is also pretty fun. But think of how many bands you’ve heard being dismissed because you’ve heard someone, somewhere, do something better than them. The Beatles? Well, my mate said they just copy Chuck Berry. The Sex Pistols? Well, they would have got nowhere without the Ramones to lay the ground. Let’s just have done with it and declare Robert Johnson the best ever musician of all time ever, and leave it at that so no-one actually needs to listen to any music except his collected works, over and over again. Until they unearth the guy that taught him to play guitar, and we have to whitewash our taste all over again…

Thank goodness no-one (well, almost no-one) actually thinks this way. But what a strange brutal world we’re surrounded by that constantly reinforces the idea that all we should ever be aiming for is the biggest number. Mahatma Gandhi phrased the answer better than anyone, and you can see his words on billboards all over the London Underground at the moment: ‘There is more to life than increasing in speed’. Well put. So I guess that makes him The Most Quotable Commentator On The Human Tendency To Rank Achievement, EVER! See what I did…

So, to this week’s playlist, which includes probably the best song Blur didn’t play at Glastonbury (well, the best Blur song anyway).

Click the link below to hear it all, Spotify-ers.

1. Blur - Ambulance

2. Kurtis Blow - The Breaks

3. Karl Bartos - Electronic Apeman

4. Parliament - Do That Stuff

5. Caravan - The Dog, The Dog, He's At It Again

6. The Bar-Keys - Soul Finger

7. Donovan - Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)

8. Siouxsie And The Banshees - Switch

9. The Smiths - Hand In Glove

10. The Kinks - People Take Pictures Of Each Other

11. Lonnie Liston Smith - Expansions

12. Bobbi Humphrey - Blacks And Blues

13. The Birthday Party - Release The Bats

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/3LaUhEXeL3TrVTmsO78hpA

More next week.

Pieces x