IchLugeBullets: six months that changed a year (part two)

The second part of our meta-heavy rundown of ILB’s top 20 most viewed posts of the past 12 months.

10. Hold On Now, Tubster (August 18th)

There’s a point to be made here about how, when I was 14, 15, 16, the guys who wrote for IPC, the Melody Maker and NME hacks, seemed like Gods. I’m not even being facetious, to me these guys, no matter whether I found them idiotic, dull or outright offensive, were the most famous people I could think of. And nowadays, two things are different. #1, I doubt the remain 40,000 kids who still read the NME could name a single one of their long-term journos and #2, the internet has brought those later 90s IPC types far too fucking close. Taylor Parkes was the king of zing back in the day, a legitimately funny, intelligent and perceptive writer, whereas now a skim of his Livejournal shows him to be as lonely, screwed up, and skitz as the majority of my ex-girlfriends. Depressing. Still, Swells has taken my repeated insults of him in decent enough humour, and regularly spams my inbox with details of what he’s written for some American alt.press rag or other. Congratulations to all concerned.

 

9. Know your enemy #2: Front (August 24th)

That picture there is taken from the DeviantArt account of a man calling himself “Quick Stop”, who specialises in drawing Alex Sim Wise as a Powerpuff Girl, draing Alex Sim Wise as a zombie, making Alex Sim Wise desktop pictures, making Alex Sim Wise banners, and so on and so forth. It may very well be that he is one of the people who made this the ninth most popular article in our sites history because, despite this mainly being a very rapidly written piece from the days when I was power commuting and regularly journeying back home at 1am with a Dark Whopper and a shitty men’s magazine, this has had nearly all of its hits from the fact then when you type the name of odd-faced ginger alt.porn model “Alex Sim Wise” into Google image search, one of the photos of our our blog hosts comes up first page. This article has been read by every single onanistic skateboarder and nu.rave kid in the country, by my reckoning. Achievement unlocked.

 

8. In celebration of: vandalism to Dotun Adebayo’s Wikipedia page (August 8th)

It’s not just me that gets reminded, by Dotun’s lovely features in the photo in that article, of Abdullah the Butcher? No? Anyway… ILB has been vandalising Wikipedia since you were still listening to 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, so we have to give up love to anyone who gets into the game for themselves, even if it is a bunch of angry grime kiddies who’ve been dissed by a clapped-out 80s DJ writing in The Sun. A mere three days after this article was published, greater lulz were had with Dotty when a sub editing an article he wrote about Isaac Hayes’ death for The Guardian changed “Steppin Fetchit” to “step and fetch it”. Dumb motherfuckers like that are gonna kill off us production editors…

 

7. Girls Aloud rape porn round-up (October 2nd)

Hey, have a guess what term Googlers get to this entry for. Actually, as well as the obvious, sometimes they mix it up by adding “Russian” to the front of “rape porn”. It’s good to have specialised tastes. Since this piece was published, Darryn Walker still hasn’t been sentenced or convicted of any actual crimes, so there’s little else to add, but… one point of note not included in the original draft of this article was that the 1997 novel “Guide” by Dennis Cooper contains an extended drugging and rape scene of a lightly-fictionalised version of Alex James from Blur, here renamed “Alex from Smear”. No wonder he turned to cheese farming.

 

6. In celebration of: angry young man Joe Mofrad (September 22nd)

Joey Boy later sent ILB a full-scale apology email, in his words “waving a white flag”. So, y’know:

Beef quashed. You hear that Claude?

 

5. In Review: Tom Gabel – Heart Burns (October 27th)

Shout out to the crazy kids over at the Against Me! forum, who shot this to its #5 position. “haha, what a dick/ He’s somehow the best ever, though” would, ideally, be the site slogan underneath Eddie G’s eyes at the top there, but we don’t know how to use Photoshop for anything other than making fake nudes of Nigella Lawson. And fantastically enough, ILB’s first album that we’ve heard from 2009 that could theoretically make a “50 best albums of the year” list is by The Fake Answers, who are apparently like Against Me! Circles within circles. Go jerk off to some Green Day.

 

4. Hum Hallelujah (December 22nd)

Seriously, do I have to talk any more about this? Less meta-handwringing on ILB (after this article ends), more hard-edged content. In the next week, expect the top 10 Royce Da 5’9″ tracks of 2008, a paean to The Indelicates, and lots of articles that subtly mention that I’ve lost a lot of weight (three stone at last check) in case anyone wants to fuck me on account of my writings. Girls with Becki Newton’s face a priority.

 

3. A brief history of vandalism to MP3 blogger Wikis (July 20th)

Easily one of the most puerile, pathetic, childish and embarrassing pieces ILB has ever published. Probably also the funniest.  The finest piece of Wiki-vandalism I’ve ever been involved in was adding the information that Dimitar Berbatov’s favourite band were Das EFX, which has since gone on to be reported as fact by Bulgaria’s national radio station.

 

2. Let’s all stand around and eagerly anticipate the launch of new pop culture magazine Disappear Here (September 20th)

A complete and utter slowburner of a piece. It was originally knocked out in annoyance at seeing the Facebook group set up to promote said magazine. At the time, I was actually unaware there was going to be a reality TV show based around the mag’s launch and maintenance, so I just knocked up my usual “THE MUSIC PRINT PRESS IN THIS COUNTRY IS UTTERLY FUCKED” missive and slapped on a few Peaches Geldof/James Brown zings over the top of it. But when the MTV show hit, we were getting 20, 30 google hits a day for this. And none of those damn people did anything other than look briefly at the article, see it didn’t contain any Peaches upskirts, and left. Fuck the lot of you.

 

1. The Yahoogroup for vintage movies that Amy Winehouse used to moderate: let’s talk about it (October 2nd)

An admirable winner, it was always something I suspected was going to blow up hard anyway, but wasn’t expecting how it was going to be mainly read by Spaniards (it got itself on the Iberian version of Digg for a short while). Considering how much inane shit about Amy Winehouse the papers have printed this year, I’m surprised nobody offered me £30 to just C+P this article into their publication, but c’est la vie. Also, those photos of La Winehouse dancing naked over Xmas… how has she maintained her pre-skinny JBP tits with that heavy a drug intake? Seriously, I want to know the answer to this.

 

SPECIAL BONUS MATERIAL: The top 20 search times that reach ILB

20.  Front magazine alt.girls

19. Rocktimists

18.  Same Difference Pop review

17.  Chicks with moustaches

16. Disappear Here

15.  Darragh Mcmanus

14.  Casio Sweep

13.  Dom Passantino

12.  Hamfatter review

11.  Mr Biffo

10. Liana Caruana

9. Dotun Adebayo The Sun

8. bunnycaress

7. DJ Khaled Out Here Grinding

6. Joe Mofrad

5. Tom Gabel Heart Burns

4. Hawaiian Sophie fame

3.  Rape porn

2. Alex Sim Wise

1. Ich Luge Bullets

 

Happy 2009, kids.