Friday 15 March 2019

Sounds of 2011: Nos. 6 to 4

Here we are at the antepenultimate post in this long, long series! Not a lot to say in this intro today, so let's get right on with the music. A quick reminder for anyone just joining us: this countdown comes from Everfree Radio's brony-voted Top 100 songs of 2011, the first full year of the show and its fandom.


At first I thought I'd have to invoke Inclusion Criterion 3 on this track, that being "songs that are just too significant to leave out". After all, everyone knew this song in the old days. However, although the artist is long gone from YouTube, he does still have an active Soundcloud, including this song – so Criterion 1 applies, ie "still available from the artist somewhere". As is obvious, this is a Pinkie Pie song. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the title comes from the scene in "Lesson Zero" where Pinkie brings a picnic basket, which immediately floats away. Other than a couple of slightly odd (but short) rap sections, this is a rather nice, light'n'bouncy track, told from Pinkie's point of view, explaining how she sees the world. There are only a few show samples, but they fit quite well. FraGmenTd does still have a Bandcamp, and though you can't get this version of the song there, you can purchase (for $1) a dance remix.


We're back in the land of The Living Tombstone now, for the last time in 2011, though many will know it from the 2012 BronyDanceParty video. This is a pretty dark song, in which a pony wakes to find the land ruined and ponies dead, with no memory of "what happened in September". As the track progresses, he gradually recalls more and more – until, right at the end, things take a shocking twist. Well, shocking the first time you hear it, at least. I quite like the structure and melody of this one, but it's another where the strength of Tombstone's accent gets in the way a bit. There's a 320k MP3 download in the video description.


Here's another song from the very early days: 20 May 2011. It's not quite the oldest brony song that's still popular, being a few weeks younger than "For the New Lunar Republic" (no. 20), but it's close. It sounds as you'd expect an Odyssey Eurobeat track to, albeit with rather more basic production values than his later Pony works. It's about a character who is experiencing a similar situation to Luna; as the artist emphasises, it's not sung from Celestia's point of view. There's the odd awkward lyric ("infinite despise" doesn't really mean anything) but this still deserves its classic status. Get the HQ version for whatever you like on Odyssey's Bandcamp.

Next time: two of the top three are revealed, and one track's popularity has endured significantly better than that of the other.

1 comment:

  1. Balloons in My Basket is one of the few old fandom classics that I still get really excited about. :D It's pretty much always as great as the first time I heard it. Also, I thought it came out later than 2011. o.O Huh.

    I never liked September, but I will always love Luna. :D The song, too. I always figured the oddly worded bits ("force-ed back"?) were Odyssey trying to emulate actual Eurobeat really closely, as it all comes from Europe and Japan, where they don't necessarily speak English well. :B

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