‘The Ancient / Giants Under The Sun’ – Yes

As part of Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes’ two-hour-long, six-song album, it was relatively undeniable that one of these songs was going to be in here. ‘The Ancient / Giants Under The Sun’ is simply picked for it marks the moment the song goes into full prog-rock mode, sprawling through wild ideas at every turn, testing how willing we are to stick with them.

Songwriting was completely thrown out of the window on his record, with the band prioritising dense arrangements over any structure. While the intention might have been innovation, the end result is actually just obnoxiousness, as the band indulge in every ego-driven idea to try and prove how technically gifted they are as musicians.

‘Time’ – David Bowie

Listening back to David Bowie’s music from the 1970s, I often find myself thinking that I want to be what he was on. He was in a world of his own, powered by the fame created from his groundbreaking music. It would have been like immortal bliss to be the ever-changing Bowie back then.

But then you listen to ‘Time’ and think that surely the ignorant state of bliss was actually just madness. There’s no real knowing what he’s on during ‘Time’, rambling through surreal and theatrical metaphors that are drenched in abstract personification. It was avant-garde taken to an almost irresponsible level, where we’re tricked into thinking this is groundbreaking just because of Bowie’s reputation. In any other context, it would be nonsense.

‘The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)’ – U2

What band is pretentious enough to believe that the entire world would want their album downloaded without permission? U2, that’s who. An entirely unsurprising answer, as the band has proven time and time again, that the world that exists behind Bono’s tinted glasses isn’t the one that the rest of us live in.

‘The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)’ became the soundtrack of that mishap, for it was the first single of the campaign and also featured on an Apple commercial, and ultimately foreshadowed the control the company would have over our own library once the album was ready for release. It was Bono playing musical god, again, but the songs weren’t even good enough to do it.

‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’ – Radiohead

“We always say, ‘[Pulk/Pull] Revolving Doors’ seems to be like a litmus test,” Yorke once said of ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’. That tells you everything you need to know about the song, for Yorke is famously pretentious in his own taste. The very fact that he’s produced a song designed to revolt fair-weather fans is an exercise in obnoxiousness.

But Yorke didn’t need to clarify that for the fan to feel it. The way in which the band completely abandons traditional melody and structure to instead opt for experimental glitchy industrial loops proves that they’re testing our patience, seeing who has the willingness to plunge deeper into artistry and scratch their chin instead of simply labelling something as crap.

‘The End’ – The Doors

Was Jim Morrison deliberately pretentious, or was he simply operating on a different artistic frequency? It’s often the conflict we have to address while trying to understand the most elaborate and groundbreaking work of our musical icons. But ‘The End’ took Morrison’s quasi-mystical approach to performance to an entirely new level.

It’s an 11-minute psychedelic sprawl that is both groundbreaking and irritating at the same time, pitting Morrison as a self-aggrandising guru here to take the world into a complete and dark existential end. Freud, Greek mythology, family and childhood are all crammed into this eulogy that, at the worst times, makes us feel unworthy of such an intensely intellectual conversation.

‘The Trial’ – Pink Floyd

Roger Waters is undoubtedly one of the most pretentious musicians in history. For a large period of time, that was harnessed well; the grand experimentalism of The Dark Side of the Moon simply wouldn’t have existed without the vignette of Waters’ god complex. But predictably, it got to a point where it wore very thin.

‘The Trial’ was the theatrical climax to his baby of an album, The Wall, which saw him wrestle control of the band and plunge it into his own narrative fantasy. It’s wholly disconnected from the sort of ambition that fans loved on Dark Side, removing all of the soul and replacing it with a brutal, harsh soundscape that was ultimately centred around Roger Waters’ own ego.

‘The 2nd Law Unsustainable’ – Muse

There’s something inherently irritating about the dramatic ambition of Muse. This desire to be the musical version of Star Wars doesn’t often feel pretentious so much as pitying, but on ‘The 2nd Law Unsustainable’ Matt Bellamy and his band of brothers somehow managed to write a new sequel, that despite their baseless appeal makes no sense at all.

When the opening has a robotic voice reciting the second law of thermodynamics, you know it’s going to be devoid of all fun. Then it continues further into a blend of sci-fi and politics, with the band’s usual brand of stadium-sized theatrics to create an absolute mess of sounds that is supposed to be groundbreaking. Whatever planet they’re heading to, I’m glad I can’t understand it.

‘Imagine’ – John Lennon

Lennon himself has been the subject of criticism for this song, accused of being perched atop his utopian throne, demanding the world to embrace a life with “no possessions” when he himself sits comfortably in his mansion.

But the real point of pretentiousness came later, when similarly protected celebrities adopted it as their tone-deaf anthem of enduring Covid-19. A string of celebrities, led by Gal Gadot, brazenly sang the lyrics down a camera to us, everyday people, in the hope that the mere sight of their faces might pull us out of suffering. Ultimately, across several decades, this track has become something of a soundtrack to celebrity delusion.

‘Sweet Dreams, TN’ – The Last Shadow Puppets

This might be the moment the world ‘lost’ Alex Turner for want of a better word. It’s a word I struggle to use because I’m not at all mad at the transition, so long as songs like ‘Star Treatment’ and ‘Body Paint’ come out of it. But ‘Sweet Dreams, TN’ is quite literally the sound of someone losing themselves to the caricature they had painted.

Turner and Miles Kane pushed the boundaries of normality with this second Shadow Puppets album and the subsequent tour, with everything feeling like a bit of an in-joke. So there was no telling if this was an extension of it or a genuine attempt at penning something grand and romantic. Either way, it’s a genuinely toe-curling musical moment that puts Turner’s new demeanour into questionable view.

‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ – Band Aid

High on their own supply of importance, this collection of A-list musicians all banded together in the luxurious surroundings of a studio in Notting Hill in the spirit of activism. But what may have read like philanthropy on paper sounded like a white saviour complex on tape, with the musicians genuinely believing that their ego-driven performances would, in fact, instil change.

On top of that, there was a wild misunderstanding of Africa as a continent. The question “Do they know it’s Christmas time?” is a complete oversight of the religious diversity on the continent, as well as the general fact that the outward view of the continent needing help adds to the wider narrative of oppression.