The final /Tuesday Ten of 2024 is a subject that turned out to have a lot of legs. Insults.

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After all, what better way to settle scores, to insult someone or worse, than in song? You don’t have to name anyone, you can be as cryptic as you like, and in many cases, a whole lot more people are going to hear about it. This week’s ten features clubbers, ex-lovers, annoying neighbours, prospective paramours, rivals and career destruction. It’s quite the ride.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a great set of songs. I’ll be back in two Tuesdays time to begin /Countdown /2024, wrapping up the best music of the year, and the /Tuesday Ten series will resume in the new year.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Wayne G feat. Stuart Who?
/Twisted
/Through the K-Hole

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I’m actually surprised that this club-bound monster – first released twenty-eight years ago, folks – has never featured before. Maybe, it just needed the right subject. A thumping, slow-build of a hard house track that would have been great as an instrumental, perhaps, but Stuart Who? provides a glorious, sneering commentary as he heads through a dingy London club, at that point of the night where everyone has come up, and they are now looking to pull. The whole track is pretty much the initial excitement of prowling the club, before realising that no-one reaches any standard at all. Thus, there are endless numbers of quotable insults, but here’s just a few choice examples:

“You’re not sex on legs / you’re dregs on legs”
“Go on, get your kit off / No, not you / put it away”

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/Sleeper
/Sale of the Century
/The It Girl

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Louise Wener was great at writing cutting lyrics, particularly observations on relationships in London, and in Sale of the Century – their first Top Ten hit, and one of their most-loved songs – probably has her greatest put-down of all amid a song about getting what you want before it crumbles before your eyes. It could be about relationships, it could be about the build-’em-up-and-tear-’em-down nature of the music press at the time, but either way, “You said I was cheap / You were the sale of the century” is a gloriously catty riposte.

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/Half Man Half Biscuit
/Paintball’s Coming Home
/Voyage to the Bottom of the Road

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Any suggestion thread I post that needs attention paying to the lyrics, and Half Man Half Biscuit will feature every single time. I wasn’t let down this time, either, with a fantastic suggestion of this song. They base the track on He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands, improbably, and the lyrics are watching a middle-class couple living their life through a bunch of middle-class cliches. Nigel Blackwell is observing them in horror, and ends the song with “If I’d have known they were coming, I’d have slashed me wrists“. I know what you’re feeling, Nigel.

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/Faith No More
/The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
/King For A Day…Fool For A Lifetime

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Mike Patton was never exactly backwards when coming forwards where there was a chance to leave the boot in, but on the finest song from an album that took many of us years to properly appreciate, he’s actually remarkably restrained on a song that is an absolute blast – literally and figuratively. This is a song that appears, initially, to be one where Patton is going to go all out on his subject, but instead, Patton is for the most part trying to reason with them, pointing out that they are better than always finding a way to blame someone else.

But then the chorus comes in, with “And all you need is just one more excuse…“, and you’re told all you need to know.

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/Daphne & Celeste
/U.G.L.Y.
/We Didn’t Say That!

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Daphne & Celeste are probably best known for the appalling small-mindedness shown to them at Reading Festival in 2000, when the festival crowd pelted them with all manner of objects onstage just because they happened to be a “pop” band (and, likely, two young women). To their credit, they stuck it out, took the piss out of some of the more unpleasant signs being held up, and played their songs – and congratulated by Slipknot and others backstage afterward for standing up to the abuse. Anyway, they had insults of their own up their sleeves, with the maddeningly infectious cheerleader chants of “U.G.L.Y. / You ain’t got no alibi / You UGLY!” and “I don’t mean to insult you / Oh wait! Yes I do.“, to name a few…

They perhaps had the last laugh, too. Their performance is pretty much all that anyone remembers from that year of Reading…

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/Fiona Apple
/Get Him Back
/Extraordinary Machine

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Fiona Apple seems – finally – in recent years to have got her due as a brilliant lyricist (as well as an endlessly inventive songwriter), and perhaps unsurprisingly a subject that comes up in her songs more than a few times is calling out the terrible, or just plain disappointing, men that she’s dated over the years. Get Him Back details three of them, all with entertainingly catty put-downs, but one line sums up the whole endeavour: “And on I go / To another one who disappoint me so“. It should be added that years on from this album, on the wonderful Under The Table, she returns to a specific event on the same subject with acidic venom.

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/John Cooper Clarke
/Twat

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The sardonic punk poet, the bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke is one of the few poets attached to alternative music to the point that he’s recorded a number of albums with bands too, and is very much a survivor from that period. His sweary, observational poetry is often full of dark humour and is hugely enjoyable, and potentially got many people enjoying poetry that otherwise might not have done. Twat remains one of his best-known works, and is an endless tirade of pithy insults, any of which would have made it eligible for this list. I’d love to know who it was about, but then, it could be any number of people…

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/Assemblage 23
/Pages
/Contempt

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A perhaps more obscure A23 track – from Tom Shear’s debut album Contempt, an album that turns twenty-five this month (!). It was obvious, even from this early material, that Shear was onto something. An album that fused electro-industrial, club bangers and more reflective songs that signalled his willingness to deal with mental health issues in particular from the off. Pages is something of a bitter character assassination amid its swirling fury and tentative pace, and is here for the opening verse:

“I read your mind / But it wasn’t a very interesting read / The plot was contrived / And the characters were too consumed by need”

There’s even a particularly chilling sample, from John Mark Byers (step-father to one of the murdered boys in Paradise Lost), that leaves no doubt as to the depth of feeling in this song.

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/Jay-Z
/99 Problems
/The Black Album

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Hip-hop and Rap are full of insults in a great many songs, and there is a long history of settling disagreements with “diss tracks” (more about that in a moment). On one of Jay-Z’s greatest songs – and his collaboration with Rick Rubin, who was returning to working with the genre for the first time in aeons, and brings in his trademark sampled guitars and a mighty bottom end – he has words for everyone. Critics, cops and people trying to start beefs with him. On the latter, Jay-Z comes up with one of my favourite disses ever:

“You know the type / loud as a motorbike / but wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight”

That’s a victory to Jay-Z right there.

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/Kendrick Lamar
/Not Like Us

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Talking of (flawless) victories… 2024 saw an escalation of hostilities between Drake and Lamar, something that had been simmering for over a decade. Track after track was released taking the put-downs and insults back and forth, but there was a distinct feeling that Lamar ended things with the quite brilliant Not Like Us. Over the kind of party-starting, celebratory West Coast beat (from new producer Mustard – what an entrance) that most rappers would kill for, Lamar goes in for the kill early and delivers the smackdown time after time, particularly around Drake’s views on the industry, and most importantly on his reputed preference for underage girls, the latter giving the real mic-drop moment that confirmed the victory, left listener’s jaws on the floor, and has probably fucked Drake’s career for good:

“Tryna strike a chord but it’s probably A Minor…”

See also this performance: Dre delivers the intro, then steps aside for Kendrick to destroy.