Best National Song

"Song No. 2," Blur

Woo-hoo! No one could have predicted that the mood-swinging Blur of Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife (both EMI) would soon be bouncing off the walls in a flurry of relentlessly catchy, blissfully dumbed-up, ragged overdrive garage-punk fury. Doing the best impersonation of the Fluid since Nirvana, their "Song No. 2" upended car stereos nationwide, replaced T. Rex at football games across the country, and gave an added twinkle to the eye of every Homer Simpson-esque "Woo-hoo!" uttered anywhere by anybody. As such, it deserves a spot next to the most incomprehensibly unforgettable frat-rock tunes of all time -- a "Woolly Bully" or "Louie Louie" for the late '90s. That wasn't quite the way Blur sang it, of course -- even though they're jumping up and down in the video, theirs isn't the woo-hoo of unfettered, naive abandon. It's the old, slightly ironic woo-hoo, the "hey, look how dumb this is; we shouldn't be allowed to have this much fun" woo-hoo. Or maybe I'm just mistaking irony for a problem with British pronunciation of Americanisms. But let's just assume there was a little irony in there -- they're British, after all. Whooping it up in a year with little to celebrate except the promise of celebration (Prince's "1999," if he'd written it next year instead of last decade), the song was both a summation of, and the antidote to, how bored everyone was with the airwaves.

-- Carly Carioli