Why is Does It Offend You, Yeah?’s You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Crunching, groovy electro beats that could chew through the back of the club (or your mind, yeah?).
What does Does It Offend You, Yeah?’s You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
This album could be described in a number of ways – it’s an electronica album, it’s a dance/clubby album, it’s a rock album – and they’d all be correct. The important thing is that overall it just crushes.
While there are many delights, the big draw is “We Are Rockstars.” The confidence of it – up to and including the song title (yeah?) – will be apparent from jump street (do the kids of post 21 Jump Street – the TV show, not the later film franchise, dig – generations say “jump street”? Let’s workshop that).
Along with its delightful pomposity and crushing hook, I like the subtlety of how the song strategically pauses in little moments to drop in a yeah (yeah!) before resuming its bottom stomping ways.
“Doomed Now” leans more to the pop and dance side of things, and effectively so, and every time I listen to it I associate it with the best of OK Go.
And then “Battle Royale” brings yet another crusher, this one darkly fuzzy and electronica-ish, and reminds me to an extent of an outstanding act called Justice.
Here’s a Justice sampler for you, for kicks, yeah? This one’s called “Phantom.”
This album also sounds like
There’s a nice mix here, including Daft Punk, LCD Soundsytem, Make the Girl Dance, Justice, The Ting Tings, The Prodigy, and OK Go (with more of Does It Offend’s electro pop stuff, like “Doomed Now”)
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Does It Offend You, Yeah?’s You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into
If you’re of a certain age – which, granted, is getting to be a depressingly old one nowadays – “Weird Science” will immediately bring you back to the mid-1980s comedy flick along with the pretty great song of the same name by the amazing Oingo Boingo. The video is a era specific pop cultural gold mine, I dare say.
And here’s the trailer to the 1985 John Hughes-directed film. I’ll let you make your own judgments.
The weirdest thing to me is how impossibly young the kids look as they were “older kids” than me when I first saw it back in the day. And a random deep cut that super fans of the movie (and I know you’re out there!) will get: when the bizarre post-apocalyptic motorcycle gang storms the house, breaking up a party, I always thought of the gang leader as the “Midnight Oil” guy.
“But will there be more Oingo Boingo and Midnight Oil-related chestnuts coming up on your Best 1,000 Albums Ever list, Eric?” Thanks for asking, and yes and yes, yeah?
Personal stuff that’s somehow related to Does It Offend You, Yeah?’s You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into
It likely won’t shock you that Does It Offend You, Yeah? hails from the United Kingdom, and Reading and London in England, specifically. I’ve always been fascinated with how languages – and specifically my native tongue English – are deployed, which added to my delight at having been fortunate enough to live and work in England many years ago.
“Yeah?” will often be casually thrown onto the end of sentences in a way you much more rarely hear in the U.S. For example, while “I’ll take a Coke” at a gas station would be appropriate in the U.S., “Give us a coke, yeah?” would be more common in the UK (and don’t get me started on the coolness of going to a royal “we”).
Anyway, common statements and declarations in American English often sound more like questions with British English in that the intonation is different. This is outside and on top of the difference in actual accents in terms of the way words are spoken.
After living in a country for six months where I was immersed in language that’s spoken fairly differently from the one I was around for the rest of my life, I found that my own spoken English was… altered for quite a while after I returned to the states. While I didn’t “speak with an English accent” – which I’m sure would have caused my New York-based friends and family to drop kick me right back on a plane headed east across the Atlantic for doing – my intonation was screwy. My declarations were more question-ish for a bit.
Yeah?
Some stats & info about Does It Offend You, Yeah? – You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Electronic Music, Dance Music, High Octane, Alternative Dance, Indie Electronic, Post-Punk Revival, Electro House, Alternative Rock, Rock, Electro Pop
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself released? 2008
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #988 out of 1,000
Does It Offend You, Yeah?’s You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.