The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @BuyIncognito for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

Let’s get this out of the way: Ned’s Atomic Dustbin is not going to win this tournament. It might not even make it out of the first round. The Divinyls were a fine band with a bigger hit than anything on God Fodder. Most of the praises I’m about to heap upon Ned’s probably apply to Divinyls too. If that’s your horse, ride it with pride.

Admitting you like Ned’s has always been kind of embarrassing. Indie was already getting pretty obscure before Nevermind. Afterwards, being cryptic was our number one defense against the jocks who knocked us down in the pit at Lollapalooza 92. The Book of Malkmus confirmed it: tricks were everything to us. Earnestness was for Pearl Jam. Detached cool was for us.

That was never Ned’s game. God Fodder is gimmicky (Two bassists! White guy with dreads!) and painfully earnest. They thought “kill your television” was an edgy statement. They penned a song about the environment that could have been used at a Bill Clinton rally. “If I don’t know what’s cool,” they sang, “would you call me a loser?” Yes, Ned, I will. When I got to college and threw myself into indie, all of a sudden Ned’s was a target for snark from the kids who came into my dorm room just to judge my record collection. Embarrassed, I’m not sure I listened to God Fodder once in my entire 20s.

However, in the fall of 1991, I wasn’t in college yet. I was a skinny, awkward teenager for whom girls existed purely as source of frustration. I had spent 7th, 8th, and 9th grade drifting and mostly hanging out with the other kids who couldn’t find another group to take them in. We listened to R.E.M, New Order, and the Geto Boys, but none of it really grabbed me. Nothing made me want to obsess over it, live in it, structure my life around it.

I obsessed over God Fodder. 

In that magical time after the first Lollapalooza and before the world found out about “Teen Spirit,” I had about 5 to 6 months where I found my music and my tribe. Superstition and Living Colour opened the door. Jesus Jones and Schubert Dip were the first CDs I ever bought. When I saw the 120 Minutes Best of 1991 countdown that my friend had taped, this band at #13 jumped out at me. Kind of catchy, and they look like they’re having fun. Let’s check them out.

And you know what? God Fodder kicked ass. I needed music that let me thrash about alone in my room and drive too fast with my new license. The first 15 seconds of Kill Your Television might still be the most raw adrenaline packed into an album opener ever, and it never lets up. The album is one long, unapologetic fist-pumping party, but not in a way any AC/DC fan could recognize. God Fodder is the sound of kids who just wanted to rock coming of age in 80s England, where (I imagine) Johnny Marr and the Cure strode the earth as giants. If an A&R man was trying to build the perfect “modern rock” band, he’d probably build Ned’s.

You could argue that God Fodder sounds remarkably homogenous, but you’d be wrong. It definitely has its own sound, but Rat Pring mixes in just enough acoustic guitar and power chords to his riffs that you can’t quite predict what’s coming from one song to the next. Ned’s could channel different blends of adrenaline, mainly thanks to Dan Worton’s drumming. Worton only had two gears: restrained intensity for the verses, balls out for the choruses. But he deployed them perfectly, and was a proficient enough player that it gave Ned’s music some complexity. The two bass thing kind of disappears in the mix for large portions of the album, but you can feel it in the construction of the songs. Taken together, the bass and the drums on God Fodder actually…kinda, sorta swung, at least by the standards of white music of the day.

As cheesy as the lyrics sounded in college, that earnestness was EXACTLY what I needed in 1991. They are packed with non-specific angst into which any teenager can insert themselves and feel understood. “She said you don’t know shit because you’ve never there” was how I thought every girl thought about me. I didn’t get “When your desire has been found, you’ll be running far away,” but it sounded deep and broody. I knew I wasn’t cool, but here was Ned’s telling me they weren’t cool either. Well, shit, jocks and cheerleaders, maybe I don’t want what you’ve got. It seems like my cool is actually much more fun than yours.

Did I convince you? Probably not. If you listen to God Fodder for the first time today, I expect you will find it dated. Just know that if you’re driving with hipster friends of a certain age, you can put on Ned’s, and they will absolutely lose their shit. For us, Ned’s is the sound of what it was like to be the perfect age when punk broke. You felt like awesome new bands were showing up on MTV every week, which was so important, because you were the age when MTV mattered. You got to use Ned’s and Nirvana and Ministry and Right Said Fucking Fred to define yourself and shape your future. Most of all, you had fun. What a blast we had.

1991 produced more important albums, but none of them were more fun than God Fodder. I’ll be rooting for it.

– @BuyIncognito