Blur's "Song 2" contains, by my careful count, two actual words: "woo" and "hoo." Everything else is fuzz, adrenaline, and a bassline that sounds like a wasp trapped in an amplifier. And yet it's one of the most instantly recognisable guitar moments of the entire decade — proof that you do not need a diploma in music theory to write something the whole planet will still air-guitar to thirty years later.
This 30-second clip is my take on that riff (I filed it under "Conquer Or Die," because naming things is hard): the verse simmers, the chorus detonates into slammed power chords, and your right hand does most of the emotional labour. If you can count to two and own a distortion pedal, congratulations — you're basically already in Blur.
How the Song 2 riff actually works
Underneath all that grime it's beautifully simple: a power chord is just a root plus its fifth — two or three fingers, no major, no minor, no opinion about your feelings. The famous "wall of sound" isn't coming from a complicated shape; it's coming from heavy distortion plus stubborn downstrokes. Blur nicked the real trick from the Pixies and Nirvana: the loud-quiet-loud dynamic. Let the verse sit back and grumble, then hit the chorus like you're settling a grudge.
Concrete takeaway: play the whole thing with downstrokes for that relentless, uniform attack, and palm-mute the quieter section so the chorus has somewhere to explode from. Contrast does the heavy lifting — a chorus is only "loud" if something before it was quiet. If clean shapes are still fighting you, warm up with applying power chords first, then come back and let rip.
Fair warning: once this riff is in your hands you will play it every single time you pick up a guitar in a shop, and the staff will know exactly what you're doing. If you want the Guitar Pro file and the PDF to nail the timing, I put those on Patreon — woo-hoo.