Thanksgiving Week: Where Rock Journalism Goes to Die
David Weigel | November 20, 2006, 1:31pm
Time is serving up the link bait, and like the slowest trout in the fjord I'm going to bob up and take it. The
mag's list of the 100 All-TIME Albums is as unsurprising as one of these lists can be.
We researched and listened and agonized until we had a list of the
greatest and most influential records ever - and then everyone
complained because there was no Pink Floyd on it. And that's exactly
how it should be.
Yes, every list should skunk Floyd and include
two Radiohead albums. (I say this as someone who has no use for
Floyd apart from
Piper and
Meddle, and no use for Radiohead apart from pounding information out of Iraqi detainees.)
There
is a real need for a list out there, one that no magazine seems
interested in fulfulling - an Americanized version of the Guardian's
"Alternative Top 100" list
from the fin de siecle. The Guardian's innovation was to mock up a list
of the boring records that clog every album ranking, and ban them. But
their list of bans is so late 90s and so British (Suede! The Boo
Radleys! Ocean Colour Scene!) as to be useless.
For my part, I'll suggest 10 influential records Time should have swapped out for its dullest picks.
1) replace
Rubber Soul with Love's
Forever Changes.
2) replace
Achtung Baby with Wu Tang Clan's
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
3) replace Patti Smith's
Horses with Genesis's
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
4) replace Dolly Parton's
Coat of Many Colors with Leonard Cohen's
The Songs of Leonard Cohen.
5) replace
The Essential Hank Williams (actually, replace all the b.s. greatest hits albums) with King Crimson's
Larks' Tongues in Aspic.
6) replace
Kid A with
Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
7) replace R.E.M.'s
Document with Alice Cooper's
Love it to Death.
8) replace R.E.M.'s
Out of Time with Can's
Future Days.
9) replace
OK Computer with Pet Shop Boys'
Very.
10) replace
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea with any album, ever.
Now you go.GILMORE | November 20, 2006, 3:17pm | #
I am a pretty sterotypical record collecter/occasional-DJ, general music nerd (akin to the character from High Fidelity), and usually groan my way through these Top Whatever lists...
But I have to say, the vast majority of it was really pretty good. Not too much to complain about.
A few things that stood out for me =
- Very glad they included a Parliament record, but "One nation under a groove" isnt even the shadow of "Mothership Connection", which is their '100% perfect' record.
- I also agree - these 'greatest hits records' - like Chuck Berry in the 80s, Hank Williams in 2000s, JB: Star Time, Elvis reissues...etc. - dont belong at all. Cite the best original record, then leave it.
- R.E.M. - I agree... one record of theirs on a list is more than enough. Document was a good one, or Eponymous. They were an 80s band that should have died in the 80s.
- OK Computer =yes - Kid A = No.
- Hole.... What? Who the @#()$*@# listened to that crap for more than a week?
- Surprised they left of Pearl Jam's "Ten" in the 90s. That album WAS the 90s for a lot of kids.
- Two Eminem records is kinda bullshit. It's not like he evolved at all.
Some things were tellingly hip choices - Stone Roses is a underrecongized must-have, DJ Shadow deserves it for Endtroducing, most of the 70s choices were all really spot on...most of their hiphop/rap citations are right calls but they are missing 1 or 2, like Wu Tang "36 chambers", & Nas' "Illmatic" in the 90s.
But in general, aside from the wrongheaded 'greatest hits' entries, I think it's as close to a good list as one could expect from a non-music-specialist publication.
Mojo magazine, a british rock mag, does lists like this all the time and they LOVE to be nerdy and counter intuitive. I think one that was near and dear to my heart was a guitar list where they ranked Steve Cropper #2...just after Jimi Hendrix. I was like, "You guys have balls. And taste." I'd never make that big a claim myself, but I do think Cropper is a demi-god.
grylliade | November 20, 2006, 4:32pm | #
I've always found REM to be to pompous. Not just their politics or anything like that.
Heh. Don't know how I got to be defending R.E.M. so much, considering that they're nowhere near my favorite band. Anyways, I'll agree on the pomposity. Which ties into my earlier point about experimental music. Seems that a lot of great bands get into that mindset where they think that they can do no wrong, and end up going off the deep end and putting out unlistenable crap. Witness U2 (everything after
Achtung Baby), Radiohead (everything after
OK Computer), R.E.M. (everything after
New Adventures in Hi-Fi, though even that album wasn't great), the Smashing Pumpkins (everything after
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) . . . I think that the Beatles avoided this, as I said, but they came damn close at times. Led Zeppelin might have done this, but I don't know their later albums well enough to judge sufficiently. Pearl Jam has certainly fallen prey to this effect, but I'm not sure when it happened, and I think that their self-indulgent crap is still pretty good.
But every single one of these artists has at least one thing in common, IMO: they all take themselves waaaaaay too seriously. They think that they're not just making music, they're Making Music. I'm terrified that this will happen to Tool, because they certainly have that air of self-importance, but luckily they come out with new albums so rarely that even if they do succumb it won't be until 2020 or so. But I think that if an artist is lacking that critical sense of humility, they're going to go off and Make Important Music that no one wants to listen to, and then they'll blame your audience for being Philistines rather than themselves for making bad music. Occupational hazard, I guess.
D.A. Ridgely | November 20, 2006, 6:41pm | #
Since no one has addressed the jazz selections, I'll cross post a few comments I posted at
Inactivist. I don't know much about popular music beyond, say, 1980 and, of course, these things boil down as much as anything to what the writer(s) happen personally to like.
One thing TIME got right was Miles Davis’ 1959 ”Kind Of Blue”. Almost without serious competition, this is the greatest jazz album of all time and would be my clear pick for those “you only get one CD to listen to on a desert island” games. If you neither like nor know jazz (pretty much the same thing, actually) you still should own this CD just in case you ever have need of impressing your musical betters.
On the other hand, Davis’ 1969 ”Bitches Brew” not only shouldn’t be on the list, every extant copy should be melted into a heaping mountain of vinyl and whatever the hell they make CDs out of. “Complex, hypnotic cauldron of sound,” my ass! Sadly, this is pretty much true for everything Davis recorded after “Bitches Brew,” too.
Similarly, although many Coltrane fans would disagree, I’d have picked an earlier Coltrane album than his 1964 ”A Love Supreme”, probably “Giant Steps” or maybe even “My Favorite Thing.” But I suppose I should count my blessings that no Ornette Coleman album made the list.
I’d trade either of the Stevie Wonder picks for his brilliant “Innervisions” and drop one of Aretha’s two picks, probably “Lady Soul,” and the Dolly Parton, Carole King and Neil Young picks just to prove I’m a sexist. Oh, wait! I’d probably include Janice Joplin’s “Cheap Thrills” as one of the replacements, so maybe I’m not all that sexist after all. Possible other replacements would include the Doors’ “Strange Days,” Cream’s “Disraeli Gears,” and another Dylan or Simon & Garfunkel album, perhaps “Bringing It All Back Home” or “Bookends,” respectively.
One final observation. Robert Johnson may be the single most important figure in the recorded history of the blues, but the sound quality of his recordings is so bad that no one but a musician trying to learn the licks or a die-hard fan actually listens to them. The inclusion of the 1961 repackaging of his 29 much earlier recorded songs on "King of the Delta Blues Singers" is pure pretension.
