Posted onApril 14, 2013|Comments Off on “Day After Day I Get Up And I Say I’d Better Do It Again” – The Kinks
I’ve been writing this blog for about three months now (just weeks after blogging was pronounced dead … similar to when I got a CB Radio in 1983 and a Sega Genesis box in 2001), trying to post at least every two weeks, and trying to keep on listing the albums I’ve been listening to. It’s harder than I thought it would be!
By the way, here’s a very serious CW McCall “singing” “Convoy”… the song that sparked a revolution in culture, culminating in a fine, fine Kris Kristofferson vehicle.
But I realize, as difficult as this is for me, it’s even harder for you folks out there reading to keep up with my sporadic posts and stay interested! I check my stats, and I’m not lying when I say I average several hundred to a thousand hits a day, but even so, I shouldn’t count on the fact that all my readers are so vigilant that they are aware of what I’m doing all the time.
This came to my attention recently when I met a fervent reader of mine at a music convention of sorts, and he casually asked, “Weren’t you going to do some internet thing about online music or something?”
So I realized that maybe I should take time this week to re-orient folks to what it is I’m doing, and why.
I am listening to all of my CDs and digital albums (well, most of them anyway) and trying to compile my list of the top 100. I listen in my car as I commute, and I make notes so that I can compare the records and finally, some day, make my list.
I started this because I was discussing the inherent bullshittiness of “Best Album Ever” lists with a friend, and so I decided to make a list of my own. I thought it only fair to give each record a listen in some kind of similar context (driving in a car) so I could compare them to each other.
In the meantime, I’m blogging every couple of weeks about music-related ideas that come up while I’m doing my listening.
I have attempted to post the name of each record I’m listening to, and I also tweet the name of the album of the day. Follow me @erm2020.
I expect the list to be complete in … well … 2014??
In 1992 the band I was in broke up and I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself. I lived in a strange place, but not strange in a good way. It was strange in a way that made me feel like I didn’t fit in, and so I decided to move to somewhere that seemed even stranger:
Feeling like an outsider, and headed toward a place that seemed like it would accept almost anything, I couldn’t wait to get there and start feeling like I fit in somewhere.
(Luckily, I got a good video of the night before my move west, including my final family meal:)
I met lots of great people and had loads of fun and found a place where I really felt at home. After years of feeling like an outsider, I had found somewhere everyone could be part of the “in” crowd just by being themselves.
It was nerd heaven. There wasn’t a “cool” crowd, there wasn’t a group that took pleasure in excluding others, or a group that misfits like me readily recognized: the group around whom we felt the disorienting duality of a) not wanting to be part of, and b) desperately wanting to be part of…
Except not really. Because there was a group like this, but it was hidden. It dressed like everyone else, went the same places as everyone else, had the same habits as everyone else … and that was what made them so devious.
I began to notice, in bars and at concerts … especially at concerts and most especially in record stores (particularly the snooty ones) (believe it or not, kids, there used to be entire stores that just sold records!) … I noticed there was a group in San Francisco who seemed to be the typical outsider like me and everyone else who had moved there (it seemed like NO ONE you ever met in SF had actually grown up there), but who took great pleasure in asserting they WERE NOT typical! (Except, of course, amongst their friends). These people felt they were the coolest of the uncool. They were a group that reveled in the fact that their style was unstylish and their tastes were distasteful.
They were the Hipsters. The Hipster Bullies. And no matter how dorky and awkward you felt, you’d feel even more so when you realized these folks were even dorkier and more awkward than you … and that they sneered at you for not being dorky and awkward enough.
Oh, you think you’re goofy because you still collect baseball cards as a 25 year old? Meet Ray, in the goatee, Buddy Holly glasses and (authentic) Atari t-shirt – he collects King Kong Kards
from the 70s and calls your hobby “jejune” … just like that jock thought (apparently), the jock who made fun of the baseball cards in your back pocket in the lunch line in 10th grade, right in front of J., the girl who you thought maybe considered you cute a minute ago, before she burst out laughing when this Muscled Moose informed you that his 9 year old brother doesn’t play with his cards anymore, and he could bring them in for you tomorrow, if you wanted …
You think you’re a little too into Bugs Bunny cartoons? Meet Stella – she collects Warner Brothers animation cels, but only the ones from before WWII and NEVER Bugs, who’s humor, she insists, is “too obvious … you can’t seriously like that shit, can you?”
These folks had been mocked and assaulted – verbally and physically – for their other-ness for as long and as hard as I had, but whereas I tried to suppress my dorkocity, and tried to camouflage myself as “normal” wherever I could, these folks responded by stockpiling their geekness and molding it into a heavy club, making weapons of their Pez Dispenser collections, graphic novels and ironically-worn small-town-diner t-shirts.
And they clubbed first and asked questions later, assuming every new person they met was the lunch-line jock – even a guy like me, in sky blue Chuck Taylors and a Dinosaur Jr. t-shirt. And music appreciation was the arena in which the Hipster Bullies really flexed their nerd muscles. Bring up any band to any of these guys (and gals) and you were sure to get one of three responses:
1) (Dismissive snort). They suck.
2) (Dismissive snort). They USED TO BE good
3) (Dismissive snort). They’re okay, but they’re really just a rip-off of (insert obscure band from Japan/Finland/Ann Arbor).
I had been “bullied” often in my life, but usually it was for things I couldn’t control (or at least not very well): my hair (which wouldn’t comb right), my clothes (which were cheap), my body (which was chubby). But these hipsters were the first people to bully me solely on my taste in the arts – something that I maybe could control.
Now I should point out here that 1) I was never so seriously bullied in school that I hated myself or felt threatened (regularly) or suicidal – I had friends and pretty much got along okay with everyone; and B) when I moved to SF I was an adult, and so I found the Hipster Bullies more amusing than threatening. But speaking with them about music made me feel like I was an utter dilettante. (Me: “The best new band I’ve heard lately is Guided by Voices.” Hip Bully: ((Dismissive snort). “New? They’ve been around for years, but their new stuff sucks.”) [This was when Bee Thousand was released, which was their first release distributed by Matador, which was/is a tiny label. Prior to this, the band had released a total of MAYBE 5,000 copies of records/tapes/cds. The band’s leader, Robert Pollard, still held his job as an elementary school teacher!!]
The good consequence of these Hipster Bullies was that they helped me consider listening to music I otherwise wouldn’t have heard, and that I ended up loving. And I have tried to keep an open mind about new artists and make it a point to try to buy music from obscure acts I like, like The Shazam, All Day Sucker and The Detroit Cobras.
The bad part about these folks is that they made me wonder if my musical tastes were out of whack. Is there something wrong with me that I like this band here, but I don’t like that band there? I became a little ashamed sometimes to say which acts I liked and which I didn’t.
But I got over that. Now I’m comfortable with my own tastes. Even when fancy, well-respected rock critics disagree.
This post about a fancy rock critic pretty much sums up my attitude toward rock critics. They often seem to me to be more interested in making sure they appear cool than in simply telling us what it is they like/don’t like about a record. They seem like Hipster Bullies.
In my last post, I confessed to enjoying a record that many people dislike: 90125, by Yes. I’ll close this post by confessing a few other tastes that I may have been ashamed of back in 1993, but that I freely admit nowadays.
Musical Stuff I Should Like But Don’t, and Some I Do That I Shouldn’t
1) I don’t get Bob Dylan. He can’t sing. His lyrics can be great, but they can also be just bizarre. He has a few good songs, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Maybe I’m from the wrong era. I guess he writes good songs, but you know who else did? Marvin Hamlisch, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and John Phillip Sousa. But they knew enough not to sing them.
2) I like Seals & Crofts. They make me think of happy, carefree summer days in my youth, going to the pool. They have good melodies and nice harmonies.
4) One of the first songs I ever bought when digital music came about was “Cherish,” by Madonna.
5) I think Springsteen is okay. That’s it, okay. As with Dylan, what’s all the fuss?
6) I like 70s prog rock. There, I said it. I don’t listen to it much anymore (I mean, who has time to listen to 26-minute mock-baroque soundscapes about the Middle Ages these days?) but I still have a place in my musical heart for Yes, ELP, old Genesis, Jethro Tull … all the music hated by most everyone.
Okay, these are my musical confessions. It’s all out in the open now. I feel like a weight has been lifted …
I recall a discussion from early in my senior year of high school, in the fall of (gasp) 1984 (!!),
with friends Rick and Josh about a report we had recently heard. The word from the radio, or maybe MTV, was that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had reunited to cut an EP. This sounded like Earth-shattering good news. I myself was giddy with excitement. Neither Rick nor (especially) Josh could ever really be described as “giddy,” but they were both interested, although one of them (probably Josh, as he has always been wise beyond his years) cautioned that there was a decent chance the EP would suck.
I was incredulous at the suggestion. “How could anyone imagine this EP could suck!!???” I wondered. “Weren’t Robert and Jimmy half of the greatest hard rock band in the history of this world and Middle Earth?? Weren’t they such a kickass band that even their slow songs fuckin’ rocked?” I chuckled at the suggestion that anything produced by such a collaboration could suck.
Sure, based on their post-Zeppelin output, I didn’t expect the EP to be as good as Led Zeppelin. But clearly, there was no way it would suck. Even the new band’s name, “The Honeydrippers,” I thought boded well, as in my adolescent mind it was somewhat reminiscent of the vaguely raunchy lyrics from Zep’s The Lemon Song.
I have a memory of watching MTV when the channel unveiled the World Premiere of the video for The Honeydrippers’ new song. Maybe it’s a purely conjured memory, but in my mind I can see Mark Goodman welcoming viewers to the unveiling of “the video for first single from the new EP titled The Honeydrippers, Volume 1” (which indicated to me that more great volumes could be on the way!!), “Sea of Love!”
This was it!! Page and Plant, together again!! “YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!” my 17 year old brain screamed, “ROCK AND ROLL!!!!!!!!!!! ROCK! ON! ROCK! ON! ROCK! ON! Hey, Hey, My, My, Rock and Roll Will Never Die!!! Long Live Rock!! I need it every night!!!”
And I settled myself down to watch Glorious Rock Majesty unfold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8znndvYVL0
Okay, I don’t expect you to watch every second of every video I post. But the first 20 seconds is enough to realize that this is NOT going to be another Immigrant Song. And by the 42 second mark, when a coiffed, mustachioed and generally hairy dude in a Speedo appears with Plant, waving beaters over – but never actually playing – a xylophone, it was clear to my teenage self that everything I thought I knew about Plant and Page was completely wrong. This was not Hard Rock. This was not Rock and Roll. In fact, this was not any kind of Rock that I could even imagine. For Christ’s sake, this wasn’t even Soft Rock!! This was music that my PARENTS would appreciate, and if there’s one thing I know that my parents DO NOT appreciate, it is ROCK MUSIC.
This was … this was … THIS WAS BULLSHIT!! My wiser friends had been right – there was a chance the music could suck. It did suck.
At the time I claimed to like the song, out of some sense of loyalty to Plant and Page, or maybe a kind of faith in Led Zeppelin – like the deeply Christian family that doesn’t understand why God allows misery, but realizes that there are mysteries to His work that one just has to accept, even if at a gut level it seems just wrong. I claimed to like it, but I knew … It Sucked.
It took me a long time to realize that it didn’t really suck all that bad, and an even longer time to realize why such (apparently) debauched Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll guys like Plant and Page would make an EP of songs like this.
The reason I relate this story in a blog about trying to name my favorite albums is because I recently pulled out (at random, as always) the album 90125, by Yes. It is an album I haven’t listened to in at least 25 years. In fact, I had forgotten about it entirely, until I was trying to put together a list of albums that I figured would have been Top Ten for me back in 1984-85. I used to play that cassette, which one of my sisters got me for Christmas in 1983, regularly, I recall. For a stretch there, I probably played it daily. I loved that cassette – every song.
I stopped listening to it sometime in college. During and after college, my musical interests began to change – I had grown to love The Beatles, and was less interested in album rock and classic rock, but more interested in college-radio acts – melodic, punkier music by bands like REM and XTC. By the time a friend loaned me a box set of The Clash (a band I’d heard before, but never really took seriously [after all, they had no intricate, 5 minute guitar solos, no confusing time signature changes, and their singer didn’t sound like his nuts were in a vise, so how could they be taken seriously?]) my entire perspective on music had been altered radically.
So I never thought much again about 90125 – or if I did, I scoffed and mocked my younger self for ever being so silly as to listen to something so glossy and produced.
But in the interest of being as thorough as possible in documenting my musical tastes, I bought a used copy of the disc ($1.99!!) on the net. And when I put it into the CD player in my car, and the songs began to play, a wave of good feelings returned. Obviously, not every memory from adolescence is happy, fun or positive, but I found myself enjoying the music, and thinking about old friends and old times that I hadn’t thought of in a while. I sang all the lyrics to songs I hadn’t heard in 25 years or more. It all came back to me, including what it was I liked about the album.
I felt like Plant and Page must have felt when they decided to collaborate on music from their teenage years, my parents’ teenage years. After twenty years of involvement with a genre, it was fun to revisit what sparked their musical interests in their youth.
For me, these associated memories make it difficult to rate albums, to compare albums against each other. The good feelings and memories can’t be dissociated from the records – at least I can’t dissociate them. My love for some albums might have more to do with associated memories than with the actual music I hear, and I don’t know how to change that. Maybe professional music critics have some toggle switch to allow them to turn off the memories and focus solely on the music at hand. I know I don’t have one. And I’m glad I don’t!
A loyal reader, J., writes, “ERM, your blog is the best thing I’ve read in my entire life! I think you are a genius! Are you going to include all types of albums in your list, including hip-hop, jazz, etc, or will it just be rock?”
It’s a good question, and it deserves an answer. And that answer – as is usually the case with someone who decides to write a blog in their spare time – won’t be a short one. Some hip-hop will definitely be included as candidates for the top 100, but I should say I don’t own much hip-hop. And the hip-hop I do own is frighteningly predictable.
The reason I don’t own much hip-hop isn’t because I have a problem with hip-hop, or dislike it as an art. It’s just that I’ve never listened to it very much. Most of the hip-hop I love tends to be individual songs that are catchy, goofy, and bordering on parody. (Though usually not as funny as The Master.) I don’t own many hip-hop albums. As a music fan, what really grabs my ear is a strong melody and harmonies, and I love the sound of guitars and a drum kit. So while I do enjoy a hip-hop song or two, I find that an entire album’s worth starts to sound too repetitive to me. As a result, I haven’t purchased many hip-hop albums.
As I noted in an earlier post, an individual’s background plays a large part in the types of music a person loves, and I never really developed a framework for serious hip-hop appreciation. I’m sure much of that has to do with the extremely white, some-might-say bigoted, area where I grew up. Among my peers growing up, music was definitely thought of in terms of black and white, and I’d be lying if I said that in my youth I never heard Motown, R&B and soul music referred to as “[n-word] music.”
My own house had music playing in it almost constantly, for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my parents would listen to Burt Bacharach, Big Band music and 8-track cassettes of Broadway shows. (Along with a healthy dose of Spike Jones and his City Slickers.) I listened because it was in the air. When I wanted to listen to music myself, I listened to whatever was playing on WLBR, one of two local AM stations at the time. (The other being WAHT, which presaged the 90s talk radio boom by 20 years by featuring a talk show host, Fred Williams, who everyone hated, but listened to anyway.) The station broadcast games of the Flyers, Sixers, and (my favorite of all) the Phillies, and played typical 70s AM fare when there weren’t any games. At the time, I didn’t make much distinction between white artists or black artists. Stevie Wonder and Elton John were equal in my book – even though I preferred Sir Duke
During my middle school years, disco was king. And since I had two older sisters who were huge fans of the genre, and who went to Stan’s Disco (at the empty Robert Hall store on Route 422) every weekend, I became a fan as well. Again, I didn’t really think much about the artists’ ethnicity. After all, my favorite disco band at the time had members of every race, who worked in most every imaginable job (assuming Cowboy and Indian were actual occupations in 1979. Not to mention Leather Guy … I guess I figured he worked in some kind of a motorcycle shop.) [Side note: I remember in 8th grade that Mike S. claimed that he heard The Village People were gay. I was incredulous, and believed that the group’s obvious manliness – as most evidenced by the very masculine Construction Worker – was all the confirmation I needed that the group members were strictly hetero. I guess I was a little naive back then …]
By my high school years, I started listening to ROCK on the radio. I didn’t know it at the time, but the format was called “AOR.” It’s the stuff that today is called “Classic Rock,” or – as incomprehensible as it sounds to someone so youthful and vibrant as myself – “Oldies.” The music was by artists who were almost exclusively white – in fact, they were so white that to say the artists were “almost exclusively” white is to astonishingly minimize the actual exclusivity of the artists’ collective whiteness. If the artists on AOR were ingredients on the side of a box of Stove Top Stuffing (let’s say), non-white artists would probably make up about 1/100th of the entirety of the Propyl gallate in the packet. (With this analogy I certainly don’t wish to imply that non-white artists on AOR radio were as (apparently) harmful to kids as Propyl gallate. The analogy holds only in terms of numbers of artists.)
Of course Jimi Hendrix was featured prominently, and Santana got their fair share of airplay, but the other artists-of-color that I can name nowadays are ones that I didn’t even realize weren’t white at the time, like one-hit wonder band Redbone
(who I didn’t know were Native American until I drove across the country and stopped in Gallup, NM, and talked to some Indian folks at a bar), and Irish-band-I-thought-were-Southern-rockers Thin Lizzy, led by the African-Irishman Phil Lynott.
And while we’re on the topic of identity politics in music, it’s probably as good a time as any to state that the non-male contingent on AOR was limited to Heart, and Heart alone, at least until Pat Benatar came around.
I watched a ton of early 80s MTV (a topic that I’ll have to cover in another post some day) and so I got exposure to Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Richie and some other black 80s pop acts, and I thought they had some good songs. But by the time rap really hit it big and started to go mainstream – maybe 1984 – 1986 – I just didn’t have an interest in it. It didn’t have melody, it didn’t have guitars and drums (unless they were sampled), and so I didn’t spend much time listening to it. In fact, in the mid-80s I was so enthusiastic about such a very small sliver of musical genres (basically only acts featuring guitar solos and high-pitched male singers, preferably playing songs as complex as possible) that I actively dismissed and agitated against other forms of music, including rap.
So, J., to answer your question with regard to hip-hop – if it’s in my collection, and I think it could be Hot Hundred-Worthy, I’ll give it a listen.
With regard to jazz … I do like jazz, and I own several jazz CDs – mostly Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, and another certain artist who my wife and I like enough to have given our son his unusual name. But I’m not going to include them in my Top Hundred list. I don’t experience jazz music the same way I do rock and pop. For some reason my little brain has trouble putting them in the same basket. So I’m not going to try to do it.
NEXT POST – I PROMISE – I’LL START ACTUALLY DISCUSSING ACTUAL ALBUMS!!!
I had to put some rules in place for what types of albums could be included in my list, otherwise the list would be chaos. The next thing you know I’d be considering EVERYTHING for inclusion into favorite albums: Greatest Hits Records, Compilations, cassettes I made as a kid pretending to be a DJ and playing hits from Ronco’s Get It OnLP, Mix Tapes …
Regarding mix tapes … I am part of the segment of my generation that put a lot of time and energy into trying to put together the awesomest mix tape possible for every situation. I can completely empathize with Jack Black’s Barry in the following scene:
And as embarrassing as it would be to dance in front of co-workers and simulate sex with an imaginary woman, as Barry does, it is even more embarrassing to recall the several second dates I had in which I brought along a mix tape as a gift, which often included the songs “Girlfriend,” by Matthew Sweet (!) …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9aWPTCc2r0
and “Little T&A” by the Stones (!!!).
“Wow,” these women must have thought, “he’s desperate AND a creepy sexist! What a catch!”
I understand now why I didn’t have many third dates …
But I learned eventually, and didn’t make a tape for my wife until we’d been dating several months. Which isn’t to say it didn’t include an embarrassing song …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlfeyeMFiYA
or two*.
Apparently, even a feminist like my wife didn’t want to think about Yoko in the context of me, despite evidence that Yoko’s evil-ness was overblown.
(Which isn’t to say I’m a big fan of Yoko – but the worst thing about her isn’t her relationship with John – I long ago grew comfortable with the plain fact that they were simply in love – it’s her horrendous art and music.)
So anyway, the rules:
1) Albums MUST BE IN MY COLLECTION! Either a digital album I bought or ripped from a friend, or a CD in my cases of CDs.
What this means, obviously, is that my Top 100 is going to probably contain several albums by a few groups, necessarily excluding some other great artists. Specifically, I expect there to be lots of Beatles, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., Replacements … I know already there won’t be ANY Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Eagles, Ramones … Nothing against those artists, I just was never moved to buy/borrow a CD of theirs (other than Greatest Hits.)
At some point, I’ll probably make a list of all these albums I own, but I can’t do it right now.
2) Albums CAN’T BE GREATEST HITS OR COMPILATIONS. For the same reason that a mix tape wouldn’t be included – they’re a compilation of great songs (typically) so of course they’d be a favorite album!!
On the topic of compilations, my sisters and I owned a variety of Compilation Records in the 70s. They were very popular, and could be ordered directly from the TV. “Just 5.99! 8-track tape or cassette, 7.99!!!” Our record library included the aforementioned Get It On, Sound Explosion, and Hustle 76, which didn’t have the real artists playing the songs but instead had a sound-alike band. We also had one called Today’s Greatest Hits that included performances of popular songs by a cover band called The Realistics! But even if they weren’t the real artists, we didn’t care – we just wanted to hear all the songs. These albums were must-haves for kids in the 70s. I myself was particularly partial to the humorous compilations, such as Dumb Ditties and Kooky Toones, both of which I owned.
I’m NOT excluding live albums or soundtracks in my list, which are usually sort of greatest hits and compilation albums, respectively. But I don’t have many of either that I think (off the top of my head) would be Hot Hundred material, so it might be a moot point.
3) Reissues are judged on the original content. There’s a lot of both excellent and crappy bonus material on reissues, and using it as a basis for comparing records seems a little unfair to me. So I’ll leave it alone.
* – I didn’t really put this song on her mix tape!
Recently, several readers (and I use the word “several” because it sounds better than “both”) have asked “So, when are you going to share your list??!!”
“Listen, mom and dad,” I said, “I gave you that computer, and I can take it away, too!”
But the question is significant, since this is supposedly a blog about my favorite albums.
So here is the answer: I am still working on my list. When I am done, I will post it.
Despite what Wired found, I have found it very hard.
See, I didn’t trust myself to just look through my music collections and pick out the best by memory. That, to me, seemed to be cheating. Or, more precisely, playing favorites. As with most things in life, it’s like when you were in high school … and the gym teacher was also the freshman soccer coach, and every time he wanted to make teams in gym class he’d pick C. to be one of the captains because freshman year C. was a great soccer player, but by now, senior year, C. was short, chubby, not even on the soccer team, typically hung over, and clearly not as good of a flag-football player as yourself, (who abstained from alcohol/friends, and had in fact grown a couple inches and DROPPED a few pounds since freshman year when you quit the soccer team on the first day of summer double sessions because of asthma and a conflict with band camp), but yet the gym teacher had it stuck in his head that, “Boy, that C. is really a tremendous athlete,” and so continued to select C. to be a captain even though if he’d taken time to really assess the state of things as of today, October 9, 1984, he would have realized that you were a much better choice to be team captain.
Nothing like that ever happened to me that I’m aware of, but it seems like a good analogy to relying on ideas I formed long ago to make a good selection today.
I didn’t want to rely on my memory. To me, the only thing that made sense to do was to listen to each album I own (or anyway, the ones I knew had a shot to be top 100) – whether as a physical CD or a downloaded/ripped electronic version – and attempt to select the 100 best.
I estimate I have about 500 to 600 albums. Probably not a lot as compared to some people, but pretty many to listen to one-at-a-time. As a middle-aged man with a family and a job, I don’t have the time that I did when I bought most of this music, (and apparently time isn’t the only thing I don’t have a lot of anymore) so it’s hard for me to find time to sit around the house and listen, uninterrupted.
But I do have a thirty-minute commute to work each day, so that gives me an hour every weekday in the car to listen for a decent chunk of time. This is somewhat of a problem, as it means I don’t get to listen to Howard every day, but I take a break now and then for a few laughs.
I write notes to myself on all the albums I listen to, and I have started a system of ranking … sort of.
But there is plenty of time for all those details later. In the mean time – since you guys wanted a list – here’s what I think were PROBABLY my Top Ten Albums (or cassettes) on October 9, 1984:
Next Van sent me this list, from NME in 2003. This list aligned much more closely with the way that I perceive music and the inherent greatness in certain collections thereof. In other words, a lot of albums that I really like appeared near the top of this list.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umwQG7fue84
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Ve2mgjgmY
This list was significantly different than the Rolling Stone list.
For a while I thought, “Now, THIS is a list I can believe in!! This is MY LIST!” I was happy. I had a list of my very own. “But,” I thought, “how come it doesn’t have Album X, by Band Y, on it? Surely NME overlooked that one! And how come The Smiths and New Order and Joy Division are on there? Doesn’t NME know that they suck??!”
After a while I realized I had as much trouble with this list (Madonna?) as I did with the RS list (The Stone Roses number four-hundred-ninety-fucking-eight???!!!???!!!) as I did with the WSJ dude (Radiohead’s Kid A? Really? That’s the Radiohead album you’ll hang your hat on??)
I spent a lot of time in the course of a week or so thinking about these damned “Greatest” lists. And it made me mad at myself. Mad, I tell you!
Because of course I know that all these lists are just for the sake of marketing. I understand that. I doubt if the editors even think all that much about it. They probably send an email to a hundred people in the music industry, ask “Hey, jot down your favorite 20 or 30 albums,” then just count which albums appeared on the most lists. Really just a Pareto Chart of favorite albums – something to excite the Lean/Six Sigma blackbelts, I guess. Then they call the output “The Greatest.” Sorry, but calling anything “The Greatest” that has not won a contest – or is not Muhammad Ali – is simply inaccurate.
But I still find myself wanting to argue with every list I read, wanting to call up the editors and say, “What are you guys, high??!! FOUR-HUNDRED-NINETY-FUCKING-EIGHT!!!???” (Sorry for the repeat link. But really. FOUR-HUNDRED-NINETY-FUCKING-EIGHT!!!???) So, if I know it’s all just marketing bullshit, why do I seem to care so much? Why do I want these list-makers to know where I think they slipped up? Why do I feel the need to tell them to their face that their lists are bullshit? And why do other people* feel the same way**??
For me, I think it’s because music has been such a big part of my life – I’ve enjoyed listening to and playing music for as long as I can remember. I categorize my life by what music I was listening to, and I categorize music by what was happening in my life. Music is a very personal experience for me, extremely important.
So I want any list of important music to include the music that I found important, otherwise, maybe my life wasn’t all that important … Right? If Works Vol. 2 isn’t on the list, then the nights I spent listening to it when I realized J. wasn’t going to fall in love with me were all for naught, right??? (Oddly enough, it only recently dawned on me that maybe boys in 1985 who listened to 10-year-old prog rock albums just weren’t the type of guys that Homecoming Queens found interesting. Could that be true? That girls just didn’t feel romantic with Tarkus playing softly on cassette through the Ford LTD wagon sound system?)
So clearly, my Greatest Album choices might not align nicely with the magazine lists out there.
So maybe I’d better just make my own!
This guy cleverly points out that John Lennon’s Imagine was given middling reviews by the mag when it was released, but still showed up at number 76 on the top 500 list!
** – This guy is just furious. And has listened to WAY more music than I ever have!
One easy way to measure “greatness,” a rather ambiguous noun, would be to actually measure things. Say, most albums sold. According to this list (which could have been completely fabricated, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s accurate) the greatest album ever is Thriller, by Michael Jackson. There is no argument – it is a fact. We stated up front “Greatest = Most Sales” and then we figured out which album sold the most. Done.
Such a list may be accurate to accountants and entertainment executives, but for music fans it is just bollocks. The list just doesn’t jibe with what our ears tell us. Sure, there may be some people who truly believe that music-wise (as opposed to sales-wise), Thriller is the greatest album ever, and – since it was a critical and commercial hit, with many hits and cross-market appeal – a rock/pop music fan like me would at least listen and consider such an argument. But is there a music fan out there who really thinks an argument can be made that The Backstreet Boys’ Millennium is the 36th greatest album ever? (Ahead of any albums by the Rolling Stones, by the way, but coming after twodifferent Celine Dion offerings …) I doubt it. (Although, maybe. As I stated previously, it’s all just peoples’ tastes …)
So Van and I discuss this a bit, and at some point he sends me a link to this story. A Wall Street Journal writer complains of “bias” at Rolling Stone. I’m going to ignore, for the purposes of this post, the inherent humor in an accusation of perceived “bias” coming from a publicationlike theWSJ. The fact is that one should assume that Rolling Stone will be pretty biased, music-wise. I mean, it was started by a hippie almost 50 years ago, to cover rock music – so it shouldn’t be surprising that the albums selected are geared towards 70 year-old hippies today.
But as I read the writer condemning RS for not liking a Bjork record …
I thought – “This guy’s full of shit, too! He’s just as biased toward his era’s music (apparently the 90s) as RS is toward the 60s and 70s!” (And I wonder if this douchebag* also complains of bias at Metal Hammer magazine, or Vibe??)
Anyway.
The upshot of all this is that it seems really challenging to put together a “Greatest Ever” list. But I figured I’d give it a try.
He’s probably a really nice guy, and not a douchebag at all. By I get a little agitated sometimes…
All of this began with an email from Van. Several emails, in fact.
Van and I have similar, but diverging, musical tastes, which makes sense because we have similar, but diverging, backgrounds – suburban males of about the same age, but differing in ethnicity and [likely] childhood economic background. Both of us attended college in the late 80s, both of us play a little bit of guitar (or bass, in my case) and have played with different bands. We tend to like guitar-based rock, although I (being a bit older) seem to have more of a fondness for “Classic Rock,” and Van seems to be more tolerant of non-guitar-based music than I am.
In any case, we are both rather open-minded in our musical tastes as they relate to popular music from the past 60 years or so (although Van – to my mind – really doesn’t worship The Beatles enough, so he can’t be all THAT open-minded). We’ve enjoyed discussing music over the past 18 months or so in which we’ve gotten to know each other.
One of our favorite topics of discussion is the relationship between music critics and music. Many of these discussions have originated as talks about the awesomeness of Van Halen. A simple précis of all those discussions would be the following: Music critics are full of shit. (Interestingly, googling the phrase “music critics are full of shit” only returns 88 results. Even more interestingly, only 82 of those results are from online forums dedicated to Rush.)
I must confess that the literary genre known as “criticism” has always seemed a bit silly to me. Whether one writes about art, movies, dance, literature or music, at its core criticism is merely one person’s opinions. That person may be able to beautifully commit to the page cogent arguments for, and impressive, well-researched defenses of, a position for, or against, the merits of a particular painting/film/ballet/novel or CD, but when it’s all boiled down the only thing a writer can truthfully say about a piece is whether or not they appreciated it. (I won’t say “liked,” as it is possible, I think, to appreciate something without really liking it. It’s how I feel about Bruce Springsteen, Derek Jeter, Fiber One bars, etc.) All the rest is just opinion – no matter how widely shared that opinion is.
So, for example, when all those lists of “Best Ever” are compiled for magazines, newspapers, and an endless string of VH1 programs featuring recycled MTV footage and “experts” no one has ever heard of, they are really just peoples’ opinions. Even if almost everyone agrees on something, there is no way to truly quantitate what makes art “good” or “bad.” So, the guy who says Kraftwerk is as good as The Beatles isn’t really wrong, he just shares a different opinion than me. And a billion other people.
So, anyway, back to those emails that started this whole thing. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone released its 500 Greatest Albums Ever issue. Van and I were unimpressed, to say the least. “Greatest? Who says?” (Okay, that question is answered in the introduction to the piece.) And secondly, by what measure?
This is my first post. I’d better stop there. I’ll have more to say later.
Happy MLK Day!
ERM
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