Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Music Mercredi: Rolling Stone's Greatest 500 Albums

filed under: music mercredi, the beatles, the clash

It’s Music Mercredi (that’s Wednesday) around here, folks, a brand-new feature that means one thing for the next 50 weeks or so: riding shotgun as I go through the thankless task of surveying Rolling Stone magazine’s greatest 500 albums of all time. Up for it? Great.

Why would I do such a thing to myself? Good question. The thing is, I’m a music critic among many other things, and there’s a record store’s worth of albums that I’ve never heard. Like a lot of you out there, I’m quick to tell people that, musically, I listen to everything. But my “everything” is the same “everything” as the average eclectic music lover my age: Nine Inch Nails, Jill Scott, TV on the Radio, Led Zeppelin and M.I.A., for example. (Another dip into my iTunes: Treacherous Three, Black Sabbath, Sade, The Sundays and Goldie.) Okay, fine.

Have I ever ever played anything by Nick Drake, Elvis Costello, The Band, Grateful Dead or Weezer? Nope. Haven’t lost any sleep over it, either. But I am a music critic. And according to Rolling Stone in this November 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, I’m missing out, because they’ve created some of the best music ever made. Long story short: I’m listening to 10 albums a week, and talking about the highs and lows every Wednesday till 2011. Let’s start this week with the Top 10 Greatest Albums of All Time:

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys
Revolver, The Beatles
Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan
Rubber Soul, The Beatles
What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye
Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones
London Calling, The Clash
Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan
The Beatles (“The White Album”), The Beatles

Well. Rolling Stone sticking Sgt. Pepper at the top of their list is absolutely no surprise, and I can’t even say it’s undeserved or that I don’t like the album. My favorite songs in the whole Top 10 belonged to The Beatles (“Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Dear Prudence,” “Within You Without You,” “If I Needed Someone,” “Eleanor Rigby”), Marvin Gaye (“Inner City Blues [Makes Me Wanna Holler]”), Bob Dylan (“From a Buick 6,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” “Highway 61 Revisited”), the Stones (“I Just Want to See His Face”) and The Beach Boys (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”).

The Clash’s London Calling, on the other hand, I hated. Remember those music clubs where you’d buy six albums for a penny and be forced to buy one for full price per year? I got suckered once, and used it to get a bunch of so-called classic albums that I played once and hated. London Calling was one of them. I didn’t like it then (15 years ago?), and I don’t like it now. I love The Clash’s “Straight to Hell”—the one M.I.A. jacked for “Paper Planes”—but with London Calling, I guess you had to be there. I might not like Rob Base’s “It Takes Two” or Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” as much either if I hadn’t lived through the summer of 1988.

Also, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is overrated. And, if only one black artist could crack the Top 10, I might’ve voted for Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life instead.

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Comments

The Man From Kazakhstan at 9:46 PM on 04/01/10:

This is what happens when you go through a list compiled by one of the (nowadays) most artificial music magazines ever published: You get incoherent choices (bad) but you are told that they are good choices and you are not intelligent when you point at the weakness of it all (worse). You are told “What do YOU know?”

It has been published in different occasions how Jann Wenner compiled these lists (basically by manipulation, in order to please clients and artist/friends/magazine sellers of any kind). And he is still at it: Do you remember what was reported to have happened in 2007 for the Rock’n‘Roll Hall of Fame induction of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_and_Roll_Hall_of_Fame

A top ten for all time with no women and just one black artist? does it look / sound OK? Fishy, suspicious…

OK, let’s take it as a friendly starting point, since talking about music is almost as fun as listening to it (and remember that face-to-face debates are always available with TMFK at a Paris terrace, but we should treat ourselves with Spanish wine).

-Beatles: Three is too much. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the overrated one. Does not belong here.

- Pet Sounds: At least not as overrated as the mythical/magical Smile, but, again, at the most at the same level as Beach Boys Today.

- Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited deserves its Top 10. I have doubts about Blonde on Blonde

- Gaye: Ditto for Dylan, even higher than him would not be uncalled for.

- The Clash: Hmmm. Your excuse sounds lame (you don’t want to offend guru-like writers in current publications, I guess). It is an album with a great variety of styles, solid lyrics, brilliant sound… It is an album that can take you to different places without you even noticing it. However, if you are going to / would replace it with Ray Charles / Stevie Wonder / Howard Tate / Otis Redding / Aretha Franklin, I would never ever complain.

Rethorical question: If instead of London Calling you had found in the list Never Mind The Bollocks and got the album in the same music club scheme, what would you have written here?

If you want a much more interesting exercise, my advice would be “The Heart of Rock and Soul. The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made” by Dave Marsh. Check here.

http://www.lexjansen.com/marsh/index.htm

Marlon James at 4:18 PM on 04/04/10:

Damn. I’ve hated Rolling Stone’s lists ever since they summed up, in their best of the 80’s issue that the decade was “not revolutionary, but not bad.” This is same magazine that never once put ‘genius’ and ‘rap’ in the same sentence until Eminem showed up. But back to the list. I actually agree with them on the Beatles. Any best of that does not have at least 3 Beatles albums is kidding itself, but Revolver and especially Rubber Soul are better than Pepper. No woman makes the top ten even though a good 200 of the 500 records would not have happened were it not for Patti Smith’s Horses (Smith has only one album on the list—No Doubt has two). This being Rolling Stone, no album from the past 20 years makes it either. Punk appears but in its Hippie approved form; not the Ramones but Clash’s respectable classic rock imitation. London Calling is a 1979 album no matter what the release date says and you’re right: their debut in both UK and US versions were far more inventive with far less ideas. Lord knows I don’t want to harp on race and gender, but it’s also ludicrous that Hendrix did not make the top ten. Nor does any underground record like, The Velvet Underground and Nico, another album responsible for a huge chunk of the records that made the list. Ironically, their 1987 list, pre-house, pre-hip-hop, pre-grunge, was still far more impressive than this. So was VH1’s.

Michael A. Gonzales at 4:57 AM on 04/19/10:

You hate London Calling? Oh, my…of course I love it, but somebody once told me, “All your taste is in your mouth.” So, what do I know.

Term papers at 11:42 AM on 04/21/10:

Such a nice article, it is really interesting, want to admire your work, Thanks.