I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular moment, but then their reputations dip precipitously and never recover... such that no young person currently emerging into the condition of informed, well-listened fandom would bother to check 'em out, in some cases simply because they don't even know of that group's or artist's existence...
So here's the New Musical Express's critics consensus of the 100 All-Time Greatest Albums from June 1st 1974. Let's look at the charting artists who've subsequently Dropped Away largely or utterly.
12. Layla – Derek & The Dominoes
Debatable, but I think in terms of young listeners today, this would be the highest-placing album / artist in the list that is completely off the menu
Followed probably by this...
17. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel
And then (the curse of Clapton again)
20. Disraeli Gears – Cream
Debatable but I feel like your average becoming-hip youth would be more likely to have heard Les Rallizes Denudes than....
29. Back In The USA – MC5
Pretty certain that the eminence-with-critics held by this next chap during the early '70s (even more so in the States - where the likes of Marcus and Bangs thought he was some kind of saviour, a ruffian poet) is completely non-existent... not just with Gen Z but millennials and Gen X too
32. Gasoline Alley – Rod Stewart
34. Every Picture Tells A Story – Rod Stewart
37. In The Court Of The Crimson King – King Crimson
Possibly pockets of interest in this lot among neo-prog and math-rock types, but generally dropped away I'd say
40. The Soft Machine – Soft Machine
Utterly voided
41. Hot Rats – Frank Zappa
I do have a student who is a Zappa nut.... but generally, off the table for anyone after punk
Now we get into the seriously gone-gone, dropped away zone ....
42. Traffic – Traffic
44. Music From A Dolls House – Family
50. Stand Up – Jethro Tull
54. Taylor, James – Sweet Baby James
Despite singer-songwriterism having returned with Lana D-R and Phoebe B et al
Zappa again
58. Mothers Of Invention, The – We’re Only In It For The Money
60. Beck, Jeff, Group – Beck-Ola
Absolutely mystifying to anyone who came to consciousness after punk = the Great Stature of this axe-bore.
68. Mothers Of Invention, The – Freak Out
Zappa yet again. Apart from the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, Frank & crew have the most placings on this chart, I think - and are the most annulled, whereas the Other Three are more impregnably canonic than ever.
70. Stills, Stephen – Stephen Stills
His daughter once took my photograph, on our porch, just feet from where I now type. Once tried to listen to Manassas but had to give up after 5 minutes.
71. Winter, Johnny – Johnny Winter And
The whole blues-god, new prodigy of blues rock guitar thing... it's one of the most unreconstructable phenoms in rock history. Supposedly Johnny Winter's record deal was the biggest advance in history to that point, for a new act.
72. Cocker, Joe – With A Little Help From My Friends
Alongside Joplin, surely the least-listened to Woodstock-era artist among all subsequent generations.
75. Rundgren, Todd – A Wizard, A True Star
Despite influencing Prince and anticipating Ariel Pink in his recorded-it-all-on-his-Todd DIYness, Rundgren has not endured. I once spent an evening in the company of some Norwegians and Mr R and a succession of incredibly pricy vodka sours (this was during an Oslo music festival). He had bitter tales of recording with XTC and the intransigence of one Andrew Partridge. Did not respond well to my soused suggestion that he play Nazz's "Open My Eyes" at his concert the next night.
77. Jefferson Airplane, The – Crown Of Creation
Quite unrecoverable, I should think. I'm surprised this gets the nod and not After Bathing At Baxter's, my personal favorite in their most curious, trapped-in-time discograpy. Amazing how many albums they recorded after the famous hits... they even had their own label, unhappily named Grunt. Then the delta of solo albums, offshoots, Jefferson Starship... almost a landfill in its own right.
81. Country Joe & The Fish – Electric Music For The Mind & Body
An absolutely forgotten group - for the longest while I myself had no idea they recorded this piercing psych rock mini-classic, having only ever heard the folksy protest ditty "Fixin-To-Die". I think the only reason I checked it out was I read that Tom Verlaine had been influenced. Psychedelia is obviously enduringly hip, if going through up-phases and relative dips, but this group - and acid rock generally, a different animal to psych really - is not on the listening-list. See also Kaleidoscope (the US one not the Brit).
85. Mayall’s, John, Bluesbreakers – Bluesbreakers
More Blues Boom boredom. Or so I assume. Wild horses couldn't drag me to the turntable - or to Tidal - to give this a fair listen.
86. Traffic – Mr Fantasy
Traffic again. Very well respected once - their second album gets in Greil M's list at the back of Stranded, he says it's a British Music From Big Pink. I like the psych hit singles well enough. John Barleycorn is a particularly trapped-in-time listen.
90. Moby Grape – Moby Grape
Another one that makes the GM Stranded list (compiled around 1978 I should think so a post-New Wave lingering-on of Old Wave taste). I've tried but I can't find anything distinctive or memorable about the Grape.
91. Big Brother & The Holding Co. – Cheap Thrills
San Francisco and all that made deep inroads into hip British taste - the magazine ZigZag was almost completely built around wistful West Coast longings among those just too young to have experienced it in real-time, let alone real-place.... Quicksilver Messenger Service epigones.... Hot Tuna hold-outs.... People who held their breath and waited and waited until the Grateful Dead would do their sporadic live concerts in the U.K.
(The first - and only, still - person of my own generation to suggest Big Brother might be worth listening to was J. Mascis... in one of the several interviews I did with Dinosaur Jr, he was going on about a recent influence on his playing being BB & THC's guitarist James Gurley. That gave me a right revisionist frisson, that did).
93. Doctor John – Gris-Gris
Dropped away utterly!
97. Newman, Randy – 12 Songs
I know a writer of the generation after mine who loves Newman (Mike Powell of Stylus / Pitchfork etc) but I would wager that His Gruffness's standing has plummeted precipitously. But in the early '70s he was the very definition of sophisticated and discerning rock taste, such that Marcus devoted an entire chapter of Mystery Train to his uuuurv, jostling alongside Sly Stone (!), The Band (!) and Elvis Presley (!!).
98. Spirit – The 12 Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus
More ZigZaggery.
I've tried with this group, this record, a bunch of times over the years but it's never stuck. My former MM colleague Paul Lester is a huge fan of Spirit even to the point of loving obscure Randy California solo albums. A fan of Rundgren too. (I think some of this may index to having grown up reading NME writer Max Bell, an Americanophile who wrote a riposte to Mick Farren's famous Titanic piece about the decadence of rock (the one that is said to have helped precipitate punk). Bell was - in early 1976 no less - like, "No, there's all this great music coming out of the U.S.A. Rock's getting every more sophisticated. It's just the UK scene that's a shithole. Start buying imports". )
99. Miller, Steve, Band – Sailor
Even more ZigZaggery. Children of the Future makes that back o' Stranded list. For those who know him only for "The Joker", "Abracadabra" and all those affably rockin' AM radio staples of the mid-70s, it's something of a head-swerve to learn that Miller was once revered as one of the finest blues-rock guitarists of his day and that the first couple of SMB albums are considered psych-era classics by some.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So that's 30 albums that have Dropped Away - almost a third of the list. Which is not that bad, I suppose. It means that 70 percent of the music esteemed in 1974 still has some kind of standing in today's taste-schema - fifty years on.
However I would wager that if there's an equivalent list that the NME did in 1979 or 1980 - and there may well be - the Dropped Away proportion would be larger, possibly considerably larger. And that subsequently there's been some canonic readmission, a bit of Dropped-Away-But-Steadily-Stealthily-Climbed-Back. Revisionism and rehabilitation. Restoration.
For most of the Dropped Away here would have originally Dropped Away within four years of this list being compiled. It was the catastrophic Transvaluative Event of New Wave that caused all these artists to suddenly become utterly irrelevant, indeed in many cases actively repugnant to young ears. It happened almost overnight.
Of course, many of the usurping upstarts have themselves suffered subsequently from the dreaded Drops Away Syndrome ... for who of the young generation listens to, or has even heard of, Eddie & the Hot Rods, the Motors, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Boomtown Rats, Eater, Mink Deville, Tom Robinson Band, the Vibrators, the Damned, the Adverts...?
I would agree with most of these, but think Cream still have some cache (Metallica and their ilk drool over them) while The Band have definitely dropped away, and I can't remember the last time anyone name-dropped Beefheart, who I had forgotten even existed. On the flipside, the reputations of Queen and Elton John have ballooned in stature over the last five to ten years.
ReplyDeleteBut on a slightly more contemporary tip, can you explain the total cultural disappearance of On-U Sound?
I'll have you know I bought Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot only yesterday.
DeleteQueen, tell me about it! One of the shocks of teaching young music students is the canonic eminence of Queen among that generation. And I don't think it's entirely down to the movie, or the retroactive positioning of Freddie Mercury as a queer icon. It's just that taste for various reasons has shifted towards acceptance of maximalism - so everything that would have seemed garish or overworked about Queen's sound, to New Wave/postpunk ears, now seems enjoyable. That sort of visceral reaction against the operatic, the showboating, has completely gone. People used to talk dismissively about "pomp rock" once.
DeleteI suppose Ben Elton and Wayne & Garth played a role too... and then later groups like Muse... but I think it's more to do with this complete collapse of indie aversions in taste .... or rather people can like indie / minimalist / lo-fi stuff but also like the polar opposite (e.g. the yacht rock love). Scruffiness / shabbiness and slickness / polish aren't seem as antagonistic, mutually incompatible sets of values.
Queen are indeed amazing. In terms of Spotify streams, which seem like a pretty good proxy for younger people's listening habits, they are not only bigger than the Beatles, but also bigger than Future, Lady Gaga and One Direction. They are nearly as big as Beyonce!
DeleteYou're probably right about The Band, although about 15 years ago with all the beardy groups like Fleet Foxes they would have been on the menu.
ReplyDeleteCream, though - not convinced. They seem totally locked in that moment.
Beefheart aren't an influence like they were in the mid-80s but I think have that out-rock credential - Trout Mask Replica is a bit like Ulysses or something, 'just how tough a listener are you then? try this'. One of those records you have to hear Once.... not likely to be in regular rotation (whereas Clear Spot...)
The Bland I call 'em.
DeleteWith Cream I think Badge is eternal, but that's a lot to do with George Harrison, isn't it? I like them a lot though, despite Clapton's undeniable toxicity.
Clear Spot was the only Beefheart record I owned (original transparent plastic sleeve as well Mister Stylo sir) but I wasn't all that impressed. He nevertheless influenced pretty much every band that I liked at one time - you could tell in an instant if a band had been listening to him, but as you say that aspect seems to be long gone.
I'm not judging it by who I personally like (I love the Band, the second album anyway... love bits of Beefheart) but about whether the Listed artist still has any currency in terms of what the young listen to... which is hard to gauge of course
DeleteBut one way - if we follow Bloom's ideas about how canons form and how they shift over time - might be to look at whether a revered artist remains a source for young emerging groups to take inspiration from... According to Bloom, the Canon is created by the successors, they choose their ancestors... So if Beefheart & Magic Band have dropped away it's in large part because young bands are not coming through influenced by their music....
Hendrix has faded a bit too, I think. Rick Beato occasionally does this thing where he looks at the streaming stats, and the numbers for Hendrix were pitiful. Beato put it mainly down to the Hendrix estate and their over-zealous guarding of his legacy.
DeleteYeah you are right - it feels like the Hendrix sound and all that it represents just wouldn't compute for modern ears. Too excessive, too grand, too utopian.... maybe even too liberated.
DeleteIn a recent class on the blues and its mutations, I played "I Don't Live Today" (it has the classic blues AAB structure but blown out cosmically) and I could tell that it wasn't connecting.
Mind you, Krautrock has a lot of young adherents still, I guess the discipline and focus maybe.
Was just browsing through this thread in a hipster cafe, and what did I see when I looked up: a guy of about 18 wearing a Hendrix t-shirt. It reminded me that I have occasionally seen Zoomers in the street in Hendrix shirts. Alongside Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana, he’s probably the only classic rock performer I’ve seen being represented by someone of that generation.
DeleteOf course, the iconography is so strong, the shirts are pretty irresistible. It may be that Hendrix is worn much more than he is listened to. The Ramones, AC/DC, the MC5 and even Iron Maiden have been through waves of popularity as T-shirt designs. Hence the meme about “Oh so you like them, do you? Name your three favorite B-sides.”
I resisted the urge to go up to the guy in the cafe and ask whether he thought that in some senses Miles and Cox were actually a better rhythm section than Mitchell and Redding.
A lot of what I call Hair and Sweat music on this list.
ReplyDeleteThis top 100 seems a lot less self-conscious than the kind of all-time polls we get in more recent times. Even allowing for the fact that a lot of classics had yet to appear in 1974 (and the test of time had not stretched over so many decades), this resembles a list put together by fans choosing what they actually like (three Zappa records, for goodness sake?!) rather than connoisseurs selecting what they feel ought to be rated.
Re: Rod Stewart - Twenty five years ago Rod still had a higher reputation than Elton. Nowadays, it's the other way around. I've got a hunch that this is only partly to do with music. Elton, with his over-sharing, his belief in therapy and his long, hard path to self-acceptance is a figure who chimes with the twenty-first century. Rod, with his unfettered Jack-the-Laddism, is not. His persona could hardly be more out of step. It's not just the whole birds-bevvies-footie side to Rod that belongs to a more carefree time, it's his lack of neurosis. Rod is an increasingly rare type of superstar who seems at ease with fame, unashamed of making money and comfortable in his own skin.
No hang-ups for this man.
I reckon in the '90s Rod might have had some currency again not as a Great Songwriter but ass part of the Loaded pantheon of jack-the-lads, exactly for those reasons you mention, that he really enjoyed being famous.... since then his star has faded much...
DeleteIn the '90s, through Oasis etc, the idea of fame as dysfunction or fucks-with-your-head would have seemed ridiculous... fame was glory was getting high was the time of your life, everything a young working class boy wanted.
Robbie Williams is poised between the two eras - aspiring to Oasis-ism (buddying up with the Gallaghers) but also neurotic, fucked up by fame and drugs, wrecked mentally by the tabloids and the paparazzi.... and most recently the subject of astonishingly self-absorbed doc, in which the narrative arc seems to be that of a born-entertainer who eventually comes to terms with his own vacuity (having struggled for a while in vain to be taking seriously as an Artist with Depths),... who learns to revels again in being a performer who gave win over huge audiences with empty anthemic uplift and not worry so much about being a charming fraud
That's a very perceptive comment about Rod, although he recently got very angry about the state of the NHS, so he might be adopting the rainbow lanyard arc of redemption.
DeleteAlso: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50403561.amp
DeleteWhat about the Doors? My sense is that anyone who missed their period as cult favourites in the 80s now sees them only as objects of derision, prime examples of everything that was wrong with old-fashioned rock music.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the Doors still have some pull on the young, partly because the best of it is such a groove and so tuneful. They had hit singles. But yeah probably diminished with the passage. The 'erotic politics' stuff in lost to time.
DeleteThere is so much data that can be thrown at this question, if you trust Spotify streams as a representative indicator. The Doors, Rod Stewart and Simon & Garfunkel are all on level pegging at about 12 million listeners a month, compared to about 50 million for Queen and Elton. Hendrix has about 9 million, and Zappa 1 million. Poor old Moby Grape just 55,000.
ReplyDeleteOne fact that shocked me: Derek and the Dominoes on 3.2 million listeners a month are not far behind the Velvets, who are on 3.7 million.
Some representatives of the 80s generation are still doing pretty well: The Cure, the Smiths and Depeche Mode are on 17.6, 15.9 and 13.4 million listeners a month, respectively. All of them bigger than Rod or Simon & Garfunkel.
DeleteBigger also than Bob Dylan, who is on 10.6 million.
I suppose the question I would have is, how legible is this data? Without some other information about the listeners, it's hard to draw conclusions. With some of the chugging-away-solid artists, it could be largely older listeners - original fans - that are sustaining that. As opposed to the young being a significant component.
DeleteAnd things like the Canon are determined by a smaller fraction of that raw listenership - it's opinion-former, new musicians forming their band-identity etc.
But yeah the Queen data supports what I had gleaned empirically (well, anecdotally really) which is that Queen are insanely popular with young people, but more than that, respected and revered. Whereas when I was their age, nobody who was the least bit into cool music or edginess or whatever, would take Queen seriously.
(I have subsequently come to take Queen seriously enough to devote a third of a chapter to them in the Shock and Awe bit on 'baroque 'n' roll'. Can even enjoy them. Not the ballads though).
Yes the revaluation of Queen has been spectacular. In the early 80s, when I was a big Queen fan, I was very shocked by hearing Elvis Costello doing an interview - or maybe a record review - on Radio One, absolutely blasting them, saying he thought they had no redeeming features whatsoever. He was still seen as pretty hip at the time, and all my cooler friends and acquaintances were cheering him on.
DeleteElvis Costello: now he's really someone who has joined the ranks of the Dropped Away, isn't he?
On the Spotify data, I agree its significance is unclear. But I would suspect its user base tends to skew younger. Its top five most-listened artists are: Drake, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, The Weeknd and Ed Sheeran.
Moby Grape's shocking low numbers can be explained by their not actually being present on streaming services - if you click on their albums, there's only like three or four tracks from them available. The reason is Mr. Matthew Katz, their old Svengali turned mortal enemy, who finally passed a few months ago at 93 but had more or less singlehandedly kept a legal stranglehold on their recordings that might not even dissipate with his death
DeleteNot that I'm suggesting Moby Grape would be Queen-level if not for that, but they would certainly do better than algorithmic fluke numbers
DeleteApparently that was the first ever published Top 100 All Time Greatest Albums list, in the UK anyway. Was probably quite a big deal at the time seeing all those album covers presented like that together, even if it was black 'n white. NME deciding to take stock of rock history 20 years on from the Sun Sessions start of it all. The Nick Cohn books aside, was this pretty unique then to organise the past like that? Notable that this list pretty much ignores the youth / pop (no recent glam, Electric Warrior, Roxy's one listing scraping in at 95). Bowie yes, as he would have possessed serious artist status among the Grey Whistle Test crowd. Most of the NME writers would have come of age in the late 60s so the likes of Layla, Traffic, Dr. John, Moby Grape etc would have had plenty of hip cred then. For 18 years olds readers a lot of the records listed would likely have been unfamiliar, even perhaps the most famous acts. They would have been only 10 in 1966 and with access & exposure to the past hard to come by then the late 60s must have seemed an unknown zone for the most part, bar what they caught on radio or from a parent's record collection. A bit like in Amercia when a lot of mid-1970s teenagers only associated Paul McCartney as the singer in Wings but didn't make the connection that he was also in the big 60s band their parent's liked
ReplyDeleteNME didn't do their next all time list until 1985, with a dedicated front cover spread for the occasion.
https://www.muzieklijstjes.nl/NMEWriters100alltime1985.htm
Pepper the No.1 from 74 doesn't even make it into the top 100 eleven years later proving maybe that In the UK The Beatles were probably at their lowest ebb critically and as an influence around 1984.5. A lot more black artists this time as well. I suppose this list and the one in the Paul Gambaccini book around the same time would have gone hand in hand with the first CD reissue rollouts and Live Aid which led on to Q magazine for grown ups who preferred Greatest Hits CD comps and who had little interest in Peel or the weekly music papers.
Ah! Very interesting about the Beatles and that's totally my impression of where they stood in the 1980s, which was - strangely - completely irrelevant in terms of modern youthful / alternative music. They only became a reference point again with the Stones Roses repping them - as much a way to big themselves up, I think. (Tears of Fears 'Sowing the Seeds of Love' was this totally anomalous thing - ridiculously out of step with the present).
DeletePerhaps we should inspect the 1985 NME list and see what has subsequently Dropped Away from that?
The improved black music inclusions make sense as the NME then was pushing the soul / jazz / go-go / rap / African music etc etc and really doing a very good job of covering black music and things outside rock - both contemporary artists and historical pieces on people like Louis Jordan or bebop.
(It's one of the reasons I get annoyed with this idea of the rock press as being this monolithically white music thing - in the 1970s and 1980s, it really was admirably comprehensive in its coverage. Even Sounds had reggae columns and reggae specialists alongside the Oi! and NWOBHM.)
That 1985 list is generally much better than the 1974 one, I think, but I guess that's just me showing my age. Some hilarious examples of recency bias, though. Tom Waits at #6! Imperial Bedroom the top Elvis Costello album.
DeleteSome interesting subtler shifts, too. The Band rated much higher, and Astral Weeks much much higher. The more punkoid Bringing it All Back Home promoted to #3 Dylan album, when it's not on the 1974 list at all. Meanwhile, Electric Ladyland, #6 in 1974, has disappeared in 1985. And Zappa has been purged completely.
I think the 1974 list is another marker of the end of Rock as a modernist project and its commencement as either heritage or postmodernism.
DeleteThe Band are still a major influence on Americana and alt-country. (Maybe this doesn't translate outside North America.) I don't think they've dropped out of relevance, but the fact that a group who looked and sounded like that were once part of (sort of) youth culture is wild.
ReplyDeleteYes! I have heard young hipster folk performers do The Weight and Long Black Veil recently, and I Shall Be Released and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down within the past five years or so.
DeleteThe beard/waistcoat/fedora look may no longer be at the cutting edge of men's style, but as a musical influence the Band seem as relevant as ever.
Think The Band were always more of an American thing, in the same way that Creedence were.
DeleteI think the Band's primary influence in the UK was on the folk-rock contingent: Richard Thompson is often quoted on how blown away he was by them, and how they were the catalyst for Fairport Convention's shift from west coast folk-rock to the English tradition with Liege and Lief. So their imprint was chiefly on bands that wound up not sounding much like the Band themselves, maybe obscuring how big they were in their time (playing the Royal Albert Hall etc.). And the UK folk-rockers seem conspicuously underrepresented in both this list and the 1985 one — aside from Fairport, John Martyn and Nick Drake feature frequently in more recent lists.
Delete"The Weight" was actually a hit in the UK. I can remember it as a song that caught my ear as a child when it was played on the radio in subsequent years.
DeleteBut the Band were musicians's musicians - their primary impact was on people like George Harrison and Traffic and Clapton (Blind Faith would be a byproduct). And as you say Fairport Convention.
There's a great review of Band reissues by Ian Macdonald that's in his collection The People's Music - he talks about the impact of Music from Big Pink in terms of cultural detoxification, it hastened the passing of psychedelia and encouraged musicians to aspire to a more organic, naturalistic sound. They seemed like men (the beards helped) as opposed to boys, sang about grown-up things.
A generation down the line, the Mekons cited the Band as an inspiration and covered "The Shape I'm In." They were pretty hostile towards Fairport and British folk music - maybe Americana seemed exotic to them.
DeleteThe Mekons are another band that have pretty much gone down the memory hole, tbh.
DeleteThis is the second lot of anti- "Trout Mask Replica" sentiment I've encountered in the past few days, which ties in with the general piece (TMR was untouchable for decades - Lester Bangs apparently have listened to it 4 times in a row upon release).
ReplyDeleteAnother big fall out of favour candidate is Big Star - who were cited everywhere in the 90s, but now one rarely hears about. Badfinger too, although I suspect their influence had as much to do with their tragic history as their musical merit.
Another couple of bands whose reputations have metastized over the last ten years, although for very different reasons, are ABBA and Rush - both groups I wouldn't have even deemed worthy of consideration when I was younger.
ReplyDeleteThe most totally erased band of the Sixties I think must be The Fugs, who were at the very spearhead of the counterculture, but now may as well have not existed. A much later band that also seem to have been totally erased is Was(Not Was) - being ultra-hip and having big hits did not save them.
Yes Was (Not Was) are totally forgotten. "Walk the Dinosaur" seems to have overnight erased all the hipster esteem they once had. They used to get written up by the likes of Ian Penman as cutting edge absurdists with a dark satirical view of American politics + society.
DeleteFugs-erasure seems consequent upon the musical deficiencies - the definition of a band whose point was topical (and continued interest in would only be historical - as opposed to something people would listen to for pleasure).
On the original list, I would suggest that The Yes Album qualifies as having dropped off, along with all of Yes's other albums. Admittedly, this may be a strictly British viewpoint, since I'm led to understand that Yes have enjoyed a much higher critical appraisal in the States, but nobody has seriously attempted to uphold the art of rock as depicted by Yes.
ReplyDeleteAnd that surely extends to prog as a whole? With the exceptions of Pink Floyd (the most overrated band of all) and Rush (likewise, baffled by their popularity), nobody treats the fitful attempts to resurrect prog with any respect. Or are today's kiddies actually grooving on down to Brain Salad Surgery?
Ed's already mentioned Elvis Costello, which gets the nod from me. Much of Van Morrison? Peter Frampton? But I think you've made the wrong call with Bridge Over Troubled Water (though I'd say Graceland is arguable).
The most annoying aspect to these greatest album lists, to how they've evolved over the decades, has been their conservatism. Rather than provoking discussion, these lists seem intended to stifle it by their unwavering conformity to each other. Has a papal bull commanded that three Beatles albums occur in every list's top ten? (I have never understood the logic of the White Album being so esteemed, despite everyone agreeing that half the album should be hacked away). Case in point: in 2004 the Observer ran a list of the 100 greatest British albums, and boldly put Metal Box at no. 10 on the list. Good move, but the bravery was undermined by three Beatles albums and two Rolling Stones albums above it.
And while I'm here, may I remind you that the Mondays were already filching riffs from the Beatles when the Stone Roses were still a rubbish goth band.
Probably showing my age (and the orthodoxy I grew up) but not too many in the list of the Dropped Away who I'd think have any reason to feel hard done by their fall from grace...lucky to enjoy their fifteen minutes when they did.
ReplyDeleteSoft Machine maybe deserve better — that first album is untouchable — but the period with both Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers in the band was over in the blink of an eye, and succeeded by a decade-plus of music I can't imagine anyone listening to today. Wyatt might still have a glimmer of name-recognition? Possibly also King Crimson, but it's more the ’73/’74 albums that I could see still having some traction than the debut.
That's certainly true about the British Music press predominantly giving black music it's due in the 70s and 80s, particularly from the second half of the 70s onwards after punk. Compared to the likes of Rolling Stone in America where there was disproportionate coverage of it and heavy emphasis for years on white Laurel Canyon singer songwriter types. Also, didn't Bowie complain during the early days of MTV on how few black music videos they were showing?
ReplyDeleteBoringly back on the Beatles for a minute and their mid 80s low ebb. They had effectively become an archaic museum piece by 83/84 as had the whole 'sixties' really in the Thatcher / Reagan heyday. The mid-80s were diametrically opposed the the mid-60s in almost every conceivable way. McCartney himself hadn't played live between 1980 and his nervy Live Aid performance and he regularly portrayed a cosy domesticated image with the odd appearance on Wogan or Breakfast TV with sensible knitted jumpers and straight laced short hair. Very youthful looking still but a million miles from the bearded hipster figure you see in the Get Back film from 15 years before. There was also the adult orientated Give My Regards To Broad Street, the Frog Chorus, the saccharine Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder duets etc.....so by the time he got to close out Live Aid a lot of young people were probably wondering who he was or at least not remotely interested in looking at him. That's my own recollection as a 15 year old regular MTV watcher in 1985 with the mega massiveness of Springsteen/Madonna/Prince/U2 going on. Possibly similar sentiments were shared by the indie fraternity who cited other 60s acts instead.
As for Harrison his profile had pretty much disappeared completely by the late 70s. Also he had little interest in current music after the 60s. He hated punk. I heard him interviewed by BP Fallon in 1988 on irish radio where said he couldn't understand how the 60s had been all about love and then all this hate came along with punk. It was strictly the old boys club for him apart from the odd younger muso like Gary Moore and the like!! I remember seeing him on the news at a 'Shanghai Surprise' press conference in London -- letting Madonna and Sean Penn rant away obnoxiously with George the film's producer a low key practically unrecognised figure there! Don't think the journalists even asked him anything. Of course he stormed back with a vengeance in the late 80s as one of the proper legends for the Q reading / CD generation, as did the Beatles obviously.
A quick aside on 90s dropped away acts that spring to mind. American Music Club and Come were two heavily pushed bands by Melody Maker in 1991/2 but you never really see any references to them now.
Not sure if the current output of a group or former members of a group necessarily affects the canonic standing of their classic works... mind you, Dylan's Born Again phase probably had some deleterious effect. And a bit later Bowie's confused, often shite output of late '80s / the 90s probably depressed his relevance quite a bit (he wasn't at that National Treasure point).
DeleteYes you are right about American Music Club, I really loved that album California.... but it's not a name you hear bandied about these days. I don't think AMC and Come ever quite reached the level of making these sort of lists of Greatest Albums though.
Mercury Rev might be another name that's been eclipsed, both for the Yerself Is Steam phase and for the later windier, Big Music-ish sound that got a lot of plaudits. Although now I think of it, there was just recently a Pitchfork Sunday Review look-back to Yerself Is Steam (me and Chris Roberts namechecked)
Yeah, it's not as if Dylan won the Nobel Prize or something.
DeleteIt breaks my heart to say this, but the Mondays are a exemplar of profoundly important groups that dropped away. I firmly blame the critics for that. As much as I respect you, that includes you.
As I recall, Simon's Melody Maker review of "Yes Please!" was about as positive as you'd find in the UK music press in 1992 (even if it was undermined by the sub-editor sticking it with the immortal headline: "No Thanks").
DeleteEven we Mondays obsessives struggle with Yes Please!. The correct query is why Bummed and Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches aren't considered eligible for the top 10 greatest British albums in the world of all time... ever!. That travesty just underscores the harsh lesson that the best don't always win.
DeleteAlso, England lost today to a overwhelmingly better team! That's worth a smile.
Rugby is a hoax, mate. It doesn't really exist.
DeleteThe ABBA thing fits well with the same explanation of the Queen revival regarding the maximalism and pomp acceptance trend
ReplyDeleteThat's true, and they're both also symptomatic of the masses being wiser than the intellectuals.
DeleteAnyone else think that Springsteen has dropped away a bit?
ReplyDeleteYup, it's hard to imagine many young people listening to him - it's so much built up in reference to 1960s and where rock was by the mid-70s.
DeleteThe last younger-generation artist I can think of who was Springsteen-influenced - obsessively so, down to wearing a wooly hat in homage to Bruce's early look - was Badly Drawn Boy. And that was an eon ago.
Jack Antonoff is basically a Springsteen/Billy Joel tribute act, so I think he counts by osmosis
DeleteThere was a HUGE wave of Springsteen influenced punk about ten+ years ago, all flannel earnestness. The Gaslight Anthem were the main culprits, even bringing the Boss on stage to jam on one of their tunes
DeleteThe Boss played at Biden's inauguration, and he had his podcast with Obama. At the very least, he's still within the public eye.
DeleteApparently, there's discussion of making a film (as opposed to a documentary) based on the making of Nebraska (my fave Springsteen album). I'll believe it when I see it, but I still think it's significantly hyperbolic to cast Springsteen as having pulled up on the hard shoulder.
It's funny, because I can completely get behind the Dropped Away idea, but once you and the other commenters start listing specific examples, I start quibbling in my head, because I've seen multiple weirdos under 30 mention them. I think general, passive forgetting needs to be differentiated from active critical revaluation (Clapton is a known quantity among the younger people I'm aware of, just not a respected one, and not just for the racism and antivax stuff)
ReplyDeleteI certainly take the idea more as passive forgetting rather than critical evaluation. It's a case of certain artists occupying a smaller space in my consciousness than they used to, and of course in many cases that occupation was involuntary on my part - many of these figures were just ambiently present in a way that was impossible to ignore.
DeleteSo in the case of Springsteen, I wouldn't say he was forgotten, but in the mid-80's he was definitely as big as Queen in terms of his ambient presence, and now he is nowhere near as big.
was (not was) dropped out? are ye kidding me? heir early Ze stuff huge touchstone for about 20 yrs for all the disco-not-disco peeps, the punk-funk mavens, punk’d club crowd that came thru the door after electrolcash…Ze a massively hip ref point for at least 20yrs from mid00s or so. ‘Wheel Me Out’ deathless deathless deathless
ReplyDeleteDon’t know who were talking to or about here - the hip kids? averagely informed rec buying public? I think Cream would be a huge influence on the slew of pretty ok but really actually damnably so-so jammy psych bands doin the rounds, (or have been over last 15 years or so) the likes of goat, wooden shjips, that Australian lot who release 5 albums everyday b4 bfast, and the like.
Softs I can’t see being out of fashion with that sort of longhair doin’ it long and hairy, and wibbly and noodley crowd; up to Third at least, I’m Xer and I have a convo about ‘Moon in June’ with someone at least one a fucking year ever year since I heard it first and it fairly did me in.
Simon Simon Simon…drop Sardonicus ffs (deff a dropped out once massive thouchstone classic album, always was hugely overrated) and try the s/t 1st and ‘clear’ both patchy but v worthwhile for anyone who digs the west coast. and at push 1st side of ‘the family…
there’s a lil pocket of peeps who’ll always dig Rand, the diff then is that that pocket were all I dunno Rolling Stone & NME writers so the dude had profile back then whereas now he doesn’t. besides, ‘12 Songs’ is in the Woebot all time 100 and thus cannot every be uncooked.
Grow up to get bored of the confessional mode and you find Rand..the lit kids, the smart,weary and sneary…they’ll ferret him out.
the early Rod solo bits also don’t think are out of favour. chance encounter with Mojo a while back and it’s full of fucking artfully tousled hair kids tryna sound like Martyn, and happy/sad-era Buckley, and ‘Astral Weeks’…the teen Spotify to Mojo pipeline I call it! straight to classic and venerable, do not by any means linger on young, impetuous and silly. and those recs are I think a ref there with their sorta folk’n’soul meld not a millions of miles away from Van or JM.
‘Greasy Heart’, ‘If You Feel’ ‘The House at Pooneils Corners’ at v least off ‘Crown’, for the caj listener. For any self-respecting JA head it’s a pretty solid album, tho no not as great as Baxter’s (but then what is?) they’ll never be fully redeemed tho and good it’s the dizzying effect of their complete otherness to now that makes me positively thirst for them. they’re “too” out of time, to weird and rad and corny. no one could really do retro JA in the way u can do Byrds of even Dead; the one unassimilable band, so the one we need, ripe with slumbering negations.
uncooked? or even uncooled?
ReplyDeletealso Family, entirely mired in the 70s and poss my fav band of the era. marvellously oddly assorted influences, difficult to place, always changing, capable of quick turning moods…and this capacity for producing bracingly chilly wintering psych, plus featuring one of the all time uk rock singers in chapo; but thankfully irredeemable u might say, the facile bro cunts can have and keep Zep.
Family had dropped off the face of the earth by the '80s. I can remember an older friend in 1987 - about ten years older than me - being really startled that I had never heard of them. He started spluttering something along the lines "one of most important bands of their day" but trailed off in the face of my blank expression. I think he intuited bleakly the fading to insignificance of most of the things that had once mattered.
DeleteThen someone else a year later taped me a 70s comp which included "Burlesque" - so I checked them out. Some great stuff. But the singer's demented vibrato is an acquired taste. I've never managed to get into Doll's House.
I feel like you are confusing whether I think these groups are any good or still worth listening to, and whether they have any grip at all on young listeners.... whether they would feature in Top 100 Albums of All Time list drawn up today. i.e. those more objective measures of standing in the world.
DeleteWhich are hard to measure. Really I just have a sense of it that is semi-empirical, anecdotal evidence.
My sense of it doesn't correlate with yours in re. Cream, Soft Machine, Was (Not Was). Even during the 2000s wave of rediscovery of mutant disco, I don't recall them coming up.
Whereas Arthur Russell - he's a classic example of the opposite syndrome, not Dropped Away, but Risen Up. Because he was never so elevated in the first place that he could undergo a dropping away. Back in the '80s, only a few disco connoisseurs knew him as an auteur, the name behind all these aliases... And then there was Melody Maker, making World of Echo one of the albums of the year, publishing the only substantial print interview with him in his lifetime.
But since then there's been the doc, the endless reissue program, Tim Lawrence's book... and now a new biography by Richard King coming out in a few months.
And lots of my students know who he is and love his music.
At the end of the day, The Macc Lads, Joe Dolce and Russ Abbott still have constituencies, still get views on Youtube, so you can make the argument about absolutely anybody that they are still relevant, still influential etc.
DeleteWas (Not Was) used to have really heavy hitters guesting or collaborating on their albums - Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, Ozzy Osbourne, Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Kim Basinger(!) - and their contemporary profile is still minuscule. There is no better marker of long-term failure than that.
They did have extraordinary pulling power, especially for that Born To Laugh At Tornados album (terrible album for the most part). Isn't the young Whitney Houston on there too - prefame?
DeleteThen Don Was's producing career took off and their arc seemed to fade. "Walk That Dinosaur", I insist, blew them out of Cred Contention for Eternity.
well indeed, no correlation, since I was fairly immersed in that scene and a handful of was (not was) tunes, true club tunes like ‘wheel me out’, the bass-heavy, 12” mix of ‘tell me that I’m dreaming’, couple tracks from the 1st album on Ze, up to ‘out come the freaks’, but no way beyond, we’re huge in that mo and played out repeatedly. they turn up on comps from the time featuring things like material, daf, Italo heavy hitters..
DeleteNo arguments re: Russell, he was a big part of that mo and still everywhere (touch overrated I would say)
No I do think I get it, comments re: Spirit & JA are asides, I just notice this mass of droney jammy neo-psych bands all around - deff made by peeps younger than me, in their 20s and 30s, who would not spit on jammier end of Cream, much less on Softs; I also notice the previously irredeemable Dead becoming a ref point again. I’m not kidding, Mojo is full of YOUNG PEOPLE doing this sort of carefully textured niche retro thing, reff-ing those kinda bands.
my point re Randy Newman is that it’s probably always been a small coterie thing, but that in his prime, making his classic run of albums (1st 4/5 on Reprise) he will obviously have more critical pull in press since it’s reviewing his best work and so forth. again, there’s a v small space in the anglophone sphere for distanced, ironic, observational songwriting and it’s occupied by him and I dunno..maybe Warren Zevon or someone…and you just sorta grow into it when u get tired of the confessional mode, the ‘diaristic poetics’ of Dylan and Joni and Lennie so forth, I mean no one since has found and occupied that small expressive niche (or could say anti-expressive) since that I can think of…so I can imagine the coterie sorta maintaining ..it’s a word of mouth thing tho Rand now…it’s quite exiting to play ‘Sail Away’ to a kid who thinks he’s just the Toy Story guy.
‘Belfast Child’ cannot blow away ‘Thirty Frames A Second’, ‘There Must Be An Angel…’ cannot blow away ‘Caveman Head’, so ‘…Dinosaur’ cannot blow away ‘Wheel Me Out’..
Deletethat’s me again obvs, being a contrarian bastard..
Delete‘Was (Not Was) used to have really heavy hitters guesting or collaborating on their albums - Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, Ozzy Osbourne, Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Kim Basinger(!) - and their contemporary profile is still minuscule. There is no better marker of long-term failure than that.’
DeleteThose records, hits or not, were gimmicky and awful and quickly forgotten, and as such - in fact partly because of showy guests - markers of their declining cultural relevance, which they had, albeit briefly, early on, via the Detroit and New York post-disco scenes…because you can have influence via the endorsement of limited numbers of culturally well placed people, esp’y in clubland, where sounds (used to) slowly simmer & coalesce before spreading outwards as new sonic pop norms.
It’s the few great records they made then that became hip reference points again when all those post-disco sounds were reconsidered or ‘rediscovered’ in the mid00s, and became the template for critically lauded acts like LCD Soundsystem.
There’s other good records was bros did as predominantly dance music producers, (I think they were known as wasmopolitain mixing squad) synth-disco, proto-house things big in the underground nyc club scene then and still with investigating now.
Every act that once had a profile has a residual fan base somewhere, of course, that’s an entirely different thing, ‘influence’ is irrelevant there.
*worth
Delete'Wheel Me Out' is fantastic and there's some great moments on the debut LP - "Oh Mr Fiction". The whole concept of Was (Not Was) at that point was pretty bizarre - discofunk, but with this Detroit hard rock guitar element poking in, and all suffused in this dark, absurdist, cynical, social-surrealist view of America, coming out of end of the Sixties / start of the Seventies idealism curdled into disillusionment - not completely dissimilar way to Devo (there's this clip floating around of a young, longhair Gerald Casale being interviewed at Kent State with a bunch of fellow activists, by the BBC). Or it's like if Zappa and August Darnell teamed up.
DeleteIn a funny way, I almost bracket them as soul-cousins with Yello - maybe it's just because the same NME journalists who liked the one, rated the other. But they seem to be coming at the dancefloor from this avant-garde/high-culture or counterculture (in Was's case) angle. Like it's club music but it's highbrow.
Yeah ‘oh mr friction’, a whole overstuffed bag of possible new tricks for pop on its own…bonkers and brilliant.
DeleteZappa meets Darnell, or ‘Wheel Me Out’ - both dreamy and downcast - as the clubside Blue Oyster Cult, & as them that sense of post-60s disillusionment…but the dream being turned inside out…to remain (disturbed) dream: no easy escape hatch to quickening punky realism.
Tho social surrealist is spot on too - the paranoid chatter on ‘Wheel Me Out’ like the voice in the head of each in the exhausted subway become sparky campy concord on record, riding a monster snaffling groove all the way back to madness (or kettledrums, same thing), dance out the cinque-a-sept hell u just been through, proof u can groove to any mood. Also adjacent in many ways to contemporaneous Eno/Byrne work & esp’y ‘…Bush of Ghosts’ that tune, come to think of it.
It’s the Mudd Club, Dancetaria moment too, art school dance, crafty and brainy, with downtown punk and disco finally mingling, presumably via agency of the culturally promiscuous art scene.
Yeah like Yello and the wacky high wire act only really works on half a dozen tunes or so, but that’s quite sufficient in da club, u don’t need u know a whole rockist string of great albums to your name to have impact or import.
the clubside ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ indeed, how to miss a trick…
DeleteI find myself fascinated by these shifts in music taste/fashions as I get older.
ReplyDeleteA few other suggestions.
The veneration of Fleetwood Mac/Kate Bush among the under-30s - I do recall that when I was in the sixth form at school (1996-97) some friends of mine who were musicianly types seemed to dig the original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, but the idea of a young person listening to, let alone owning Rumours was a bit curious. As it turned out, all that was about to change.
I recently got a bemused reaction from some Kate Bush fans for saying that, when I was a kid, KB was seen as music for middle class housewives. "Naaaahh!!! Kate has always been cool " they told me. If you say so, but that's not how I remember it.
Simple Minds and Tears For Fears are really fashionable, now. They were once the two least fashionable bands in the world.
The Undertones are held in greater esteem than The Boomtown Rats, who were much bigger at the time. Teenage Kicks which was only a minor hit when it came out is now hailed as a pop classic. I Don't Like Mondays, of course, got to number 1 and sold a million and a half copies, but it now sounds really dated - Time-locked specifically in that very late seventies/very early eighties period that can be summed up in five words - The Kenny Everett Video Show.
The relaxing of taste strictures on pre-punk music, about twenty years ago, has also lead to a major re-appraisal of ELO and Wings - Jeff Lynne, once accused of being a copyist is now viewed as a pioneer. Also, have you noticed that you come across more Paul McCartney fans, nowadays? Not Beatles fans obliged to give McCartney his due. Not the American/Japanese obsessives who would follow his tours and dress head-to-foot in merchandise, but people who openly dig Paul McCartney as in Beatles/Wings/Solo - The whole story.
Ah well Kate Bush, in fact, was the original spur for me to come up with the Drops Away Syndrome notion. I had written a piece on her for the Guardian and then mused on the blog about how while she was nowadays a national treasure and a big influence for a bunch of art-pop female artist, as I remembered it, when I was growing up, during postpunk days, she was not taken seriously by the crits and the hipsterati. At all.
DeleteHere's the blog about Bush as uncool https://blissout.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-ultimate-in-being-uncool.html and then the follow-up, the original Dropped Away blogpost https://blissout.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-drops-away-syndrome.html
Fleetwood Mac are a good example of Drops Away AND Rises Up. The original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green were regarded as one of the greatest white blues groups around... but no one young has listened to that phase in decades, most people don't even know about that incarnation even though it had No 2 and No 1 hits. But the Rumours / Tusk (and even Tango in the Night) era of FMac has steadily risen and risen in cred and love.... It was particularly strong with millennials, might actually be fading a bit with Gen Z.
ELO being cool and fondly thought of is something I have noticed... must say I've not noticed that with Simple Minds and Tears For Fears, though. I hope it's Empires and Dance Minds, or at least 'Glittering Prize / Miracle' Minds.
Boomtown Rats are one of the great disappearing acts of pop history. Two number ones, front covers of the music papers.. Perhaps Geldof's second act as saintly bigmouth somehow erased the music? More like, its datedness, sub-Springsteenery, is the cause.
Boomtown Rats seem like a proto-U2 to me - right down tho the would-be messianic frontman - so when Bono and co showed up, they were shoved aside
DeleteI think the influence of Zappa and King Crimson can be heard in young musicians like Black Midi, Domi and JD Beck, and Black Country New Road, so they might have not really dropped away.
ReplyDeleteBlack Sabbath seems to have taken the top of the podium in the metal cannon, replacing Led Zeppelin, who I feel have completely dropped away, even though they are still remembered as "one of the greats", but no one seems to listen to them anymore. Since metal started moving away from its blues and rock roots, they gradually lost their crown.
One band that I feel has completely dropped away in the last two decades is The Clash (are the Sex Pistols and the Ramones still an influence on young bands? I feel they are, but I can't name a young band who follow their path).
Sorry for my english.
You're right about The Clash. It's quite possible that they're not even viewed as Punk's second band any longer. Too male, perhaps? I can imagine a young band in 2024 being influenced by The Slits, but not The Clash.
DeleteAlthough The Clash were a quintessential London band, their primary influence often seemed to be on bands from the provinces and Celtic fringe - Big Country, Wah!, The Alarm, U2 at their most martial and, of course, The Manic Street Preachers - A non-London band if ever there was one.
Surrealistic Pillow, Volunteers and Bark are also cool. The latter is pretty offbeat. Check out Royal Trux's cover of Lawman- perfect. Jefferson Airplane's music is definitely of it's time but that's part of the charm.
ReplyDeleteAt 63 comments - 64 with this one - this post is the most commented-upon blogpost I've ever done. Bravo to all.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Black Midi, Domi & DJ Beck, BCNR - I would say, honestly, Zappa / Crimson have Almost Completely Dropped Away, if that's the evidence of continued life in the culture.
You're probably right about Led Zep. And ditto The Clash.
I love Jefferson Airplane - well, the Famous Hits and Baxters, for sure. But I really think are utterly lost in terms of anyone under 50 listening to them. They came up in a class I did yesterday - on Goth - where I ventured that Grace Slick was the only precedessor I could think of for Siouxsie's style of singing. Nobody had heard of Jefferson Airplane.
Whereas Grateful Dead, I guess because it was a Subcultural Phenomenon, and then went on to found a genre with jam bands... that's much more enduring. Despite the paucity of studio-recorded stuff that anyone would want to listen to.
Thing is, they’re just as unlikely to have heard of Arthur Lee and Love as Grace & the JA, yet there’s a tangible but amorphous sense that Love hasn’t passed out of critical favour relevance, but JA has…or has just somehow fallen off the map, ‘dropped out’ in sense of not being explicitly ‘cast out’, just fallen out of critical consideration.
ReplyDeleteThere’s an overlap here, difficult to parse out, between what we consider to have ‘dropped out’ of the culture taken as a contemporary ’snapshot’, and what ‘ver kids’ are specifically listening to. if we want to consider what they would put in a top 100 it demand waiting on them coming of age, (a small selectorate anyway) and passing judgement on the stuff that we still somehow feel has cultural cudos, in the sense that it’s still part of the broad cultural conversation that all (inc yoot) have access to, ie regarding 60s into 70s likes of Buckley, Van, Can, Elevators, Love, Doors, Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys.
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Delete"if we want to consider what they would put in a top 100 it demand waiting on them coming of age, (a small selectorate anyway) and passing judgement on the stuff that we still somehow feel has cultural kudos"
Deleteyes I suppose I haven't really formulated who it is I imagine who would be doing this current-day assessment, it's a kind of a set of vague hunches based partly on the quite large number of young people I've spent time in classrooms with over 3 years of teaching (most of them music students) plus my own kids and their friends, my own friends and their kids... and just a vague sense of what's going on in the culture, what reviewers reference, what bands cite as influences...
To make the scenario clearer - one way would be to imagine if a NME-like publication existed today - whose writership is mostly under 30 (there were some older-than-thats on the staff, in editorial positions but most of the writers were early-mid 20s)... and this publication in 2024 tasks itself with deciding what are the 100 Greatest Albums of Rock / Pop / Rap etc. Of course there are actually publications that do that kind of thing - Pitchfork, Rolling Stone. But I'm imagining it as a Brit publication. Music critics tend to be more learned than average music fan and therefore take on inherited ideas of what's Great and what's Important, almost like a super-ego type effect.... So (as per the 1985 Dropped post), it could be that What's Going On would still be in the Top 100 today... I just can't imagine it being #1 still - at least not if people were honest about what they listen to and what matters to them. Received Wisdom on carries you so far, even for such guilty and dutiful types as rock critics.
I suppose I don't really know what that 100 Greatest Today would look like, in terms of positive inclusions, but oddly I do feel like I have a good idea of what would have Dropped Off or Slid Down Significantly.
One thing I've noticed that is really surprising - and I've seen evidence of it this very week, a bunch of young trendy crits on twitter picking their Top 13 Albums based on the Quietus Baker's Dozen concept - is that Sade is quite widely considered a Significant Auteur. Sade's elevation is as surprising to oldheads like me as the Rise and Rise of Queen.
Velvets, Stooges, Zep should be on that list obvs
ReplyDelete73 comments - it's a record.
ReplyDeleteDeff noticed the Sade thing; it’s partly via hiphop… that’s strange melange of stuff that passes in the US hiphop scene, eg also Phil Collins, despite untouchable status elsewhere, (& esp’y Drake repping her).
ReplyDeleteSlick is big. or not a turn off as it is for punk gen peeps. so as per ‘84 discussion also the critical comeback of the ‘Dan. but really that’s pushed by 30 something hipsters.
There’s the yacht thing (I mean, what is that outside a couple Michael McDonald albums? Christopher Cross? blue-eyed soul like Boz Scaggs & Ned Doheny? I never got it, and it’s also fairly long in the tooth now, that term)
There’s the AOR is A-OK thing. kids repping fuckin’ Toto or whathavu..
(not for me kiddoes)
I BET ver kids are inta JACKSON BROWN, (or would be if they paid attention) u know, they won’t be into Buckley but that smoothy sensitive sad-eyed Laurel Canyon ting yes…Joni’s stock has been risin and risin as well. The slickness again, everything slightly glazed and distant…those balmy fag-end of cali summer day vibes u also get on odd future stuff…stoned, distracted, wistful… they love that shit (that’s ‘Rumours’ too innit, so much a west coast record actually)
Dennis Wilson ‘Pacific Ocean Blue’ in that vein too, big hipster ref point of recent years. I mean I’m a Beach Boys head so yeah, great, glad Dennis is getting the props, and there’s some great stuff on it, but it doesn’t all work. Get yerself copies of ‘Today!’, ‘Friends’, ‘Surf’s Up’ and ‘Holland’ at v least 1st kids!
shit saying ‘get yourself copies’ sounds fucking ANCIENT doesn’t it..
ReplyDelete