Dropped Away, Part 2 - the 1985 consensus

Okay, let's see how things had shifted, in terms of the canon, slightly more than a decade after the 1974 appraisal by the critics of the New Musical Express (said to be the first time anyone had ever done such a look-back summation of Rock's Achievement So Far). 

Here's NME re-adjudicating the 100 All-Time Greatest Albums in November 1985.

 

The list in easier to peruse form. 

Much has changed since '74 - obviously there's a whole swathe of punk and postpunk potential inclusions, as well as reggae and soul and funk contenders in that eleven years elapsed.... 

But it's also the case that the shape of rock history -  what should be included and what gets to be taken seriously -  that's gone through some convulsive shifts - i.e. the rockism discourse. 

So there's a LOT more black music - Sixties 'n' Seventies soul... reggae.... even jazz makes an appearance.

This kind of self-correction work resembles what's been going on in U.S. pop criticism in the past decade or so - attempts to be inclusive and retroactively compensate for the slighting of certain genres in the past.

In the NME list, there's also, interestingly, some early rock'n'roll, via the 'Greatest Hits' album, which I don't recall being counted as proper albums on the 1974 list. Perhaps that's a kind of "anti-rockism" in so far as it's breaking with the privileging of the album-album as the canon-worthy format, and reorienting things in favor of the single. 

And then - partly to make room for new inclusions, but also reflecting changed values in the after-punk era, many things that were on the 1974 List have simply disappeared. Other eminences remain but have diminished significantly in estimation, surprisingly so (the Beatles).

But let's look at 1985's Brit-crit consensus from the present's vantage point. What on this list has Dropped Away, in the sense of no longer being something that an entry-level aspiring-to-be-informed young listener would feel some kind of pressure to hear? What artists are no longer on the menu, in terms of stuff that a forming band might take up as an influence? 

Get your disagreements ready, it's going to be a contentious ride. 

Right away, we have a possible contender for Dropped Away - at the very summit of the chart!

1 Marvin Gaye - What's Going On - 1971

I know, I know... sacrilege, "what are you thinking Reynolds?" And yet, and yet, I do not think this record, once considered an imperishable classic, has much currency for today's listeners. 

This, despite the fact, that young hip listeners are generally more likely to listen to R&B and treat it as a genre inhabited by auteurs. They listen to Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino, FKA Twigs....  

But strange as it may seem, love of R&B does not necessarily imply any knowledge of or liking for soul. (Even though the contemporary artists they're into often themselves love 70s soul, replicate its sonix,  sample it as Ocean did with a clip of Stevie Wonder doing a vocoderized cover of "Close To You")

One of the classes I teach is "Headphone Soul and Album-Oriented R&B". And I came away with the sense that things like "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" or "Pusherman" or "Shaft" were unknown to the students...  There's A Riot Going' On too.  Stevie Wonder. Al Green. Philly. 

And then if '70s soul, with its lushness and orchestration and even the odd synth seems long-long-ago, just imagine what Otis Redding or Stax sounds like. Positively antediluvian. 

For this generation, R&B starts with... maybe Aaliyah.  And even that is a quarter-century ago now. 

(Another reason What's Going On may have slid is also that it is a bit over-rated. "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" - c'mon!  I prefer Gaye in sensual-not-sententious mode:  "Got To Give It Up")

6 Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones 1983

A classic example of the parochialism of the present - there was such a BUZZ about this album (was it NME's Album of the Year? I think so) that it must have seemed inconceivable to the crits that the artist's stature would rapidly plummet. But #6 Greatest Album of All Time - what were they thinking?

I don't think I've listened to Swordfishtrombones all the way through since the year it came out, when I esteemed it highly; I did play a few tracks from it recently though in a class titled the Blues: Uses, Abuses, Mutations. Back in the mid-80s, Waits lost me with the next few, even Partch-ier albums and I've never quite got it together to get to grips with all the barfly albums of the 1970s.  

My favorite at the time, "Frank's Wild Years" is kind of a nasty track, isn't it?  Probably if I was to reach for a Waits song, it would be "This One's From the Heart" - but the impulse never comes. 

I might be mistaking my own weak cathexis to the artist for objective standing here, but I don't think so. 

(Rain Dogs, astoundingly, would be NME's #1 album of 1985)

17 James Brown - Solid Gold 1976

Same with Marvin Gaye - completely off the map for young listeners today. I  venture also that the breakbeat connection that might have kept JB current during the hip hop era has completely gone, given that breakbeats have not been a significant element in 21st Century hip hop.  As for the ballads, that kind of rasping, volcanic kind of singing is very different from R&B modes favored today, which are smoother and more poised.

18 Patti Smith - Horses 1975

A landmark record - but in that sense, rather like a historic building in a foreign city that people go to see because they are supposed to go see it.  Like tourists reading up in their travel guide or listening on those headphones they give out as you go in, this is an album that requires historical back-filling and zeitgeist-reconstruction. Perhaps the pure spirit of "Gloria" leaps across time, jumps out of its own moment. "Free Money" maybe. But "Birdland" and "Break It Up" and "Landed"...  inexplicable stuff, I feel. 

19 James Brown - Live at The Apollo, October 24, 1962 1963

See JB above. 

23 Otis Redding - Otis blue - Otis Redding sings soul 1966

26 Temptations - Anthology 1973

27 Aretha Franklin - Greatest hits 1971

More soul!

28 Jimi Hendrix - Are you experienced? 1967

Phil Knight proposed Hendrix as a Dropped Away contender in the comments to the previous post, causing me to respond in sad agreement: "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.  In a recent class on the Blues.... 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."

The blues base of much of the music is one reason Jimi Hendrix has Dropped Away... but the Experience are part of it too: the freeness in the rhythm section, Mitch Michell's jazz background. 

From the guitarist on down, the virtuosity required is beyond anyone's aspiring, but also, even more, beyond anyone's desiring.

Yes, they don't know what they are missing. But they don't care. 

29 Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance 1978

Fantastic album, as is the one after it, and the Datapanik collection of early singles. But as much as postpunk seems to be quite hot...  still firmly on the listening-list of young people... what they think of as "postpunk" has significant gaps... areas of droppage...  I think Ubu are one, whereas Devo (the group I paired them with in Rip It Up) are not. 

30 Robert Johnson - King of the Delta blues singers 1961

The blues in general, really.

31 Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Imperial Bedroom 1982

I feel like the function of Elvis Costello - in his time, in his prime - is one of the most unrecoverable things for a modern listener.  What even is this music for? It's sort of pop, yet simultaneously sniping at pop...  pop and anti-pop combined in some combustible, internally unstable blend of catchy vitriol...  I can't imagine what a modern ear would make of the verbosity.... the puns and wordplay.... perhaps, most of all, the tone of voice.  A seriousness, or sneeriousness even, that just doesn't travel across time. 

The run from This Year's Model, through Armed Forces, Get Happy!, Trust, (let's forget about the country album), to this record, Imperial Bedroom, is the  astonishingly sustained  peak of something, but also the ending of something. The last blast of Dylanism-Lennonism: the idea that words - finding the exact right formulation of language - have an inherent power.   Words as weaponry against the Powers That Be.

 Around "Oliver's Army" you can still believe, in part because EC believes it...  by "Pills and Soap", belief is tottering... "Tramp the Dirt Down" is just an impotent whimper, as ineffectual and silly as "Margaret On the Guillotine". 

 

32 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Anthology 1973

Soul, again.

34 Dexy's Midnight Runners - Searching for the young soul rebels 1980

Meta-soul! So doubly inexplicable. 

37 Bobby Womack - The Poet 1981

The apotheosis of Womack, by the criterati of the NME, is one of the stranger episodes in UK music journalism. I mean, for sure, he's a great singer... he's written some good songs... but even in his mid-1970s heyday Womack was not really a soul superstar. He had a few big Billboard R&B Chart hits, some solid-selling albums... but we're not talking Al Green here. 

At the time, though, I totally bought into it. Went to see him at Oxford Apollo (pretty great - but then again, I'd never seen a full-blown soul revue, so there was an element of first-time blown-away syndrome). Bought The Poet II and some of the '70s albums.... enjoyed them... honestly cannot remember anything much about them. For some reason I never heard and still haven't heard The Poet, the '81 album, on which his elevation was constructed. Perhaps that was because it was an import? 

At any rate, I feel in the annals of artists who have Dropped Away, few have Dropped Away more  precipitously. Perhaps precisely because of this mystery about the Rising Up in the first place. I think the framing was to do with him being the last of the Soul Greats still standing.... a '70s survivor. Part of it had to do with his contiguity to the Greats: guitarist for Sam Cooke,  accomplice to Sly Stone during the coked-out making of There's A Riot Goin' On. 

The warm feelings during that Eighties moment seemed to extend to anyone with name "Womack"  - e.g. Womack & Womack, the duo of Bobby's brother Cecil and his wife Linda (Sam Cooke's daughter). I suppose it's the dynastic thing - people do seem to love that.

This conjunction in the NME top 50 albums of 1985 chart seems significant

7 Sam Cooke

Live At The Harlem Square Club

8 Bobby Womack

So Many Rivers

Also noticed that the Poet II was NME's #1 album of 1984!

40 Elvis Costello - This Year's Model 1978

See the entry on Imperial Bedroom.

44 Parliament -  Mothership Connection 1976

Pretty certain none of the P-funk stuff was on the 1974 List... another sign of the huge transvaluation made as a knock-on of postpunk, the anti-rockist discourse, and soul-boyism. I feel fairly confident that this is not music on the radar of young listeners or music-makers today. 

45 Al Green - The Cream of Al Green 1980

46 Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On 1973

50 Impressions - Big 16 1965

More soul. 

52 Alan Vega & Martin Rev - Suicide 1980

Debatable, but I think Suicide have faded in the hip memory. A great shame, but the Canon is cruel in its ever-shifting reconfiguration. 

55 Madness - Mad Not Mad 1985

Christ on a bike, talk about the parochialism of the present! I'm frankly amazed that this, out of all the Madness albums, would be chosen as a Top 100 contender -  7 or Rise & Fall are surely far better, and the first of their greatest hits albums would be better still. I shouldn't think even Madness rate this  record. 

58 Various - The Harder They Come (soundtrack) 1972

Generally surprised how much reggae music has dropped away. If there's any continued currency, it would be the dub side of things. Even there, it's much diminished as a force of influence, compared to the 2000s and even more so compared to the '90s.  

61 Isley Brothers - 3+3 1973

Soul, but also black rock...  Not part of the conversation, more's the pity. 

66 Captain Beefheart and the Magic band - Clear Spot 1972

Trout Mask Replica retains some of its "can you handle this?" avant-cred - one of the canon of "out" records.  But Clear Spot, comparatively "in", is low down on the list of things a young hipster would check out.  Far and away my favorite Beefheart record.... they don't know what pleasures they're missing... 

67 Elvis Costello - Get Happy! 1980

See entry on Imperial Bedroom.

70 Lou Reed - Berlin 1973

The Velvet Underground remain in hallowed elevation, I think, but I can't imagine any Reed solo outing having much allure to the younger sort - maybe Transformer, for its Bowie connection and the queer aspect... perhaps Metal Machine Music for the same reasons as Trout Mask Replica...

71 Buddy Holly & the Crickets - 20 golden greats 1978

77 Chuck Berry - Chuck Berry's golden decade 1973

Rock'n'roll seemed old even when I first heard it, which must have been the early '70s. Give or take a "Summertime Blues" or a "Shakin' All Over", whose starkness still cut through, the songs and the legends - Holly, Berry, Haley, Little Richard, Presley, Fats Domino, and especially Jerry Lee Lewis - just seemed to come from another era altogether. The olden days - golden but long-gone.  The music  sounded creaky -  even next to contemporary records, like T. Rex or Glitter that drew on early rock'n'roll.

Oh it's great obviously - all this stuff that has dropped away is, for the most part. But History is cruel. Cruelest to that which is Historically Important, in fact. 

78 Jackie Wilson - The very best of Jackie Wilson 1995

More soul. 

82  Magazine - The Correct Use of Soap 1980

C.f. Pere Ubu and the things that have dropped-out of a beginner's guide to post-punk....  Magazine - once enormously fussed about, discussed about, taken seriously, seen as central.... have drifted to the outside of everything. I really liked Correct Use of Soap at the time, but in retrospect this music's claim to newness is not as starkly achieved compared with other groups considered to be Magazine's fellow travelers.  

88 Howlin' Wolf - Chess Masters 1981

See Robert Johnson.

89 Elvis Costello - Armed Forces 1979

Even more EC. See Imperial Bedroom.

91 John Cale - Paris 1919 1973

What I said about Lou Reed solo, applies doubly to Cale solo. 

92 Abyssinians - Forward On To Zion 1977

As per the comments on Harder They Come, the vocals-forward style of roots reggae is lost to time, unlike the dub side of things, which still has a weak grip on present ears. 

I feel that skank as a riddmic mode - the ambling mellowness, the warm keyboards, the gentle bubble of bass, the chick-a-chick smallness of the guitar - is something that the modern listener would find it hard to get their heads around. And then you factor in the cooing softness of the harmony vocals. The disjuncture between the mellifluousness and the militant / millenarian lyrics would confuse. 

Mind you, lover's rock seems to have won a small contingent of hip support (part of that self-correction poptimistic revisionism thing - a formerly demeaned young women's sound, bright and treble-toppy and syrupy sweet.... almost the hyperpop of its own time). Maybe this could lead some listeners through the back door into the non-secular and solemn sort of roots-vocalism. 

93 - Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True - 1977

You know the drill by this point - see Imperial Bedroom. 

 94 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes 1984

Love this record... I cannot imagine it coming into the earshot of contemporary music-discoverers. Like, what would the mechanism be... how would you know it exists, even? 

I thought about passing the same verdict on another inclusion in this Top 100 - Prefab Sprout, Steve McQueen, also a record I adore and still dig out now and then. But I feel like the Prefabs have just a smidge more of a cultural half-life. Feel like it's come up in things I've read recently. The ultra-detailed, super-pristine production would appeal to the modern ear. 

99 Undertones - The Undertones

Dunno why ... but the Undertones's brand of simple punk-pop perfection is not as widely known as rough equivalents like the Ramones or Buzzcocks...  Perhaps because they weren't quite as much the pioneers as those two bands... they came along that little bit later... they had bigger hits in the UK than either, but haven't lingered. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So that's 38 Dropped Away - quite a bigger chunk, nearly 40 percent, than with the 1974 list. 

Once again, here's the list in full - check if there any droppers-away here that I have missed.  I am already having second thoughts about letting through The Scream, Strange Days, Darkness on the Edge of Town...

1 Marvin Gaye What's going on 1971

2 Van Morrison Astral weeks 1968

3 Bob Dylan Highway 61 revisited 1965

4 Clash The Clash 1977

5 Television Marquee moon 1977

6 Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones 1983

7 Band The Band 1969

8 Bob Dylan Blonde on blonde 1966

9 John Lennon John Lennon/Plastic Ono band 1970

10 Joy division Unknown pleasures 1979

11 Beatles Revolver 1966

12 Elvis Presley The Sun sessions 1976

13 Sex pistols Never mind the bollocks, here's the Sex pistols 1977

14 Love Forever changes 1967

15 David Bowie Low 1977

16 Velvet underground Velvet underground + Nico 1967

17 James Brown Solid gold 1976

18 Patti Smith Horses 1975

19 James Brown Live at The Apollo, october 24, 1962 1963

20 Beach boys Pet sounds 1966

21 Miles Davis Kind of blue 1959

22 Bob Dylan Bringing it all back home 1965

23 Otis Redding Otis blue - Otis Redding sings soul 1966

24 Doors The Doors 1967

25 Rolling stones Exile on Main street 1972

26 Temptations Anthology 1973

27 Aretha Franklin Greatest hits 1971

28 Jimi Hendrix Are you experienced? 1967

29 Pere Ubu The modern dance 1978

30 Robert Johnson King of the Delta blues singers 1961

31 Elvis Costello and the Attractions Imperial bedroom 1982

32 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles Anthology 1973

33 Beatles The Beatles (= the white album) 1968

34 Dexy's midnight runners Searching for the young soul rebels 1980

35 Velvet underground White light/white heat 1968

36 David Bowie Young Americans 1975

37 Bobby Womack The poet 1981

38 Kraftwerk Trans Europe Express 1977

39 Bruce Springsteen Darkness on the edge of town 1978

40 Elvis Costello This year's model 1978

41 Brian Eno Another green world 1975

42 Captain Beefheart and the Magic band Trout mask replica 1969

43 Kraftwerk The man machine 1978

44 Parliament Mothership connection 1976

45 Al Green The cream of Al Green 1980

46 Marvin Gaye Let's get it on 1973

47 Sly and the family Stone There's a riot goin' on 1971

48 Ramones Rocket to Russia 1977

49 Sly and the family Stone Greatest hits 1970

50 Impressions Big 16 1965

51 Bob Dylan Blood on the tracks 1975

51 Bob Dylan Blood on the tracks 1975

52 Alan Vega & Martin Rev Suicide 1980

53 Buzzcocks Another music in a different kitchen 1978

54 Joy division Closer 1980

55 Madness Mad not mad 1985

56 Roxy music For your pleasure 1973

57 Siouxsie and the Banshees The scream 1978

58 #s The harder they come (soundtrack) 1972

59 Gang of four Entertainment! 1979

60 Velvet underground Velvet underground 1969

61 Isley brothers 3+3 1973

62 Joni Mitchell The hissing of summer lawns 1975

63 David Bowie Heroes 1977

64 Smiths Meat is murder 1985

65 David Bowie Station to station 1976

66 Captain Beefheart and the Magic band Clear spot 1972

67 Elvis Costello Get happy! 1980

68 Talking heads Fear of music 1979

69 Iggy Pop Lust for life 1977

70 Lou Reed Berlin 1973

71 Buddy Holly & the Crickets 20 golden greats 1978

72 Band Music from big pink 1968

73 Beatles A hard day's night 1964

74 Roxy music Roxy music 1972

75 Ramones Leave home 1977

76 John Coltrane A love supreme 1964

77 Chuck Berry Chuck Berry's golden decade 1973

78 Jackie Wilson The very best of Jackie Wilson 1995

79 Miles Davis In a silent way 1969

80 Roxy music Stranded 1973

81 Talking heads Talking heads '77 1977

82 Magazine The correct use of soap 1980

83 Bruce Springsteen Born in the USA 1984

84 Joni Mitchell Court and spark 1974

85 Doors Strange days 1967

86 Talking heads More songs about buildings and food 1978

87 Doors L.A. woman 1971

88 Howlin' Wolf Chess masters 1981

89 Elvis Costello Armed forces 1979

90 Prefab sprout Steve McQueen 1985

91 John Cale Paris 1919 1973

92 Abyssinians Forward on to Zion 1977

93 Elvis Costello My aim is true 1977

94 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Rattlesnakes 1984

95 Beach boys Best of 1968

96 Augustus Pablo & King Tubby King Tubby meets Rockers uptown 1976

97 Beatles Rubber soul 1965

98 Suicide Suicide 1977

99 Undertones The Undertones

Bonus beat: David Stubbs from Monitor magazine writes in to the NME to take issue with the Top 100 and attendant discussion, which continued sputtering on into January '86: