The Friday Fun Canon Discussion And Monster Poll
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER you love. You can interpret how strong an attachment you want “love” to be, of course.
The list of albums is from Acclaimed Music, a kind of ‘metacanon’ which lists the top 3000 albums.
To make it more interesting, answer these questions in the comments box:
1. What’s the WORST record on this list?
2. Which of the records you ticked did you love first?
3. Which of them did you start to love most recently?
Poll below the cut.
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I ticked Blue then unticked it but it was very borderline. I’m actually quite surprised VU&N is winning: it’s our Astral Weeks! (Except not boring.)
Only three votes for The Joshua Tree? Far out. #616 is going to be grimmer than I thought. Not my favourite U2 album (that’s Achtung Baby), but still…
And only four votes for Who’s Next? It’s fantastic! There’s no way that ranks alongside the crummy old Doors. I can only assume that many of you haven’t heard it, or else there is no justice.
Coincidentally enough, I finally picked up our number one favourite on CD last week (to replace an old tape) in a charity shop for a quid. Someone out there disagrees with the Freaky canon.
Tom, you didn’t ask us what our BEST was. The Velvets being in the lead is clearly the Citizen Kane effect, i.e. it crops up on the most lists when people are asked to nominate a number of loved/best films/albums/etc. My best out of this lot, in the sense that I’m always in the mood for it, would have to be Revolver.
Pet Sounds is another personal blind spot. I’ll have to address that.
I didn’t ask about best cos I thought it would arise naturally from the comments.
I didn’t tick VU&N – not heard it in years.
I suspect the Live At The Apollo listing may be a fuck up on Acclaimed Music’s part.
AM is basically an aggregate of a load of old and recent lists, which is why I said “metacanon” – I don’t think it’s definitive (obviously) and individual publications would probably work to include more recent records, but those recent records haven’t “settled” yet. I’m pretty sure the Acclaimed list was put together before the recent “00s round up” features here there and everywhere, though.
Swanstep – “astonished” because I was a vocal Led Zep hata for AGES, in a really annoying knee-jerk way. I particularly love IV though because it has all their best D&D stuff on it.
I’ve decided to listen to one of these a day – when I’m near a PC/can be bothered – so I’ll let you know if I have any great revelations.
Just to repost this, for comparison purposes: the rock critic’s top hundred that p.gambaccini compiled in 1978
Excellently off-canon entries on same:
Boz Scaggs by Boz Scaggs!
Ommadawn by Mike Oldfield!!
Romance is on the Rise by Genevieve Waite, ah yes, wait, WHO?
Ticked 15, and meant to tick another three but somehow missed due to exhaustion (the three I meant to but didn’t were Blood On The Tracks, Ziggy and Remain In Light).
1 – Joshua Tree is just appalingly bad, terrible, not-good and unpleasant.
2 – First one I loved would be either Goldrush or Revolver, both of which I’ve known since I was tiny.
3 – Most recent one I’ve loved is probably Remain In Light, but even that was a good ten years ago…
actual real name Geneviève Waïte, this gets better and better!!! (I am now always going to spell the “oh wait” joak with an ÜMLÄÜT öbv)
(The LP was produced by John Philips of the Mamas and Papas, whose wife she was.)
@30 Ommadawn deserves every exclamation mark it can get – equal best with the criminally underheard (but beloved by M.O. fans) Amarok. As with Tom’s comment on Ziggy, Tubular Bells is only about my 7th or 8th favourite Oldfield album.
Why After the Goldrush on this list and not Harvest, I wonder. Guess I’d better revisit Goldrush too.
Ah bvgger, I ticked the ones I *own* not the ones I love. I am an idiot. Anyway, the only one of those I really genuinely LOVE is Purple Rain, with Nation of Millions, Closer, Forever Changes, Remain In Light and Marquee Moon making it in on a good day.
Ommadawn is sorta kinda the P.Glass-esque precursor of how the post-house ravewave will violently split from rock-crit canonism, isn’t it?
@lex. Blue and Joni Mitchell more generally has just never worked for me on any level. I don’t like the instrumentation on her records, i don’t like her chord changes, I don’t like her voice (all the little jazzy slides into notes absolutely kill any feeling in her songs as far as I’m concerned), and I don’t like her lyrics.
I’m gathering from remarks above that the Doors are a similarly comprehensive strike-out for many people. And I’ve certainly heard people say similar things about, e.g., Bjork, Jeff Buckley, Morrissey. I guess very distinctive/idiosynchratic singers & song-writers just do tend to polarize.
@koganbot,19: Any new top 50 canon would surely include one or two of Autobahn/TEE/Man-machine/Computer World. Maybe there wouldn’t be support for a true alternative canon to this one, but one that was a little broader overall and that cut back the 4 or 5 slots each that the beatles/stones/dylan have here to allow that would be doable I reckon.
I only ticked eight – White Album, Pepper, Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Blue Lines, What’s Going On, Purple Rain and Bollocks.
1. OK Computer. Mewling whining self-important crap.
2. Probably Pepper edges it. I got it for my 14th birthday, I bought the White Album (which I love more) about six months later.
3. I got into Pet Sounds surprisingly late. Still 10 years ago, mind.
There are a few on that list that almost made it (Nations Of Millions), some that over time I’ve grown off (Queen Is Dead), loads that I’ve just never got around to listening to (Closer, Sly Stone) and a few that I still wouldn’t out of principle – The Doors and Dylan for example.
Surprised to see VU & Nico at the top. Some nice songs, but personally I’ve always found it hard to get passed its awful recorded-in-a-shed production.
@35 Sorta kinda; he had more Glass-esque moments (e.g. Incantations). Oldfield worked with Steve Hillage off and on at the time, who went on to play a part in post-house ravewave indie wotsit (producing one of the better Charlatans albums, for example). Unfortunately M.O. slid into a bland chillout frame of mind in the ’90s from which he has only occasionally roused himself, as if he used up the last of his Ommadawn juice on 1990′s Amarok.
I am slightly surprised at how FEW of these I tickyboxed, given that I <3 albums and have rockist old-skool tastes.
WORST: I think the Joshua Tree, but growing up in Ireland gave me a bit of an aversion to U2 and all their works, so I might be unfair to it.
FIRST LOVE: Sgt Pepper – that was also the first one of these I encountered. It was about when I was tiiiiiiiny. I think I loved the Best of the Seekers even more, though. (I still kinda like the Seekers.)
RECENTLY: Probably It Takes A Nation Of Millions, but the ones of these I love, it's the only one I didn't encounter when tiny or teenager. Everything else was in parents/relatives collections (Beatles, Pet Sounds), or tape-from-the-library-able (Dylan!) or in the teenage tape-swapping pool (Joy Division, Smiths).
BONUS! Which do I love best now? Blonde on Blonde, I think. I love the Dylan best from that list, and I love that best of all the Dylan.
And I rly want to listen to some of these now but I brought my headphones home last night (last day in current job!). Bah.
Well I ticked 19…quite surprised by that, but there’s a hell of a lot of stuff I haven’t heard in ages on that list, including albums I have ticked, but tbh need a reappraisal.
So:
1. Nevermind. Gotta say I prefer Bleach for it’s rawness.
2. Sgt Pepper’s was the first canonical album I bought with my own money. Dark Side Of The Moon, Pet Sounds and Who’s Next have always been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
3. Kind Of Blue. My first canonical download. Yes I made a conscious decision to buy it as soon as I bought an iPod.
@tom, 28. Thanks for the info. But doesn’t Led Zep 2′s ‘Ramble On’ have the best/silliest tolkien-y stuff (‘gollum and the evil one’ etc.)?
So where should I start on the Stones? And on Dylan, come to that? The multiple slots they get on these polls always leave me paralyzed with indecision, until the moment of curiosity passes. That, and the fact that an annoying cousin was a big Stones fan and an old school friend once bored me to death (in an entertaining way) with a Bob LP singalong. I enjoy some individual tracks by each, but what album should I be listening to? Sticky Fingers? Highway 61? Should check punctum’s blog, I guess (are you up to Sticky Fingers yet? Was it a number one LP?). [Edit: went and had a look. Now there's a Bob Dylan album I know better than to start with. But I haven't read your review yet to see if you can change my mind on even that...]
WORST: Probably ‘The Joshua Tree’
FIRST: Definitely ‘Nevermind’ – I’d just turned 10 when it was released, but didn’t really begin my music obsession until I was 12. ‘Slippery When Wet’ was the first album I ever bought*, and from there, it was a short hop to Nirvana and Metallica.
MOST RECENT: Led Zep IV. I’d never listened to a Zep individual album until about a year ago, just compilations.
* OK, first album I ever bought that wasn’t by Right Said Fred.
My attitude to Public Enemy is not unlike my attitude to King Crimson (who’re on the Gambaccini list): I totally understand why PE’S intervention has to be respected; how original they were in actual content; how exciting in lineage and linkage; how inevitable and important they immediately came to seem — but I really don’t actually like what they do. I would elevate literally dozens of less “political” hiphop LPs above theirs. Obviously the above is a ROCK not a rap canon — not sure that there can even BE a “general” canon — and rap expanded into a vast rich territory quite some time after rock was starting to get interested in organising its own valorisation, so the overlap is inevitably small and a bit pro forma.
Rory, read Koganbot’s book for good ways to start listening to Dylan and the Stones. Places is probably the 64-68 stuff in both cases…
@43: Ways to start listening to Dylan and the Stones: don’t even bother.
@29: OMG don’t put yourself through it Tom!
Could literally make a better list of 100 albums from the last two years alone.
@rory. Let it Bleed and Beggar’s Banquet are the two Stones records that really hooked me, and Freewheeling was my Dylan start (followed by Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde). All of these records are truly exceptional.
@47: Haha well late 80s when i wz yr age lex I felt pretty much exactly the same, only I was using undiluted punk dogma to justify my year-zero stubbornness. (I actually did like some of the poppier, prettier stones, but not the stones Kogan reps for…; I didn’t get Dylan at all, and loudly declared myself uninterested in bothering… what FK taught me see was that they made music about the contradictions in my own attitude; that what I disliked about them was a mirror not a difference
I resisted Dylan fiercely all through school, where he was very popular, and then suddenly crumbled the summer I left: I was given a box of tapes which my Uncle had owned. He died in a car crash about a month or two after I was born and nobody else in the family had really been into music so they had languished. I guess he was an early home-taping adopter, they were all copies – the most recent thing on them was Exile on Main St, which I didn’t get AT ALL (and only came to very recently). The Dylan stuff he had – Greatest Hits Vol.2 of all things – suddenly made sense and I started buying his ‘classic albums’ as quickly as I could afford them.
The Stones I got into from doing Popular – I assumed I didn’t enjoy them and then I heard them and discovered they were terrific.