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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Have heard: about 35 of these.
I’m setting the bar very high on ‘love’ – only about 5 would qualify.
1. Worst? Hmmm. Abbey Road? There’s something about that record, a sort of smugness (cf. also most of Lennon’s solo career) that irritates. I’m not big on hating individual records though, and even the albums on the list that overall leave me cold (e.g. Blonde on Blonde, What’s Going On, Forever Changes) have their moments. I’ll save my hate for the canon itself. It gets more ridiculous with every year that passes. As does the idea that The Album is a thing for which a canon is even needed.
2. First love? Remain in Light or Closer, which appeared around the same time.
3. Latest? Live at the Apollo, possibly – though I haven’t played it enough to know whether I truly love it or just like it.
@ #30 – that Gambo list was much longer IIRC. Went up to at least 200 and possibly 500. Was published in a fancy book which libraries often stocked. The album in the lower reaches of the list I’ve also wanted to hear – but at same time am frightened to now, as it’s bound to disappoint – is Playback by The Appletree Theatre.
@66 I guess I get what you mean when you say Amos and Morissette are anti-canon, in that they’re not reliable mainstays of lists like these, but I’ve seen both – esp Little Earthquakes – on enough “greatest ever” lists to really call them anti-canon; that phrase brings to mind genres that are inherently resistant to rock-crit canonisation, singles-driven or club-based or female-coded music: freestyle, r+b, dancehall, house.
I only have time for a couple of Morissette songs (though “You Oughta Know” is a stunningly well-crafted song) but Amos is a sorely underrated artist – superior to all but a handful of those on this list and the equal of the very best – who never seems to get the props she deserves for her songcraft, scale of ambition, singularity of vision and sense of experimentation. From The Choirgirl Hotel and Boys For Pele are probably my favourite albums of the 90s. It’s a pity that many seem resistant to her; Tom would be far better off investigating her work over this tedious list!
Highest Alanis on the Acclaimed Music list – Jagged Little Pill (#326)
Highest Tori – Little Earthquakes (#441)
Out of THREE THOUSAND so plenty of room for more stuff by them I’d guess. No.3000 is Black & White by The Stranglers so the bar is not being set high!
I voted before I really thought about it and therefore my threshold was far too low.
In retrospect the only ones I’d say I really “love” are “Thriller”, “Dark Side of The Moon” and “Closer” and probably at least one out of “The White Album”, “Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Abbey Road” (but the Beatles ubiquitousness almost makes it hard to really know what I think!).
Worst: “Nevermind” to think “people” (all right a large proportion were 14 year olds who hated their parents)were listening to this whining dinosaur bollocks in the rave era beggars belief. About as cutting edge (outside America)in the early 90s as Engelbert Humperdinck…
Earliest: “Dark Side of the Moon” had it as a 14 year old at the beginning of my couple of years of being earnest about rock music.
Last: “Thriller” just because it’s the most recent of my choices.
This list terrifies me, as I don;t think I’ve heard any of these albums all the way through. I’d be hard pressed to identify the artist on probably half the list, maybe more.
I’m 23, this is perhaps the reason, I am also in no way an albums guy, But still, the extent of my ignorance is disconcerting.
I should have added “The Doors” (I can ignore the pretentious aspects in favour of the overall atmosphere/perfect music) to my list of really loved although I prefer “LA Woman”.
What no “Electric Warrior”, “Off The Wall”, Nick Drake, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, anything from the post-1988 parting of the ways (even if WAS a singles medium)? – this list is USA-centric to say the least
Lex, without Dylan you don’t get Joni and Tori and Alanis and Ashlee and Lindsay and Taylor.
Here’s a very short thing (625 words) I wrote about Dylan just a few years ago. The intent was to make classic Dylan a living problematic force.
Think of the wind from Dylan’s 1965 mind rustling up dust and litter and emotion in the culture, still blowing today, delivering us whole heaps of jetsam and brilliance, Taylor Swift’s feminine me-first storytelling and Ke$ha’s celebration of vomit.
To make the ’60s classics potent rather than pedestaled it helps to rejigger our minds. Imagine a couple of kids on the bus singing “She loves you yeah yeah yeah” and they won’t shut up, just that refrain over and over, for twenty or thirty minutes until the bus driver threatens to kick them off.
Think of Jim Morrison singing “All the children are insane” and he’s talking about everyone you know. Neil Young singing “This much madness is too much sorrow.” Ditto.
I should have been a little more generous with my love ticks. The Doors and Are You Experienced?* still sound exciting to me. Electric guitar once meant electric adventure. I’d rate them higher than anything in our current top ten (Pet Sounds through Purple Rain) except Highway 61 Revisited and *maybe* The Velvet Underground & Nico.
Probably canons are the only way that art from the past plays in the present. But there ought to be ways that it (1) actually does play in the present, intermingles and takes its lumps, (2) is open to the air of the world, so it contains more than one notion of greatness and one style of listening and using, and (3) contains something of what it was like when the artwork was young and struggling, before we knew what was what with it, when it was surrounded by contrary sounds. An alternative canon might have K-Tel disco anthologies that somehow include Kiss and Bachman-Turner-Overdrive tracks because K-Tel couldn’t license enough actual disco songs for the comp. It would include Swedish pop reggae. It would include Boney M. It would include difficult music. It would include Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. It would include U. Roy. It would still risk being rendered lame in the context of our appreciation, so we’d have to attend to points 1 through 3.
(I think stuff like Popular is a good way of making music continue to play in the present. I hope I can make time to attend to Marcello‘s and Jonathan‘s similar efforts.)
*American version with “Hey Joe” and without “Red House.”
And of course koganbot = above-mentioned Frank Kogan, penny drops, clink clatter clunk. Looking forward to reading your book.
I regret that I only recently started paying Lord Sükråt to do my publicity.
Recently had a convo where I explained that the reason I rarely credit the people whose ideas I lift is word limits. Just realized that my Dylan piece is a perfect example, in that I only had 625 words so didn’t mention that I took the “He didn’t know his place” argument (the “uppity” half, that is) straight from Greil Marcus’s review of Albert Goldman’s Elvis book in the Village Voice. Anyway, obv. I do have the space here.
As for a countercanon: this list has no country, no makeout music, no swing, little jazz, little funk, very little that has anything to do with dub, dancehall, disco, hip-hop, freestyle, house, rave, Italodisco, bosh, post-soul r&b, metal – so very little of the amazing changes that have gripped my musical world for the last forty years, and only one album prior to the last forty-five. But a lot of that music has resisted consensus and canonization.
@rory 27. #616 may indeed be scorned when it comes up, but it did have that rather that nifty Hollywood remix (+ its associated great vid.). Indeed I don’t remember hearing the album mix (or seeeing its vid. – I never saw the movie either) at the time: the remix+hip.vid. was *that* dominant. My experience was that lots of people who were otherwise completely allergic to U2, liked that remix a lot, danced merrily to it, etc..
@Koganbot. Thanks for your Dylan piece. I have to say that watching Mad Men the last year or two has given me a much sharper sense of the cultural and personal energies that were around in the early ’60s that Dylan and the Beatles really burst out of.
I only truly love 5 of the albums on that list, with Exile on Main St and After The Goldrush at the top.
The worst record on there – take a bow Bono.
The one I loved first was probably Highway 61, although I wouldn’t vote for it now, as I can barely listen to Bob Dylan anymore.
That list of ‘canonical’ albums invokes feelings mainly of – yeah used to like that, Oh God I remember really thinking I should like that. etc etc. Very few of those records are fun to listen to. Several are truly terrible.
The Beatles I find hard to love because I don’t feel I am experiencing listening to them first hand. But I do really like side 2 of Abbey Road and (this will sound very pompous) my own edit of The White Album.
Revolver I find quite a depressing listen and have never understood its popularity.
Public Enemy, Sly Stone and Astral Weeks all just missed the cut – all good albums that I like and at times have loved. But I don’t really listen to them much nowadays.
And it’s a shame we’ve had to endure Radiohead and U2 for so long.
Would have voted 6 had Rumours made the list….that’s one of the few ‘canon’ albums that I have never fallen out of love with
When the 1978 canon was mooted — no one has jumnped in to say there were earlier attempts, so I’m going to stick with my claim that this was foundational — it was an attempt to summarise c.20 years of a particular strand of music: of importance to the summarisers. This canon list, by contrast, summarises c.55 years of several strands of music. So — to use a phrase I consider hugely silly — it’s apples and oranges. Twenty years is a meaningful slice of one generation’s experience: a collective lookback is not only achievable, but reasonable (leaving aside whether Gambaccini’s methodology was acceptable). A 55-year-slice has to drop across the experiences of several generations (even if we accept that where and how we draw the boundaries is contentious): as a summary, it can’t be a snapshot of shared experience — because that “shared” experience contains what an old friend-foe of mine unhelpfully terms “cleavage”. I’d argue (so would he) that the generations were also divided against themselves; but I think a correct use of canon can probably elucidate that. This aggregate canon smooshes together division within generation and division between generation; I don;t see how to “use it correctly” to resurrest this distinction. The sense of its being stifling is surely that you literally can’t imagine half of its components ever vanishing from the list — because the methodology is skewed to ensure the won’t.
(One of the things that was so exciting at the time about punk’s break with its immediate past was that it acknowledged “cleavage” as a fact: but this actually only retains meaning if you continue to valorise noth sides of the split; which is why — tho I love the Pistols, and regard the impact of Lydon’s squiggly intellect on my own as one of the shaping experiences of my life — I think Rosie is basically correct to say that the routinisation of punk as a value has ultimately turned things more stupid. I dare say were Andypandy’s rival aesthetic to be established without opposition, and all the rockchat it opposes swept into oblivion, this too would enforce stupidity rather than crackling intelligence…)
(Frank K’s book is also about this process of routinisation: “renedered lame in the context of our appreciation” — I am excited that I am to be PAID for saying such things! The invoice is in the mail!)
lots of typos there: i blame the “impact of Lydon’s squiggly intellect on my own”
These things are, ipso facto representative of those who devise them. So the classic canons of whatever year represent the views of those who write about these thigs in the specialist media. And the poll whe have before us reflects the views of the sort of people who are following Popular. More specifically, those who are following Popular at a point in its trajectory where it’s covering the pop music of the mid-to-late 80s. Having said that, I’m gratified to see that the top five albums in the poll at the time I am writing are very much the albums of my era.
I wonder if the result would be different if the poll had been taken when Popular was covering the T-Rex/Slade era.
I keep thinking of more and more albums that I would put in a personal canon, to the point where it seems pointless – all such lists are subjective after all. And in the end there are only albums that I love; I wouldn’t care to try to rank them.
(But this list is not at all derived from Popular input: as Tom says, it’s borrowed wholesale from Acclaimed Music — all we’ve done here is vote on their list… )
(Popular’s own canon list would be strange and interesting i suspect…)
I trump sukrat by claiming that the 1974 NME critics’ poll is the very first attempt to set the canon;
1. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – The Beatles
2. Blonde On Blonde – Bob Dylan
3. Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys
4. Revolver – The Beatles
5. Highway 61 Revisited – Bob Dylan
6. Electric Ladyland – Jimi Hendrix
7. Are You Experienced? – Jimi Hendeix
8. Abbey Road – The Beatles
9. Sticky Fingers – The Rolling Stones
10. Music From Big Pink – The Band
11. Let It Bleed – The Rolling Stones
12. Layla – Derek & The Dominoes
13. The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground
14. Golden Decade Vol 1 – Chuck Berry
15. Rubber Soul – The Beatles
16. Tommy – The Who
17. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel
18. Hunky Dory – David Bowie
19. Beggar’s Banquet – The Rolling Stones
20. Disraeli Gears – Cream
21. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn – Pink Floyd
22. My Generation – The Who
23. Crosby, Stills & Nash – Crosby, Stills & Nash
24. The Rolling Stones – The Rolling Stones
25. Imagine – John Lennon
26. Tapestry – Carole King
27. Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
28. Freewheelin’ – Bob Dylan
29. Back In The USA – MC5
30. Deja Vu – Crosby, Stills & Nash
31. The Band – The Band
32. Gasoline Alley – Rod Stewart
33. A Hard Day’s Night – The Beatles
34. Every Picture Tells A Story – Rod Stewart
35. Led Zeppelin 4 – Led Zeppelin
36. The Doors – The Doors
37. In The Court Of The Crimson King – King Crimson
38. Exile On Main Street – The Rolling Stones
39. The Beatles – The Beatles
40. The Soft Machine – Soft Machine
41. Hot Rats – Frank Zappa
42. Traffic – Traffic
43. Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart
44. Music From A Dolls House – Family
45. Talking Book – Stevie Wonder
46. Anthology – Smoky Robinson & The Miracles
47. Strange Days – The Doors
48. Led Zeppelin II – Led Zeppelin
49. Otis Blue – Otis Redding
50. Stand Up – Jethro Tull
51. Big 16 – The Impressions
52. Forever Changes – Love
53. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere – Neil Young
54. Sweet Baby James – James Taylor
55. Fifth Dimension – The Byrds
56. Band On The Run – Wings
57. The Man Who Sold The World – David Bowie
58. We’re Only In It For The Money – Frank Zappa
59. Get Your Ya-Yas Out – The Rolling Stones
60. Beck-Ola – Jeff Beck
61. Raw Power – The Stooges
62. Smiley Smile – The Beach Boys
63. Astral Weeks – Van Morrison
64. Loaded – The Velvet Underground
65. Greatest Hits – Aretha Franklin
66. With The Beatles – The Beatles
67. Blue – Joni Mitchell
68. Freak Out – Frank Zappa
69. After The Gold Rush – Neil Young
70. Stephen Stills – Stephen Stills
71. Johnny Winter – Johnny Winter
72. With A Little Help From My Friends – Joe Cocker
73. The Yes Album – Yes
74. Moondance – Van Morrison
75. A Wizard, A True Star – Todd Rundgren
76. Plastic Ono Band – John Lennon
77. Crown Of Creation – Jefferson Airplane
78. LA Woman – The Doors
79. There’s A Riot Going On – Sly & The Family Stone
80. Who’s Next – The Who
81. Electric Music For The Mind & Body – Country Joe & The Fish
82. King Of The Delta Blues Singers – Robert Johnson
83. Best Of The Beach Boys Volume 1 – The Beach Boys
84. Songs For A Seagull – Joni Mitchell
85. Bluesbreakers – John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
86. Mr Fantasy – Traffic
87. Bringing It All Back Home – Bob Dylan
88. Greatest Hits Volume 2 – Elvis Presley
89. White Light/White Heat – The Velvet Underground
90. Moby Grape – Moby Grape
91. Cheap Thrills – Big Brother & The Holding Company
92. Dark Side Of The Moon – Pink Floyd
93. Gris-Gris – Doctor John
94. Music Of The Mind – Stevie Wonder
95. Stranded – Roxy Music
96. Surf’s Up – The Beach Boys
97. 12 Songs – Randy Newman
98. The 12 Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus – Spirit
99. Sailor – The Steve Miller Band
100. Goat’s Head Soup – The Rolling Stones
Who voted in that, though, Billy? NME writers only, or a broader swathe? Magazines run their OWN polls all the time: magazine polls perform an important function — as it was not at that time termed — establishing the brand and policing the niche within its own readership.
I think the Gambaccini poll was doing something slightly different (not least because it was published as a book; which means a one-off readership that doesn’t have to be nurtured and maintained). It polled old and young, hippies and punks, US and UK commentators, writers and radio DJs: was (I am arguing) making a broader bid for generation overview.
(Interestingly Gambaccini didn’t poll musicians themselves, I don’t think — indeed I’m not sure i’ve ever SEEN such a poll in rockworld… jazzworld much more likely to poll musicians and set them off against writers. Did old-school MM ever poll musicians only? It was far more musician-centric in the 70s than its rivals — this is actually one of the reasons I’ve always been somewhat sour about the late 80s ascendency at MM, beyond mere sibling rivalry: I think something valuable was unthinkingly destroyed at MM during the 80s.) [/Old man rambling grumpily on...]
It was just the writers, its true, but I think that it was the first time that anyone had tried the exercise – about the same time, NME published the equally canon-setting Book of Rock. The missing no. 100 was voted for by the readers, amongst whom one lucky winner won all 100 LPs – a serious prize in an age of musical scarcity!
Lillian Roxon’s Encyclopedia of rock was the very first of thaqt kind of book — I’ve never seen a copy, and would very much like to. I have two very VERY tattered editions of the NME Book of Rock, which was pretty formative for me — not the very first edition though, sadly. (Sadly for me.) (In all possible senses of sad obv…)
Had Rolling Stone and/or Creem really not done similar polls previously? Very interesting if yr right about that
Mark @ 92 – you misunderstand, or maybe I didn’t make myself clear. The list, I agree, is derived from elsewhere. The way this group votes on it is determined by its self-selecting nature.
Yes, I agree with that Rosie — it was meant as a general corrective to various people saying “but where is KRAFTWERK”? I guess the distinction I’m trying to make is that a given community’s own canon-formation is indeed part of the natural self-grooming maintenance of that community’s purpose and integrity: where I think Gambaccini’s proposed canon differs from say the NME’s, is that in the second case, the community is the readership, which may want tweaking but is basically pre-established; whereas in the first, the community is in some sense out there to be discovered (who will buy this book and adopt this canon?)
And the distinction between a canonic list popular drew up and voted on, and our responses to this parachuted-in Acclaimed Music canon, is that we don’t have any real sense of where or what the relevant community is — pre-established or to-be-established? pan-generational? — that we’re responding to. How do we know if we feel at home in it or want to leave it? Or wish to send fraternal greetings from afar, or explosive brickbats?
what even is a brickbat?
“A piece of brick used as a missile” – I’d never thought to look that up!
Does ‘The Sun Sessions’ never appear on these lists anymore? It always used to when I took such things seriously in the 1980s. That’s possibly my favourite album in the absolute officially accepted history of rock canon.