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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Worst: I’ve always thought Nirvana were lumbering and formulaic, so probably Nevermind. I’m none too fond of the Smiths but not sure if I’ve heard TQID all the way through. Astal Weeks is mainly wailing and tuneless but there are a couple if songs I like on it.
First: either the Doors, Joshua Tree, Led Zep 4 or Ziggy Stardust.
Last: probably Remain in Light
I ticked over 30: I went through a conscious stage of buying much of the canon, guided partly by a 100 best albums feature in Mojo about 15 years ago. I think virtually everything on the list above I’ve heard at least in part, and mostly the whole (although there a few I think are overrated apart from the ones mentioned above).
In the pre-Internet days I found the various expressions of the canon very useful – a few on the list above (eg Marquee Moon) I bought pretty much without hearing a note.
@lord sukrat,94. Your observation about how infrequent musicians’ as opposed to critics’ (or joint critics+musicians’) polls are in rock as opposed to jazz (or film – BFI/sight and sound has had separate critics’ and directors’ polls since 1992, e.g., here) has got me thinking that rock/pop might be a very special case. It’s principally a young or relatively unformed/untrained person’s music. The average rock critic/writer almost certainly can lord his or her understanding of things over the latest greatest sensations in rock/pop in ways that are barely imaginable in other fields (e.g. film, where the no-joshing-around, hottest directors can be pushing 60 (Bigelow) or beyond (Haneke)). Perhaps musicians polls in rock are rare because we don’t at bottom respect what rock musicians say (no one does film actors’ polls for somewhat similar reasons perhaps).
if rock musicians voted for favourite artist, led zeppelin would finish a long way ahead of the field.
Mojo did a couple of musicians-voted polls, in the singles one I believe “Good Vibrations” won with “Waterloo Sunset” 2nd (it might have been songwriters polled about songs, come to think of it)
Those of us of a certain age will be able to parse the 1974 list and link certain choices to certain writers (i.e. MC5 – Mick Farren) I’m surprised at the relatively low place for the White Album. The relatively high place for Pink Floyd’s PATGOD may reflect the influence of Nick Kent’s reappraisal of Syd from around this time. You can already begin to detect fault lines between different camps at the NME that would lead to Farren’s ‘Titanic’ article/call to arms bemoaning the state of rock n’ roll the following year.
Making a tenuous link back to Popular’s current focus on 1987 here’s the NME readers top album poll from 1988 which illustrates the perils and pleasures of such lists – but who knows, perhaps Psychocandy will be restored to it’s rightful place one day.
1. The Queen Is Dead – The Smiths
2. Psychocandy – Jesus And Mary Chain
3. Unknown Pleasures – Joy Division
4. A Hatful Of Hollow – The Smiths
5. Velvet Underground And Nico – The Velvet Underground
6. Astral Weeks – Van Morrison
7. Revolver – The Beatles
8. Closer – Joy Division
9. Never Mind The Bollocks – Sex Pistols
10. Blonde On Blonde – Bob Dylan
11. The Clash – The Clash
12. What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
13. The Smiths – The Smiths
14. Imperial Bedroom – Elvis Costello
15. Hlghway 61 Revisited – Bob Dylan
16. Blood On Thetracks – Bob Dylan
17. Marquee Moon – Television
18. Forever Changes – Love
19. Document – REM
20. The Joshua Tree – U2
21. Swordfishtrombones – Tom Waits
22. King Of America – Elvis Costello
23. The Doors – The Doors
24. Steve Mcqueen – Prefab Sprout
25. Get Happy – Elvis Costello
26. Rattlesnakes – Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
27. The White Album – The Beatles
28. London Calling – The Clash
29. Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
30. Pet Sounds – Beach Boys
31. Strangeways, Here We Come – The Smiths
32. Rum Sodomy And The Lash – The Pogues
33. Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
34. Infected – The The
35. Horses – Patti Smith
36. Darkness On The Edge Of Town – Bruce Springsteen
37. Meat Is Murder – The Smiths
38. Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart And The Magic Band
39. Life’s Rich Pageant – REM
40. Rain Dogs – Tom Waits
41. Soul Mining – The The
42. Sgt Pepper – The Beatles
43. All Mod Cons – The Jam
44. Treasure – Cocteau Twins
45. Searching For The Young Soul Rebels – Dexys Midnight Runners
46. Parade – Prince
47. Hunky Dory – David Bowie
48. The Sun Collection – Eivis Presley
49. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – John Lennon
50. Exile On Main Street – The Rolling Stones
51. L.A, Woman – The Doors
52. Reckoning – REM
53. This Year’s Model – Elvis Costello
54. Kind Of Blue – Miles Davis
55. Otis Blue – Otis Redding
56. Dark Side Of The Moon – Pink Floyd
57. Bringing It All Back Home – Bob Dylan
58. Singles Golng Steady – Buzzcocks
59. Setting Sons – The Jam
60. Low Life – New Order
61. Murmer – REM
62. Animals – Pink Floyd
63. Abbey Road – The Beatles
64. More Songs About Buildings And Food – Talking Heads
65. Rubber Soul – The Beatles
66. Moondance – Van Morrison
67. Sign ‘O’ TheTtimes – Prince
68. Fear Of Music – Talking Heads
69. Substance – New Order
70. Born In The USA – Bruce Springsteen
71. Low – David Bowie
72. For Your Pleasure – Roxy Music
73. Lexicon Of Love – ABC
74. Bend Sinister – The Fall
75. Clear Spot – Captain Beefheart And The Magic Band
76. New Gold Dream – Simple Minds
77. High Land Hard Rain – Aztec Camera
78. Darklands – Jesus And Mary Chain
79. Grotesque – The Fall
80. Station To Station – David Bowie
81. Power Corruption And Lies – New Order
82. The World Won’t Listen – The Smiths
83. Beggars Banquet – The Roiling Stones
84. Berlin – Lou Reed
85. Hounds Of Love – Kate Bush
86. George Best – The Wedding Present
87. The Scream – Siouxsie And The Banshees
88. London 0 Hull 4 – The Housemartins
89. Blood And Chocolate – Elvis Costello
90. Sister – Sonic Youth
91. This Nation’s Saving Grace – The Fall
92. Safe As Milk – Captain Beefheart And The Magic Band
93. The Wall – Pink Floyd
94. Young Americans – David Bowie
95. Let’s Get It On – Marvin Gaye
96. Electric Ladyland – Jimi Hendrix
97. Crocodiles – Echo And The Bunnymen
98. Boy – U2 (Island, 1980)
99. Nightfly – Donald Fagen
100. Live 1969 – Velvet Underground
In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I copied this from http://www.rocklist.net/ – possibly worth adding to Populars Useful Links
And I remember the letters page was awash with “Wot no Public Enemy?” missives.
Mark, as I recall the Gambaccini methodology, it was basically Pazz & Jop types combined with the British equivalents (strangely, the only participant I remember for sure was Charlie Gillett, and I doubt many of his choices made it near the top); it also had a real small sample size, and though I don’t think Gambaccini said how he weighted his scores, it was obviously the ridiculous 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 or something like it, which meant that if one single critic placed the New York Dolls in fourth place or thereabouts (and someone did, hurrah!) it made the top 200, whereas if s/he had voted it eighth it wouldn’t have. Iirc, the people left out of the voting were the same ones Pazz & Jop has never been able to really entice, those at the dailies and the trade publications etc. I.e., the only critics in the world who might actually have been offended by punk. So, whatever critical squabbles over punk existed among the type of people likely to vote in a critics poll, this wasn’t an intergenerational struggle. Punk was named and conceptualized by members of the first generation of rock critics, and they plumped for the music, and for them ’76 through ’79 was the return of the good old days. Of course there were plenty of critics who weren’t with punk, but the difference wasn’t generational.
But coming from the critics who generally liked punk was also a critique of the canon, but such polls don’t capture the critique: the punkiest people who’d vote for the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and Clash might also vote for this or that K-Tel/Ronco anthology, and some would vote the Ronettes and others would vote Tommy James, and maybe an odd disco or Sabbath record would get a nod, and a U. Roy and Big Youth collection, and some Otis and Marley (surprised that Legend‘s not on the list up top, but maybe compilations were ineligible), but this wouldn’t show up anywhere near the top of a list, in ’78 or now. Whereas the Ramones and Clash and Sex Pistols would get votes from the classic rock people who weren’t fucking around with the Troggs and the K-Tel anthologies.
The big problem is that the list Tom posted up top might as well have been created in ’78, since the records that postdate ’78 – all eleven of them! – hardly challenge the aesthetic (except maybe Thriller and Blue Lines, one of which I haven’t heard). Disco doesn’t exist in this universe, nor does the rethinking of the ’60s that we’ve gotten subsequently. And what this says to me isn’t that “we” (whoever we are, the people whose ideas get compiled in these polls) all agree that what’s up there is the canon, but rather that we don’t really have any kind of consensus on what the story of popular music is, so the stuff that ends up in the “canon” is there by default.
The canon in 1979, as voted by employees of the Strand bookstore, NYC and compiled for Stranded magazine, a zine some of us put out, except we also allowed certain ex-employees and friends to vote in order to help get the results I wanted. The methodology is that I compiled people’s top ten lists and then added up the results. I didn’t weight the votes, so a tenth-place vote was the same as a first (and a lot of the lists weren’t ordered, as I recall). There were 62 voters. Here were the top nine albums (the ones that got four votes or more):
1. Blonde On Blonde Bob Dylan 8 votes
2. Horses Patti Smith 7 votes
3. Beggars Banquet The Rolling Stones 6 votes
3. The Clash The Clash 6 votes
3. The White Album The Beatles 6 votes
6. Electric Ladyland The Jimi Hendrix Experience 5 votes
6. Highway 61 Revisited Bob Dylan 5 votes
8. Let It Bleed The Rolling Stones 4 votes
8. The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust David Bowie 4 votes
So look, all but one of these appear on that canon list up-top. And this is from punk rock/avant garde central, NYC 1979. (I should note that Patti Smith had worked at the Strand some years earlier.)
But also note that the top vote-getter only got on 8 ballots out of 62. And if you start looking at the individual ballots themselves, you see that someone who listed Beggars Banquet also voted for the first Village People album and for Bionic Boogie and the Trammps and Stevie Wonder, that someone who voted for The Clash also voted for Little Eva and Nina Simone and Glenn Gould, someone who voted for Blonde On Blonde also voted for Don Williams (country love balladeer) and Ray Charles and Les Paul, another Clash voter voted for Wayne Shorter and Terje Rypdal and Elvis Costello, another Blonde On Blonde voter listed Thomas Tallis and Bela Bartok and Goro Yamaguchi, someone who voted for Let It Bleed also voted for Pharoah Sanders and Charles Mingus and the Buffalo Springfield, an Electric Ladyland voter also voted for Bach and Schonberg and Verdi, another Electric Ladyland voter voted for Eddie Palmieri and the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, another Clash voter voted for Al Green… You get the point. I took a group of people with wide-ranging tastes and open ears and the poll results made them look narrow and parochial.
I also compiled the results by performer, with the Rolling Stones winning overwhelmingly, getting 33 votes on 22 ballots, in comparison to the Beatles getting 19 votes on 14 ballots and Bob Dylan getting 19 votes on 13 ballots. But if you go to the artists who got on two ballots, the first ten alphabetically are the Allman Brothers, the original cast of Anything Goes, John Barry, Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Hector Berlioz, Big Youth, Blind Faith, Clifford Brown, the Buffalo Springfield. And John Cage was next, the first C.
“Canon” might be the wrong word. Common ground. Common reference points. Common knowledge.
From Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia (1969); turning to a page at random (I swear), I see:
EDEN’S CHILDREN
Eden’s children is a Boston-based trio which inevitably, and unfortunately for them, invites comparison with 1968′s most famous rock trios, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream.
[Lists band members, albums with track listings, and a single.]
EIRE APPARENT
Eire Apparent is a rock group that came out of Ireland and in 1968 toured the U.S. with Jimi Hendrix and other acts also under the management of ex-Animals Mike Jeffries and Chas Chandler.
[Lists band members, an album with track listing, and a single.]
[Next listing is for the Electric Flag; the write-up goes for a full page.]
kbot@107: “whatever critical squabbles over punk existed… this wasn’t an intergenerational struggle” — nor did i really mean to imply this, as i too was arguing that the gambaccini project was largely an intra-generational snapshot — but (and this may not be related to the gambaccini poll, with its small sample-size, but it was a thing in the air of the times in the UK), i think the intergenerational divide over punk was much more extreme in the uk, possibly because the rock press didn’t establish itself till a lot later… Melody Maker in particular was ALREADY considered the paper that covered “pop” in a serrous and adult way, but it was the weekly journal of record for jazz in the UK, and (from I would judge c.1970?) it had hugely favoured prog rock and “musicianly” rock more generally: its elders were on the whole quite hostile to punk, and quite scornful of the rad-hippie generation of writers also (who had arrived on the NME in the early 70s from the uk underground press, Oz, Frendz, IT, and were — as lonepilgrim hints above — in many ways protopunkers anyway: charles shaar murray, nick kent, mick farren… prior to their arrival NME was not very far from an entertainment-industry trade paper; certainly it wasn’t a rock paper)
the other wild-card element is john peel — as i say, i’m fairly sure i recall him saying he’d been asked to contribute and had declined (in this period he had a weekly column in sounds as well as his nightly show): when he began to feature punk and post-punk (and reggae) on his show, he divided his listernership; was regarded by the disappointed half as a traitor to rock ideals; but the engaged half would — i suspect — already have been chafing against this statement of the canon, as his refusal to participate suggests
of course he too was a product of the first generation of “critics” (Radio DJ as performative critic): so this too is an example of intra-generational dissent — but i think the two halves of his DJ career also mark the arrival of the intergenerational divide, even if he himself does not
it’s not very clear, but i wasn’t using hippe-punk as a temporal distribution, but an associational or spatial one!
(I gather from Roxon’s Wikipedia entry that her book was a vivid look at NOW rather than a statement for the ages: of course she herself died distressingly young)
“Canon” might be the wrong word. Common ground. Common reference points. Common knowledge: as i say somewhere above, I think you can’t have a Canon of Everything, because it’s about determining the limits of a usage or a form (or — if this is different — a community).
Very rough (UK-centric) rule of thumb: 80s musicwriting became a juggling of rival subcultural canons (some cleaving to one alone; others being deliberately pluralist; 90s musicwriting was purgative — pluralism was eschewed and became a kind of thoughtcrime, subcultures grew apart and communicated less and less; 00s musicwriting, well the net favours elective affinities and hence gulf crisis?
What I guess i’m getting at is that — based on my own response to this Gambaccini book as i looked at it in bookshops in 1978, the year I went college — the DIVIDE was already changing within ME (as a rockpaper reader of perhaps two years standing; for a year with vivid intensity) from a diachronic divide, this part of my sensiblity (gong fan) over HERE, this part (siouxsie fan) over HERE, into a synchronic divide (this — PROG — is my foolish past; this — PUNK — is my brilliant future). And the fact that I didn’t buy the book is a sign that, synchronically, I was rejecting its perspective.
Now at the time I was just one confused ill-informed teenage n00b, in a small rural agricultural town in an era of informtion scarcity, so this is anecdata only: but my sense is that the synchronic divide in US pop culture did indeed hit somewhat later than its equivalent in the US, perhaps just because the UK is smaller and other things were going on…
The relative suddenness of Peel’s audience changeover (and canon shakeout) illustrated in the Festive Fifty polls, as discussed by me here)
I think you can’t have a Canon of Everything
Oh yeah? How about this?
1. Dinosaurs
2. The wheel
3. The way she looked that summer
4. E. coli
5. A. Conan Doyle
6. Napoleon
7. Superwords
8. WTF?
9. China
10. Protein
But anyway, “Western Art” and “Western Literature” do have canons despite being too big for them and lots of people now screaming bloody murder, and those canons tell a useful story, even if it will be overthrown and replaced by other ones. “Western Music” does not have a canon that I or anyone like me would remotely buy into anymore, probably because the Official Good Stuff (i.e., classical) was so removed from so much of the popular, wasn’t just seen as different in quality but different in kind, that it found itself vulnerable to overthrow and marginalization.
Farren’s only a year younger than Christgau, and three years older than Cohn, which doesn’t necessarily mean that he can’t be a later generation. I’m the same age as Tiven and only a year or two younger than Metal Mike, and as close in age to Bangs as to Eddy, but people would rightly put me in the Eddy generation and Tiven and Metal Mike in the Bangs generation, not that it makes any difference now. But Farren is still pretty early, right?, getting criticism printed in the early ’70s according to Wikip.
“Punk” itself was perceived as more temporal in Britain than in the U.S. Tosches tagged the Heartbeats and Dylan as punks in “The Punk Muse,”* and of course for Marsh and Bangs it was underway with the Troggs and ? and the Mysterians, so it was music they were weaned on, and ongoing, never not contemporary. Whereas in Britain there was The Punk Rock Movement that challenged what had preceded it.
*”Muse” was as important as “punk” in that essay; his idea was that the punk on the street had visions of the great mystery of life and getting into Betty’s pants, the two more or less equated.
Unfortunately, the Roxon is more interesting as an artifact than as criticism, and what I mostly use it for is the list of Billboard and Cashbox albums and singles at the end, which of course one can find online too.
@Tom, 113. Peel’s festive 50s are new to me. They are almost hilariously unbalanced and narrowcast (and I say that speaking as someone who absolutely loves the music they champion). The 1982 all-time list tells the tale of an extinction-level-event/year zero that kills off almost all pre-punk. Looking at the next (only subsequent?) all-time list from 2000, 5 of the top 10 from 1982′s list (#1-3,8,10) survive into 2000′s top-10, only with enhanced status: they now occupy #1-5. The rest of 2000′s top 10 are 1983-1985 releases (mainly smiths and new order) with only Smells like teen spirit from the post-1985 world.
It’s a remarkable picture: a new regime takes power in a bloodbath and then spends the next 20 years further entrenching itself. I’m so ronery. Or maybe a biological model of population bottlenecks is helpful – either way, I can see why Peel might not have liked looking in this particular mirror!
So are we saying Peel killed the canon? Maybe it’s the case for the indie-centric pop kid, but if it’s through the likes of Peel’s Festive Fifty that the focus changes, and some may cite punk as the catalyst, then he may well have indirectly been rsponsible for the shift in focus away from the traditional pre-punk canon. If the Allmusic list is anything to go by, then perhaps the canon wobbled a bit and then re-asserted itself with maybe a few visible scars to show for the punk mauling it got.
I think the Peel lists are more like ambiguous tree ring evidence for SOMETHING happening – they might help explain why the canon started to feel a little oppressive/irrelevant/silly/odd, and they’re a good reflection of a particular kind of counter-canon, which then itself stagnated, much QUICKER than the “official” one I’d say.
Yes, I doubt Peel had much of a general effect — indeed Tom makes the point in that piece that he didn’t even have that much of a local effect; and however beloved he was to a certain agegroup, he was always treated as sanctioned outlier and pet eccentric (a very British kind of tolerance). But he’s a symptom and an early marker of a disaffection that manifested in the UK as more generational than it probably actually was: and also a bit of an awful warning against the pretensions of year-zero thinking. Howsoever radical you believe yourself, you only think you escape the past — whatever it is made you, even if it made you negatively, is always with you.
I was mainly making the argument (not very clearly) that while canon-formation was a joint US-UK affair, I think its timing and the inner dymanics were very different on either side of the Atlantic, for a variety of reasons to do with the respective media settlements. There isn’t an equivalent of Peel in the US — or indeed of the BBC — and the US rockpress sprang up more or less fully formed, whereas the UK rockpress had to colonise extant pre-existing publications, with the battles with a (pre-rock) old gaurd that this entails.
In the past I’ve argued that John Lennon’s massive multi-part interview with Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone in 1970 had a canon-forming effect: in that he took the various musics the Beatles had sanctified, and made judgement what was good and what was not. (However I have not reread this interview for many years, and am not sure how well this idea — my idea — stands up.)
Would it be fair to say that when William Rees Mogg wrote the “Butterfly on a Wheel” editorial in The Times in ’67, the fact that a broadsheet acknowledging rock (albeit about Mick and Keefs Redland trial), forced a change within the music press establishment of the day, thus including more rock within the pre-existing canon? Perhaps in a similar way to how punk entered the canon later. Mainstream acknowledgement is always helpful to a new movement irrespective of whether that acknowledgment is positive or negative.
No, the Times’s music critic William Mann had already written glowingly about the Beatles, and his review of Sergeant Pepper was carried as an editorial — this wasn’t unimportant in the sense you’re proposing (it’s what drew SP: to my parents’ attention, so is arguably the making of me as a pop writer!); and possibly also set the seed of SP’s subsequent overthrow. It used the phrase “pandiatonic clusters”! (Correctly!)
(Also I think Butterly on a Wheel is 1968…)
I’m not sure there WAS a pre-existing canon in the UK, in pop anyway: I certainly don’t know where it would have been explored or agreed on (MM would maybe have had a jazz one; NME was kind of a trade paper really, lots of charts every week but nothing to establish a shared retrospect). Pop and jazz didn’t even arrive on Brit radio-dials until 1967, except via Luxemberg.
And Caroline.
Worst – The Queen Is Dead
Earliest love – Thriller
Most recent love – Born To Run
Favourite, even though no one asked for it – Forever Changes
Amazed it’s After The Gold Rush that makes this list and not Harvest.
“Amazed it’s After The Gold Rush that makes this list and not Harvest”
this
“Worst – The Queen Is Dead”
but not this