“I think the article’s conclusion was a bit rough, unfortunately. The thing I’m wondering about is really the idea of importance – if a record is actually “important”, and if the people who say it is are doing their jobs, then its impact on pop should be such that you can construct an accurate image of it without ever really hearing it.”

So the fault is partly mine – I was finishing a column in something of a hurry.

(I deleted a much longer, much crosser post… I really hate it when Simon gets into this dickish and obnoxiously inaccurate mode, but I’m frazzled and on-deadline, and have no will at all to refight ancient bald-men-over-comb wars. I just wish he’d cut it out, and actually for a change try and do what critics are meant to do, which is understand stuff OUTSIDE their own parochial class-and-culture-bound theories. But SR and I seem doomed to spend eternity at either end of a very long tunnel on this one… )

^^This is Mark Sinker, it seems boringly necessary to have to state, and Simon’s and my disagreements are as long-standing as our friendship, unfortunately.

Having said that, I’m intrigued by the “Rock-Critical legend” he teases us with. May be a former Creem contributor, perhaps?

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2011/10/quite-contrary-tom-ewing-on-never_11.html

How well does anyone know these Classic Albums anyway? Everyone’s heard individual tracks off most of them, but heard together in sequence? What does it mean for a sixteen-year-old kid to listen to Nevermind for the first time; for such a supposedly “canonical” record it hardly ever gets played on the radio – the radio being torn, through fear, between anguishly glueing itself to NOW, NOW, NOW and cremating itself in a comforting broth of 200 “oldies” that will get computer-played again and again because it stops mothers from crashing their cars or burning the lunch, or it’s nice music to which to paint the shed/ceiling, and anyway all of it is based on fear; with the consequence that out of all of these records listed above, virtually none is handed to a contemporary audience on a plate. The Smiths, such a sausage band (please note: I habitually use the word “sausage” as a substitute for “ic*n*c”) – when was the last time you heard them on Radio 2?

So all of this is spoken about and humbly nodded towards but, as I said, I suspect hardly any of them are played (except for individual tracks) or listened to; why should you? They’re there, on your shelves, in your hard drive – why ought you make the effort and listen to them? Except that “make the effort” makes listening to music sound like PE class.

Maybe it’s because they might all sound…different. You do “miss out” on things as they’re happening – everybody does, via prejudice or overload or indifference – but come back to them like a swimmer might stumble upon an old ship, or raft; who were these people, what were they saying, why were they so revered, and…above all…what does it say about how and where and why “I” stand in the world?

But more often than not the albums we DO know, have memorised by heart, are the ones which hit us when we didn’t have Lots Of Records, when we were still young and learning, when records caught you and embraced you for weeks, maybe months, on end. The ones you have time to get into when “now” happens to be your time.

In response to the three questions at the top my answer to all of them would have to be Dark Side Of The Moon – it spoiled me, it opened I don’t know how many doors for me, it then caused stupid denial, and then you come back to it and realise that just because everybody says it’s the greatest album ever made doesn’t necessarily not make it so (this is NOT what I’m saying since that’s going back into what needs to be gotten away from NONETHELESS join some dots).

Nevermind and my thoughts on same will have to wait until I get to writing about it, sideways, on the album blog.*

*I don’t think as a writer I do “now” very well, anyway; it’s always my “now” and sometimes it refracts and proves me totally wrong but even when it reflects I still think “well I’m missing something, still learning…” Oddly enough, getting into the past helps me see “now” a lot more clearly.

And still it ended up as hundreds and hundreds of words. I can’t explain.

That’ll be £100 to you Guv’nor!

i ticked about ten, though it would that would have at least doubled if it had been ‘like a lot’.
1) i hesitate slightly to call it the worst, but i’ve never managed to like a single second of ‘marquee moon’, so worst it is;
2) ziggy stardust was my first love – i spent my early teens bog eyed with excitement about it
3) ‘blood on the tracks’ is the one i’ve grown to love most recently. i’ve had it for about fifteen years, pretty much as long as i’ve liked dylan but, inexplicably, until a couple of years ago i somehow managed not to notice that it is absolutely f-cking wonderful. possibly this was because it’s one of the few dylan records that works as pretty, unobtrusive background music and so that’s how i used to listen to it. more likely, i’m just an idiot.

First one I remember owning and loving was Never Mind The Bollocks, but I had heard and loved large chunks of Thriller, Purple Rain and Abbey Road by then.

The one I started loving most recently is Remain in Light. I’ve had the album forever and probably haven’t listened to it from beginning to end in over a decade, but “Born Under Punches” completely knocked me out when I heard on a mix CD recently, in a way that it never had before, and it’s made my memories of everything else on the album sound a whole lot better. I need to go back and listen to the whole thing pronto.

Nice point @205, swanstep.

(On the music buyer angle: the stores selling physical music are naturally still going to push every repackaging of Beatles and Stones albums they can, because the CD buyers walking through the door are 40+, 50+, and are disproportionately interested in them. That’s just business. And perhaps that shapes our perception of the music business still being dominated by the old guard. Anyone can get a sense at a glance of what’s selling in physical format just by wandering around HMV; we can’t do that as easily online, where the teens and 20-somethings are buying – or not buying.)

In the meantime, though, younger music fans have had to deal with and respond to the rock canon much as the baby boomers had to respond to the legacy of the second world war. I grew up having to think and talk about the Vietnam War and its legacy (not least in music) even though I was four when Australia’s troops were pulled out of it. The Thatcher years no doubt cast a similar shadow over today’s UK 20-somethings. We can’t escape what’s gone before us, and we shouldn’t expect to, because it’s how a culture perpetuates itself: by handing on what it values the most, and hoping that later generations will want to preserve it, or some of it. That doesn’t mean that later generations are bound by a tradition or a canon, because we get to pick and choose, to modify, supplement and discard. But that process is a contested one, because you have different generations all taking part, arguing about what’s worth keeping. That argument inevitably involves the exposure of fresh young minds to old ideas (and artifacts), because they have to know what it is they’re rejecting or accepting. I can’t say anything about whether some entries on the list above are still worth exalting, because I haven’t heard them.

So in that light, a thread like this is still valuable, even if it’s an old debate. Or is it so old? In Internet years, in pop years, sure; but in generational terms, historical terms? Not that old, really. And we can’t know whether we’re still halfway through it or actually close to the end of it. These may be the last days of the 1970s rock canon, for all we know, and our discussions and polls could be part of the formation of a new one. Look at the bottom ten of that list and we see some once highly venerated albums (Who’s Next, Kind of Blue, Are You Experienced) that are lowly ranked by this audience, either because they haven’t been heard or they’ve been heard and rejected – either way, they’re less likely to form part of the next canon, if this audience has any say in it.

How much of a say we’ll have in shaping the next rock music canon is debatable, though, because many of us come to it as tourists. Tom framed the thread in just that way: “which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here”. For some of you, rock music was never your thing, so it’s no surprise that you don’t express particular love for Hendrix or the Who or whoever. Personally, I don’t think of myself as a tourist when it comes to rock, because rock was where my head was at from ages 16 to about 24, and alternative rock from 24 to 30, and it’s only since then that I’ve woven other musical threads more strongly into my musical tastes, to the point where I no longer think of myself as mainly a rock/alternative-rock guy. That’s why I found this canon poll and discussion so valuable: it gave me a nudge to re-think, re-explore and even explore for the first time some of these “classic” albums, because I value the tangential, rock-outsider take on it all of many Popular readers and know that I’m not getting the same old boring “classic rock is unquestionably good” line that I know all too well from years of reading Rolling Stone. I read far too many words about the genius of Dylan, the Stones and Brian Wilson in RS in my 20s, and none of them spurred me to actually sit down and listen to them the way this thread did, and to determine for myself that: I actually enjoy early Bob Dylan; listening to Beggars Banquet suggests that I might also enjoy 1968-1972 Stones; and Pet Sounds hasn’t made a convert of me at all. I used to stand outside the whole process of cultural transmission of those examples, either for or against; now I can and will be a part of it, thanks to this thread.

But I digress. What I really wanted to say was that Popular itself is in the canon-formation business. Here it is, a popular music (not rock music) canon as seen through the lens of UK number one singles. It’s just unfinished business, that’s all; we’re only up to 1987. In ten years’ time, that page will cover everything up to the then-present day, and will continue to evolve as new members sign up and add their votes. I would bet, though, that it will ossify just as the 1970s rock music canon has, because once the initial list is complete only the occasional outstanding later entry will crack the top 20. Even now, while I don’t expect a-ha to hang onto their number 17 position for long, I’d be surprised if any of the top five were knocked out of the eventual top ten; and it would take a truly stunning track to displace the current number one. A track that the entire body of Popular readers to date has ranked so highly has to be a pretty good bet: if new readers don’t know it they’ll be inclined to check it out just because it’s number one, and there’s a strong chance they’ll fall under its sway too, because it’s already demonstrated its ability to transcend the years and convince a newer generation. Unless, that is, the next generation is looking for something else entirely in music, and rejects everything that Popular readers of the 2000s value. That’s always a possibility. (It would be valuable to take a snapshot of that list every now and then, to be able to follow how the rankings change over time.)

Which brings me back to this 1970s-dominated rock music canon, and Popular’s rejection of it. Out of 100 voters exactly (as of today), only three of these albums are loved by the majority. How many of the fifty will Popular’s readers by enthusiastically promoting in our various spheres of influence in years to come? Just as traditions die when people stop learning about and practising them, albums are forgotten when people stop being told about them and listening to them. Albums drop out of canons when they lose their champions.

Taking the long view, Lex, you have nothing to worry about.

And plus just to note that I agree with Frank’s “genuine original” also – though I want to argue a bit about some of the other stuff he says, I think — or anyway open it up for argument.

But not right this second, as I have work and admin demands eating into my own dalliance here :(

However, the “getting off the bus” process is immensely harder to do when so much music is out there still waiting to be discovered. Pop isn’t necessarily a linear story, beginning at one point. One thing you can guarantee is there will be something that will take you down an interesting path. You might even find other avenues of interest that lead into labryinthine spaces where you’d think you could linger for an eternity, only to find a doorway back into some space that is familiar or even stranger than the previous space. That’s the beauty of pop. I don’t think I could get off the bus, even if I wanted to. I’m proper hooked!

And we take stuff we’ve known for 30/40 years and bury it somewhere on an mp3 player amongst 2000 songs on shuffle so when it comes up it will startle us and sound anew

(the ‘we’ in all this = me obv)

And i’m also thinking about Popular and the ways people in the comments box seem to USE Popular (one of its fascinations) – the way some people are clearly using it to live through the experience of hearing these songs for the first time again, and by extension and often quite explicitly the experience of living through that moment of their lives for the first time again – critics/historians reaching back to their reviewer/fanselves, or holding the two in tension…

Me, I work as a counsellor. I think a lot of my work is about people holding those two things in creative tension, trying to re-engage with their pasts as they felt then as well as how they look now, and trying to re-imagine their presents from a historian’s distance. You’d be surprised how often music crops up in people’s attempts to do this. (actually you lot probably wouldn’t)

The thing about the Stones’ best material, which sold big because it meant a lot of different things to different people, is that, paradoxically, for me the material isn’t open to a lot of interpretations, and I rarely like to hear it covered. If you can’t do Jagger’s tensions – e.g., “Heart Of Stone,” which is the Stones’ real can’t-always-get-what-you-want song – can’t totally deliver strength and menace while writing lyrics that expose the strength and menace as a fraud, with the singing and playing forcefully counteracting the lyrics and being as convincing as the supposed unmasking… if you can’t prance along that balance beam, then what’s the point?

Since this time it’s Didi’s voice, you get the sense that, though as the singer she’s the narrator, she as much as the person she’s singing about can be menaced and played with, but nonetheless she’ll display bits of vocal strength that make the “don’t mess with me” credible; and because the song’s lyrics own the weakness a lot less than “Heart Of Stone”‘s do, Didi’s actually brought something to the song, walks along her own borderline between not getting what you say you can, and getting what you say you can’t, and not knowing what you need.

I think it was Craig Bell who started the Society (in Cleveland he was in Mirrors and Rocket From The Tombs, then moved to New Haven and was in the Saucers iirc). I met him in 1981 when he was visiting some friends of mine in NY. One reason that Cleveland punks in the early to mid ’70s were more interesting than subsequent punks is that the Cleveland punks didn’t hate Pink Floyd.

So what I’m seeing in Lex is someone who is a genuine thinker and a genuine original who’s having trouble facing the fact that inevitably this throws him into isolation, from time to time.