Twelve Albums To Listen To

There was a time when, according to the Rock Press, the Best Albums Ever were Revolver and Pet Sounds, in either order of your choosing.

Not even the journalists who said that believed it. It’s just what they have to say so they keep their Rock Journalist Cred Card. For one thing, the best Beatles album is either Rubber Soul or The White Album. For another thing, Pet Sounds is not the best Beachboys album: that would be some Greatest Hits compilation, because the Beachboys were a pop-singles band. And their best song is Heroes and Villains, closely followed by Good Vibrations. In case you were wondering.

In the 1960’s all the pop bands were trying to do the same thing: entertain the public, sell records and get into the Top Ten, but even then there were tribes - Surfers, Mods, Rockers, Hippies - for whom music was part of a lifestyle. By the 1970’s The Sex Pistols were not trying to do the same thing as Yes, who were not trying to do the same thing as Blue Oyster Cult, who were not trying to be America. From the 1970’s onwards the audience for `music’ was so large and cosmopolitan that bands could make a living writing for niche markets. The idea of a `best album’ had become silly.

Given the sheer output of some artists, it barely makes sense to ask what is their `best’ album? One’s `favourite’, sure, but best? Which of Miles’ output is the `best’? Or Neil Young? Joni Mitchell? Madonna? Eric Clapton? Frank Zappa? John Digweed? As opposed to, which one will blow your head off with its experiments? Some artists do have a `best’ that also sold a container-load, and go on to produce a steady output that is bought by a core of die-hard fans, see for example Suzanne Vega. Some artists have a `period’, usually of not more than five years or so. If they don’t break up, they carry on afterwards, but the magic has passed. Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Beat, Prince, Spandau Ballet, and others.

Some bands just can’t make an album that has no clunkers. They are basically singles artists, and their Greatest Hits album is usually almost too much too take.

Here’s my list of Twelve Albums That You Must Listen To:

After Bathing At Baxters - Jefferson Airplane (1967)

Everyone Knows This is Nowhere - Neil Young and Crazy Horse (1969)

Blue - Joni Mitchell (1971)

Bod Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol 2 - Bob Dylan (1971)

Bremen / Lausanne - Keith Jarrett (1973)

Get Up With It - Miles Davis (1974)

Press Colour - Lizzie Mercier Descloux (1979)

Timeless - Goldie (1995)

Endtroducing - DJ Shadow (1996)

Bedrock, Complied and Mixed by - John Digweed (1999)

Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene (2005)

These are all older, because by the 1990’s all the genres had become settled and refined. There’s no Metal and no Rap, because neither speak to me, and both genres were settled more or less the first time they were played. There’s no Stadium Rock, Folk or post-Coltrane jazz because it isn’t experimental, it’s settled.

The Good Stuff is always at the start, when the rules aren’t set, the limits aren’t known, the A&R people don’t understand what they are dealing with, and there isn’t a huge technical hurdle for newcomers to jump. Every new technology has to be learned by everyone from scratch, and that takes away the advantage of older musicians, if only for a couple of years. Every new movement in pop music starts with a new technology or the rejection of something from the past: punk explicitly rejected the techno-flash of early 70’s bands; 80’s music has the sound it does because of all those early synthesisers and drum machines; Britpop was a deliberate rejection of the slick production of the 80’s; nuMetal was a fusion of Metal and rap that dropped the need for shredding; Grunge was Punk v2. Rejecting the techniques and the slickness means that the bands have to focus on songs, and pop music has always been about songs.

It may be no kind of co-incidence that the two most creative bands - The Beatles and Miles Davis - both worked with classically-trained musicians - George Martin and Teo Macero - who had gone into music production when it was a suit-and-tie salaried job for classically-trained people who didn’t quite fit in to the orchestral performance world. Both Martin and Macero not only knew all the usual classical composition technique, they also knew about the avant-garde composers. They knew about electronic music, sound effects, musique concret, and the like, and they knew about what the avant-garde jazz musicians were doing. These were possibly the most musically well-informed guys who ever graced a recording studio. Miles was no slouch either, and Paul McCartney spent the months before recording Revolver listening his way round London’s `Underground Music’ scene. (Revolution No 9 was the Beatles saying Yeah, we are so freaking good we can even do musique concret.) They had to look back on the history of other genres of music, because rock / pop had no history of its own. By the mid-1970’s there was enough history for the whole enterprise to have its own history, and it became more consistent and stable.