What I am about to tell you may shock, disturb and even repulse you, so I don’t know, you might wanna sit down: I have never listened to a Bob Dylan album. Not intently anyway, I may have once sat in the kind of über-cool bar that only sell Macedonian lager in tiny bottles while Bob caterwauled his way through ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ in that imitable Jimmy-Saville-holidaying-in-the-Swiss-Alps style of his in the background, or been cornered at a party by some coked up prick yammering on about the screenplay he’s just about to get started on while dear Bob spouts lyrical genius about Spanish grasshoppers drinking soup from consulates’ knee-caps (or something) over our heads, but I have never once deliberately and intentionally sat through an entire record of his apparent genius. Neither have I heard ‘Exile on Main Street’, ‘Rubber Soul’, ‘Dusty in Memphis’, ‘Lexicon of Love’, ‘Exodus’, ‘A Kind of Blue’, ‘Joshua Tree’, ‘Harvest’, ‘Bat Out of Hell’, ‘Otis Blue’ or almost countless other ‘classic’ albums in popular music’s canon. I can’t even name a Steely Dan, Allman Brothers, Crosby Stills and Nash, Funkadelic, Can or Supertramp song. And none of this has ever bothered me before.
See, I love music. Sorry, that should read: I LOVE music; listening and talking about music I love, like, or even despise has been consistently the biggest and most important part of my life since before I could even attempt to moonwalk, and I still try to procure new music as often as is humanly possible, experiencing dozens upon dozens of new albums every year, amassing a CD collection the size of most WW2 Battle-Cruisers.
However, I have always been firmly against canonisation, which has always seemed to me to be nothing more than a method used by middle-aged music journalists (98.2% of whom are white and male) to a) continue to set the agenda on what is considered good music, and b) perpetuate the irritating myth that music reached a incontrovertible peak in about 1969[1] and has been getting rapidly worse since. So, as a child of the 90s I have never once really felt the need to go back and investigate pop music’s classics, or even never had the time- why go all the way back to the 1960s to listen to ‘Astral Weeks’ when Future of the Left’s second album was released a few months ago and is FIVE TIMES as good (possibly, I’ve never heard ‘Astral Weeks’)!?- which means while I could wax lyrical over what I think is The Auteurs’ best album and why Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ is actually superior to ‘Nation of Millions’, I could never really argue how much the former’s lyrical savagery owes to The Kinks’ Ray Davies, or how much the latter’s style was informed by Gil-Scot Heron…
Ok, I could, and I pretty much just did, but at the moment every argument I make is only 38% knowledge and 62% bullshit. But imagine if I could truly claim to have heard every album that the popular music press considers ‘classic’?? What do these monsters of critical and public acclaim actually sound like to virgin ears? What if I procured something like, oooh I don’t know, Rolling Stone Magazine (the world’s biggest music magazine, so AOR and in thrall to the 60s/70s that it actually comes with a free beard and a pair of Levis Strauss, and probably thinks that U2 are the most exciting band in the world right now) list of the 500 (that’s FIVE HUNDRED) greatest albums of all time, and listened to them all. In order. Would I actually die before completing it? Will I actually go insane before completing it? Exactly how many Beatles albums would I have to sit through? Will the ingestion of all of this popular culture make me some kind of cultural superhero, dispensing pearls of music wisdom like sticky white goo from each of my wrists? Or will it just turn me into that guy who hangs around your local bus stop, you know, the one who angrily tells himself off for farting and only wears trousers on days beginning in ‘T’?
That, essentially, is what this probably never ending blog is about, I will attempt to buy, beg, borrow or… erm… ‘borrow’ all 500 albums in an attempt to listen to every one of what Rolling Stone Magazine considers the greatest artistic achievements of popular music so far, and blog on each one, whether I liked it or (hopefully, just for the entertainment value, I’d hate to get through all of this and realise that Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ is actually better than Ultrasound’s seminal 1999 self-titled debut) hated it. I will most probably own, or at least be very familiar with, a great deal of the more modern records, but I’ll write about them all the same. Of course, this is all based on the assumption that no good records were released after November 2003,but when you consider only about 8 of these albums were released after 1980, that’s not really a problem. And of course I’ll probably give up before I even reach ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran
There’ll also be album reviews and self-important ramblingss and all the other rubbish you’d expect on a blog. Wish me luck, if I do one a week this will only take me (quick calculation) NINE YEARS AND EIGHT MONTHS????!!! Jesus…
[1] about the time of Woodstock, which is still celebrated today for cementing the hippy movement’s promotion of selfish gratification against collective movement, placing itself firmly in opposition to more ‘conflicting’ movements such as, ooh I don’t know, women’s lib and civil rights, and starting the slow death of socialism in western nations… Phew, not quite sure where that came from
See, I love music. Sorry, that should read: I LOVE music; listening and talking about music I love, like, or even despise has been consistently the biggest and most important part of my life since before I could even attempt to moonwalk, and I still try to procure new music as often as is humanly possible, experiencing dozens upon dozens of new albums every year, amassing a CD collection the size of most WW2 Battle-Cruisers.
However, I have always been firmly against canonisation, which has always seemed to me to be nothing more than a method used by middle-aged music journalists (98.2% of whom are white and male) to a) continue to set the agenda on what is considered good music, and b) perpetuate the irritating myth that music reached a incontrovertible peak in about 1969[1] and has been getting rapidly worse since. So, as a child of the 90s I have never once really felt the need to go back and investigate pop music’s classics, or even never had the time- why go all the way back to the 1960s to listen to ‘Astral Weeks’ when Future of the Left’s second album was released a few months ago and is FIVE TIMES as good (possibly, I’ve never heard ‘Astral Weeks’)!?- which means while I could wax lyrical over what I think is The Auteurs’ best album and why Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ is actually superior to ‘Nation of Millions’, I could never really argue how much the former’s lyrical savagery owes to The Kinks’ Ray Davies, or how much the latter’s style was informed by Gil-Scot Heron…
Ok, I could, and I pretty much just did, but at the moment every argument I make is only 38% knowledge and 62% bullshit. But imagine if I could truly claim to have heard every album that the popular music press considers ‘classic’?? What do these monsters of critical and public acclaim actually sound like to virgin ears? What if I procured something like, oooh I don’t know, Rolling Stone Magazine (the world’s biggest music magazine, so AOR and in thrall to the 60s/70s that it actually comes with a free beard and a pair of Levis Strauss, and probably thinks that U2 are the most exciting band in the world right now) list of the 500 (that’s FIVE HUNDRED) greatest albums of all time, and listened to them all. In order. Would I actually die before completing it? Will I actually go insane before completing it? Exactly how many Beatles albums would I have to sit through? Will the ingestion of all of this popular culture make me some kind of cultural superhero, dispensing pearls of music wisdom like sticky white goo from each of my wrists? Or will it just turn me into that guy who hangs around your local bus stop, you know, the one who angrily tells himself off for farting and only wears trousers on days beginning in ‘T’?
That, essentially, is what this probably never ending blog is about, I will attempt to buy, beg, borrow or… erm… ‘borrow’ all 500 albums in an attempt to listen to every one of what Rolling Stone Magazine considers the greatest artistic achievements of popular music so far, and blog on each one, whether I liked it or (hopefully, just for the entertainment value, I’d hate to get through all of this and realise that Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ is actually better than Ultrasound’s seminal 1999 self-titled debut) hated it. I will most probably own, or at least be very familiar with, a great deal of the more modern records, but I’ll write about them all the same. Of course, this is all based on the assumption that no good records were released after November 2003,but when you consider only about 8 of these albums were released after 1980, that’s not really a problem. And of course I’ll probably give up before I even reach ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran
There’ll also be album reviews and self-important ramblingss and all the other rubbish you’d expect on a blog. Wish me luck, if I do one a week this will only take me (quick calculation) NINE YEARS AND EIGHT MONTHS????!!! Jesus…
[1] about the time of Woodstock, which is still celebrated today for cementing the hippy movement’s promotion of selfish gratification against collective movement, placing itself firmly in opposition to more ‘conflicting’ movements such as, ooh I don’t know, women’s lib and civil rights, and starting the slow death of socialism in western nations… Phew, not quite sure where that came from
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