The wimps at
Splendid have offered rebuttals to some of their choices:
Score One for the Consensus: 14 Reconsecrated Cows Editor's Note: last week's list -- 22 Musical Sacred Cows that Need to Be Put Down -- generated a lot of talk and a number of heated e-mails (not to mention an equal or greater number of "You're right, such-and-such album sucks ass!" e-mails). And that's not all. Before the list even went live on the site, several of our writers had thrown together a rebuttal. This is it.
Part of the reason that writers who are music fans end up writing for publications like this one is that they have strong opinions about the music they love, and they don't see those views expressed anywhere else. This, combined with the naturally contrarian nature of criticizing anything for a living, sometimes leads them to make a mistake in the heat of passion. Or, in this case, a whole bunch of them.
This, then, is an attempt to correct -- or at least refute -- some of the statements made in creating the earlier list. And, of course, to make snide comments about the earlier snide comments.
Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking Sure, it can be hard not to reflect on the bigger missteps in Perry Farrell's career path (a short list would have to include Porno for Pyros, the latest, terrible Jane's Addiction album, using heroin way after that cultural moment had passed, and most of his hairstyles). Blaming this album for everything that came after it, however, is a bit specious. For a while there, Jane's Addiction was the white teenager's Esperanto -- it was a language that everyone spoke, including the metal heads, the prog rock dorks, the burnouts...even the jam rock guys liked Jane's Addiction for some reason. They were also at least partially responsible for the fact that during a brief, shining early '90s period, rock radio didn't suck. Much.
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Look, if you're going to take a stand against this album, you've got to be prepared to take your licks. Complaints about this record (which, and let's not put too fine a point on it, is without question one of the finest artistic moments of the postwar period, across all media), to my mind, say more about the person complaining than they do about the record. To be fair, my erstwhile colleague did cover his ass ("While every album by The Beatles should be considered essential for anyone interested in rock..."), and while we can all acknowledge that "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" sounds a bit '60s-ish on first listen, it's still stunningly original and brilliant. More scorn should be heaped upon our anonymous contributor, whose "might be as overrated as The Beatles" and "The Beatles started out cool" comments later in the list are signs of a troubled and purposelessly contrarian mind. In my humble opinion. And Ringo's.
Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On To equate this album with the musical abortion that is smooth jazz is to commit a sin remarkably similar to that of the smooth jazz players themselves. Whereas Gaye brings an understated sexuality and a masterful musicianship to even his most politically conscious tunes, smooth jazz guys strip all of the nuance and...um...soul out of soul music, leaving it a hollow shell. If more people could see the fine gradations of powerful, soulful songcraft, we'd be able to avoid a lot of crap.
Radiohead's OK Computer Nick Hornby already set the standard for misunderstanding Radiohead with his breathtakingly wrongheaded New Yorker review of Kid A. That being said, a three-word dismissal of the first life sign that rock had showed in the five years since Nevermind was released (more on this later), again echoes the kind of glib countermanding of consensus opinion that is tailor-made to pick up intellectual girls at a party. While Hornby's Kid A argument boiled down to: it's not rock and roll if you have to think about it, the argument expressed here ("emo for adults") can be reduced to: if enough other people like it, you can seem cool by seeming barely able to consider it.
Beck's Odelay If some of us find "I got two turntables and a microphone" embarrassing, many more of us find that they've still got a devil's haircut in their minds. And they like having it there.
The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin Although you might detect a similarity in the thin-larynxed vocals of The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and Supertramp's Rick Davies, the sonic similarities pretty much stop there. The same can be said for the rest of the songs on The Soft Bulletin, which are better characterized as an homage to the nursery that spawned so many bands like Supertramp: prog-rock. Despite The Flaming Lips' predilection for retro '70s pop, "The Spiderbite Song" bears no actual resemblance to the "The Logical Song", no matter how long or how hard you try to hear one. You'd be better off comparing Soft Bulletin to Pet Sounds: both albums are obsessively preoccupied with song-craft and production. Both albums want to lift you into a new spiritual realm, like gospel -- not through a religious message but through sheer sound. The Soft Bulletin has what many albums, even other Lips albums, lack: a unique and demonstrative aesthetic that binds all of the songs together like a poetic cycle. For some music critics, the late nineties marked the return of the album as an viable art form, in large part because of this album and the afore-defended OK Computer. Let's hope the trend will continue. Good albums, that is, not prog-rock.
The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols As with any musical movement, punk has roots in many different places, and although the New York Dolls were the bellwether of punk, the Sex Pistols were irrefutably punk's belle laide. The New York Dolls are in some ways too American to be punk, often sounding like a cross-dressing Elvis on a bad amphetamine trip, playing to a crowd of drunks at a sweaty, shit-stained dive in the Bowery (which is never a bad thing). Much of the reason why earlier bands didn't receive their fair share of credit as punk pioneers involved image and other pointless discussions (are the Stooges punk or glam? Discuss.). Mostly, though, the problem revolves around the simple fact that none of those bands wrote and recorded "Holidays in the Sun", "Bodies", "Liar", "Anarchy in the UK", "God Save the Queen", "EMI", and "Pretty Vacant" and put them on one album. Nor did those bands have Johnny Rotten's voice or Steve Jones's Les Paul. This band and this album were clearly and unequivocally spit-in-eye punk. Period. No bullshit. To listen to Never Mind the Bollocks is to hear the voice of a God who doesn't like you. In fact, he wants to nick two quid off you and kick you in the throat. Despite all of the purple prose dedicated to establishing the genesis of punk, it is obvious to any listener that The Damned, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music, even the beloved New York Dolls never released anything as revoltingly beautiful. But why quibble?
Blur's Parklife First and foremost, let's talk about the snarling, rabid monster that is Graham Coxon. Coxon's guitar-work on Parklife is about as instrumentally thin as Marlon Brando. Parklife brims with punk, psychedelia, disco, synth-pop and music-hall, all of which coalesces organically, with a nod toward the traditional and a wink at the revolutionary (a touchstone of any great album). In many ways, one-upmanship is the album's theme. Coxon is clearly shooting to one-up of Johnny Marr, Damon Albarn is one-upping Morrissey as lyrical laureate, and Blur is one-upping of all other pretenders to the Royal throne. Unfairly, perhaps, all new Brit-pop bands have their singles compared to "Parklife" and "Girls and Boys" as a benchmark of innovation, but that is the price of admission. Ride, the Verve, and Supergrass -- all good bands in their own right -- simply cannot boast a similar claim to either quality or consistency. They're not even close. Parklife is more a watershed for what it didn't sound like -- the Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin -- than what it did. Still, Blur easily incorporates these influences in subtle ways: the Fab Four's fearlessness with instrumentation, Ray Davies' story-driven infatuation with the English middle and working classes, Johnny Rotten's linguistic sneer, Quadradphenia actor Phil Daniels's turn on the title-track, etcetera. In addition, any who would accuse the band of being too fey or twee will see their arguments evaporate in the face of a song like "Bank Holiday". Parklife did away with lachrymose musings and put the lager-swilling balls back into Britpop, without sacrificing any of the ooohhs and laaaas. It is precisely the fact that Blur had the capacity to reimagine "Penny Lane" as a rock song (see "Jubilee") while remaining mindful of their New Wave antecedents that condemned bands like Oasis to remain always a few steps behind. Yeah, cheers.
The Clash's The Clash I can't really be too sure as to what standard justifies dismissing the Clash, and in particular their first LP, as not rocking "hard" enough. If, indeed, half-time high school marching bands rocked this hard (perhaps in the little hamlet of Malmsteen, Sweden), I've really got to go to more football games. Since you may consider the sepulchral, monolithic distortion worship on the order of Rammstein as a model for rocking hard, it's important to gather some perspective. Rocking hard is more than just trying to make your medulla oblongata burst through the top of your skull, and punk is an attitude that goes beyond simple anger or turning your amp to eleven. That said, you'd have to search far and wide to find songs that rock with as much immediacy and emotional presence as "Janie Jones", "White Riot" (U.K. version for all you pedants out there), "Complete Control" or "London's Burning". And these songs don't just rock; any band can write a riff and turn up the volume (lord knows Iron Butterfly tried), but few bands can pen a song as solid as "Remote Control" or "White Man in Hammersmith Palais". We find these truths to be self-evident, that the US version of The Clash is unassailable and ought to be the foundation of a new religion...a bad religion, if you will. If the album doesn't rock enough for you, I suggest two courses of action: first, paint yourself black and strike your own head repeatedly with an iron rod or similarly blunt instrument -- this is the only way to make the voices stop. Second, declare your lifelong love for Air Supply in front of a large group of people, preferably little girls. This should begin the healing process.
Nirvana's Nevermind Nevermind didn't change everything that music meant to me, probably because, thanks to The Beatles, The Stones, and The Kinks, I had been aware of the existence of good music for almost two decades before the album came out. However, for all of those nascent music lovers born in the early eighties, I am truly sorry that your favorite rock star offed himself. What can you say? The man was troubled. Still, isn't it a bit puerile to suggest that his unfortunate suicide was a marketing ploy? Should we all be suddenly critical of Elliot Smith's self-inflicted shuffle off this mortal coil? Nevermind is essential for the following reasons: (1) It's a great collection of songs that leap off the disc, (2) everyone loved it, and (3) it ushered in a new awareness of a music movement by a majority of Americans. Yes, the Pixies were better than Nirvana and did everything else first (some say they even discovered America), but that is neither here nor there. If it were a fair world, Nirvana would be known as the band that recorded Bleach and really loved The Pixies. But it's not, and nobody was more aware of that irony than Mr. Cobain.
Tom Waits's Rain Dogs Once again, for this one we had an acknowledgement that Mr. Waits's oeuvre, as a whole, was not worthy of dismissal. However, to be fair, the characterization of this album as sounding like pirate music is truly apt...as long as you've never listened past the first song. "Singapore", one of Waits's most successful genre exercises, conjures up a whole cavalcade of characters, in full 3-D, in three minutes. Then, this being a Tom Waits album, he veers off into other parts unknown. There's the equally well-realized weirdness of "Big Black Mariah", "Cemetary Polka" and the title track; the cool as ice "Jockey Full of Bourbon" and "Walking Spanish"; the haunting "Clap Hands"; the mythical/folk-punk epic "Gun Street Girl" and the haunting ballad "Time"... Unless you're one of those poor fools who never got into Waits, it's clear that this is one of the most successfully diverse, intensely musical expressions of a major talent at the height of his powers that we'll ever be priveleged to hear.
Anything by The Doors I don't even know where to start with this one. I agree that Jimbo and company strayed into self-indulgence more often than necessary ("The Celebration of the Lizard"), but come on. The worst thing to happen to rock and roll? Where would rock and roll be without tight leather pants, dark sunglasses and lyrics about fucking your mother all night long? Remember, the masses hadn't been doing this for 35 years at the time. As for saying the band is over-rated, there is not one bad song on The Doors, and Strange Days is similarly packed with classics. Yes, the later albums are a bit lean, but would you want to live in a world where the Dead Milkmen's "Bitchin' Camaro" has no Crystal Shit reference? How about The Lost Boys without the spooky "People Are Strange" montage? What about Apocalypse Now without "The End"?
Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica Supposedly written entirely on piano, this is the most artfully constructed chaos Planet Earth has yet borne witness to, a grouping of some of the most fertile musical imaginations in recent history, and -- to top it all -- features a guitarist named Antennae Jimmy Semens. One of the most explosive, and brilliantly ridiculous albums of all time. So there.
The MC5's Kick Out the Jams Look, maybe they didn't invent punk in 1969, and quite possibly they've attracted some not-so-cool fans since then, but the MC5 put rock and soul and blues into that Detroit-style blender and whipped out the loudest, dirtiest, most distorted sound the world had ever seen. This is, without question, one of the best live albums ever, its indelible riffs ("Ramblin' Rose," "Kick out the Jams," "Motor City Is Burning") dipped in battery acid and set on electrified fire.
