Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll

HATE the production.

i voted for mogwai young team from pure campanilismo

xp i'd be interested to hear why you hate the OKC (assuming that's what you mean) production. at the time it felt like the most space-age thing, like the opening minutes of planet telex turned into a full album.

i'd argue a lot of accusations of triteness/cliche when it comes to OKC are only really applicable in hindsight, if only because it's become that way through setting a benchmark that others have followed, or through being overplayed.

even 'fitter happier' sounded cool at the time, although it's easy to laugh at it now. the text-to-speech voice, 'a pig in a cage on antibiotics', the fact it's obviously a filler but also an 'eye-of-the-duck' thing that epitomises the album, 'shot of baby smiling in back-seat', the overall dystopian tone of the thing - all these are kind of laughable now in today's context, but they felt pretty new and arresting at the time.

Missy Elliot was more futuristic and arresting though.

apples and oranges

Not in this poll.

My only exposure to Missy at this point was via her singles and she didn't SOUND futuristic until "Beep Me 911", which wasn't released until 1998

this is apples and oranges, c'mon man.

I'm just saying that I owned both albums, liked OKC, but was blown away by "The Rain" in contact (Homogenic too).

*on contact

I could not get past "Beep beep/Who got the keys to my jeep?/VROOOOOOOOM"

I did think the video was hilarious, though

Seeing/hearing the 'The Rain' video for the first time was mesmerising.

I'm just saying that I owned both albums, liked OKC, but was blown away by "The Rain" in contact (Homogenic too).

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 19, 2015 2:20 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's a commonly-held wisdom (especially in the UK musicsphere) that says 1997 was the year pop started going space-age. So yeah, you had all these albums, OKC, Ladies & Gentlemen, Homogenic, maybe even Urban Hymns (but I never cared to listen to the Verve), going for a grander, artier, more 'futuristic' vision maybe as a counter-attack to Oasis' 'real rock for real people'.
There's an inkling of truth in this, especially if you viewed music through a UK rock/pop lens (like I did at the time, admittedly), and you could easily lump in things from other plains - in the US, Mellon Collie from a few years before, the Sophtware Slump a few years later; and of course stuff in other genres like rap and r'n'b, although I find it hard to make connections between the timelines and scenes as they seemed quite separated.
Late 90s feels like a transitional period for me, music-wise, and '97 was the start of that transition from listening primarily to Britpop and grunge and starting to embrace other styles - hip hop, electronic music, 60s and 70s music etc. Looking back I think Radiohead represented a big part of this - moving away from the acoustic and hard rock of The Bends and into a more 3-dimensional sound. The difference might feel extremely subtle now, but as a UK teen it was a big deal to me; OKC seemed to be looking forward in a way that Blur and Oasis hadn't managed to in any way up until then, sharing more in common with Portishead than those bands or even old Radiohead.

I can agree with you on the crucialness of OKC while still thinking that it still is p moldy. Kid A does,a much better job of portentously/symbolically granting pop a vision of its future while at the same tkme being a compelling listen

Also imago I heartily recommend Laddio Bolocko and that Gravitar album to you