THE MOST IMPORTANT 12" OF THE PAST 25 YEARS?

that was more than 12 years ago!

Just realised that the thread title is wrong - should, of course, read:

THE MOST IMPORTANT 12" OF THE PAST 25 YEARS?

How can I change this?

More importantly, what was the most important 25" of the last 12 years?

stardust's "music sounds better with you"

Gotta be "Let The Music Play" vs. "Buffalo Stance"

i think planet rock is definitely a contender, but i think it would be absurd to actually choose one.

stardust and shannon: maybe?

hey greg. glad you found ILM.
more enjoyable stuff written by greg wilson re malcolm mclaren : here

blue monday = most talked about as big seller

http://www.discogs.com/release/8894

Display Name: Yes. Or, Washing Machine. Or, Blue Monday. Or... Kind of a hyperbolic claim methinks.

I'd say "The Message," but could appreciate "Blue Monday" too.

this is the most important 12" of the last 25 years:

http://www.discogs.com/release/148501

nothin but a g thang

http://www.discogs.com/release/221824

http://www.discogs.com/release/91456

Knusper2000 - 30-Nov-04 08:15 AM
Late 80's Euro Dance Hit, but I don't like the 7" Version because its this 80's Euro crap which my mother loved to dance to, everybody in Europe knows this song. It was a big hit and is still played on many radio stations.
However, the other two versions sound different and much better, because the don't use the same baseline and the same stupid Euro Beat, instead they are deeper and breakier.

http://www.discogs.com/release/314978

http://www.discogs.com/release/215139

http://www.discogs.com/release/732372

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Snap!

http://www.discogs.com/release/2123

"It's Yours" by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay

Obviously...

http://991.com/newgallery/Killing-Joke-Eighties-83495.jpg

I'd never seen that KJ single cover before! That's awesome.

Yeah, it seems to me that sleeve ought to look a hell of a lot more familiar than it does. *shrugs*

I guess Manuel Gottsching E2-E4 was basically a 12" single (mine is).

That might be a runner up to my first choice for anyone who ever thought "techno" was anything to write home about.

I like this Greg Wilson.

That Greg Wilson, he speaks the truth!

I bought Planet Rock, The Message and Walking On Sunshine (Rockers Revenge) on the same day in the summer of 1982, all unheard before purchase... took them home, put them on... and, to be honest, didn't immediately get it. It took a couple of weeks to adapt, because I'd never heard anything remotely like this stuff before. The only other comparable, jaw-dropping, WTF-is-THIS? moment would be with "Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel" a few months earlier.

Favourite John Robie moments would be Planet Patrol's "Play At Your Own Risk", which was a kind of song-based variation on some of the themes introduced by "Planet Rock" - and C-Bank's "One More Shot": the missing link between Yazoo and Shannon.

http://www.indielondon.co.uk/img/history_hip_hop.gif

I bought this at a carboot last sunday.

3CDs with Planet rock, 900number, Freakon, Message, whitelines, snoopdogg, Hardknocklife, in fact it would be easier to say what it didn;t have on it. (Rockers revenge)

£1. Wonderful stuff.

Hip-Hop, House, and Techno all indebted to this electronic wonder.

hell yes. unsurprisingly "the message" got all the rock-crit attention in 1982 but "planet rock" (and "wheels of steel a year before) changed the world in terms of music -- audio hindsight is 20/20 too. too many electro novelties followed in its wake for my taste but stuff like "hip-hop/bebop" and mantronix kept the level of innovation up there.

Underworld - Rez/Cowgirl gets my vote.

predictably no-one has said why any other choice is/could be important.

Yeah, I think there are some folks who are missing the point, here. I remember hearing Planet Rock at junior high school dances and it really didn't sound like anything I'd heard before. I even remember going up to the DJ once and asking what that song was. It just wasn't the kind of thing you could hear on the radio at all. Another song I remember being played at those dances that kindof hit you in a WTF kind of a way was Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love.

I don't think I've heard Rockers Revenge...I will seek that out.

I think my Planet Rock moment was in 7th grade, but with the Furious Five's "Scorpio". The school bus driver was your standard scuzzy young white guy in a tank top, but for a long while he played "Scorpio" on his boom box every day. I had no ontological equipment to process that fucking song. It was like glowing space junk. It still retains a lot of power for me.

There is no such thing as too many electro novelties.

(xps)

Planet Rock and Blue Monday are both fine, fine choices for me.

Really interesting to read peoples replies, here and in other forums. Apart from 'Planet Rock' it seems the other 2 contenders would be Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's 'The Message' and 'Blue Monday' by New Order. Interesting that all 3 tracks were issued within 12 months of each other, which illustrates just how innovative the early 80's period was.

Flash & The Five's 'Wheels Of Steel' has also been a popular choice, although it doesn't fit into the timescale, having been released in '81. Had it been 26 years, it would certainly have been a worthy contender - undoubtedly a milestone in black music.

However, it never burst on the scene with the seismic force of 'Planet Rock', but rather made a gradual impact. It wasn't really until 1983, when Electro had brought Hip Hop culture out of the Bronx (largely via the success of 'Planet Rock' and 'The Message') and into worldwide focus, that 'Wheels Of Steel' began to fully make sense. I wrote the following about it:

Then, later in 81, there was a huge clue as to what lay ahead, in the form of a record that is now regarded as one of the most innovative releases of all-time, ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’. However, as is often the case with things that are before their time, it went right over peoples heads and, although it sounded interesting to some, others regarded it a jumbled mess! We had no idea of the sheer creative force that Flash had put into making this track, as it would still be some time before we understood the concept of scratching and cutting. As far as getting played in the specialist black music clubs (which were then Jazz-Funk based), it was a total non-starter, not completely because of its wildstyle nature, but as a result of some of the records Flash had cut-up, like Blondie and Queen, which, as former Pop hits, ‘disqualified’ it from being played to an ‘upfront’ audience. So, with the exception of perhaps the odd student venue, this great record was completely ignored at the time, and it wouldn’t be for another couple of years until it finally began to get the recognition it undoubtedly merited, when it was revived in the Electro-Funk era.

By way of contast, 'The Message' made a huge impact on its release:

The next landmark release saw Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five gain the type of plaudits they’d deserved the previous year for ‘Wheels Of Steel’. This time it wasn’t so much Flash, but rapper Melle Mel who led the way with a powerful tale of inner-city decay. This wasn’t the ‘throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care’ type of style we were used to, but something of real substance. With ‘The Message’, Rap came of age. It was no longer regarded as a fad, but now acclaimed as street poetry. The words, delivered to maximum force over hard downbeat Electro-Funk, not only translated directly to the experience of black people throughout the US, but also across the Atlantic here in the UK.

It had been just a year since England had had it’s own race riots, resulting from the continued marginalisation and downright disregard for the black community by mainstream British society. The majority of the early Electro-Funk crowd were black kids who’d either been directly involved, or at least caught-up in it all. Tensions had remained high, and ‘Don’t push me cos I’m close to the edge, I’m trying not to lose my head’, was a sentiment that almost every young British black could personally identify with. Further to this there was massive unemployment, not just in black areas, but also amongst working class whites, and the future looked grim for a whole section of society (with an increasing number of white council estates kids now turning to heroin). Signing on the dole was becoming a way of life, and apathy had begun to eat away at a sizeable chunk of the population who found themselves with little prospect of finding work. Arriving in the UK against this backdrop ‘The Message’, with its tale of urban degeneration, perfectly caught the mood of the time and just couldn’t be ignored, no matter what colour you might have been. It was without doubt one of the most important releases of the decade, and would take Rap music back into the Top 10 of the UK Pop chart.

'Blue Monday' was obviously of major importance because it appealed to a mainly white audience who were generally dismissive of dance music, laying the groundwork for the Damascian conversion of countless indie kids later in the decade. It was also, of course, the biggest selling 12".

But it's debatable as to whether there'd be a 'Blue Monday' without 'Planet Rock' as Arthur Baker was a big inspiration for New Order at the time (he produced the follow-up, 'Confusion'). 'The Message' also took its cue from 'Planet Rock', by putting the rap over a beatbox.

The release of 'Planet Rock', and it's subsequent success, provided the catalyst for so many things, not least the confidence it gave to artists and producers when it came to experimenting with their own electronic dance directions. Its influence simply can't be overstated.

Thanks for your contributions to this thread.

Greg

It's doubtful there would have been a Planet Rock without a Trans Europe Express!

If we could stretch it back to '79 I'd nominate Chic's "Good Times" btw...

i kinda feel like there isn't anything to say! okay, then, onward and upward.

or Numbers

xpst Blunt

It's doubtful there would have been a Planet Rock without a Trans Europe Express!

ya think?

Is this another of your inscrutable "I'm just taking the piss me mate" statements that you eventually try to backpedal from? If not, you may consider Wikipedia's viewpoint:

The borrowings eventually resulted in an out-of-court settlement between Kraftwerk and Tommy Boy Records head Tom Silverman.

well, I guess so.

new sample stuffed greg wilson remix posted : here

[admins : been cleared to post this about so not breaking any rules i would like to think]

The ...of the past 25 years bit is just there to exclude the obvious choice: I Feel Love.

haha, is this now the greg wilson thread?

song id help: late 80's early 90's dubby soul "Who's steppin out" or "who's steppin now"

well seeing as greg started the thread i thought i'd add my post re his new mix, to this one.
off to read that other one as i never spotted it ..

FACED BY GR8080

oh, i wasn't chiding anyone for mis-using a thread. just linking to my recent GW thread.

http://www.discogs.com/release/68347
Why doesn't Greg Wilson get mentioned more often. His 'Credit to the Edit' series is great, as well as the release I linked above. I believed he creates his using records and turntables, as well as the reel to reel.
-- Jacobs (LolVStein), Wednesday, October 25, 2006 9:37 AM (9 months ago) Bookmark Link

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http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ailx.wh3rd.net+%22greg+wilson
-- Confounded (Confounded), Wednesday, October 25, 2006 9:42 AM (9 months ago) Bookmark Link

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I stand corrected
-- Jacobs (LolVStein), Wednesday, October 25, 2006 10:06 AM (9 months ago) Bookmark Link

Might as well have his own thread.

..of course if this becomes the GW thread, then it might look like every new GW release is the MOST IMPORTANT 12" OF THE LAST 25 YEARS.