Ned, let's talk about your 136 Albums of the 90s.

i think these lists of opinion by lots of people are extraordinarily useful in todays music world -- i can only admire Ned's useful hyper-qualified effort here -- i wish that more of people's big lists were so good at qualification, on rationale.

and Ned seems to like participating here, which makes the list potentially 'interactive' (cool) (well that's up to him, all those hyper-qualifications enough volunteering already).

Thank You Ned.

That's not even that great an album. Is Dead is much better. There's nothing whiter than listing 3 Feet High on your hip-hop best-of. Okay, except for listing PM Dawn.

Yer welcome. The list -- which was composed a year before the start of ILX, to give it some context -- was very much a combination of whim and opportunity, but it seems to have lasted as an interesting enough personal document. But yeah, actually talking about every record -- which I did while listening to each specific one as I went -- is I think its best feature in the end.

Oh man.

Weird..."Show Business" is a weak track!? Frankly, I think hip hop hit a peak in the early 90s of flat-out PERFECTION that it has been unable to attain since...I'm not sure how you can dismiss albums like "Hard to Earn," "Illmatic," "Ready to Die," or "The Sun Rises..." as having filler tracks. Sounds sorta crazy to me...that was the peak of the Q-Tip-Large Pro-DJ Premier-Pete Rock production explosion, where the creativity and progressive production of the hip hop albums were achievements unsurpassed today...frankly, I find myself more bored listening to a lot of rock albums from the early 90s - Pearl Jam, RHCP, etc. etc. etc. than I do listening to hip hop. And indie rock, as a general rule, bores me SENSELESS. I do love My Bloody Valentine though.

?

This is quite possibly the most insane thing I've ever read.

I didn't call him a name, I called him wrong-thinking. But if you think that Mascis is kidding, or trying to somehow give us the opposite of what we expect, please elaborate. I think he's a truly sad guy who likes his 70's rock served warm.

Not an either/or question, I think! To me Mascis at his best is commenting on the nature of what Mark S once called "the dangerous and pernicious notion of INFLUENCE" or something along those lines - my Latin professor liked to compare it to INCEST, with the "son" or "daughter" (the "influenced") cannibalizing/"incesting" the "parent" i.e. the source material. What Mascis does/did with his influences is to my ears a really interesting act of reading-out-loud, and often a very sloppy one, which is where some of the irony lies. Not ha-ha irony: I think irony's a much more complex (and, lately, wrongly-derided) trope than just "I said one thing, but I meant another!" For this I blame Alanis Morissette.

(obligatory theory-check: no I don't think Mascis sat down and said "this is what I intend to do, and the world shall marvel at my wit!" rather I think that reading his stuff in ways that take off from the above-outlined possibility are the most interesting readings to give)

In the Sonic Youth sampler album from the mid-1990s (Screaming Fields of Sonic Love?), there's a flyer for a Sonic Youth/BHs/fIREHOSE show that says it's part of the "Sonic Butt Fire Tour".

But her definition of "ironic" was completely different to this!

Sloppier than Neil Young?

This is interesting, but I've never heard irony defined any way other than the dictionary way and the wrong way (facetiousness, coincidence). What exactly makes this cannibalism ironic?

Mind, I am not a giant Mascis fan or anything - I'm not one of those people whose lives were changed by You're Living All Over Me - but I do think he and his body of work are interesting, and not easily dismissable.

It occurs to me I still haven't answered Chris's original question. Hm.

Technically. But did they really?