1980'S ROCK POLL ALBUMS/TRACKS VOTING THREAD. (Voting closes September 20) (all welcome to vote inc Lurkers)

in this particular context (ILM), however, people are heavily invested in the record's reputation

People might genuinely like the record and might want to stick up for it, rather than just being "invested in its reputation."

Except when it's not. I would imagine that some people genuinely like the individual tracks on Daydream Nation quite a bit and would make the case of the album's structural merit based not only on its across-the-board vibe but on the strength of its individual tracks.

I have no doubt that there are people who love every single aspect of the record to bits.

People might genuinely like the record and might want to stick up for it, rather than just being "invested in its reputation."

to professional music critics as well as people who are music fanatics (or both), I don't think there's any difference whatsoever.

Would love to know why NME decided Warehouse was the Husker Du album for their canon. Were they late in covering them or did they just prefer the poppy more college rock aesthetic?

You think that's why critics prefer Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade to New Day Rising?

I can see ZA as being better, but I think that there's something robotic and suspect about the way ZA and Double Nickels are always the favorite records, no matter who is voting or where the voting is taking place or when it's taking place (it's a plot!) I mean, you would think that someone somewhere actually has a different opinion. I can actually see arguments for Punchline or What Makes a Man being better than Double Nickels, though, and I'm sure there are people (somewhere) who prefer New Day or Flip Your Wig and are actually willing to go on record with their opinion (no pun intended).

ha! competition is rough for magazines these days; maybe they realize that they actually have to differentiate their opinions for people to give a shit.

xp

I think those 3 Huskers are perfect and tbh I guess I have a different favourite at different times however if push came to shove I'd go with New Day Rising more than the others.

I love Daydream Nation and the albums that preceded it. all these goofy theories about why it's clearly inferior but revered by critics for clearly wrong reasons are whatever.

― cute, banned, alert (some dude), Sunday, September 2, 2012 9:53 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah

i read most of hellhouse's posts but they are mostly prolix in the extreme, full of dead reifications and thuddingly reiterated piecemeal formalism with no nuance and capacity to think beyond this weird half-world of musical, textual purity

sonic youth are the apogee of impure music, they are allusive in the extreme, postmodern to a fault, you might as well take berio's sinfonia and treat it as an atomized, orphaned musical object

Nah hellhouse I doubt NME cares about Husker Du anymore. Them and Sugar (1992 album of year)seem to have been wiped out of their history. Bob Mould is no longer god there. Raw and Kerrang in the early90s loved both though.
NME has Pixies, Sonic Youth and maybe Dinosaur Jr in their canon now. Maybe HD need to reform &reissue the albums.

i'm not sure i understand your criticisms of daydream nation or its canonization, hellhouse, other than that you seem to have an aversion to to the celebration of what you see as extramusical virtues. the problem is that, to the extent that we aren't well versed in music theory and/or practice, it's difficult to discuss an album's "purely musical" virtues in any but most vague and personal terms. and even if we are well-versed in theory, taste always boils down to more-or-less arbitrary preference.

daydream nation isn't my favorite sonic youth album. evol is more seductive, sister more visceral, and goo more thrillingly varied. i find some of its most celebrated tracks (especially "teenage riot") a bit dull and miss the scruffy digressiveness of the early records, but i simply can't agree that it's "so tepid, so half-hearted, so pointless and rote." to push a little harder, while you may be responding authentically to the music, it's hard to engage with that sort of analysis beyond simply nodding or shaking one's head. different strokes, right?

like most "ambitious" doubles, daydream nation is way too long, but in that it offers us an enjoyable opportunity to construct the version that best suits our tastes - especially if we throw in the whitey album as its b-side. i'll take "eric's trip", "rain king" and "total trash" while someone else might start with "teenage riot" and "cross the breeze". i find my groove(y)-enhanced reduction about as musically satisfying as any other sonic youth album, though it'll never be my absolute favorite.

the whole hellhouse project of reducing culture to a series of contained artifacts, then treating each object as if it were a monolake record, seems to depend for its existence on some negative definition with the imagined 'critical world', where culture is bled of its intrinsic value in some horridly miscegenate amalgam of the nontextual

within the sphere of popular music, the critics reward those rock bands who ascend 'the (imaginary) sliding scale of rock/pop within rock music', thus themselves being agents in the aesthetic degeneration of the one pure petrine unsullied ROCK

contrarily one can not really care very much about critics, save perhaps to note that sometimes the famous one is the good one too

yeah

i read most of hellhouse's posts but they are mostly prolix in the extreme, full of dead reifications and thuddingly reiterated piecemeal formalism with no nuance and capacity to think beyond this weird half-world of musical, textual purity

sonic youth are the apogee of impure music, they are allusive in the extreme, postmodern to a fault, you might as well take berio's sinfonia and treat it as an atomized, orphaned musical object

3/10 (you forgot "megalomaniacal").

idk how far along you within the authoritarian personality 'sliding scale' but post a jpeg of all your military paraphernalia and i'll assess

OT but
I do wonder if that's the only album they have by the band sometimes. It certainly explains why so many rate Sgt Peppers as the best Beatles album.

It's my favourite by far (and afaict Revolver tends to be picked as the 'best' by critics, at least from the past 15 years or so). I don't really have anything new to say about it: as an album, it's the pinnacle of the Beatles' sonic experimentation and is masterful in its orchestration and production. "A Day in the Life" alone is stunning, even just that final chord, but really, there's so much to listen to in each track. Never bored listening to this. The distorted guitar tones are fantastic too.

This may be a challops but Revolver seems like an uneven transitional album to me. For consistent pop tunecraft, I'd easily take Rubber Soul imo; in terms of sound, orchestration, and production, I obviously think the Beatles went on to do greater things. The Beatles did not make bad, or even mediocre, albums in this period; "Eleanor Rigby", "For No One", and "Tomorrow Never Knows" are three of their greatest songs. Still, I'd rate these songs as relative duds: "Love You To" (I can't hear this as anything more than an embarrassing preparation for "Within You Without You") and "Yellow Submarine". Not duds exactly but lesser tracks imo: "Good Day Sunshine", "Doctor Robert".

People might genuinely like the record and might want to stick up for it, rather than just being "invested in its reputation."

to professional music critics as well as people who are music fanatics (or both), I don't think there's any difference whatsoever.

― Hellhouse, Sunday, September 2, 2012 6:57 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

so there's no difference between liking a record and being invested in its reputation. to music fanatics. including presumably you. ok.

i'm not sure i understand your criticisms of daydream nation or its canonization, hellhouse, other than that you seem to have an aversion to to the celebration of what you see as extramusical virtues. the problem is that, to the extent that we aren't well versed in music theory and/or practice, it's difficult to discuss an album's "purely musical" virtues in any but most vague and personal terms. and even if we are well-versed in theory, taste always boils down to more-or-less arbitrary preference.

daydream nation isn't my favorite sonic youth album. evol is more seductive, sister more visceral, and goo more thrillingly varied. i find some of its most celebrated tracks (especially "teenage riot") a bit dull and miss the scruffy digressiveness of the early records, but i simply can't agree that it's "so tepid, so half-hearted, so pointless and rote." to push a little harder, while you may be responding authentically to the music, it's hard to engage with that sort of analysis beyond simply nodding or shaking one's head. different strokes, right?

like most "ambitious" doubles, daydream nation is way too long, but in that it offers us an enjoyable opportunity to construct the version that best suits our tastes - especially if we throw in the whitey album as its b-side. i'll take "eric's trip", "rain king" and "total trash" while someone else might start with "teenage riot" and "cross the breeze". i find my groove(y)-enhanced reduction about as musically satisfying as any other sonic youth album, though it'll never be my absolute favorite.

I'll unpack some of this later. I'm done here for now.

you are king blog and ilx is your commentbox

Hellhouse can correct me but as I understand it, his criticism of DN itself boils down to that he thinks that Sonic Youth have no knack for writing relatively traditional pop/rock tunes. So when their relative focus shifted more towards writing rock songs (with noisy guitar bits) instead of experimenting with guitar sound (and sometimes coalescing their compositions and improvisations around rock song forms), they moved away from their strengths and towards a realm where they are less skilled. The debate about canonization and extramusical matters seems to be another issue.

And this is where I don't entirely agree, although I used to feel somewhat similarly: "Candle" in particular is a fantastically-crafted song imo.

Some great riff-based hard rock too: "Silver Rocket", "'Cross the Breeze"

i've never been much of a sonic youth fan -- i've nothing against them, it just didn't really come up until somewhat later. the first album of theirs i owned was the geffen reissue of daydream nation and i remember reading the little essay in the liner notes (by some german guy?) that was all like reagan-nation had made the world a living hell for everyone but then sonic youth fought back against ronald reagan with crazily tuned guitars.

i thought it was a cool record. maybe if i'd been on the downtown scene in the 80s i'd have seen it as a musical a-bomb, but probably not. anyway, now i (no doubt wrongly) think of it as absurdly pretentious, just because of that essay.

Yeah, I mean, they can be pretentious but do remember that they don't write their own liner notes.

oh sure. and i do like it. it just colored it in the sort of way that a bad video might color a song.

Those notes kind of added to the heady excitement when I was 16.

For those whose fave albums are the ones in the canon, I do wonder if that's the only album they have by the band sometimes. It certainly explains why so many rate Sgt Peppers as the best Beatles album.

― Algerian Goalkeeper, Sunday, September 2, 2012 3:36 PM (1 hour ago)

this seems weird to me, overly reactive. i can't say for sure, but i think i love sgt pepper's best simply because i grew up with it, because it was the sountrack of the first ten years of my life. that's "extramusical", perhaps, but not of lesser importance or value than any other point of appreciation. sgt. pepper's taught me a great deal about music, the pleasures of imagination and, though it sounds silly to say, about life. i imagine other people like not only because it's fucking crammed with timeless songs, but because it's so completely generous and open-hearted. it's as warmly welcoming as any pop album i can think of, uncynically embracing the most joyful and poignant aspects of experience. even its darkest moments occur in candy-sweet settings. in comparison, rubber soul, revolver, the white album and magical mystery tour are all a bit prickly.

^ "generosity" is great way of putting it and largely the #1 reason i go back to pet sounds

i think i love sgt pepper's best simply because i grew up with it, because it was the sountrack of the first ten years of my life

yeah my votes in this will be primarily based on the stuff i loved then, because i was 8-18 years old. and the cooler stuff i've learned to love since then like minutemen or killing joek or hüskers isn't gonna make me disavow donnie iris

bump to indicate that i have voted

lol me like a rock

contenderizer it's kind of hilarious that you basically said "it's weird for you to suspect that Sgt Pepper's is someone's favorite Beatles album because it's the only one they've heard...it's my favorite because as a child it was the only one i heard"

dag, blowing the donnie iris joke :(

haha some dude otm

contenderizer it's kind of hilarious that you basically said "it's weird for you to suspect that Sgt Pepper's is someone's favorite Beatles album because it's the only one they've heard...it's my favorite because as a child it was the only one i heard"

yeah, i get that, but i grew up with all of them. despite that general immersion in all things beatles, sgt. pepper's was the one we gravitated to as a family, the one that became our special album. i won't deny that ubiquity is self-affirming, but things often become ubiquitous for reasons that reach beyond hype and the tendency of critics and fans to internalize & repeat the official story.

AG otm that plenty of bands i only know one album by - the one in the canon. a lot of albums i voted for in this poll were like that. i voted one def leppard album, one anthrax album, one bon jovi album, one van halen album. i may have heard one or two things outside those single albums (hysteria, among the living, slippery when wet, 1984) that convinced me that i didn't want to spend too much time on them, or i liked the album enough to vote for it but not enough to check out more.

also thank u AG for including lazyvoter's method in poll. i hit unweighed, scrolled down nom list to pick out 50 albums i liked in alphabetical order, and hit submit. easystyle!

taking shots at the famous thing by suggesting that fame is a conspiracy of laziness is the cheapest possible zing. it emphasizes the "story" over the art in the worst possible way.

Well it's seandalai you need to thank. I just asked him to use the same system we used in last years awesome jazz poll. Which was his system.
But yeah, I used the split system. I think most voters used split system in last years jazz poll too. It's great I think.

xp

oh and no spoilers re: the ballots!

contenderizer, i don't know why you insist that the appreciation of a work of art should only exist within the context of the individual, when actually art is received + appreciated by aggregate communities too. who you hear about to hear is a product of various systems of distribution (economic, taste, geographic, social) that bring them to your attention. it is not an inadequate way to appreciate an album by talking primarily about its reception in a community, and certainly not to pair that w/ other more personal impressionistic accounts. which is not to glorify the canon (which should + does sustain challenges to it constantly) but to say that what you hear in the first place is just as important as why you like it.

the Grauzone - Eisbar that was added to the spotify playlist is a horrid remix. The original one is not on Spotify. This is it in case youre not familiar with it:

http://youtu.be/cTuTc_liKS4

The funy thing about all this is that there's an extremely high chance of DN walking this poll. The fact we're all talking about it suggests it will runaway with it. The previous 80s poll results suggest the same as the only albums ahead of it were ineligible! I should just save these comments for the blurbs hahaha

But don't be put of discussing it, just discuss other albums and other things too! Really enjoying the chat so far.

contenderizer, i don't know why you insist that the appreciation of a work of art should only exist within the context of the individual, when actually art is received + appreciated by aggregate communities too.

i, uh ... do i do that? in part i was trying to say that sgt. pepper's is important to me because it was important to my family. when i was younger, especially in my teens and twenties, it seems to me that my taste was "intensely personal" (and, not coincidentally i suspect, it often reflected my antisocial tendencies). at this point in my life, i place more emphasis on the sharing and social use of music.

The main reason it was talked about for years was because of the album cover the packaging which is iconic but nothing changes the fact that sgt peppers,except for 3 amazing songs, is fucking boring.

Also anyone see the irony in Beatles discussion in the thread for a poll on probably the decade that had the least Beatles influence since they began?
The 90s had 13 year old kids into them, not so in the 80s. I did not know one person who did.

Of course i didn't know anyone who liked sonic youth or husker du nor had i heard of them myself hahaha

what did you like at the time then

Beatles were huge in the 80s, especially once the cds finally came out. And there is plenty of music from the era influenced by them, too.

well you have minimized the legitimacy of the observation that some ppl rate certain albums bc those are the albums they have been exposed to. something that seems self-evidently true in many cases and certainly worthy of note xxxp

btw, this seems the right place to say this - 80s is my least favorite decade of popular music

mookieproof early 80s i liked Madness and basically singles, it was a great time for pop music for me til about 1985. Later 80s we got a cd player and I was into U2,Springsteen ,Waterboys, Bon Jovi and Hysteria by Def Leppard. As ive said many times in the past I did not really get into music til Nevermind. 18 years old left school, had money to buy cds for first time. Great times. all the awesome 80s music I heard post nevermind.

The main reason it was talked about for years was because of the album cover the packaging which is iconic but nothing changes the fact that sgt peppers,except for 3 amazing songs, is fucking boring.

yeah see this is the thing where people just rewrite history to suit their tastes, hate this

btw, this seems the right place to say this - 80s is my least favorite decade of popular music

and your favorite?