To "rock fans", what is meant to be the canonical, everyone can agree on, album of the decade?

what i'm saying though is inside the 00s as we still are, at least you & I can agree that Kid A is the most significant album, and we prolley coul have said the same thing for Nevermind IN the 90s (though--oddly overlooked on this thread--there are prolley at least 5 albums that are considered more relevant nowadays) but could a lot of the 80s canonical choices be consider all that important IN the 80s, not knowing that Nirvana, Grunge, shoegazer, everything that happened not two years later would drastically change the game?

also, weirdly i've been listening to hysteria a lot lately and to me it's sort of the one place where almost all the trends of the 80s sort of merge into one....hair metal, really produced pop, drum machines, samplers, guitar solos, clean Police style guitar arpegios, crazy vocal harmonies...

it's sort of the reverse of something like avril i mentioned upthread...sort of a hard rock record with pop signifiers

i remember reading in Mojo once that their stated goal was to make the "Thriller of heavy metal" which seems like the ultimate 80s goal.

oh master of puppets is a good point...lol nevermind etc.

00's sucks sucks sucks as far as rock goes. sucks.

hysteria is good-call 80s record, but mentioning it seems wilfully perverse, given that this whole discussion is framed by the canon, thus critical respect, myths regarding artistic quality & importance, etc.

granted I didn't pay all that much attention to reviews when this came out but I have memories of all of the ones I did see being 5-star jizzfests

mak(ing) the "Thriller of heavy metal" (was) like the ultimate 80s goal.

That or having more ménage à trois with mother/daughter combinations than any other hair-metal band.

80s canonical choices be consider all that important IN the 80s, not knowing that Nirvana, Grunge, shoegazer, everything that happened not two years later would drastically change the game?

i see what you mean. no, and yes. 80s were a different era in a lot of ways. in one really important way: development of an indie rock subculture before it became obvious that it was a farm league system. records like damaged, zen arcade, daydream nation, psychocandy, the perfect prescription & c. were regarded as instant-canon classics pretty much from the day of release, but only by critics and within a relatively small circle of "hipster" fans. i suspect that they'd still be held in high regard, even w/out the influence they cast on the likes of MBV & nirvana (though, you know, if things were different, they'd be different).

I have memories of all of the ones I did see being 5-star jizzfests

― HI DERE

i have memories of a LOT of people taking the piss, esp more rockist/hipster types. plus it's not like the succeeding decades have done a lot to burnish the rep. i think it's mostly remembered as a kitschy fun party record, beloved of strippers and people who appreciate irony

http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/207338/review/12285422/hysteria

xxxp to contenderizer right...zen arcade, surfer rosa, daydream nation...they're the blessed black wings, and blood inside, and burned mind of their day...

records like damaged, zen arcade, daydream nation, psychocandy, the perfect prescription & c. were regarded as instant-canon classics pretty much from the day of release, but only by critics and within a relatively small circle of "hipster" fans.

this (my words) probably much more true in the US than the UK. pop press (NME/MM) seemed hugely influential in the UK and went apeshit over this stuff. the massive, seemingly unbridgeable gulf between indie-mainstream was more a US thing

xp hey strippers like all kind of music...

what's the oddest song you've seen a stripper dance to?

that's an after-the-fact review from 2006, Dan. i doubt that RS dug it at the time.

here's Xgau's review from back in the day, tho:

Hysteria [Mercury, 1987]
You know about the music, and if you don't think you'll like it you won't: impeccable pop metal of no discernible content, it will inspire active interest only in AOR programmers and the several million addicts of the genre. In short, it's product--but as product, significant, because it's product for the CD age. Stuck with over an hour of material after four years (after all, could twelve songs be any shorter?), they elected to put it all on one disc because as technocrats they instinctively conceive for formats that can accommodate an hour of music: cassettes, which now outsell vinyl discs, and CDs, which outdollar them. The cassette sound is a little too dim, as commercial cassette sound usually is, and though I sometimes find myself preferring the depth of the vinyl once I've turned my amp up to six or seven, the clarity of the CD gets more and more decisive as the needle approaches the outgroove. I mean, I have trouble perceiving these guys as human beings under ideal circumstances. Not docked a notch because at least they didn't pad it into a double. C

lol @ slamming a record by saying it will inspire interest in "only several million people"

i dunno, are "addicts" people?

yeah, i remember reading hysteria reviews in RS, spin, voice (?), bunch of other places. reception was mixed, at best.

edit: pretty much like that xgau bit. catchy, but fake, "sold out", empty. rockist value differentiators very much in play

Well, fwiw, I seem to remember that RS gave Nevermind just 3-stars upon its release.

"Servicable catchy rock" was basically the review.

Well, fwiw, I seem to remember that RS gave Nevermind just 3-stars upon its release.

― Daniel, Esq.

i.e., in-the-moment RS reviews as a poor guide to what will eventually end in the RS canon

the perfect prescription & c. were regarded as instant-canon classics pretty much from the day of release

probably much more true in the US than the UK

Uh, not for those two albums (whatever they are.) And fwiw, U.S. critics hardly went ga-ga over Damaged when it came out either. Mostly, they ignored it.

"of no discernible content" is the part that always kills me.

xxp

Uh, not for those two albums (whatever they are.) And fwiw, U.S. critics hardly went ga-ga over Damaged when it came out either. Mostly, they ignored it.

― xhuxk

think i may have been a little unclear there, xhuxk. my point was that the albums i mentioned were regarded as instant-canon classic within their indie underworlds. that in the US at the time, the divide between indie and mainstream seemed much larger than it did in the UK. so indie-crit sanctification in many cases took time creeping up into the mainstream (or into the long-memory indie semi-mainstream, anyway). damaged and spacemen 3's perfect prescrip being examples.

This question is totally flawed.. "rock fans" has yet to be defined in this thread as it can mean 1 of 100 things. Make the question less vague and you may find your answer.

Origin Of Symmetry might be a good answer for U.K. residents and anglophiles.

why don't we try to define what rock fans does not mean, in the purpose of this thread first?

trying to define "rock fans" is probably a losing game. different fans define the genre differently. what emerges from all those conflicting definitions is some kind of vague, blurry ghost that can't really be pinned down, but exists nonetheless. we've gotta work with the uncertainty.

changed my mind. its without doubt fever to tell.

2000:
relationship of command - at the drive-in
parachutes - coldplay
the white pony - deftones
the sickness - disturbed
veni, vedi, vicious - hives
hybrid theory - linkin park
mad season - matchbox 20
kid a - radiohead
1000 hurts - shellac
all hands on the bad one - sleater kinney

2001:
love and theft - bob dylan
vision creation newsun - boredoms
sinner - drowning pool
gorillaz - gorillaz
origin of symmetry - muse
silver side up - nickelback
rock steady - no doubt
come clean - puddle of mudd
oh, inverted world - shins
break the cycle - staind
is this it - strokes
toxicity - system of a down
lateralus - tool

2002:
source tags and codes - ...and you will know us by the trail of dead
i get wet - andrew WK
beaches and canyons - black dice
yoshimi battles the pink robots - flaming lips
oceanic - isis
neon golden - notwist
songs for the deaf - queens of the stone age
yankee hotel foxtrot - wilco

2003:
transatlanticism - death cab for cutie
a mark, a mission, a brand, a scar - dashboard confessional
kid rock - kid rock
hypermagic mountain - lightning bolt
de-loused in the comatorium - mars volta
sing sing death house - the distillers
the real new fall LP - the fall
elephant - white stripes
fever to tell - yeah yeah yeahs

2004:
sung tongs - animal collective
funeral - arcade fire
crimes - blood brothers
franz ferdinand - franz ferdinand
american idiot - green day
they were wrong, so we drowned - liars
leviathan - mastodon
vol. 3: the subliminal verses - slipknot
burned mind - wolf eyes

2005:
X&Y - coldplay
from under the cork tree - fall out boy
blessed black wings - high on fire
wonderful rainbow - lightning bolt
frances the mute - mars volta
gimme fiction - spoon
black one - sunn0)))
hypnotize - system of a down
standing in the way of control - the gossip
separation sunday - the hold steady

2006:
the warning - hot chip
blood mountain - mastodon
black holes and revelations - muse
the black parade - my chemical romance
pearl jam - pearl jam
10,000 days - tool
return to cookie mountain - tv on the radio

2007:
new wave - against me!
mirrored - battles
pink - boris
infinity on high - fall out boy
in rainbows - radiohead

2008:
saint dymphna - gang gang dance
vampire weekend - vampire weekend
oracular spectacular - MGMT
when the world comes down - all american rejects
pretty. odd - panic at the disco

2009:
merriweather post pavilion - animal collective

just wanted to reiterate how happy these lists make me...

That's a kinda awesome list, dude.

nickelback especially

but i haven't liked nickelback since they were a silverchair/bush rip-off band...

(or at least since their silverchair/bush imitations were a marginal blip on the altrockradio landscape)

No, I totally dig. I was definitely listening to Nickelback in 2001. Of course, I was sixteen at the time, but still. You're missing Evanescence, tho.

wow lol am i older than you Mordy?

only time I thought I might like Evanescence was in that Seether "Broken" video when Amy Lee had that pair of black angel wings...w/o that lingering perv element in my personality Evanescence wd be of zero interest to me...

however contenderizer's inclusion of white pony, toxicity, and hypnotize only serves to reinforce this list's awesomeness

I guess you are! I think I love your list because it almost mirrors my own music listening evolution pretty spot-on. Except it's missing some screamo/emo albums that I was listening to around 18-19 years old (Thursday, Thrice, Coheed + Cambria, etc) and skips directly to Fall Out Boy. Tho you do have Dashboard.

Also, these lists are reminding me of tons of albums I loved, and haven't listened to in awhile. Nostalgia ftw!

To "rock fans", what is meant to be the canonical, everyone can agree on, album of the decade?

There is none.

coheed wd not be too bad in here...

yeah, there's tons of stuff i should have included but spaced on, both shit and shine. 00s decade of rock

whats that coheed song that actually charted a while back?...it sounded kind of like "kashmir", and actually managed to cop some of that song's grandeur, without being crushed by its colossal weight...so thats an accomplishment...

Dave Matthews Band had their big album this decade (Everyday), and if I remember correctly, Dispatch had their big album in 2000? Also, has The Rising been mentioned yet? That seems like a shoe-in for a certain kind of critical rock album list.

Hot Fuss, maybe?

Dave Matthews Band had their big album this decade (Everyday)

What? Under the Table and Dreaming and Crash both sold upwards of 6 million; Everyday sold half that.

Also, I certainly don't travel in jam-band circles, but you're only the second person I've ever heard mention the band Dispatch.

I don't travel in big jam-band circles, but among college-stoners Dispatch has always seemed huge. And you're right. For some reason I blocked out those other DMB albums. I'll admit -- not the hugest college-rock fan.

i skipped the screamo stuff cuz i'm so unfamiliar -- i dunno what's worth a mention. thursday, thrice, taking back sunday? WTF? was kinda into the braid, promise ring, get up kids & hot water music type stuff, but that was late 90s. jimmy eat world bleed american shoulda been on there. maybe cave-in's jupiter. dillinger four? different kinda thing, smaller scale...

and what about coheed? i always wrote em off cuz the whole premise seemed so goofy, but i was listening to some tracks tonight and kinda dug em. goofy as hell, but in a way that reminds me of the rush/BOC sci-fi stuff i used to dork out on as a kid. singer even sounds like geddy. what's the best place to start?

Sadly, the answer is teh chilly pepperz.

sadly, that is some bullshit

If it's RHCP, it's By the Way. Wasn't Californication in the late 90s?