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I bought most of Diamond’s records during the Great Dollar-Bin Era of vinyl. I’m still missing a handful, although I don’t really know which ones exactly. I always meant to listen to his catalogue in sequential order someday, although my failure to keep up with the weekly Lightfoot thread suggests that’s not going to work for me.
He never got a ton of cred from the rock guys (too touchy-feely) nor from the singer-songwriter crowd (too mersh). Despite the rehabilitation of yacht rock over the past 20 years or so, he never really benefited from that, either (not hedonistic enough?); the Adult-Contemporary slot he wound up in by the late 70s has never been cool.
Somehow, his most barf-inducing gestures (his post-911 “freedom song”, e.g.) haven’t put me off the rest of his catalogue the way they might have with another artist. It’s probably totally a function of nostalgia. Neil’s records were some of the first I ever fell in love with. Beautiful Noise was on constant rotation during my early childhood. Trying to appraise him critically is probably something I can never do. When I listen to Neil by choice, it’s his scrappy early stuff I choose to spin (altho BN and the two Rubin albums get a fair amount of play, that is, once every few years), but I respect the hell out of him following his muse into weird, ambitious, deeply sappy, irony-free territory. Neil RULES.
― Una Palooka Dronka (hardcore dilettante), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 11:52 (four years ago) link
four years pass...