"What's your favourite album?"

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Drawing heavily on that discussion we had on Poptimists a week or two ago, here's my latest Pitchfork column. I wanted something straightforward after last month's reaction-free one (which I'm still quite pleased with) and I appear instead to have accessed my inner Nick Hornby.

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"I came late to albums-- at 11 or 12"

i didn't buy albums almost til i went to college! mostly as i am not counting stuff bought for me, comedy records, and the Robin of Sherwood sound track.

in fact i rarely even listened to non-compilation non my-parent's albums. i recall randomly borrowing a tape of a Howard Jones album.

I may have bought PSBs Actually when i was in 6th form. i really can't recall.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

part of this is limited funds/access when you're a teenager though innit? every time I bought an album it was a HUGE thing for me, I had to be so sure I wouldn't be disappointed. compilations aside I think I only actually owned less than 20 albums by the time I went to university.

now I think nothing of going on to Amazon marketplace and buying up the entire Janet Jackson back catalogue for 1p + p&p each on a total whim.

I really wonder how teenage Lex (or indeed anyone) would have turned out, with all this unprecedented access to music - I think it would probably encourage a lot more magpieing around all over the place, and discourage obsessive interests in particular artists.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

JJ's Control was something like the 2nd album i bought when i was up at college!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I've had that and Rhythm Nation for years - it was the 90s/early 00s I didn't have, and we were talking about some of those singles on poptimists the other day, and I was suddenly like OH SHIT I want a copy of 'All For You'!

$$$

[koganbot]

it seemed weird to me to buy a record where you didn't know you'd like everything on it

At age 9 I couldn't understand why anyone would buy singles. Why spend $1 for one song when you could get 12 for $3½.

Re: $$$

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh I didn't buy singles either! I used to tape them off the radio :)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i didn't buy many albums (as a percentage) but i taped *so* much stuff off my mates and they would tape stuff off me to the point where i was really gutted when, independantly, my mate jamie bought 3 feet high and rising the same weekend i did...

most of my favourite albums are still slightly hissy taped version often missing half of the last song(appetite for destruction, nevermind, everything's alright forever, bizarro)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Haha yes the curse of the 49 minute album!

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I didn't have anything to play music on (other than a radio, that is) until I was 12 or 13 - I guess I was 13 when I first bought an album. That was Slade Alive, and it stood as my favourite for a couple of years (and I still love it). In recent years I've been citing Pulp's Different Class, but the allegiance aspect, which is certainly very often part of such a choice, is a negative for me in this case, as I've disliked or hated 99% of indie since around 1990, and more specifically I hate 99% of other Britpop, so I don't feel any affinity with the genre, fans or whatever.

I'm still in the habit of not considering compilations when I answer this question - if I did, the albums I love most would be Al by Al Green, one of the prime-period Louis Prima comps, or even James Brown's Star Time, if we can stretch the definition that far. There is some point to considering albums made as albums, rather than compilations of the act's best work, separately for some purposes, but I'm not sure why I still answer a favourite album question on those terms.

Loveless

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

:-)

my stock answer for quite some time. it still is most of the time. its just burned into my head - to the point where hearing any deviation in it, alternative versions, live versions, whatevs - it ruins it.

None more indie

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the burned in to the head thing. See also: Daydream Nation, House Tornado, first Drive Like Jehu album, Brown Album.

Re: None more indie

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

The Stone Roses, Blue Lines, Lou Reed's New York Now 10...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

In the past I have answered: Doolittle, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, the first Omni Trio album, erm. probably some more.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

For ages my only non-compilation albums were:

Elastica
Protection
Dummy
Jagged Little Pill
(and er, Mosely Shoals, which I listened to about twice)

Things only stepped up a gear when I got a cd player.

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

I really liked this week's column, Tom. Simultaneously manages to personalize without subsuming the ideas totally. I'm not sure if "access[ing] your inner Nick Hornby" is supposed to be a criticism of the piece, but if so, you're being a bit hard on yourself. Hornby can be quite insufferable about music.

Didn't have a CD player into the house until 8th grade (00=01ish), so early favourites were defined by the parent's vinyl collection (Simon & Garfunkel, Beatles, etc.). First purchased album was Paul Simon's Graceland, and a bunch of classical.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

On one hand, I'm one of those people whose favorite album changes all the time, depending on my mood -- but on the other hand, I feel like if it's only been your favorite album for five hours, it's not really your favorite album. So I never know how to answer "What's your favorite album?" and I usually end up just saying "Fleetwood Mac's Tusk" and leaving it at that. It's not necessarily the album I enjoy the most -- it's not necessarily even the Fleetwood Mac album I enjoy the most -- but it is the album I have known the longest which is also at least a little cool, and it is a nod to my massive teenage Fleetwood Mac obsession, and it serves as sort of a reference point for what I like about music (melodies, messes, odd productions, behind-the-scenes drama, having to follow lyrics from song to song, etc.).

So basically...yeah, I agree, nice column.

A critic confesses

[koganbot]

I've heard almost none of the albums in full that are mentioned in the piece or on this thread!

[koganbot]

the act of choosing them signifies a kind of allegiance to something. Ah, but what?

I can't say I've figured out my answer.

The album that I could feel unfettered allegiance to has never been made. It would have the fierce and desperate warm sounds of freestyle, the density of r&b, the rhythmic unsettledness and uncertainty of On The Corner, the heart and poetry of the Dolls, the passion of the Shangri-Las, the vulnerability of the early Wailers, the sketchiness and openness of ________ (can't think of a great one here, yet), the unrelenting critical mind of the Stones. I don't think it's possible to combine those things, and a mixtape that combined these bands isn't what I mean. I mean songs that did all this at once.

But favorites often confute allegiance. Read my comments on my 2007 Idolator ballot.

[koganbot]

To follow up on that: when I admitted at age 18 that I preferred the Stones to Dylan or the Airplane, I was choosing something powerful but relatively narrow and detached over music that sounded much more vulnerable and openended and had far more color. And I was working out that I identified with Jagger's critical mind, but I didn't (and don't) think that Dylan and the Airplane couldn't have kept their character while developing their intellect to the level of Jagger's. Discovering the Dolls a year and a half later seemed to solve the dilemma: Stones and Shangri-Las and Dylan all in one, and stronger moments of poetry than you got from any of them. So admitting to myself that I preferred Raw Power to New York Dolls was admitting defeat, in a way. Maybe if the Dolls had pulled their sound together in the way that the Sex Pistols did on Never Mind The Bollocks they'd have remained at my top for longer. Never Mind The Bollocks topped my list for a while, too, and that felt just like returning to the Stones.

As for post-1981, it seems as if whole areas of my fan aspirations have gone to shit. The music where I'd expect the rhythmic unsettledness and uncertainty of On The Corner, the heart and poetry of the Dolls, the unrelenting critical mind of the Stones, has produced lameness instead. It's like the smart people suddenly went dumb while opting for a simulation of intelligence and to prove their supposed smarts they deleted the life and throb from their music. Exceptions: Appetite For Destruction is great music but Axl really didn't have the mind to push through. I'm not putting my hope on Ashlee growing a Jagger mind or Dylan restlessness either (I like her jumps in style, there's exploration in them, but the restlessness doesn't embed itself in her sound). Eminem somehow regenerating himself and finding a collaborator to add a hunk more musical color and surprise than he ever had isn't likely. Is there a way that Eminem Year 2000 even has an entry into music of 2008? I'm not hearing it in my mind's ear. Amazing that my musical hopes for 2008 are all pinned on a Cassie LP. Seems to leave out an awful awful awful lot of what music can do, doesn't it?

[koganbot]

Back in '88 I wrote a piece for Jack Thompson's Swellsville that was called "Smoochfaces On The Vanguard" where I was basically saying that the girl twirl of Company B and Vivien Vee and and Exposé and Maribell and Sa-Fire and Chip Chip and Deborah Allen et al. could evolve within it raving critical Stoogesness and I was implying that the criticalness of the Stooges was being leached out of post-Stooges music, which wouldn't be able to find its way back to the throb of life and the roar of language that you could find in dime-a-dozen dance music. The way I put it was that there was The Dance Of Life and then there was The Life Is Fucked Celebration Dance (which was short for The Dance Of Cantankerous Recalcitrance And Resistance To And Proto (Or Pseudo) Rebellion Against The Conditions Of Life And Dating), and I was claiming that if you started with the first you would grow the second within you without having to abandon the first, but if you went for the second while forgoing the first you ended up with nothing. The piece wasn't written well enough to go in my book, I decided, and you could get a lot of the same ideas from the pieces I did reprint, but I regret not including it because it has wonderfully passionate polemics raised to an absurdity: "This IS the Dance Of Recalcitrance, the Dance Of The Party, the Dance Of The Anti-Dull. It isn't yet the Life Is Fucked Celebration Dance. But this is where the next Life Is Fucked Celebration Dance will originate.... The future of 'punk' is disco. By this I don't mean 'punk' bands that go 'rhythmic, like'; nor do I mean dance bands that wear British attire. I mean from within disco - The Disco Dance Of Life just naturally (without necessarily trying) dances itself fucked. Because 'fucked' is, like, there. Like the Matterhorn. You put on the record or go to the disco but bring your own dance with you - because after all the record is just your soundtrack. Go for it. - Frank Kogan"

(This is an example of the famed prognosticatory ability that has made me rich today.)

So the allegiance is to something, but to what? Which record?