"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

[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?