My 1001 Albums Journey

So I remembered that I still had to listen to this at 11pm on a stormy Tuesday in October after one of the worst days I’ve had all year. I was not thrilled. The lightbulb in my kitchen blew just to be dramatic. I had no food in the house. So I listened to the whole album by candlelight with wine, whisky and a Halloween themed cupcake for dinner. It’s the perfect album for that situation. Literally perfect. I will treasure it always. I cannot imagine a person enjoying this at 10am. I cannot imagine a person enjoying this on a sunny summer’s day. I cannot imagine a person who meal preps enjoying this album. Perhaps that’s a failure of imagination on my part but I’ll leave it to those people to discuss their experiences. For me, last night, it was perfect. Tom was perfect. And I’ll treasure him always.

Honky Tonk Masquerade is a kinder term than “Stale, Vacuous Redneck Drag” so I understand picking that as the title.

I’m slightly embarrassed at how much I enjoy this.

Such a perfect distillation of cynicism and earnest rage. It doesn’t feel like a singular moment in time, either - it just knocks you down and drags you into its own moment. Heart-Shaped Box was always one of my favourites and it probably still is. Dumb and All Apologies were also highlights. I’m choosing not to look to deeply into the fact that both of those songs feature Kurt Cobain yearning to be stupider so that he could be happier. I was also delighted by the Leonard Cohen reference in Pennyroyal Tea. It’s one of the things that the legions of Nirvana imitators usually failed to grasp - Kurt Cobain was the voice of a generation because he’d looked very far and very wide to find someone else who spoke for him and came up empty. But he respected all those influences and you can tell.

Did you date any pretentious, sad, morally superior, slightly-misogynistic-but-in-an-ironic-way-so-it’s-fine, “sprezzatura”, Morrissey-listeners in the early 2010s? If you didn’t but you inexplicably wish you had, then this is what it felt like. Awarding an additional star purely because I’m a sucker for a clever neon sign.