1001 Albums Summary

You know how on albums from this era that drugs make the album and other times drugs made the album? This is definitely one of those.

Sure, one of the greats. But the recording and playing is just incredible. With the band in Memphis and Dusty in New York, just an incredibly well produced record.

Gen X pop punk is the American version of the long nineties. Turns out there’s a lot of collapsing middle class families in a nation.

Back when cannabis was smooth and mild, and the dealers were genteel, ruthless hippies.

Will these words add anything to the volume of those already written about this? No.

“What were the seventies in America?” Is a question to which this is one of foundational documents. In this thesis, I shall argue…

The bridge between the post-britpop afterglow and Coldplay’s soft lad optimism rock. But it’s a more significant epitaph; ‘The Man Who’ is the last breath of British art school as a cultural force in the UK. Killed by sky high tuition fees, the emergence of the Brit-school as a machine, and the establishment reasserting control over the cultural industries. Now, the only class difference between British pop stars (and actors, and writers) is whether they were full boarders or day boys.

“Commercial R&B has been an extremely important genre for young black women since the 1980s, but because it doesn’t speak to me directly, it’s terrible” - every goddamn review on this website

Most of us are the same. And then a very small number of us are two standard deviations away from the most of us.

Try all you want; put on a donkey jacket and flat cap, add all the brass and play all the stuff you heard from two-tone. Even put on a dress and hire backing dancers. But if the first thing people think of when they hear your name is white British people dancing in a municipal hall in the eighties and nineties, that’s who you are. Alternatively: Track 1 on a musical accompaniment to a Martin Parr exhibition.

“Britpop was the sound of the nineties!” so goes the aging writer, as they attempt to sell another reminiscence of being ridiculed by Damon Albarn outside of The Good Mixer. They are wrong; Popular trance and house music was the sound of the nineties. This was not popular.

As I’m under 50, I have no working memory of Britain before Thatcherism. This is what I choose to believe it sounded like.

New Orleans you say?

Good songs with the force multiplier of insanely beautiful frontman.

Sometimes you are just two songs, and that’s fine.

I don’t care for this, but the enduring touring machine has really set the mould for how rock and roll became an old man’s game.

The moment when Damon Albert stopped being an insufferably smug prick who hated working class people and became an insufferably smug prick who hated mass media consumption.

Coffeeshop singer-songwriter was a widely derided genre that started in the mid-eighties but came to prominence in the nineties. Every song was an elegant variation of the same subject; the constant negotiation of heterosexual love, set to Yamaha synths and an acoustic guitar. Its association with the corporatisation of America’s nascent coffee scene did not help its image. A reputation as the Gen X vaseline. High Fidelity but with the smell of vinyl replaced with espresso. It’s doesn’t deserve this reputation. In a somehow more homogenised, forever elsewhere in a screen world, the notion that a relationship lived on your skill with your tongue rather than your writing is now alien. A transitory genre (the coffee shop is an inherently transitory place) is preferable to one of the permanence of surveillance.

What if Metal but silly? Yeah, I know there’s Iron Maiden, but sillier.

It’s quite an experience — having heard all the derivatives, facsimiles, samples and straight up rips offs — to hear the real deal

She was 20 when she made this.

Very rare do you get to listen to something and go “This is the genesis of a genre”.

The tension between the one who wants to be the travelling electro shock blues man and the one who wants to go home.

Garage Rock is the best genre of music that involves an electric guitar and it’s not even close.

Was every band formed in the millennial youth times just a facsimile of a previous band? Are Muse really that much like Queen? And how did that rat faced mfer end up with Kate Hudson? The answer is it’s Classic Rock now and we’re all essentially dead.

If you have room for only one racist on this list, then this should be your guy.

Given the advances in cocaine purity levels over the last decade, it’s more likely that this album is the result of talcum powder withdrawal. It could also explain why we’ve not seen a real 10 record in the last decade.

The difference between the British media’s perception of what bands were big in America and the bands that actually were big in America are a case study of how an insular elite can convince themselves of an alternate reality.

Is Worldbeat Orientalist? Or is “So” the exception that proves the rule? In this essay, I shall…

The most London band ever. Multiculturalism, Empire, private education, violence, pubs, socialism.

From an era where genre was a very tribal, parochial thing in the UK. People dressed according to their taste and they went out in different parts of town. Indie, Dance, Pop, Goth were identities and fraternising was rare, probably due to the casual violence that made Saturday night in a town centre so bracing Now, the kids all dress the same, listen to everything and generally glass each other much less. Progress.

Goddamn

This was a part America’s Britpop (AKA, the soundtrack to the cultural milieu of GenX’s 1990s)

The tension between the very shy person who feels that they absolutely must perform is always interesting

How do we reconcile the sensitive feminine dandy of then, with the flag waving and dodgy views of now? The answer is you can’t.

Every day, someone who only knows Randy Newman from his Toy Story songs, listens to this album for the first time.

Three barely competent musicians, one mercurial singer, an inspired guitarist and some of the worst audio production ever. Anjali Dutt is right; every song is compressed down to an inch of dynamic range, rendering it basically unlistenable. An interesting experiment would be a Taylor Swift style complete rebuild of every part of the album from scratch. Could this actually sound good?

The road to President Trump was laid by white GenXers, and the warning signs have been there since the late nineties.

Mick Jagger has said that he happened to live in the vanishing small period in the music industry where an artist was able to make real money.

I heard your dad cries when listening to this album.