I’ve never listened to an entire Blur album before. I knew the single, Song 2, as it was hard to miss at the time, but I didn’t care for Britpop then. It turns out that I still don’t! Or at least not this album. I hear some of their influences here—Pavement, Bowie—and it’s mildly interesting but I’d rather listen to that than Blur’s interpretation of it. I don’t hate it, but nothing grabs me enough to want to go deeper with it either. In all, it feels a bit light, don’t know if that’s just an ingrained dislike for the genre.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I looked at the track listing on this one and saw the cover of the soft rock hit “Summer Breeze” but it certainly wasn’t a ripping fuzzed out guitar solo. I preferred the harder and funkier parts of this album to the more gentle and soulful bits, but overall it’s a really good listen, and a nice way to start a cold and snowy Monday morning in November.
The Who performed their rock opera Quadrophenia on two nights at GM Place in Vancouver in October of 1996. Commercially, it was a flop with lots of unsold tickets and empty seats. On the second night with a few friends from high school we took public transit downtown to try our luck with the scalpers. I wasn’t able to get a seat with my friends, but I did get row 14 on the floor for a whole twenty bucks. My memories of the show are vague: Billy Idol (already well washed-up) and Gary Glitter (before we knew he was a pedophile) had roles; the Who played some non-Quadrophenia classics after the opera; the boomers in the audience loved it. I think they were good, but like I said impressions are vague. What stands out more to me is the feeling of still being in school and getting that little taste of the world out there, without parents, and the freedom that comes with that. So I’m giving this album an extra star for bringing up this memory which is largely forgotten.
It’s hard to give a rating to albums like this because they carry so much weight. I’ve seen documentaries discussing the importance of the synth intro for leading song Baba O’Riley; some of the tracks, like Behind Blue Eyes and Won’t Get Fooled again I’ve heard countless times in countless contexts. If I try to step away from all of that and take the album as an album, it’s okay. Production values being what they were at the time, Roger Daltrey’s vocals are too high in the mix for me; the things that I’d like to hear more of, like Keith Moon’s often spectacular drumming, sit much lower in the background only hinting at the power they must have had in a live setting. Who’s Next is sandwiched between the rock opera Tommy and the previously-mentioned Quadrophenia, and the ambition to be more than a rock band comes across, but because it doesn’t resolve as a narrative, it sometimes feels meandering and lacking focus. Maybe you had to be there at the time.
Many years ago I was reading a collected volume of Leonard Cohen’s poetry that I’d picked up at a second hand bookstore late one evening while waiting for a metro at Place des Arts station. An older woman noticed what I was reading and began talking to me. It turned out that she’d met Cohen a few times many years ago because her late husband was friends with Leonard Cohen’s mentor. She recounted how the first time she met him she was feeling down and wasn’t very talkative; the next time they met she apologized for it, and told him that she’s not always so depressed.
“I am,” he replied.
Five stars.
There’s so much dumb, horny, disreputable swagger here. It’s great. Lust For Life doesn’t have the sheer force of Iggy’s work with The Stooges, but there’s plenty of energy here, and a bunch of great songs. “Neighborhood Threat” is particularly excellent. I gave this a few listens today.
I should note that some of this really hasn’t aged well though. I’m listening and writing this in November of 2025 with the Epstein files in the headlines and songs about lusting after teenagers is not it. Iggy Pop was far from the only musician writing songs that wouldn’t pass today, and as far as that goes, “Sixteen” isn’t among the worst of them. Still, even while acknowledging that music like this isn’t about having an upright moral character (and nor should it be!) it’s pretty gross.
Upon revealing this album my first thought was that I don’t like The Doors. After sitting down with this album, trying to put aside my biases and listen with an open mind, I still don’t like The Doors.
Taken out of the context of the reported importance the band had on the development of counterculture, this is middling blues rock with an above average frontman, but one whose importance is I think greatly overstated due to him dying young.
I get the feeling when I see these lists of supposedly essential records with a heavy bias towards the 60s and 70s it’s just because these lists are largely written by white dudes who were around then and have the access to be published in magazines or in books. And this stuff just reflects the music of their youths, the stuff they were really into before the pressures of every day life, the careers, the families, the bill payments and mortgages took over too many waking moments. I totally get it, I feel the same way about a lot of the music that was around when I was younger and that felt formative in my development as a person, but I don’t think that gives any of it an objective value either.
At least Morrison Hotel isn’t very long.
This is likely going to end up in regular rotation. Catchy and accessible synth pop with a darker edge. I hadn’t heard this album before today, but this might be my favourite thing I’ve come across on here so far.
The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago, and they’re included on this list, so clearly someone is hearing something I’m not.
I get the overall idea of the band, the stripped down garagey rock n roll that seems like it’s best appreciated in a small, crowded, and sweaty room, but it never comes together for me. Jack White has some interesting lyrics from time to time here, but overall I get the feeling of pastiche that’s filtered through the idiosyncrasies of a two piece band.
I appreciate that Jack White is a huge music fan and has used his platform to promote a lot of lesser-known bands, but that doesn’t make me like this any more.
The short review:
You had to be there at the time. And be on drugs.
The long review:
When I reflect on my music listening life, I sometimes have a twinge of regret that I missed out on the rave scene of the 90s. I had friends into it at the time so I was aware of it in the era when it was underground where the location was only revealed when you showed up to the meeting point. At that time I was going to punk and hardcore shows held at community centres, and if it wasn’t hard and fast and guitar-based, I wasn’t interested. As I’ve gotten older and as my musical horizons have broadened, I realize that I missed something that was interesting and unique, and that really only existed for a short period of time. When you’re young you think things as they exist will carry on forever, not aware of how fleeting it all is. And not that it was all good, because I remember friends feeling absolutely rotten on post-rave Mondays at school coming down from their weekend intake of ecstasy or ketamine.
And listening to this, assuming that this album made the list because it’s some sort of classic of the genre, I don’t seem to have missed anything musically either. I understand that music written explicitly to dance to in an unoccupied warehouse isn’t necessarily going to work in the context of listening in your car on your morning commute, but it’s just so lacklustre. Uninteresting drum programming, limp bass lines, blah synths. The hippy dippy rave culture lyrics are what they are, times have changed. I like electronic music, but this sounds lazy, like it’s a parody of the genre. Maybe I’d feel differently if I was high off my tits in some sketchy warehouse or field somewhere, but in the sober light of morning this is absolutely dreadful.
My first real surprise out of this 1001 albums project.
I didn’t like it at all at the beginning. As a rap album, it doesn’t really flow, it has a jilted and sparse production that sounds like it came out of somebody’s bedroom. And yet somehow about half way through the album I started warming to it. Because, somehow, completely implausibly, this laddish British rap opera works. The actual story here is mundane: guy loses money, guy meets girl, they break up because of mutual infidelity; themes and characters weave throughout the course of the album. It’s so sharply observed that it feels cinematic, the way that “Get Out of My House” ends with a domestic argument that grasps the exasperation when both people are just done, how in “Blinded By The Lights” the detail about going to the door of the club to get phone reception feels so real. You can imagine all of these scenes. There’s a truth in here.
In the first couple of minutes I thought this was going to be a one-star album with yet more questions about how this list was compiled, but I’m happy it’s so much more than that.
