Canonical albums that you hadn't heard, were certain you would love, but DIDN'T

HORSES by Patti Smith springs immediately to mind.

the velvet underground & nico
nick drake - pink moon
daft punk - discovery
wilco - yankee hotel foxtrot

Is Daft Punk already in the canon?

Not at all, Horace....it's just seemingly rare to find people who agree with me. Huzzah!

Mine:
Neil Young: TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT
Sex Pistols: NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS...
Slint: SPIDERLAND
The Creation: almost all (except for a few sparkling exceptions like "Making Time")

Anyway...regular canon: Exile On Main Street and Never Mind The Bollocks...; also, ABBA in general.

ILM canon: Avril Lavigne.

Is there a thread for "Canonized albums that are fine and all but sort of pale in comparison to other stuff that's not as loved"? (Mezzanine > Blue Lines goddammit)

agreed: Trout Mask Replica and Horses - both rub.

and: all Rolling Stones, basically, except Their Satanic Majesties Request; Godspeed; Sleater-Kinney.

some great songs but not a great album izit?

I once even started a thread on Marquee Moon being overrated but I like it much more now. Oddly, the title track is one of my least favorites.

If we're going to state our opinions- Bob Dylan- Let go of your nose and Stop Whiiinning!! Wilco-You Blow!!

i am with you on 'never mind the bollocks', though.

I can understand having mixed feelings upon hearing Suicide's debut album for the first time or even being underwhelmed by MARQUEE MOON (which, however, is truly a grower if you stick with it), but I can't imagine not being blown away by NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS. Obviously, this many years later it doesn't sound as shocking, but the songs and the character are still there in abundance. Or I think so, at least.

Add 'Tommy' to my pile.

yet despite the fuss made of Suicide in Wire i've always loved that first album because when i first heard it there were no other minimalist synth duos, and they had the riffs and the humour (the only David Lynch movie we had to compare it to back then was Eraserhead, which i though was pretty lame, so Suicide were like "good david Lynch")

Exile .. is the pay-off after all the half-assed Stones albums of the '67-'71 period -- it's finally their own sound that rocks, prophesising low-fi and sidestepping the superficial slick production notorious in the '70s -- it's moving on from the dark Oldham inspired sound of their great early simgles -- it's like a song cycle that is somehow deeply satisfying, even if 'down the line' and 'happy' don't bear thirty listens, because the rest, well i'm still counting

Slint are just a band with a novelty sound and like minded photographers -- a concept sound that moved a different dynamic to the boring punk chord dynamic into the "sub pop" sound -- good for people looking for somewhere out of alt punk rock music of the times, but as enduring as The Chipmunks

It Takes A Nation Of Millions .. sounded like nothing else when it came out, at last here was rap with some musical brain, (ie the extra layer of skew chord/noise jabs) and smart lyrics
but it got superceded by Fear of a Black Planet which was muli-layered in comparison and took the rhetorical politician/fool thing to a really clever new level,
then NRA introduced a more heavily layered soul and funk approach, leaving the minmalist Millions sounding a bit flat or empty,
and then PE adopted the one heavy groove formula, leaving the layers and jabs of Black Planet behind, hard to imagine topping it anyway

Sonic Youth after their Goo crossover attempt have been the most over-rated nyc art name-dropping wannabe _act_ ever since -- they should retire -- even their wtc experience gave them no inspiration -- didn't buddy holly go down in a jet ? why don't they collaborate with artist Christo ? destroy all their special instruments at least ? broken punks .. so Murray Street is the most anticipated and least inspiring album for me -- the most hyped and the least convincing -- as stupidly inwardly lookingly American w/out meaning to be as President Bush is a transparent big oil fuck-the-environment narrow minded warmongering dummy, for all the world to see -- Nixon has been outdone and the flagship alt-rock band aren't exactly taking it to the people are they ?

Who here wants to see Charlton Heston doing "Fuck the Police"?

so Ned, i'll try and think up an acronym that combines the NRA style 'real political party' angle with the local cant of our prized rugby-playing nz pig-hunters, shearers and deerstalkers, those "Southern Men' who you were so taken with, who don't rap so much as grunt

one of the seminal flying nun releases (double album with 4 early dunedin bands each getting a 45 rpm side, including one band called The Stones) -- came in nz photo montage like the mainstreet verion -- flying nun talked the majors into letting them press local records here as long as the cardboard covers were black and white
two of the four bands became very important influential early flying nun bands and all four were quite famous (tribute album & punk piss take ?)
so i guess there's always been Exile .. on the barbeque circuit, and wasn't there some weird feminist rebuttal take on it dressed up like it by Matador (tribute album and indie piss take ?)

Almost as good -- the Ice-T behind the music shows a clip of Charlton reading the lyrics to "Cop Killer" in his 10 Commandments style! "Die... die... die pig die."

Also, I hated Obscura by Gorguts at first but have grown to think it's great.

don't you think some of the arrangements on this alb are quite exceptional tho'. and I'm sorry but saying that its a hippie type rec is nothing to me. the lyrics are have some sort of vague environmentalist stuff as i recall.

george- how many listens have you given this? I didn't think of it on first listen but I def enjoy it after a few. are you talking abt the lyrical content here? explain...

i do not hear the musical dynamism or acceleration or melodic mystery in Murray Street, but i only have a superficial acquaintance with the lyrics of some of the songs, the first 3 making the album seem like a novel not worth finishing, so it hasn't had the large no. of listens, seems to have nothing to pull me back in, whereas .. Nation had both lyrical angles and ever more intriguing exploration of their real musical freedoms that their approach has not admitted more recently

the fast band with an excess of musical force and range vs. the middling slow build up grateful dead style, but where are the "sonic deadheads" as i the watch anti-war protest in america live on tv for the first time in my life ?

*("logical" considered here as a relative quality, not an absolute)
**(no responsibility taken for actual factual truth of any of these statements)

what does a 'sonic deadhead' look like? do you need to see the t-shirt george?

Oh, and all you Patti Smith haters - I kill you all.
Yikes. (At least I agree with the sentiment. The 'kill' bit is a little much.)

I got it on the first listen. Is there something wrong with me?

well, I like both the Dead and Sonic Youth, for similar reasons. there are no 'tourheads' for SY, tho, because noise makes for less of a party for most people and maybe takes more thought.

also, this statement is incoherent to me- is there a political platform that's supposed to go with either/both bands? is opposition to the war a corollary of understanding their music? what are you talking about?

i'm certainly no fan of Bush, and i'm not necessarily a supporter of a war that may have great costs, but i'm also not wholly convinced that it's a bad idea - what if the (perhaps unlikely) result is an Arab democracy that has something good to say about America and helps spur a revolution in Iran? that could help both us and the Middle East. and what if our intelligence does say Saddam is close to nuke-capable? I'm not comfortable with going in until that's made public, but if it's true, I think it would overcome any differences between him and Osama.

the real problem is an administration that feels no need to justify a war in anything but the vaguest terms. very suspicious.

and i seem to remember many bands bothering to make a fuss about political events and the mess their country makes elsewhere during these other times

and the impression now is that any real journalistic freedom when it comes to reporting to those special american people is stymied, and if you don't agree 'you're against us', anti-american/ un-american

i'm sorry if jim o'rourke is so bummed out by actually seeing all that new york stuff to break out of easy listening mode, but i thought that sonic youth asserted themselves that they were following in the footsteps of all their heroes and think themselves quite cool as a new york band -- so are the fbi interested in the lyrical content of this radical band (like they thought lennon would destablise america in spelling mistake on memo blunder) ?

is bush winning votes with ageing GIs that did time in Japan by flouting international conventions again, this time at "camp x-ray" (just my theory) ? isn't hussein floating UN resolutions ? but hasn't israel flouted the most ?

debate about this stuff used to seem partly spearheaded by "the left", the fringe or marginal or rock'n'roll "leaders" of large groups of younger people who used to be the cannon fodder in these situations -- now young people in america think this war will be like an arial crop dusting computer air-flight simulator sort of game i suppose

Sonic Youth, please change the name or disband with all your special side projects, because as a nucleus for anything beyond post-modern re-analysis of rock culture to suit your navel-gazing middle-aged selves, you've nothing to say about what's goin on -- pass the olympic flame over to some other people, retire -- get over the endless self-satisfaction -- isn't the fuss about some of your recent projects just the evidence that you're capable of still producing albums, with Murray Street people seeing maybe a slight return to form ? please say something lyrically about something important, because musically i think you're as tame as the eagles were in their day

I just wrote and erased an off-point post, but right on, brother. I've never been afraid of my own government before, but I sure am now.

Your neurology-of-repetition argument is 12-ft-lizards nonsense also.

Incidentally, lest we forget: 1992's "Youth Against Fascism"

NELLY IS UNFORGIVABLE.

you don't seem to be looking at the substance of what i'm saying in your post (do you think sonic youth should keep on going the smug way that they are ? is there no-one to fill the vacuum ? i don't know what you think about anything specific i've written) Is it ok for you to do a meta-post, or is that clearly scornful tone supposed to be language i understand ? a yangian response ?

eg if you simply opt for ways which make you sound good to yrself and push them further into what you consider their deluded robot ignorance, then that's because secretly you prefer it that way, with reaction in flaming ascendence and you as the little noble lonely voice of dissent.
this is a load of assumptions, and if you want to explain how you got to them privately do it that way, but there's a gap between what's been discussed in music and what you've said here -- i'm not going to assume what you've written is based on your basic attitudes, what you think sounds good or provides credible rebuttal, but i could guess one person who you've been talking to in order to make these extraordinary personal leaps
i'm not trying to play an outsider and i'm just writing what seems to be correct to me (cf: what looks good) like everbody else who writes anything here, but i admit it's my theory -- this is pretty scornful stuff here -- do you want me to just react against what you've written, repeat what i've written about music which you haven't addressed at all, simply ignore/accept it, i don't want it to be calling your bluff -- i can't deal with what you've written w/out being oppositional, which is what you'd like to more generally claim i am -- but it's too meta anyway -- do i agree with you implicitly by dropping it ?
is there a 12ft tuatara logic to all of this anyway ? IS it about politics in music (are sonic youth, the only musical targets of any scorn from me in this thread (with Joan Jett)), indefensible musically/lyrically here ? i just want them to move out of the faux superstar limelight enough to allow other alternatives -- yes, y against fascism was a long time ago, and it sounded like going thru the motions to me -- they're a Geffen act aren't they ? Julio, what made them important pre-Geffen had a lot to do with their lyrics, how they accumulated interest in often so-so music, sometimes brilliant sometimes even post-industrial -- what do you think ?
but if they're the fathers of grunge ther're implicated in a youth movement that has descended to blink whatever and post-Cobain cut-youself-ups -- are punk rockers tuff guys, turf clerks ? is this sort of rhetoric not punk or not rock ? or not pop ? or just not ilm ?

unfortunately i gotta have this fight later if i have it all

''Julio, what made them important pre-Geffen had a lot to do with their lyrics, how they accumulated interest in often so-so music, sometimes brilliant sometimes even post-industrial -- what do you think ?''

pre-geffen: mostly the music: their guitar sound was praised, not so much attention was given to lyrics, I think.

I'm at work right now but i'll come back to this later.

catholic block, chapel hill, cool thing, candle, all political songs ?
and total crash had lyrics that reflected on the merits of the trade-offs their music made to the heavy rock sound and "headspace"

it intrigues me that they are still seen as important worldwide when a lot of their music has that american inward looking obsession in its own culure -- yet here's a world event, and Murray Street is circumstantially a loaded title for this album, putting what happened in washington and nyc squarely on the agenda i would have thought, and we're not listening to the lyrics ?

here in semi-rural new zealand we saw a repeat of "the year punk broke" on tv recently, and watching thurston rapping away made me cringe just as much as it did when i first saw it (ten years earlier ?) -- his concession that they were "brat" rockers still left an uncomfortable taste in the mouth, given that you could not say that the audiences at that tour were in the least bit interested in the politics of their own county, let alone the world (i'm assuming this from the lack of lyrical content in this special new punk rock breaking and on display, and from the amount of respect audience members appeared to be showing each other) -- you could not compare these audiences to the well-meaning if naive audience at woodstock, or could you ? (americans, tell me it wasn't as bad as it looked)

in the days after sept 11th it was reported that thurston spaketh ["yeah, i need to look into/ catch up on politics"] -- not so tear-jerking as o'rourke being woken up and going along to have a look, something that david geffen would see as important to play up, but a reminder of where the bands' "head" was at -- how dare thurston say "o'rourke's our Brian Eno", because people might actually believe him -- it's not hard to imagine david geffen sending in and paying for o'rourke -- hey o'rourke has been so busy he must be spending time with s.y. for the love of their special art-music, right ? oh and he interviews as if "who could imagine actually being invited to join sonic youth !!" -- lucky o'rourke, but i hope he doesn't spend so much time with s.y. that he wastes time at a peak in his career (even though he's not that interesting anyway, and working with s.y. is a two-way back scratch i suppose)

ignore the lyrics of s.y. if you want, but then they're hardly very "sonic" are they, unless they believe we should be tuning into them and dropping out -- musically they've got tamer and tamer, or different, wiser, deliberate if you like, but their music just doesn't pack the visceral punch it once did -- there aren't the engaging hooks and internal musical logic of daydream nation which had plenty to say lyrically but didn't need to sound well produced because the music shone through -- face it, that album is three times as musically dense as Murray Street, even after 30 listens x 15 years, and it sure didn't sound like the grateful dead or the eagles then (or now)

and this is all just what i'm suggesting by way of discussion anyway -- i don't mean all of it seriously, i'm joking, i don't think what i'm saying is necessarily true, and it's opinion about music isn't it, not the middle east -- i guess the days of bands with serious graffiti, lyrics, art and politics as part of their implicit punk/rock stance are over