Artists that never released a bad studio album

Unlike BAD to BAD2.

Never released an album, but hey!

And are these too new to evaluate? The Hold Steady. The New Pornographers. The Decemberists. I figure your question requires a minimum of three albums to qualify, but that's my purely arbitrary feeling.

;P

the stooges
the velvet underground (exluding post-lou reed years)
the beatles

"Strangeways Here We Come" is a strike against The Smiths.

REM? Get real.

i shouldn't comment, i'm not the biggest REM fan to begin with. did see them in concert though...

thirteen.

can they really all be good?

yep.

throwing muses

Well, if you want to look at it that way, sure - certainly you're right about the assumption unless stated otherwise of straight white male-ness; but a singer who speaks in universalities makes me think of bad songwriting more than normative subject positions. I think people tend to write songs that way because songs like that have been successful in the past/they aren't particularly talented lyricists.

Within the context of "emo dudes are still jerks DO YOU SEE?" she has a point. But it's not exactly a groundbreaking revelation to point out that carraba-types who ask for pity (or punishment) for their bad behavior are self-absorbed cockfarmers.

Beyond that, it's pretty woeful. Accusation != critique.

In the USA that may not be the case too often (the American working class - in terms of level of education - tends to be either black or kind of stuck in a traditional white Christian fundamentalist/far right thinking), but in the UK, indie rock musicians are a lot more likely to come from a working class background. Which makes the generalization of college rock, or all "white" rock all over the place, to be even more weird coming from someone based in Britan like Marcello.

Geir, do you actually know anything at all about the UK?

Liars

Pavement

Spoon

tim, that sentence kind of ended before i got to the point. too many qualifiers, i guess. i was calling for attention to be paid to one's (dominant) speaking position when purporting to speak from a position of neutrality, generally about universal experiences. i.e. the everyman is a white guy, no?

i should clarify. it's not that many bands outrightly claim to speak for or to some universal human condition but, rather, that there is a curious double-bind inherent in most forms of artistic expression. on the one hand, you have the singularity of the artist, which is often not a "nobody knows my pain" but more a "no one can properly express this pain but me." (substitute "pain" variously with love/anger/any other kind of feeling.) even the "no one has ever felt this sad" claim is proleptic; it contains within it the desire for its audience to understand the pain, to share in the experience. therein lies the claim to the universal, that we can transcontextually share experiences ("that ella fitzgerald song totally expresses how i felt after my breakup") irregardless of class, race, gender, sexuality, time, space, etc.

wait i thought you were dissing the pixies??!

ramzi, i meant "monkey gone to heaven" as an example of a claim to a universal experience. so far as i know, there is no such thing as a universal experience. death maybe, but, having not died and having not spoken with anyone after they have died, i don't know.

I mean are you criticizing songwriters for not writing songs explicitly spelling out what position they're singing from?

no.

Are you suggesting that we can't? (With an appropriate discount for projection, of course.) Or that we can, but only as middle-class white men?

irregardless

Less theory, more vocab.

irregardless

Less theory, more vocab.

pwned?

but i'm suggesting that any experience we think we share with a pop song is an imaginary one. the problem with this, as i have said, is that this shared experience is too often grounded on a normative class position that is not actually normative. i.e. who can participate in this imaginary sharing of experience? who is excluded and, thus, interpellated as an Other by this?

also, kultur shock, dead kennedys, and, as far as I can tell, acid mothers temple. although they have released 900 albums, so there could be a few hundred duds out there I'm not aware of (ditto fushitsusha/keiji haino).

i agree with you. the gendering of guitar riffs as somehow essentially masculine is stupid. if dean wareham intended for his songs to do what they do for me, he'd agree with you too. but, stupid or not, i won't pretend that guitar riffs aren't coded as masculine. in the same way, it's stupid to gender the slowness of galaxie 500's riffs, the way they made loud distorted guitars sound soft and pretty, as feminine. but they are nonetheless coded as such. i can't speak to the simon reynolds book because i haven't read it, but what galaxie 500 does, i think, is precisely call into question the arbitrariness and stupidity of what you call "gender stereotypes," the conventionality of these assumption, as well as the subject positions that underlie these assumption.

another way of thinking about it might be jackson pollock's painting. is that kind of painting essentially masculine? of course not. it perhaps allegorises painting as an act of male dominance and virility, but how can any painterly practice be essentially masculine or feminine? but that doesn't mean that artists like shigeko kubota, nam june paik, duchamp, lichtenstein, and, to a degree, yves klein should have ignored the masculine coding of pollock's painting instead of problematizing the grounds of this encoding, exposing the stupidity instead of saying, "that's stupid. i'm above engaging with or even considering it."

I think Henry Cow is pushing it a bit too

There are a few Henry Cow duds, it must be admitted.

The Necks

Basically, all popular musicians with some level of popularity are all very wealthy, which, economically, puts them not only into the middle class, but as a matter of a fact into the upper class, and indeed makes them rather privileged. This goes regardless of race, social background, Nationality, gender, education or whatever, so I guess they should all write lyrics like that then?

The most important difference between a middle class or working class background will thus be more about culture than about economics, and I would say people like Damon Albarn, Green Gartside and Paddy McAlloon have all written lyrics that could not have been written by anyone who doesn't share their middle class background. I mean, imagine someone with a working class background namechecking Jacques Derrida or Balsaz in their lyrics. I think not!

Also note that skin colour doesn't necessarily matter here. Fro instance, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's middle class background comes through very obviously in their lyrics.

Shut up, you dick

SHUT THE FUCK UP *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*
SHUT THE FUCK UP *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*
SHUT THE FUCK UP *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*

xp!

The Necks are a strong candidate--the only duds I've heard from them have been live. Haven't heard every studio album, though.

Another possibility is Cluster, but I can't remember if I've heard all their albums.

later!

katatonia

agalloch

isis [ep's and remixes don't count,do they?]

monolake

Really, we clearly not supposed to interpret Mick Jager as human being.

Of course, maybe that's the root of your problem with the music of the Pixies, since they come out of a punk tradition that sometimes rejected that kind of cartoon deification, self objectification. Frank Black does seem to be identifying as a person despite being a white guy.

Still he clearly engages with privilege in the song. The exaggerated white New York diction and accent at the beginning placing his identify, and later “I’ll get mine too” acts as a reference to being the kind of thing at the top of the food chain though at the same time the physical limitations of privilege, mortality/extinction. The pixies don’t assume that their own position in society is neutral/normative, rather they assert that despite their advantaged position in the matrix of domination they have as much access to universal human experience, so far as it exists, as anyone else.

Let’s also not pretend that the question of the humanity of whites isn’t on the table. Some of the cleverer of the punk and "collage" rock acts do defend their claim to humanity rather than surrendering it on a platter like say David Bowie.

Oh man, I just noticed that he specifically avoids saying the devil is six three times, but of course puts the notion in our heads by saying 5 and 7 three times. Cleverness is universal no?

• Califone
• The Clientele

Tones on Tail
Geraldine Fibbers
Opeth
Enslaved

Unwound

Daniel, how does the new Califone compare to Roots & Crowns?

Geraldine Fibbers 1 million% otm!

i would say

Mr. Bungle
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

but, you know, of course i would

Only including artists with at least three studio albums:
Otis Redding
Possibly Sam & Dave, though I've never heard their reunion album from '76.
Mississippi John Hurt
The Coup
TLC
Kanye West
If we exclude posthumous releases (hell, even if we include most of them), then Jimi Hendrix
Again discounting posthumous releases, Bob Marley, though there's some early stuff I've never heard
Hound Dog Taylor
There's a lot by him I still haven't heard, but maybe Eric Dolphy
Clifford Brown
I've never heard his '90 comeback, but Allmusic likes it pretty well, so perhaps James Carr
I really want to say Al Green, but I've yet to venture into his gospel period
I also want to say Neu!, but apparently there's a studio album from the 90s that everyone agrees sucks
The Dictators
I missed his Christmas album, and a couple other recent releases, but I can't imagine a Bootsy Collins album that's not at least listenable
Nobody in the world agrees with me, but I think every studio album released by the Jam has its significant merits (even The Gift)
Ditto for Eric B. & Rakim (even Don't Sweat the Technique)
Ditto again for Rilo Kiley (especially Under the Blacklights, which is actually my favorite album from them)
the Police
the Undertones
the Feelies
the English Beat
the New York Dolls
the Auteurs
Maybe Ghostface Killah, but I haven't heard the new album yet
Maybe Grandaddy, though they released an album before Under the Western Freeway that I've never heard

i would say

Mr. Bungle
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

but, you know, of course i would

― FCK R VWLS (jjjusten), Friday, October 9, 2009 4:36 AM

and you'd be 100% correct.

although SGM, bafflingly, did release one of the worst live albums of all time.

tempted to add melvins to this list. there are certainly less good albums (stoner witch, bootlicker), but no bad ones as such. ditto cardiacs.

Kyuss

Maybe Ghostface Killah, but I haven't heard the new album yet

The new one totally killed this possibility for me.

Slowdive