The 40 Most Boring ‘Classic’ Albums by challopsy critics

you know that Sister will win this, right?

Easy. Sister.

Bowie, with Prince second.

Ha. xpost. Although would vote for Bowie second.

I think Led Zep might beat Sonic Youth

and dont rule out prince fans

sister, then king crimson

or neil young

1. The Hissing of Summer Lawns
2. Sister
3. Physical Graffiti

Trans

Whoops, didn't see King Crimson, swap that for the Led Zep.

Trans was once a 'Classic' album?

this list is kind of baffling

Oh Jane's Addiction for sure

dave marsh is no fun

had didn't notice the beatles album in there

Are we voting for the most boring? Or the best album as a fuck you to the list?

Which album is the best here?

Pshaw. You expect me to read?

PG won the Zep albums poll iirc...?

Trans, Ritual, PG, Let it Be, Diver Down, Diamond Dogs all great records. ATWIAD is pretty good but the ballads really weigh it down.

oh shit I voted for most boring.

lol

You didn't read!

the rev really is a fan of that stevie wonder album

dont let him fool you

Pretty funny list, but if Marsh had any guts he would've included Nebraska.

Thick As A Brick.

Voted Kiss even though I like a couple others better, maybe, because I am really pissed anyone could call that album boring. Lame, crass commercialism? I can accept those. But boring? Nay.

no layla, no credibility

dave marsh is the guy who does the rock and roll hall of fame?

Among other things.

http://www.amazon.com/Dave-Marsh/e/B000AP5FP0

Prince, over Joni.

prince will try it on with anyone wont he?

sister then HoSL

In what world is "Trans" boring?

Which one's the most boring would have been fun too.

I doubt Janes Addiction or Sonic Youth will ever be getting in the hall of fame

uhh

Which one's the most boring would have been fun too.

― pplains,

I'd get banned if i started another poll! Feel free to do it however. Would be funny if the top 10 were the same.

oh shit didn't even see Hissing on here. that album is great

Voted The Wall.

What a bizarre list. Some of these are records no one anywhere has ever considered 'classic'.

In what world are most of these considered classic? Subjectively, such a list would include stuff like Moondance, Layla, etc.; if I put my own feelings aside, you might have Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, etc. But Kansas, Sting, and a late-period Who album?

king crimson is my favorite of those

Who the fuck ever spent 5 minutes thinking about The Juliet Letters?

Xpost lol the very first thing that popped into my head when I saw the thread title was Moondance

Blondes Have More Fun: I remember how rock critics really rallied around that one.

crimson v tull v jane's, good reasons for voting for each (best single piece of music, best whole album, best 27-minute 3-track run of unspeakable glory respectively)

HMMM

oh uh Yessongs is pretty damn decent too. not heard Sister yet.

Im not sure when this list is from. tarfumes might have the book.

btw check out this one
http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/steveparker/world_critics_lists.htm

who considers "Pictures at an Exhibition" a classic, I wanna know

NFNF is on Spotify; it's basically the album everyone thinks channelORANGE is, only his same-sex love song is a "sorry, I don't swing that way but we can be friends" story with some questionable late-80s imagery

im not even that into it but every time one of you reposts that janes addiction album title as "ritual to habitual" its like nails on my accuracy chalkboard.

split decision for me between prince and tribe

oh, you never heard that bootleg? it's INCREDIBLE

NFNF got neg reviews at the time iirc

Christgau dug it, moreso than Hardline.

MTV did a massive promotional push for it, for about two days. Big hour-long special, heavy rotation for a couple of the videos (something like three or four were released simultaneously), and then suddenly it vanished forever.

I didn't have MTV at the time but I eagerly anticipated NFNF and loved it on first listen; watching everyone else's nonplussed dismissal of it was very upsetting

I was a little apprehensive about watching the MTV special, partly because of TTD's "I'm better than everyone!" schtick, and partly because of the title of the new record. But I loved Hardline, so I wanted to hear the new shit. I remember really liking a couple of songs and being non-plussed by others, so I never bought the record. But I only heard "This Side Of Love" that one time, and I can still hum it, so I guess that counts for something.

It hit the top ten over here (UK), but then people heard it and it sunk very fast..

it certainly did

My brother was a huge TTD fan and as such I heard NFNF dozens of times growing up. Not listened to it in years but in my memory it's a really good album. I remember it being hugely flawed but still really enjoyable.

the random "I love my voice" a capella bits slay

OK I'm half way through listening to NFNF and it's just as crazy and fun as I remember...

yay there are three of us #teamNFNF

http://healthculturesociety.wikispaces.com/file/view/strait_jackets.jpg/267349942/553x407/strait_jackets.jpg

It's definitely the work of someone with a gigantic ego.
However it's never boring even when he's off on some mad tangent and there are great tunes inside the madness.

Still didn't vote for it in the poll though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

no surprises there then really

though I thought more Prince fans would've been about.

Most Prince fans around here hate that album

Really? I thought prince fans thought it the 'neglected masterpiece'..

Surprised at the high Joni placing..

I did get NFNF in a turkish market, on cassette.

Just saw this thread -- Neither Fish Nor Flesh is a deeply weird record, almost every song feels like the "experiment" on a mainstream album (ie, Hardline...) that casual fans would likely skip. Weird forms, weird instrumentation, weird lyrical conceits.

Sentimental fave: "Billy Don't Fall" -- his message to a gay dude that supports his right to be gay, just not to be gay for him.

wtf is wrong with Around the World in a Day? 5 killer songs out of 9 is damn good for a Prince album.

xpost I think "This side of love" is my fav TTD song.

Also, check out "The Incredible E. G. O'Reilly – The Birth Of Maudie "

The genealogy of this list can explain the use of the term "classic".
In 1950, Columbia University Press took a poll and made a list of the "15 most boring classics" (i.e. literature - the "winner" was Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan). This list was reprinted in The Book of Lists published in 1977.
When Dave Marsh was compiling the original Book of Rock Lists in 1981, he obviously wanted a similar list of albums, and had it compiled by critic John Swenson. It was called "John Swenson picks the most boring 15 classic albums", despite the fact that classic has a different connotation when applied to Proust vs. Iron Butterfly.
When Marsh redid this list for the 1994 edition of the book, he kept seven of Swenson's fifteen, and added both older and more recent albums, which is the list polled in this thread. For posterity, these are the eight (possibly) boring albums picked by Swenson in 1981 and unpicked by Marsh in 1994:

All Things Must Pass - George Harrison
At Carnegie Hall - Chicago
John Denver’s Greatest Hits
A Gift From a Flower to a Garden - Donovan
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John
In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly
The Sun Bear Concerts - Keith Jarrett
Time Has Come - The Chambers Brothers

Of this list of forty, my favourite is Physical Graffiti and most boring is Wheels of Fire (at least the live album).

I don't think that clarifies it much!

Like, I don't think Kilroy Is Here and Pictures at an Exhibition are regarded as classics even by genre aficionados in the same way that Physical Graffiti is.

I just meant that this is the source of the word "classic". Why else would both of the lists have 15 entries?
Obviously, Swenson and then Marsh combined well-reviewed albums with popular albums in their lists. I guess they just wanted to avoid including records that were total non-entities, poorly reviewed AND poor-selling.

"Boring" makes more sense with those other eight. Most of them are either very long albums or contain very long songs. (Although who would find "Time Has Come Today" boring?)

On the other hand, <i>Around the World in a Day</i> may be one of the more uneven Prince albums from that period, but I would definitely not describe it as "boring."

yea seeing that ELP album on there is weird, it's not a classic and it's certainly not "boring". if this was written in 1981 I guess it makes some sense

Obviously, Swenson and then Marsh combined well-reviewed albums with popular albums in their lists. I guess they just wanted to avoid including records that were total non-entities, poorly reviewed AND poor-selling.

the confusing thing is they also include poorly-reviewed and unpopular albums like trans & satanic majesties. its like having a 'most boring classic films' list that includes lawrence of arabia and cats

This was the 94 version. Sister was only released in 1987.

Well, everyone seems to agree that this list is poorly named, with unclear criteria. This is why notions of "classic" and "canon" can't necessarily be carried over from literature or academia to pop fields.

I don't think people are that confused by classic rock radio or the Classic Albums Live project (https://www.classicalbumslive.com) or the BBC Classic Albums series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Albums). This list just seems especially weird, like it's made by people who are so in love with the canon that they need to pretend that Kilroy Was Here was a classic in order to take something down.

Dave Marsh doesn't understand why or how people like what he doesn't like. I suspect he believes that all Styx, ELP and Neil Young fans adore all their albums without reservation, so he has to step in as the voice of truth.

Marsh complained one time that Bowie "discarded" his previous fans every time he made a stylistic change, whereas Bruce only brought in new fans with each new record.

Hotter Than Hell by Kiss was a commercially disappointing hit-less sophomore album which I doubt even Kiss fans consider a classic. Listing it smacks of deciding to hate on a particular band and then attacking them at their weakest point. iow previous two posters otm.

Stuff like this is always meant to be hyperbolic, but yeah, some of the "boring" stuff on here feels like Marsh calling it so because he's too thickheaded to engage in anything beyond his narrow, conservative views of rock music. This is DeRogatis quoting Marsh so I'm not sure if he's getting it wrong, but Marsh supposedly justified his exclusion of the Ramones from his Heart of Rock & Soul book because "there's no blues" - that alone would explain a lot.

In his defense, a lot of those albums do really suck.

Elsewhere in the Book of Rock Lists, he calls Sparks and the Ramones "puerile satire" compared to the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

Hotter Than Hell by Kiss was a commercially disappointing hit-less sophomore album which I doubt even Kiss fans consider a classic. Listing it smacks of deciding to hate on a particular band and then attacking them at their weakest point. iow previous two posters otm.

― Josefa, Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:07 PM

on the other hand, kiss deserves to be insulted at every legitimate opportunity, so. . .

Hah, true.

Anyway, I don't think Marsh is a great critic, but if Marsh was just an author who wrote books on the Who and Springsteen and didn't pretend to have expertise in every corner of rock, I'd say yeah, he's pretty good.

The New Book Of Rock Lists (1994) was by Dave Marsh and James Bernard. Bernard was apparently a Kiss fan, hence the “Kiss was the P-Funk of white rock” in one of the lists (and holy hell, no they weren’t. I don’t know who was, but it wasn’t Kiss). Bernard also apparently placed Alive! in the Best Live Albums list, writing, “It’s great. Fuck you.” Marsh kept Alive 2 in the Worst Live Albums list: “Owning this is like putting a bad joke on a tape loop and locking yourself in a room with it. Once wasn’t enough?”

But yeah, like most critics, Marsh has his preferences and blind spots. But if really was the “I ONLY LIKE MEAT ‘N’ POTATOES ROCK” guy that he’s often made out to be, he probably wouldn’t love PiL’s Metal Box, or Sun Ra, nor would he put, say, the 12” club mix of Noel’s “Silent Morning” on his 1001 list.

Marsh supposedly justified his exclusion of the Ramones from his Heart of Rock & Soul book because "there's no blues" - that alone would explain a lot.

He didn’t say that was a bad thing (he praised them in the RS guides), just that the absence of blues (as far as Marsh could hear) in the Ramones meant they didn’t fit the parameters of his list. And he apparently heard blues in “Live To Tell,” and in Bonzo Goes To Washington’s “Five Minutes.”

I actually think it was good for my critical acumen to have read his books when I was young. It made me think harder about why I liked what I liked.
It's true he's a lot better on why Smokey Robinson is good than on why Queen or Devo are bad, but he really overplays that negative side in his public profile.

I don’t know if he plays up the negative side so much as it’s played up by others (but I don’t have satellite radio, so I’ve never heard his shows). And I think part of why he’s better at explaining why Smokey is good than why Queen is bad is because he’s obviously gonna spend more time and consideration delving into the good stuff. It’s easy to tell with some of his reviews that he had a knee-jerk reaction based on maybe one listen (though on occasion, those knee-jerk reviews are accurate).

One thing I recalled recently is that he was apparently the only writer in a US mainstream publication to call out Disco Demolition at the time (1979) for being racist and homophobic:

“Your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead… White males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see Disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”

I definitely read an article where Marsh proudly compiled a list of his own pretty witless negative reviews, like "Kate Bush is Patti Smith combined with a vacuum cleaner". Christgau, I think was often brilliantly perceptive in bad reviews, even for artists I love.

a lot of provocations are so stupid you really don't need to show them the response they yearn for

or: clickbait avant la lettre, a history