worst SPIN album of the year (no "your hard drive" edition)

I've never actually heard the Teenage Fanclub album that notoriously beat <i>Nevermind</i>, so I'll refrain on voting until I do. I have a month.

hmm could vote for a lot of these.

well, not System of a Down. or Against Me! wtf with those.

It's probably one of the ones I don't know (Cornershop or Against Me! seem like solid choices), but of the ones I do know, it's probably Dear Science. I like TVOTR but that album was a mess.

TFC album is great. how they ever thought it would be big in America, I dunno

oh wait this is a worst poll. um invert my previous comments plz

Worst as in worst album or worst choice for the year? i.e. Bandwagonesque over, say, Loveless or Nevermind

I don't see Animal Collective not winning this in a landslide.

can't vote for something I haven't actually listened to and I'll be fucked if I'm going to bother finding a download of SoD, Against Me!, or Moby so ... voting for Hole cuz I hate that record.

These are the worst

1995: Moby - Everything Is Wrong
2003: The White Stripes - Elephant
2008: TV On The Radio - Dear Science

who the fuck are Against Me!? sounds like a punk pop band. "Bandwagonesque" is great tbh if Big Starry chunky guitar pop is your kinda thing. "Dear Science" sounded good the first time I heard it and "Golden Age" is a good track but the album gets more and more dreadful the more I went back to it.

oh wait this is a worst poll. um invert my previous comments plz

― Ayn Rand Akbar (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, October 17, 2013 12:44 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Poll is for worst album

against me! are a pop-punk band

That Against Me! album is truly great, fuck is wrong with you guys?

1992: Pavement - Slanted And Enchanted
1996: Beck - Odelay
1997: Cornershop - When I Was Born For The 7th Time
2001: System Of A Down – Toxicity
2009: Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion
2011: Fucked Up - David Comes To Life

these are the most indefensible. i think even in a contest that involves pavement, animal collective remain the nadir of civilisation

i only have time for 6 of these albums though which is a pretty terrible hit rate

never heard of cornershop

have a hard time believing the lex gives a pass to TFC

that cornershop album rules so hard

have a hard time believing the lex gives a pass to TFC

― Ayn Rand Akbar (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, October 17, 2013 12:55 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i quickly read this as "the fucking champs"

never heard a single song by them by they do look anathema to me, yes, exterminate them too please

xp

Cornershop mania, if that's what it was, was a weird thing. I like them okay, but no album of theirs should ever have been album of the year.

System of a Down possibly = best example of band I thought would be unbearable who turned out to be reasonably good actually. Seeing them on SNL kind of turned me around on them, circa Mezmerize.

well, not System of a Down. or Against Me! wtf with those.

lol those are probably my favorite records here

with that, i'm voting new wave

anybody votes Ice Cube I will poke holes in your body

wow even after the confusion about the thread earlier, i ended up voting for my favorite?!?!!

oh well

most of the recent indie rock choices here (animal collective lmao, tvotr which is an album i like and fucked up) already seem like really bad ideas and it's not even been a decade

if i could i'd vote for both white stripes records

i voted Beck cuz why not

MPP is a great record fuck all yall

the Collective ya love to hate

the answer to this poll is obviously system of a down. next poll

Cornershop mania, if that's what it was, was a weird thing.

Yes! They were really heralded as... something huge and new and long lasting. And now people posting on this thread have never heard of them. Oh well. Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, I guess.

They were really heralded as... something huge and new and long lasting.

the music press when i was growing up was so embarrassing, even when i was 12 it made me cringe when they did shit like this

Stuck between Moby and Fucked Up (the only albums where I don't even know a "hit" that I like). Going to Spotify them both today for a run-off.

i'm guessing Moby will win though. As most as post-hardcore Springsteen worship can annoy me (esp with puke vocals), I don't know if mid-'90s techno crossover has aged BETTER.

That Fucked Up album is amazing but it's a weird choice for album of the year.

At least the Moby album in question isn't Play.

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/29500000/I-love-music-music-29530960-300-300.jpg

the answer to this poll is obviously system of a down. next poll

― sleepingbag, Thursday, October 17, 2013 1:06 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man somebody alert Stryper cuz this guy CAN'T STOP THE RONG

Actually, if Play the 1999 pick and say, To Bring You My Love or Maxinquaye was the '95 one, I'd just vote for Fucked Up. I DO like "Run On."

Albums I've enjoyed since high school, even if they wouldn't be MY pick for the best albums of that year: Bandwagonesque, Slanted, Odelay

Recent albums I've dug quite a bit, but wouldn't probably even make my top 10 of the year: elephant, new wave, dear science

Albums with a good number of unfuckwithable songs, but I've never really dug as full-lengths: amerikka, guyville, Live Through This, 7th Time, Miseducation, WBC, Dropout, Cookie

eh, the hits are fine: Fragile, Toxicity, MPP, Fantasy

Orange I've only listened to once and enjoyed enough that I woudn't vote for it.

toxicity is really wonderful

That Fucked Up album is amazing but it's a weird choice for album of the year.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Thursday, October 17, 2013 1:12 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

2011 was a weird year. the top 5 on pazz and jop were

1. tune yards
2. pj harvey
3. watch the throne
4. wild flag
5. tom waits

lmao

drake should've been on the spin cover tho, missed opp

late registration should be in my "recent albums I've dug quite a bit" list.

I own or would own all of these except System of a Down.

Cornershop were a lovely thing when they emerged (wipes away tear)....I still listen to them.

Yeah I love that Cornershop album, it still holds up.

there are few more telling signs of the corny indie fuxxor than shitting on System of a Down

I'm sure it's a different listen for people who were into techno at the time, but this Moby album's charm for me right now is primarily the same as the jetsons

'goth'

if fools can come in here acting like Pavement and TFC are the lols on this list, then I can vote for Toxicity w/o hearing it

I wanna play Toxicity right now

embed it into this thread so people can't open w/out hearing it

Toxicity > Slanted and Enchanted

I couldn't fathom having the comfortable teenhood and/or smug adulthood to have any opinion otherwise

leave it Jake, it's indietown

hm, yes, but how does that make you feel, whiney

god help us when whiney decides he can fathom smug adulthood

http://i.imgur.com/zi7hd.gif

was kid a the 'runner up' in 2000? i remember at the time wondering if it would end up like the fragile, much anticipated ambitious/difficult electronica gateway drug by altrock act that nobody would bother to listen to in a year or so. i can remember that issue of spin, w/ the airbrushed glamour photos of the band, was when i first realized that all my indier than thou friends who gave me shit for liking u2 were somehow HUGE radiohead fans. in retrospect something like arcade fire was inevitable.

yeah it was

They actually fucked up a half-decent list with those Your Hard Drive antics.

1. Your Hard Drive
2. Radiohead - Kid A
3. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP
4. D'Angelo - Voodoo
5. At The Drive-In - Relationship Of Command
6. Outkast - Stankonia
7. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
8. Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R
9. Armand Van Helden - Killing Puritans
10. Le Tigre – Le Tigre
11. Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele
12. Aimee Mann – Magnolia: Music From The Motion Picture
13. Sigur Rós - Ágætis Byrjun
14. Capleton - More Fire
15. Shelby Lynne - I Am Shelby Lynne
16. Mouse On Mars - Niun Nigging
17. Quasimoto - The Unseen
18. Madonna - Music
19. Coldplay – Parachutes
20. U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind

'yr hard drive' was and still is a bad joke but spin does deserve some credit for recognizing (before anyone else really beyond maybe some the future is now slobs at wired or whatever) that the way ppl were going to acquire and listen to music was going to radically change. kid a fell right on that cusp, the first album i can really remember ppl downloading before its actual release and the last album i can remember ppl hanging around the record store to listen to if the promo was playing on the stereo before its release.

lol whiney

'yr hard drive' was and still is a bad joke but spin does deserve some credit for recognizing (before anyone else really beyond maybe some the future is now slobs at wired or whatever) that the way ppl were going to acquire and listen to music was going to radically change.

― balls, Sunday, November 17, 2013 12:27 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, that's certainly true! But I think why "Your Hard Drive" was ultimately wrong was that the majority of music listeners clearly weren't 100% ready to say that their individual tastes and curatorial skills didn't need some sort of mediator like SPIN or Pitchfork or RS or AP or w/e. Pitchfork's hilarious, slobbering, incomprehensible Kid A review was a watershed moment because it validated the opinions of alt-rock listeners at this cusp — i.e., they still felt they "needed" an arbiter like SPIN or Pitchfork to echo their approval and then push them towards more things: See also, the early roster of Vice Records, Pitchfork's Arcade Fire review, the rise of music blogs like Fluxblog and GvsB, FADER covers circa 2005-2008, etc

I think by the time P4k bought all the competition for Altered Zones and then deaded thier individual "influence" as grassroots tatsemakers by shuttering its doors, most people by 2010-2011 were like "Thanks we can do this on our own: My Hard Drive is better than you can tell me, thanks," which is why no seems to notice or cars any more when Best New Music is bestowed on some band like Mutual Benefit ot Foxygen or Dirty Beaches or Baths.

"Your Hard Drive" finally realizing it's assumed goal as a popular opinion/consensus tool/"I can make the Best Record of the year, not what you tell me" tool is really a 2009/2010/2011 phenomenon

yeah i'll agree w/ that though that's why it was prescient in 2000, by the time time magazine made 'you' man of the year it was kinda 'no shit grandpa'. think the decline of pitchfork influence is in some ways a deliberate move by them, away from hip toward authoritative/establishment ie rolling stone 1968 vs rolling stone 1988. it had more influence in 2003 but it's making more ad revenue now. i know ppl who use bnm as a filter but it's not the discussion setter or whatever it was once nor is pfork in general (and it's not a case of it having been supplanted by something else). we're a long way from something like clap yr hands or black kids and it's kinda unlikely it happens again, at least w/ an act that unestablished. think also there was a increasing awareness that pfork in general hasn't been healthy for indie, that it's been a far more hegemonic influence than college radio ever was, and maybe some ppl turned away from it or stopped taking the bait (this could be some 'i wish' on my part though). where the real diminishing of curation/mediation has occurred has been w/ the decline of record stores imo, esp on the indie level. ppl still desire this mediation, they just want it in a more personally tailored form than rock crit outlets or radio can give them. if spotify could come up w/ an algorithm as effective as netflix's instead of the confused robot fumbling thru allmusic.com they have now it could make their service much more effective and necessary for their customers.

sleepingbag = worst poster itt btw

― Lesbian has fucking riffs for days (Neanderthal), Sunday, November 17, 2013 11:49 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Oh the ironing

whiney otm

actually was recently missing hipster mp3 blogs

I think discobelle still updates

when Best New Music is bestowed on some band like Mutual Benefit ot Foxygen or Dirty Beaches or Baths.

Surely three out of four of these band names are made up

ppl still desire this mediation, they just want it in a more personally tailored form than rock crit outlets or radio can give them. if spotify could come up w/ an algorithm as effective as netflix's instead of the confused robot fumbling thru allmusic.com they have now it could make their service much more effective and necessary for their customers.

depressing but otm

...the rise of music blogs like Fluxblog and GvsB

If by "rise" you mean a tiny handful of people started reading these, then yes, they did indeed rise.

Only a tiny handful of people read Fluxblog but every single one of them later went on to post as 'Position Position' on ILM

I mean, despite how small their audiences were, for a while they were considered "tastemakers" by the people who write profiles on people who are supposed to be tastemakers, and the latter even wrangled an A&R deal at some major label out of it i think

I mean, the amount of people who read pitchfork is incredibly small compared to like, actual websites on the internet

would like to read a piece on the various music taste algorithms and the assumptions that go into them. i can remember when sleigh bells were first breaking, when the name and some mp3's were out there but the album wasn't out yet, creating sleigh bells station on pandora and slacker radio, both apps had the act in their system but no actual music by the act (and presumably not a ton of user data related to the act yet)(hipster joke). the pandora sleigh bells station was all nu metal, stuff that matched pretty well w/ the sound of sleigh bells (on paper at least) but not really what the sleigh bells demo listens to. the slacker station was general indie, stuff like vampire weekend or whatever that didn't sound remotely like sleigh bells but was probably the kind of crap ppl creating a sleigh bells station would want to listen to. obv sleigh bells pre-release is a rare case and eventually (and pretty quickly most likely) you'd have enough user data to tell you 'ok ppl that want a sleigh bells station want this' and i'm curious what a pandora sleigh bells station is like now but but there are times where the wisdom of the crowd doesn't exist yet, algorithms are useless, and bullshit top down mediation is useful.

god remember when perp had that rant about someone writing npr was a 'tastemaker', blowing up (heh) that npr wasn't a tastemaker, HE WAS A TASTEMAKER.

i wonder if 2009-era pitchfork will be the last thing percieved as a "cool mediator" that indie ppl will ever have. It's funny now to watch all the indie sites tripping over things like Lana Del Rey and Haim and Icona Pop that clearly don't need their help at all

i had no idea haim were supposed to be indie at all until all the kvetching. i guess if you kept everything else the same and replaced the singer w/ a white guy w/ a thin voice boom obv indie. that reminds me of something from last night - how is haim pronounced? i've been pronouncing it like corey haim but on snl last night i swear they said the musical guest next week would be 'hy-em'.

That's correct

lol, so it's actually pronounced as in "if you go to tel aviv, you should meet my cousin, haim"

― i've a cozy little flat in what is known as old man hat (Hurting 2), Thursday, March 28, 2013 5:01 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark

One of those posts that floats into my mind from time to time

Think it's because I don't have a cousin in Tel Aviv named Haim

But I wish I did

speaking of decline of mediators has anyone observed a decline of college radio where they are? in town here for the longest time getting a slot on wuog was ridiculously desired and something you had to work for, now there's so little interest from the student body the station is barely ever actually on the air they have such difficulty staffing it. trend or just something else i can hang on cobb county?

I mean, despite how small their audiences were, for a while they were considered "tastemakers" by the people who write profiles on people who are supposed to be tastemakers

Yeah, absolutely. But ultimately they weren't correct about that. Nothing got big as a result of a Fluxblog post. Except maybe Perp's ego.

my alma mater's station is now robot-staffed overnight. seems kinda lifeless.

"now there's so little interest from the student body the station is barely ever actually on the air they have such difficulty staffing it. trend or just something else i can hang on cobb county?"

this was not my experience when I was at (a major state) college. the interest meeting filled an entire classroom.

2013 aoty: the cloud

Our college radio station (of which I'm the adviser and assistant director) held its first general meeting Friday afternoon: forty students, the classroom filled to capacity. We have problems getting funds from SGA because so many of our costs (tower rental) are fixed and not enough underwriting, plus Miami is a saturated market. But we live.

long term trends not good for non-satellite radio, period, but college media lag behind the times by about three to five years.

i have an overnight show at my college station. slots are pretty hard to get because it's also/mostly a community station and people hold onto their slots forever. the other english college station has overnight robo-dj and is on the AM dial. don't think it was ever wildly popular though, and it's relatively new (under 20 years)

KCOU at the U. of Mo. where I was program director in the late '90s hit a rough patch in the '00s and was Internet-only for a while, which I thought was the beginning of the end for them. but now they have a fancy new studio and I think are back on broadcast as well as web so I guess it really was just because of a dorm renovation. a few years ago some friends were in Columbia MO and complained about pre-recorded shows on the overnights so I think they did go through some of that but it doesn't seem like a permanent or fatal lack of interest.

extra relevant to a Spin thread because I still remember reading the issue that they produced in Columbia. (at the time that came out I was in high school in St. Louis)

I wish my college's student station (U of Illinois) was even half as adventurous as other student run stations, instead they always settled for being Q101's kid brother. I remember attending the (super packed) interest meeting, but we were told that unless you were a media major you weren't ever going to get any slot, let alone anything on-air (the waiting list was HUGE). Anyway, I dated a girl for a short time that did the late night slot from 2:00 am to 6:00 am and, even then, her playlist was pretty strictly controlled. Though this was back in the late 90s and a lot might have changed since then. Thankfully Champaign-Urbana had a completely separate community station that picked up the slack and actually played interesting stuff.

still have two of them! and a third is starting, although internet only

boston college has an fm and am station and i have a show every tuesday on the fm station and it's pretty awesome. boston is probably an outlier in that it has a lot of college stations on the fm dial still—emerson's is very commercial, harvard's and mit's and bc's less so.

oh ILM never change

maura i will have to listen to your show! also, i feel like BC radio plays like 80% leftield electronic music? i don't always like it but i also kind of appreciate that there is an FM station that plays that much experimental stuff.

also tufts has an fm station too but i can't pick it up anywhere south of the charles

kxlu (loyola marymount in L.A.) is really great. my college radio station was shit, basically candlebox and matchbox 20 made up 25% of the playlist.