Tag: lists (Page 4 of 5)

As if you needed proof I’m a bit off, one of my favorite things is to check out </span><span style=”font-family:Helvetica Neue;”><em>The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits</em></span><span style=”font-family:Helvetica Neue;”> from the library and then just flip through the pages, soaking up the trivia. I recently checked it out again and figured I would put it to some kind of use. Thus, I scribbled some notes about one hit wonders as well as bands/artists you might think were one hit wonders but in fact were not. I’ll be sharing the results of this intense research over the coming weeks. Here is my first list based upon it: my five favorite one hit wonders of all time.
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I did struggle with methodology a bit. Strictly speaking, a one-hit wonder is an artist that only had one charting single. But there are some bands that had songs that got decent airplay, yet never charted. Or perhaps charted on specialty lists, like the Modern Rock or R&#038;B charts, but never hit the top 40 (The Church is a fine example. “Under the Milky Way” was their only top 40 hit, but they had several other charting songs on the Modern Rock list.). So there is some randomness and inconsistency here.

5 – “Welcome to the Boomtown” David &#038; David, #37, 11/15/86. A very cool song that was probably a bit ahead of its time. It didn’t really fit into the mainstream rock world if 1986.
4 – “Don’t Disturb This Groove” The System, #4, 5/16/87. A classic pop/R&#038;B jam that reminds me of living in California and the spring.
3 – “Cars” Gary Numan. #9, 3/29/80. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, synthesizer songs ever.
2 – “Tainted Love” Soft Cell, #8, 5/22/82. I’ll admit, it’s still a great song even if it sounds a bit dated. But in the spring of 1982, it sounded like it was from a completely different time and place.
1 – “Do They Know It’s Christmas” Band Aid, #13, 1/5/85. The greatest modern Christmas song from a group made to be a one-hit wonder.

There’s plenty more one-hit wonder madness to come.

I must admit, this is a terrifically difficult album for me to write about. First, a ton has already been written about it, and I always fear that I’m simply regurgitating things I’ve read elsewhere. Second, I find myself attempting to “solve” the album each time I listen to it. It’s a bit like The Wall, in that sense. As I’ve had it on heavy rotation over the past two weeks, I have to catch myself from over-analyzing what a drum roll here, a sigh there, or an oddly placed noise is symbolic of. So, rather than a pure essay, I’ll break OK Computer down to its finest components for the bulk of my review.
Why is OK Computer my second favorite album ever?

1 It has one of the all-time great Track Ones. “Airbag” sets the tone for the entire album: it’s a complex, layered, confusing song that has beautiful moments set against others that are terrifying. The album is about being unsettled, and that mood is set in the very first measure of its opening track.
2 It contains the best song of the 1990s, “Karma Police.” From Thom Yorke sneering “This is what you get, when you mess with us,” to his admission that “For a minute there, I lost myself,” it sounds straight out of something Orwell would have written. When the song dissolves into a screeching tone from Ed O’Brien’s guitar, it sounds both like someone losing their mind perhaps, or like a modem (Remember those? It was 1997, after all) gone haywire.
3 The middle triplet of “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” and “Karma Police,” stands up to any three consecutive songs on any album ever. The mood of the album changes from anger “We hope that you choke,” in “Exit Music” to submission “Let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug on the ground,” on “Let Down,” to a fascistic defiance on “Karma Police.” It’s not rock and roll; it’s opera.
4 The throw-away song fits the overall concept perfectly. “Fitter Happier,” a list of slogan and phrases uttered by Thom Yorke’s Mac at first seems like something Pearl Jam was doing in the mid-90s: putting a horrible song or two in the middle of the good stuff just because they could (Think of “Pry To,” “Bugs,” and “Hey Foxymophandlemama, That’s Me,” on Vitalogy). However, as OK Computer reveals itself, “Fitter Happier” suddenly makes perfect sense.
5 Finally, mirroring “Airbag” at the open, “The Tourist” is one of the all-time classic closing tracks. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking plea for people to take the time to appreciate life and reclaim their individuality in the process. “Hey, man, slow down. Idiot, slow down. Slow down.”

As I wrote earlier, I view OK Computer as a bookend to the 1990s with Achtung Baby on the other side. Where U2 was writing about the possibilities and promise an era of peace offered, only five years later Radiohead were saying that all those promises had been left behind as the world became more corporate, more homogenized, and more overwhelming. The individual was being buried under an avalanche of information, corporate messaging, and cultural imperialism. Technology, rather than improving our lives, was speeding the world up to the point where our minds could no longer process everything thrown our way. Several of the songs devolve into layers of sounds that are barely distinguishable as component parts. I’ve always taken those moments to be Radiohead’s representation of that information flood: the sounds of our minds overloading and shutting down. In its darkest moments, OK Computer speaks of a world where we’ve all shut down, given in, and become slaves to the things that were supposed to set us free.

Another admission: as I’ve listened to it over-and-over during the past couple weeks, I came to the realization that the gap between #1 and #2 on my list is quite small. In fact, I could say OK Computer is, in fact, 1B. If you bought me enough drinks and got me talking about it for awhile, I might even admit that it’s a better album than London Calling. I keep it at #2, though, for two reasons. First, The Clash is my all-time favorite group. Politics are involved, here! Second, London Calling’s influence is unquestioned. I’m not sure what place OK Computer has in determining how the music that came, and will come, after it sounds. Great album, yes. Influencial? I do not know.

OK Computer is a masterful album. It has a strong thematic core supported by excellent lyrics, amazing music, and wonderful production. Thom Yorke’s voice takes you to highly emotional places and then the rest of the band forces you into an even more charged state. Many bands attempt to make an album like OK Computer. Most fail. Thank goodness Radiohead came through for us.

“You’re quite hostile.”
“I got a right to be hostile, man, my people been persecuted.”

I said in my initial list that this is the most influential album in my life. Before we get to that, first a quick review of how this album fit into the history of rap. When it was released in 1988, rap had already entered the mainstream and was beginning to become a cultural force. That said, most rap was tame, slightly silly, and reminiscent of early rock & roll: fun to listen to but not terribly thought provoking (To be fair, there were many important early songs in rap that had a social context). Then, this hit the world like a punch in the gut. Chuck D’s huge voice, which was to hip-hop what Eddie Vedder has been to rock over the last decade. Amazing production by the Bomb Squad, with layers upon layers of beats, samples, and strange noises designed to assault the listener. The hardest of hard hitting lyrics, all demanding social change. It was Revolver and What’s Going On and Exile on Main Street combined into one album. The music world was never the same. Unfortunately, as hip-hop became the dominant force in music, this social consciousness got left behind.

Now, for the personal side. Music is always personal for me. Songs attach to events and become part of my memories. Music compliments my moods, reinforcing good times and comforting me in the rough periods. But no album has ever affected me like this one. I came from a house where it was demanded that all people be treated fairly, regardless of what they looked like, how much money they had, or where they lived. That was my core belief, but I never thought about it much until I popped this tape into my stereo for the first time. As Chuck D rapped about Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X, I felt an urge to learn more about them and their beliefs. Within a few weeks, I was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Let me tell you, that was a BIG hit when I took it with me on my visit to my grandparents and family in central Kansas.). As I’ve listened to Nation over the past couple weeks, I realized if the Wikipedia had existed in 1988, I would have burned that thing up learning about Huey P. Newton, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, and Marcus Garvey.

Soon, I was questioning the life I lived, my environment, and the beliefs of people I knew and loved. Veiled racism became more apparent and I wondered why people were so willing to tell black jokes or default to stereotypes when discussing people who weren’t white, middle class, and suburban like us. Being 17, I was probably far more judgmental that I had any right to be (after all, it’s not like I was without fault or inconsistency in belief), but for a few weeks I imagined myself as a fist pumping, slogan shouting rabble rouser who was going to shake things up in my community. Naturally, I ended up taking a far more subtle route, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 50% of my political and social beliefs have roots in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. OK, it is an exaggeration, since PE was talking about matters of social and economic equality and race relations and not predicting where political discourse would be 20 years later. But that summer was a turning point in my life. I looked at the world differently, had new ideas for what a just and fair world would be like, and sought out like-minded people who were far more eloquent about their beliefs that I was capable of being. When people looked at me strangely when I rolled around in my parents’ cars, windows down, stereo turned up to black men shouting “I rebel with a raised fist, can I get a witness,” I smiled to myself, thinking that I was, in my own passive-aggressive way, advancing the platform of the Prophets of Rage.

There are better albums (although this is a great, great album), albums I’ve listened to more, but none has changed my life the way It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back did.

One final point. In my Revolver review I said I liked to imagine people listening to classic albums for the first time. This was that album for my life. A new genre, a group like no other before them, and an album that shook the foundations of popular music. When kids in the future imagine someone listening to Nation for the first time, they’re imagining me at 17, staring at my stereo with a look of awe and disbelief, my world turning upside-down.

“I got a letter from the government the other day.
I opened and read it.
It said they were suckers.”

No list of best albums is complete without a Beatles disk. I say that as someone who really didn’t like the Beatles for most of my life, finally learning about and appreciating their genius over the last five years or so. (My dislike for the Beatles was perhaps the first manifestation of my contrarian side. When I was little, my parents and their friends listened to the Beatles all the time, so I got sick of them and decided I didn’t like them. All the Wings albums my parents had didn’t help, either. I think John would have approved. “Don’t like something just because someone tells you to. Find your own way, man!”) But over those five years, I’ve become a true fan and now count them among my five favorite bands of all-time.

I know it’s a real stretch listing Revolver as my #4 favorite album. It’s generally considered one of the ten greatest albums of all time. While you can make an argument that any one of five Beatles albums is their best, I think Revolver is clearly their finest effort. It fits into the sweet spot of their career, when they were just beginning to expand their sound but had not yet dissolved into a band in name only. Where the later albums were basically collections of John, Paul, and George songs (along with a few that John would write for Ringo), Revolver still sounds like a true group effort. The band was beginning to see just how far they could stretch things, how much freedom the studio offered, and how they could sing about more than just falling in love or being chased by teenage girls.

It doesn’t hurt that Revolver includes both my favorite Beatles song, “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and what I feel may be their most influential song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which I argued awhile back is the root from which all alternative music grew. Aside from those, it includes two other great Lennon songs (“I’m Only Sleeping,” and “She Said She Said”); three great McCartney songs (“Eleanor Rigby,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and “For No One”); George Harrison’s first major statement as a songwriter (“Taxman”); and a song custom-made for Ringo (“Yellow Submarine”). Finally, the album shows exactly where the band members were headed in their writing over the next decade.

One of my favorite things to do with albums that changed music is to try to imagine the reactions of people when the album was first released. With Revolver, I like to imagine a young girl, maybe 16 or so and deep in the grips of Beatlemania in 1966, taking the album home and placing it on her small turntable. She thought “Taxman” was a little strange, but her dad always complained about taxes and it was nice that her dad and the Beatles agreed on something (And who was that singing? John or George?). “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here There and Everywhere,” and “For No One” were beautiful. “Yellow Submarine” was lots of fun to sing along with. “And Your Bird Can Sing,” was a bouncy little rocker. “Got to Get You Into My Life,” was different, but also sounded kind of mature, and the boys were growing up. And then “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Nice girls didn’t drop f-bombs back in the 60s (or at least in my little fantasy they didn’t), but I imagine the girl sitting and staring at her turntable, slack-jawed, and thinking, “What the fuck was that?” and seriously considering not listening to the album again just because of it.

Revolver covers an immense amount of territory, jetting off in dozens of different directions. It’s remarkable that the album sounds so good when the band was exploring so many new sounds and ideas. Some of their later albums, notably the White Album, suffer from trying to cover too much ground. Revolver, though, was the perfect statement at the perfect moment. Along with the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, the Beatles were leading rock and pop into an exciting new age where writing music meant more than just crafting a dozen or so pop songs that lasted 3:30. Revolver is the album that every band since has tried to equal.

All great bands must have an album that changes all the rules, destroys all expectations, and challenges their fans to open their minds to something new and unexpected. Achtung Baby was exactly that for U2, marking a dramatic shift from the sound they perfected on 1987’s The Joshua Tree. While U2 could have kept cranking out the same sound, and selling tens of millions of albums in the process, they looked to the changes in Europe and to the changes in their own lives and decided to take a dramatically different path for the next full studio album (Worth noting the 1988’s Rattle & Hum had some studio tracks on it, some of which were quite good. But the disk was weighed down by the live tracks.).

It was apparent this was a very different album from its opening notes. “Zoo Station” announced itself with Edge attacking his guitar, processing the results until they sounded like a giant, angry bee. Larry Mullen’s drums were also processed, creating an industrial sound (the sound of Europe rebuilding itself?). Bono’s voice was also highly processed, and when all these elements were layered over Adam Clayton’s huge bass, they sounded nothing like the same band they had been just four years earlier.
Even today, when I listen to the album, I’m struck by the feelings of a new Europe and new era that the album conveys. That industrial, electronic sound wasn’t just a band exploring its own possibilities, but also a blueprint for what was possible in the post-Cold War era. At first, it was ominous. But, after that initial worry, it was a time of immense opportunity and excitement. Listening to “Mysterious Ways,” or “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)“ still makes me think of those heady days after the Berlin Wall had come down, Communism had retreated, and anything seemed possible.
Every great album must have a great song. Achtung Baby is loaded with great songs, but one stands above all others. Bad pun, because “One” is that track. It is the emotional center of the album, despite sounding like a natural progression from The Joshua Tree’s sound. Despite those sonic similarities, “One” does mark a significant change in U2’s approach to music. In the past, they had focused on matters of politics and war to make their strongest statements. With “One,” however, they began looking at the dark elements of personal relationships. The song is so good that even with a few typical Bono clunker lyrics, they pull it off (“Did I ask too much? More than a lot?” I’m still trying to figure out why they let him get away with that.). It’s a powerful song that can be applied to many situations, witness how the band used it as their way of honoring the victims of the 9/11 attacks in their late 2001 concerts.
One of the marks of a great album is how it becomes timeless. When I was listening to it over the past week, I still found every song to be great, and the overall impact of the album to be strong. While it was very much about a moment in time, the awakening of Europe in the early 90s, it manages to sound timeless, and more importantly, still fresh even 16 years later.
As the history of 1990s rock is written, another album from late 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind, tends to get most of the attention. I would argue, though, that Achtung Baby was equally important to the decade’s sound. Nevermind may have opened the door to the emergence of the college rock movement into the mainstream, but Achtung Baby did a better job of predicting where we would end up. For all of its optimism, there is a significant undercurrent of uncertainty and opportunity for darkness to prevail. I’ll talk more about the comparison in a few weeks, but I think Achtung Baby posed many of the questions that Radiohead’s OK Computer answered six years later.
Achtung Baby is a fantastic album. It is so good, it forces me to forgive Bono of his hubristic sins each time he gets on my nerves. When you create a piece of art this exceptional, you earn a lifetime pass for certain behaviors. It is worth mentioning, though, that Achtung Baby’s huge success is what really unleashed Bono on the world. It turned him into a global force for change, but also made his mug ubiquitous. Art, like life, is full of trade offs.
Key Tracks (Highest Billboard Top 100 Chart Position Noted): “The Fly,” #61. “Mysterious ways,” #9. “One,” #10. “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” #32. “Who’s Gonna Ride Your White Horses,” #35.

Remember a while back when I mentioned a new gimmick of lists of five things I would be dropping on you? Haven’t seen list #2 yet, have you? Well, there is an explanation. This list is a biggie, and I’ve been struggling with how to properly roll it out to you. I’ve finally figured out how I want to do it, so hopefully we’ll get back on track.

This one is a multi-edition list. We’ll start today with the list itself. Then, since it’s a Big List (meaning an important one), I will break down each element over the next 4-5 weeks, probably on Mondays. Along the way, I hope to get additional lists of fives posted on Fridays. But you know me; don’t hold your breath.

Five Favorite Albums of All-Time

Rules: No soundtracks or greatest hits packages. One album per band. I must own the complete album in one format or another. And it obviously must rock.

5 –Achtung Baby – U2. Somewhat overshadowed by another album released about the same time Nevermind this helped to define the 90s sound.
4 – Revolver – The Beatles. The album every other album wants to be.
3 – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back – Public Enemy. No album influenced me more.
2 – OK Computer – Radiohead. The last, great, rock concept album?
1 – London Calling – The Clash. The entire history of rock &#038; roll on two pieces of vinyl.

Honorable Mention:
Paul’s Boutique – Beastie Boys. Vastly underrated.
The Rising – Bruce Springsteen. The perfect statement about one of the worst days ever.
Vitalogy – Pearl Jam. Their artistic high point, would rate higher if not for the obligatory throw-away tracks.
Summer Teeth – Wilco. An American stab at what The Clash did on London Calling, summing all genres into a single piece of art.

Super Honorable Mention:
Purple Rain – Prince &#038; The Revolution. A soundtrack, yes, but one performed by a single artist rather than an all-star affair (Like Footloose, for example).

Look for the Achtung Baby breakdown on Monday. Happy Labor Day weekend!