Pitchfork has a cool feature that's been going for a while now, but I just learned about it today. Artists share their favorite songs from when they were 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. The lists are shorter or longer depending on the age of the artist. Like Scott Miller's new book, which I've also commented upon recently, it provides a list of great songs as well as some personal perspective on what made them great at that point in their lives. Sometimes they go on a bit longer than I'd prefer about each song, but it's still quite interesting. It's definitely better than the non-contextual artist top 10s in the Rolling Stones best 500 songs issue.
For example, TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek liked Free to Be You and Me when he was 5, Blondie when he was 10, Bad Brains when he was 15, Pharoah Sanders at 20, and Aphex Twins at 25. TV On The Radio makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it?
Showing posts with label scott miller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scott miller. Show all posts
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
1976 - A Musical Lowpoint and Turning Point
When I made my best songs of the 70s list, the mid-70s ('74 to '76) contributed the fewest tracks, so I was especially interested in Scott Miller's picks for those years in his book Music: What Happened. Here's his countdown for 1976.
The Damned - Neat Neat Neat
Flamin' Groovies - You Tore Me Down
Bob Dylan - Sara
The Rolling Stones - Hand of Fate
David Bowie - Station to Station (edit)
Abba - Knowing Me, Knowing You
Electric Light Orchestra - Tightrope
Todd Rundgren - Cliche
Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK
Joni Mitchell - Song for Sharon
The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner
Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop
Sneakers - Condition Red
Pere Ubu - Final Solution
Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper
Murray Head - Say It Ain't So, Joe
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - American Girl
You need to buy the book yourself to read his insightful comments about these tracks, and I do recommend that. For now, though, you'll have to settle for my free commentary.
1) He lists about 20 tracks for most years. I don't know how much I can read into the fact that 1976 only has 17 tracks listed, but I don't think it was accidental.
2) What makes this a turning point year is that it's the first year with real punk songs (I say real punk songs to distinguish from the proto-punk of The New York Dolls, The Stooges, etc). As the year that punk hit the US and UK with the Ramones and Sex Pistols respectively, it's a turning point, but it's also easy to detect the bloated excess that rock and roll had become making punk rock necessary as a response.
3) I'm pleased to see Final Solution near the top of the list. Pere Ubu appeared on vinyl before 1976 and I think their 70s incarnation could be called real punk rock in spite of their avant-garde proclivities, but they didn't generate the press or sales of The Ramones or Sex Pistols, so that's why I say 1976 was the first year of real punk rock.
4) The Ramones and Sex Pistols don't make the top 5 in spite of their obvious importance. Important is different from good. The first Ramones record was really good, particularly for 1976, but for regular listening I prefer later punk rock. Same goes for the Sex Pistols who haven't aged as well as the Ramones in my opinion. Good for you if you got to see one of their shows - I'm talking about their recorded music here.
5) Murray Head, huh? I guess I'll need to track down that song and hear it. This is one of those little oddities Scott Miller throws in that make the book more interesting to me.
6) Yes Abba! More importantly, yes Knowing Me Knowing You! Rolling Stone Magazine includes "Dancing Queen" from the same record in their top 500 songs of all time, but it really wasn't the best song on that album.
7) No Eagles, no Thin Lizzy, and no Peter Frampton. I think if you're going to let Blue Oyster Cult join the party at #3 and if you're going to let in any mid-70s Stones whatsoever, you have to consider giving a nod to the rest of what the arena brought us in 1976. I won't try to make the case for Kansas's "Carry On My Wayward Son". Parts of that song hold up great, but other parts not as much.
8) Soul and R&B was similarly in transition in 1976 and that doesn't show up on this list at all. I can see how the Ohio Players "Love Rollercoaster", Heatwave's "Boogie Nights", and Lou Rawls "Love Rollercoaster" wouldn't make any sense of Scott Miller's list, but they made sense to me on mine.
The Damned - Neat Neat Neat
Flamin' Groovies - You Tore Me Down
Bob Dylan - Sara
The Rolling Stones - Hand of Fate
David Bowie - Station to Station (edit)
Abba - Knowing Me, Knowing You
Electric Light Orchestra - Tightrope
Todd Rundgren - Cliche
Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK
Joni Mitchell - Song for Sharon
The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner
Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop
Sneakers - Condition Red
Pere Ubu - Final Solution
Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper
Murray Head - Say It Ain't So, Joe
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - American Girl
You need to buy the book yourself to read his insightful comments about these tracks, and I do recommend that. For now, though, you'll have to settle for my free commentary.
1) He lists about 20 tracks for most years. I don't know how much I can read into the fact that 1976 only has 17 tracks listed, but I don't think it was accidental.
2) What makes this a turning point year is that it's the first year with real punk songs (I say real punk songs to distinguish from the proto-punk of The New York Dolls, The Stooges, etc). As the year that punk hit the US and UK with the Ramones and Sex Pistols respectively, it's a turning point, but it's also easy to detect the bloated excess that rock and roll had become making punk rock necessary as a response.
3) I'm pleased to see Final Solution near the top of the list. Pere Ubu appeared on vinyl before 1976 and I think their 70s incarnation could be called real punk rock in spite of their avant-garde proclivities, but they didn't generate the press or sales of The Ramones or Sex Pistols, so that's why I say 1976 was the first year of real punk rock.
4) The Ramones and Sex Pistols don't make the top 5 in spite of their obvious importance. Important is different from good. The first Ramones record was really good, particularly for 1976, but for regular listening I prefer later punk rock. Same goes for the Sex Pistols who haven't aged as well as the Ramones in my opinion. Good for you if you got to see one of their shows - I'm talking about their recorded music here.
5) Murray Head, huh? I guess I'll need to track down that song and hear it. This is one of those little oddities Scott Miller throws in that make the book more interesting to me.
6) Yes Abba! More importantly, yes Knowing Me Knowing You! Rolling Stone Magazine includes "Dancing Queen" from the same record in their top 500 songs of all time, but it really wasn't the best song on that album.
7) No Eagles, no Thin Lizzy, and no Peter Frampton. I think if you're going to let Blue Oyster Cult join the party at #3 and if you're going to let in any mid-70s Stones whatsoever, you have to consider giving a nod to the rest of what the arena brought us in 1976. I won't try to make the case for Kansas's "Carry On My Wayward Son". Parts of that song hold up great, but other parts not as much.
8) Soul and R&B was similarly in transition in 1976 and that doesn't show up on this list at all. I can see how the Ohio Players "Love Rollercoaster", Heatwave's "Boogie Nights", and Lou Rawls "Love Rollercoaster" wouldn't make any sense of Scott Miller's list, but they made sense to me on mine.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Best Songs of 1967
Scott Miller, of Game Theory and the Loud Family, has a new book with a short blurb on each of his favorite 20-or-so songs from each year from 1957 to 2010. I highly recommend the book, which I bought at bn.com, where I'm able to take advantage of the internet while still paying state taxes that support my schools and road and firefighters and so many other things that Amazon apparently thinks are unimportant.
The 1967 countdown is:
The Marmalade - I See The Rain
The Beatles - Penny Lane
Lulu - To Sir With Love
Cream - Sunshine of Your Love
The Kaleidoscope - If The Night
Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade of Pale
Scott McKenzie - San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)
The Beach Boys - Wonderful
The Hollies - Carrie Anne
The Rolling Stones - Citadel
The Association - Windy
Love - Alone Again Or
The Doors - The Crystal Ship
Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You
Nico - Fairest of the Seasons
The Kinks - Waterloo Sunset
Jefferson Airplane - Somebody to Love
The Monkees - Daydream Believer
The Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs
Pink Floyd - Lucifer Sam
Jimi Hendrix Experience - Manic Depression
The Beatles - A Day in the Life
There's just a whole lot to love about this book. Obviously, there's the selection of the best songs of each year, which is why I'm writing about it here, but, as Aimee Mann sarcastically writes on the back cover in reference to the web site that preceded the book, "you're thinking: it's not everyday that someone writes about music on the internet" She goes on... "especially to pick favorite pop music; we can all thank Scott for troweling that wide cultural gap. But really - this is a new and lively style of music writing that you just keep wanting to read more of."
The blurb describing each song has more of an essay feel than a review feel, but they're all just one paragraph long, so they never drag the way I find actual essays on music drag. They never drift into talking-about-music-is-like-dancing-about architecture irrelevance. For instance, as much as I like Nick Hornby's fiction, his book "31 songs" was a complete snore for me.
Scott Miller (no relation, by the way) mostly, and very intentionally, follows my own rules about limiting repetition of artists. The Beatles show up twice in 1967, but it's hard to make too much of a fuss about that. There's a very nice mix of stuff you've almost definitely heard and stuff you almost definitely haven't, and the descriptions are good enough for you to make an informed decision about whether or not to search out the stuff you haven't heard.
His 2010 list unexpectedly included the Taio Cruz hit "Dynamite" and I was pleased to learn he has a kid about the same age as mine who apparently loves that current pop hit as much as my kids do. That song is almost completely uncharacteristic of the rest of the songs on the lists, but what is not uncharacteristic is the way he explains how the song fits into his life and what's happening in popular culture in that year. That's part of what makes the book actually readable as a whole, but it's also fun to leaf through in no particular order. And forget Aimee Mann's snide comments - lists for lists' sake are great too.
The 1967 countdown is:
The Marmalade - I See The Rain
The Beatles - Penny Lane
Lulu - To Sir With Love
Cream - Sunshine of Your Love
The Kaleidoscope - If The Night
Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade of Pale
Scott McKenzie - San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)
The Beach Boys - Wonderful
The Hollies - Carrie Anne
The Rolling Stones - Citadel
The Association - Windy
Love - Alone Again Or
The Doors - The Crystal Ship
Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You
Nico - Fairest of the Seasons
The Kinks - Waterloo Sunset
Jefferson Airplane - Somebody to Love
The Monkees - Daydream Believer
The Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs
Pink Floyd - Lucifer Sam
Jimi Hendrix Experience - Manic Depression
The Beatles - A Day in the Life
There's just a whole lot to love about this book. Obviously, there's the selection of the best songs of each year, which is why I'm writing about it here, but, as Aimee Mann sarcastically writes on the back cover in reference to the web site that preceded the book, "you're thinking: it's not everyday that someone writes about music on the internet" She goes on... "especially to pick favorite pop music; we can all thank Scott for troweling that wide cultural gap. But really - this is a new and lively style of music writing that you just keep wanting to read more of."
The blurb describing each song has more of an essay feel than a review feel, but they're all just one paragraph long, so they never drag the way I find actual essays on music drag. They never drift into talking-about-music-is-like-dancing-about architecture irrelevance. For instance, as much as I like Nick Hornby's fiction, his book "31 songs" was a complete snore for me.
Scott Miller (no relation, by the way) mostly, and very intentionally, follows my own rules about limiting repetition of artists. The Beatles show up twice in 1967, but it's hard to make too much of a fuss about that. There's a very nice mix of stuff you've almost definitely heard and stuff you almost definitely haven't, and the descriptions are good enough for you to make an informed decision about whether or not to search out the stuff you haven't heard.
His 2010 list unexpectedly included the Taio Cruz hit "Dynamite" and I was pleased to learn he has a kid about the same age as mine who apparently loves that current pop hit as much as my kids do. That song is almost completely uncharacteristic of the rest of the songs on the lists, but what is not uncharacteristic is the way he explains how the song fits into his life and what's happening in popular culture in that year. That's part of what makes the book actually readable as a whole, but it's also fun to leaf through in no particular order. And forget Aimee Mann's snide comments - lists for lists' sake are great too.
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