Smokestack Lightnin'

[melannen]

So synecdochic has this post up asking people for lists of, in their opinion, the fifteen best albums of the past thirty years.

If you're like me (and several of the other people I've seen comment about it) your first reaction to seeing the lists that were generated was along the lines of "Ugh, Radiohead? Really?" So much of the music listed in those comments is by white American rock guys, it's kind of oppressive. And boring.

(Not that I have anything against Radiohead. I just don't have anything for them, either. I can put on an entire Radiohead album and come out of it unable to remember a single thing about it, nor able to come up with any reason why I'd want to. I can't actually listen to it long enough to dislike it before I get distracted and zone out.

Perhaps it's an influence thing, and OK Computer was just a new and amazing thing that defined music for a generation! And if I'd been listening to anything in the mid-'90s except Tom Lehrer, the Muppets, old Moog albums, They Might Be Giants, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Tapes, I would know that! But I've been spoiled by all the stuff that's come after Radiohead that they influenced and can't understand how important they are.

...which is possible but you know I came to Johnny Cash and Howlin' Wolf and, I dunno, Karlheinz Stockhausen at least as spoiled, and yet I was still able to recognize them for the brilliant trailblazers and great musicians they were. So I think it is just "Ugh, Radiohead? Really?")

Anyway, sara egged me on. I consider myself completely unqualified to name the "best" albums of anything, (well, no, okay, Songs By Tom Lehrer is the best Tom Lehrer album. And I have an original 10" LP of it! And I bet you don't! :P) but there were actually a lot of good albums by people other than white American rock guys scattered among all the Radiohead and Greenday and MCR, so I have gone and pulled out a sub-list.

I could have gone all out and really complicated! But that would have been too much work, considering how busy I was today not cleaning the house, so instead, I only pulled out the list of albums on there which are not rock (regardless of whether or not they are by white American guys.) Which was what I was most interested in, because I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what the important and influential rock groups are - I can't really help it, given the people I live among (Radiohead? Why?) but learning about all the other amazing musical subcultures and histories out there will never not be interesting to me.

Specifically, I put an album on the list a) if someone included it in their top 15 in a top-level comment on that post; b) if the sidebar on the artist's wikipedia page did not at any point use the words "rock," "pop," "alternative", "indie" or "new wave" to describe the genre; c) if the artist works in several distinct genres including pop/rock, but the page for the specific album had none of those words in the sidebar; d) if the artist had no wikipedia page at all or the page had no sidebar (points for obscurity regardless of genre).

I know genre is squishy and also wikipedia is not always entirely accurate (believe it or not) so this might not be the same list you'd come up with, and the genres I listed are approximate, but it's informative anyway! And I kind of want to listen to most of these albums now. (I still don't want to listen to OK Computer. I've tried, okay? Lots of times. I think. I may have blocked some of them out of my memory.)

artist	album	genre
Danielle Howle	Catalog	?
Dead Can Dance	Into the Labyrinth	?
Naked City	Naked City	?
Storm Inc.	The Calm Years	?
The Lounge Flounders	Imaginary Saints	?
Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses	Mescalito	Americana
Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses	Junky Star	Americana
Hugh Laurie	Let Them Talk	blues
Ndidi Onukwulu	No, I Never	blues
Arvo Part	Tabula Rasa	classical
Edgar Meyer and Joshua Bell	Short Trip Home	classical
John Adams	Harmonium	classical
Kevin Volans	String Quartets 2 'Hunting: Gathering', 3 'The Songlines	classical
Michael Nyman	String Quartets 1-3	classical
Philip Glass	Koyaanisqatsi	classical
Philip Glass	Akhnaten	classical
Steve Reich	Tehilim	classical
Steve Reich	The Desert Music	classical
Steve Reich	Different Trains	classical
Wynton Marsalis	Trumpet Concertos	classical
Yo Yo Ma, Mark O'Connor, and Edgar Meyer	Appalachia Waltz	classical
Bill Hicks	Rant in E Minor	comedy
Darius Rucker	Learn to Live	country
Emmylou Harris	Cowgirl's Prayer	country
Garth Brooks	The Chase	country
James McMurtry	Childish Things	country
Jason Aldean	Relentless	country
John Anderson	Seminole Wind	country
Johnny Cash	American IV: The Man Comes Around	country
Johnny Cash	American Recordings	country
Johnny Cash	American Recordings III	country
Kathy Mattea	coal	country
kd lang	even cowgirls get the blues	country
Keith Urban	Golden Road	country
Luncinda Williams	Car Wheels on a Gravel Road	country
Martina McBride	Evolution	country
Mary Chapin Carpenter	Come On Come On	country
Reba McIntyre	For My Broken Heart	country
Sarah Evans	Restless	country
The Judds	Rockin' With the Rhythm	country
Tim McGraw	Not A Moment Too Soon	country
Tim McGraw	Set This Circus Down	country
Trace Adkins	X	country
Hesperion XX	El Cancionero de Palacio	Early Music
Amon Tobin	Permutation	electronic
Aphex Twin	Richard D. James Album	electronic
Atari Teenage Riot	The Future of War	electronic
Delerium	Karma	electronic
Dirty Vegas	Dirty Vegas	electronic
Fatboy Slim	You've Come A Long Way Baby	electronic
Jonathan Elias	The Prayer Cycle	electronic
Juno Reactor	Shango	electronic
Le Tigre	Le Tigre	electronic
Massive Attack	Blue Lines	electronic
Portishead	Dummy	electronic
Presets	apocalypto	electronic
Royksopp	Melody AM	electronic
Syntax	Meccano Mind	electronic
Tricky	Maxinquaye	electronic
Underworld	Second Toughest in the Infants	electronic
Echo's Children	A Dancing World	Filk
Vixy and Tony	Thirteen	Filk
flogging molly	swagger	folk punk
Alison Kraus et al	O Brother Where Art Thou	folk, american
cry Cry Cry	Cry Cry Cry	folk, american
Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer	Drum, Hat, Buddha	folk, american
Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer	tanglewood tree	folk, american
Iron and Wine	Our Endless Numbered Days	folk, american
Josh Ritter	Hello Starling	folk, american
Kris Delmhorst	Appetite	folk, american
Loreena McKennitt	The Mask and the Mirror	folk, american
Loreena McKennitt	The Book of Secrets	folk, american
Loreena McKennitt	The Visit	folk, american
Peter Mulvey	Letters from a flying machine	folk, american
Tracy Chapman	Tracy Chapman	folk, american
Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco	The Past Didn't Go anywhere	folk, american
Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco	Fellow Workers	folk, american
Zoe Mulford	Traveling Moon	folk, american
Gurrumul	Gurrumul	folk, australian
Vika & Linda	Vika & Linda	folk, australian
Billy Bragg	Workers Playtime	folk, british
Talis Kimberly	Archetype Cafe	folk, british
Basia Bulat	Heart of my Own	folk, canadian
Heather Dale	The Road to Santiago	folk, canadian
James Keelaghan	Timelines	folk, canadian
Wailin' Jennys	40 Days	folk, canadian
Hedningarna	kasksi!	folk, scandinavian
Grace Jones	slave to the rhythm	go go
Beastie Boys	Ill Communication	hip hop
Beastie Boys	Check Your Head	hip hop
Beastie Boys	Paul's Boutique	hip hop
Braintax	Panorama	hip hop
Brother Ali	Us	hip hop
De La Soul	3 Feet High and Rising	hip hop
Dessa	A Badly Broken Code	hip hop
DJ Phatrick	A Song for Ourselves Mixtape	hip hop
Eminem	The Marshall Mathers LP	hip hop
Jay-Z	The Blueprint	hip hop
JME	Blam!	hip hop
Kanye West	My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy	hip hop
Kanye West	The College dropout	hip hop
Kanye West	Graduation	hip hop
Lowkey	Soundtrack to the Struggle	hip hop
Lupe Fiasco	Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor	hip hop
Mos Def	Black on Both Sides	hip hop
Outkast	Speakerboxxx/The Love Below	hip hop
Outkast	Aquemini	hip hop
Public Enemy	It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back	hip hop
Public Enemy	Fear of a Black Planet	hip hop
Run-DMC	Raising Hell	hip hop
Skinnyman	Council Estate of Mind	hip hop
The Roots	How I Got Over	hip hop
Erik Truffaz	The Dawn	Jazz
jamiroquai	Travelling Without Moving	Jazz
jamiroquai	Dynamite	Jazz
Mark O'Connor Trio	Hot Swing!	Jazz
Astor Piazzola	Zero Hour	latin
Buena Vista Social Club	Buena Vista Social Club	latin
Jonathan Larson	Rent	musical
Lopez & Marx	Avenue Q	musical
Enya	Watermark	new age
Enya	Shepherd Moons	new age
Enya	amarantine	new age
Babyface	Tender Lover	R&B
Erykah Badu	Baduizm	R&B
Janelle Monae	The ArchAndroid	R&B
Lauryn Hill	The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill	R&B
Mary J. Blige	My Life	R&B
Danger Mouse	The Grey Album	Remix
DJ Shadow	Endtroducing...	Remix
The Black Mages	The Skies Above	Remix
Paul Kelly	Songs from the South	Soul
Simply Red	Men and Women	Soul
Bobby McFerrin	Circlesongs	World
Hector Zazou	Sahara blue	World
Kirsty McColl	Tropical Brainstorm	World
Kronos Quartet	Pieces of Africa	World
M.I.A.	Arular	World
M.I.A.	Kala	World

As of when I posted this, there were 80 top-level comments on that post, and there are 140 albums on my list. Assuming each commenter averaged around 10 albums, that means that a ballpark of 80% of the songs on that list were something in the family of rock music. synecdochic said "Wildly Divergent Tastes"! Live up to it, people! :D

...I would also like to note for the record that even this list is leaving out a lot of diversity to really be any list of the "best". Nearly all of the albums on it are in English, just to start with. (Most of the not-in-English nominations were jrock or jpop.)

Comments

[sara]

I would call Danielle Howle "folk, american" or "singer-songwriter." I didn't nominate the Dead Can Dance but...hmm. Maybe new age? Maybe goth? Kinda gothy new age classical electronica. I have the record, it's really pretty good.

Also, it makes me sad that the only two Latin records on there are two I threw up. Jesus fuck, I know a lot less about Latin music than I would like to, that's just sad. Someone out there must know more than I do and be able to put something better up there.

(Although you might call that Fabulosos Cadillacs record "Latin" too, though it's also punk. And ska. And country! It's awesome, I put it on again today in the car and the kids were cackling like maniacs, which is always a good sign.)

[melannen]

I was sad that there weren't more Latin records! There were a few other Latino artists in, but they were mostly pretty firmly on the rock/pop side, so they didn't go on the list. (I really wanted to put in the Fabulosos Cadillacs but the wikipedia sidebar for the album has the word "rock" in it, and if I break my rules for one group...)

But, yeah, there are entire genres of Latin music that have only been invented in the past 30 years that didn't get even a mention. (What I wouldn't give for a good English-language intro to Duranguense right now...)

Most of the ? were either "there is no Wikipedia sidebar, I don't feel like trawling around Myspace" or "it legitimately does not fit into any single existing category." :)

[sara]

Yeah, I suppose Maná would be firmly in the rock camp as well, under those criteria (and I don't know Maná well enough to talk about which of their albums is the best, sadly).

Do you know the Alt Latino podcast NPR does? I like that as a way to find new Spanish-language bands.

Also, I am cracking up at this whole thing as, like, DW problemsolving techniques in a nutshell: Dee has a grand vision, I sit in the corner and crit, you run a spreadsheet. *snicker*

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

If I listened to any music made in the last thirty years that wasn't either ren faire music or showtunes (Jason Robert Brown!), I'd be all over this challenge. But I... really, really don't. I was brought up on classic rock and blues/folk, and everything else just *sounds* wrong. I occasionally catch a song here or there that I like (Accidentally in Love, Why Don't You and I) but it's a rare thing.

But I am all for making alternative lists. And you clearly put a lot of effort into this- very cool! Perhaps I shall do some research. :)

[melannen]

...I would totally approve of more ren faire music and showtunes showing up on the list. (Although tbh even most of my showtunes favorites are probably more than 30 years old...)

I grew up on mostly stuff from the '50s and '60s (it's what we had around the house!), and since I got internets and access to basically all the music ever, I've been trying to educate myself about the rest, but even with modern stuff - I like a lot of the pop/rock, but the stuff I end up really caring about tends to be... almost anything else. And I far-too-often read interviews with modern rock stars who obviously know nothing about anything other than rock, and I facepalm so much...

(The only album I could think of that really qualified for a list of best-in-the-last-30-years Genuine Negro Jig by the Carolina Chocolate Drops...)

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Thanks to iTunes, though, I never listen to albums as albums anymore- the albums I know backwards and forwards are the ones I listened to endlessly on my mom's turntable (like Carole King's "Tapestry" and Cat Stevens' "Moonshadow") and a few CDs. I have contemporary artists I like (Jason Robert Brown, Medieval Baebes, Jolly Rogers, Santana, Gaelic Storm) but the only "albums" I know these days are soundtracks of musicals (Wicked, RENT, The Last Five Years, etc.).

[avendya]

Oh my god, showtunes count. [goes to nominate Next to Normal]

[avendya]

Wikipedia is lying when it calls Vienna Teng's Dreaming Through the Noise pop. It's folk.

[melannen]

But... but... If you start believing that Wikipedia can lie, where is truth any more? O_O

Actually Wikipedia doesn't seem to list a genre for that particular album, I have to admit I disqualified it partly because I do know Vienna Teng a little bit, and I think of her generally as an indy singer/songwriter type rather than straight-out folk, and nothing in Wikipedia specified that album was more folk-influenced than her work in general. But folk, or at least folk that isn't drawn from an actual specific folk music tradition, is such a wavery category that blurs into everything else all sides and everybody draws their own lines.

[avendya]

Possibly someone with more folk knowledge than me should answer this, but I think DttN is much more folk-influenced than her other albums. (And, yes, she is a indie singer-songwriter, but calling DttN pop is... not accurate, and it's certainly not rock either.)

[melannen]

Well, most of this came from having spent ... a lot of time, a while back, genre-ifying several hundred gigs of mp3s using a similar procedure. I would say there are songs that are definitely pop, and ones that are definitely rock and ones that are definitely folk, and ones that are definitely none-of-the-above. But thehre's a fairly large group of artists who fall somewhere in the folk/rock/pop triangle without exactly being any of the above - they're people who just play music without worrying about genre, but it's music heavily influenced by the music they've heard all their lives, which is pop, rock, and folk. And they are (generally) marketed to the alt rock/indy rock crowd - more likely to play Bonnaroo than Newport - and as a result will have been described at least once as "alternative" or "indy" (which is why those terms went on the exclusion list.)

A fair amount of musical genre is based on audience rather than sound. There's quite a bit of modern R&B and country that, in terms of sound, is indistinguishable from Top 40s pop, but because their audiences and marketing are toward the genre niche, nobody thinks of them that way. If they start crossing into new audiences, though, they immediately get reclassified by the press as "alternative" or "pop", because God forbid white people like R&B or urban Northerners like country.)

But, I mean, I'm not a folk expert either! And even the audience lines there are kind of fuzzy, because unlike with pop-country and pop-R&B, the audiences for pure folk music are just about as white and middle-class as the audiences for indy rock, and the Decembrists have played Newport...

And I was raised by a man who would still rant about the Electric Dylan Controversy when prompted, so I may be more conservative about the division than some!

[sara]

Yeah, I have no better way of distinguishing modern U.S. folk from indy from country from Americana than saying that it draws on the American folk tradition.

I mean, I've been listening to a lot of Blitzen Trapper, and they make a crack in one of their concert recordings that we listen to about how they're not playing heavy metal, they're playing heavy folk...and apparently the difference between "heavy folk" and "rock" is that they, um, like to go to Pickathon.

Yeah.

[seekingferret]

Naked City might be rock and it might be bebop. It might also be something else entirely. I'm not sure, and I've listened to that album dozens of times.

Half of the albums I nominated aren't rock. But I like rock, and I like Radiohead, or at least I think OK Computer is pretty amazing and occasionally like other things Radiohead did.

Also, I only put fourteen albums in my top level comment, so you missed it, but my fifteenth album was also not rock: the jazz/klezmer fusion of Masada's "Alef".

[melannen]

Yours one one of half a dozen or so comments that was mostly not rock! Which was great.

Yeah, I feel like I should probably go back and do the ones that were not in top-level comments (Stan Rogers is another one that I know got named in an addition, which ought to be on here) but that would be work. :p

[sophia_sol]

ahaha, unfortunately that Stan Rogers was me and I stupidly nommed an album that is well before the 1982 cutoff date. I need to go back and say "From Fresh Water" instead. Somehow I managed to forget that Stan Rogers died 29 years ago....

(I also have some other non white-american-rock in my third comment, where it's even less likely to be seen -- African-American, South African, and folk.)

On the subject of your post in general -- yeah, I too had trouble with some of the formulation of the question and the types of answers it's designed to elicit. Conversations in comments in my journal have helped clarify that. I know that I felt weird nomming things because it was supposed to be "best" and not "favourite" and although I am a huge music fan and find music vastly important to me I don't actually know enough to be able to judge objective "best"s. Which means that the stuff I love listening to that's not standard/popular/well-recognized I don't mention (or feel wrong mentioning) because clearly it's idiosyncratic of me to like this particular thing.

Plus, as naraht mentions, the "album" format is one that is specifically geared towards certain genres of music.

[melannen]

It's possible this was biased because the people who took some time to think about it and added albums in later comments were more thoughtful about what they were nominating, yeah.

But I have the same problem as you with "best" because most of the stuff I really listen to is off-the-mainstream enough that I don't have any context for what "best" would mean for it.

[sara]

Ooo, jazz/klezmer.

[seekingferret]

In some fashion all Klezmer Revival is Jazz/Klezmer fusion, because virtually all Klezmer Revival klezmorim were trained as jazz musicians. There's very little cultural purity in Klezmer, not that there ever was, and nobody should think that that's a problem.

Masada, strictly speaking, is Downtown Jazz/Klezmer fusion. Alef is John Zorn's announcement of what he termed Radical Jewish Culture, which is a musical movement about stopping being scared of assimilation destroying our heritage. Alef looks backward both to Zorn's early '80s game pieces (and their inspirations like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler) and to traditional klezmer scales and melodies and rhythms.

In any case, it's an amazing set of songs.

[sara]

I would like to know more about klezmer than I do -- there's a local klezmer band that plays at our weekend market and I think they're a lot of fun, but that's about the extent of my knowings. So thanks for the rec!

[seekingferret]

I could and probably should make a whole post dedicated to klez recommendations, but let me at least give you the single most fun klezmer album I know: Carnival Conspiracy by Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars. It's just an explosion of sound and language and joy.

[sara]

Well, if you do, send up a flare -- I would totally be interested in reading that.

[seekingferret]

http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/101162.html

[sara]

I dled that last night and whee, that is a lot of fun! We put that on in the kitchen today while doing the food prep for lunch for twenty, it was great (and it's been a rough little while, so having something cheery was excellent). Thanks!

Also, I am amused that between the Spanish and the Yiddish, I understand a lot more of the lyrics than I really would have expected (I'm a goy but was raised among a lot of L.A. Jews, and have ended up having more Yiddish than I really think I do just because I never think of it as being anything but part of the vernacular....)

[ilyena_sylph]

You are so incredibly awesome for this post.

*all the hearts!*

[holyschist]

I considered posting a Top 15 that would have been mostly folk, but then I decided it would be too much work and I don't really think of music as "albums" rather than discrete songs anyway and that's really more of a rock/pop way of thinking about things and the first "album" that came to mind was from the 1960s and hence disqualified. :-P

Did anyone nominate any fado albums? I'm not up enough on the genre to suggest any, but on the topic of Latin music that isn't rock or pop....

Okay, actually I kind of want to nominate now.

[melannen]

There was very, very little Latin music, sadly (though I don't know enough about it to know what to nominate either.) And yeah I think part of the problem is that a lot of people who aren't rock fans are going to be thinking of older albums first!

[holyschist]

I do like rock, but if I were nominating rock albums that blew me away, very few of them would be mainstreamish US/UK artists...I mean, a lot of the music I listen to is rock/pop, it's just First Nations or Arabic or Turkish or whatever.

[kore]

Oh, nice!

[busaikko]

And I have an original 10" LP of it! And I bet you don't!

I do! And I bought it for a dollar in a basement charity shop in Connecticut. It is a thing that gives me joy (er, assuming my brother didn't eBay-sell it to you *suddenly fears*).

I'm surprised Cordelia's Dad didn't make the list for Spine. Now I'll have to go see what slander Wikipedia is saying about my favorite ballad-covering (as in, Little Margaret-type ballads) band.... I'd have put them down as American Folk, at least that's what they toured as.

[melannen]

Nope, I bought mine for $.50 in a charity shop in Maryland! (But yay for you having it too!)

Cordelia's Dad was nominated at least once, but Wikipedia had them listed as Alt Rock + Folk, but looking at them more closely, if Spine was a nominated album (I don't remember) it probably should be on the list, yeah. (Come to think of it, I think "How Can I Sleep" - which is at least part rock - was definitely nominated, and if Spine was nominated later, I might have just assumed they were already disqualified...)

[busaikko]

\o/

[kaz]

Ouch. :/ I'd nominate some stuff but a) I mostly listen to classical so I do not feel qualified to judge "best 15 of the past 30 years", it would just be "stuff Kaz likes" anyway, and b) it looks as if most of the stuff I do like is a subtype of rock anyway. Even if I suspect German (as in, both by nationality and language) medieval rock isn't exactly standard.

[naraht]

Surely there have been classical albums released in the past thirty years. ;)

[melannen]

There has totally been good classical released in the last 30 years! (Most of the recent classical I've listened to isn't 'classic' classical - it's the pop-movie-soundtrack stuff or the slightly-off-the-wall avant-garde stuff - so I don't know any to nominate to speak of, but I bet there is some.)

And German medieval rock would disqualify for my list because of my arbitrary rules but I assuer you it would still add diversity to Synecdochic's!

[holyschist]

I would like recs for German medieval rock! I have some, but mostly tending towards metal and I always want moar!

[naraht]

I missed the initial post so I'm now going to have to go back and compile my list of fifteen! It will certainly include some rock on it--it might even, gasp horror, include OK Computer--but I'll now be making a special effort to widen my choices slightly. As I do indeed listen to a lot of things that aren't rock.

I wonder whether part of it is the format in which the discussion is taking place. The concept of the "album" as an artistic unit is very rock-centric to start with, after all. If you were talking from a standpoint of classical as normative, you would be talking about great compositions, after all. Even if you were being pop-centric, you might ask for best singles. So that certainly affects the discourse.

And then once people start nominating things, other people often read those lists before they nominate, and what happens is a conversation. One with a goal, come to that. So I could nominate a La Monte Young "album" (which isn't an album) that only a few people have ever heard of, or I could respond to the fact that I've seen other people nominating Paul's Simon's "Graceland," which I also love, and in putting it on my list I might have a chance of getting it onto the top fifteen. Whereas nominating La Monte Young is basically me shouting into the wilderness.

If my top fifteen is too rock-centric I'll come back here and give you some other recs. Promise. :)

ETA: Oh, and Radiohead aren't white American rock guys. Just saying....

[naraht]

In case you were interested in my list, I've just posted it, and divided it up a bit by genre/gender:

Arthur Russell - World of Echo
Kronos Quartet - Early Music (Lachrymæ Antiquæ)
La Monte Young - The Well Tuned Piano (1988 release)
Elizabeth Kenny and Theatre of the Ayre - Venus and Adonis [John Blow]
The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation - Anthropomorphic

Radiohead - OK Computer
The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come
Paul Simon - Graceland
Sisters of Mercy - Floodland

Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
PJ Harvey - Rid of Me
Tracy Chapman - Tracy Chapman

The Streets - Original Pirate Material
Jamie T - Panic Prevention

Do let me know if you want more recs in one genre or another.

[sara]

...I think "The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation" is a beautiful name for a band.

[espresso_addict]

I'll look out for the La Monte Young -- thanks for the rec.

[melannen]

I don't know - I mean certainly the album concept is closely associated with rock for a lot of people, and the artistic meaning of an "album" shifts between genres, but it's not anywhere near exclusive to it. I would say that the concept of an "album" is associated with music composed in the second half of the 20th century when the LP, tape, and CD were the primary ways music was sold - there's plenty of classical from that period which was written for the album format (just not the classical that was trying to stick to older forms!) and I'd actually say that the some of the first people to really figure out albums were jazz rather than rock. (Even OK Computer was apparently inspired by a Miles Davis album.) But Hip Hop, Blues, Jazz, Electronica, Folk, etc. from the period when albums were the thing did albums at their best just as well as Rock ever did. (And there is some pop where real thought was put into the album as an art form, too.)

That original post is not very clear about what exactly we're nominating for! Some people nominated the same albums as others in hopes of getting them in, but at least as many people deliberately nominated only new things in order to get all the albums they like in. And some people just picked their top 15 without trying to game the system. :P It really depends on how the final list is being generated, if there's even going to be one, and she never actually said.

If she's listing all nominations and people can for any 100, then you probably want to get as many different ones in as possible, because people will be voting for more than just their top fifteen. If she's choosing them herself, then you probably want to get a lot of electronica in. But who knows!

ETA: And yeah I know, Radiohead is British. Nationality is at least as hard as genre and more likely to get people mad if you get it wrong, so that's why I decided to only stick to genre. :P

I too completely fail to understand the appeal of Radiohead

[kiezh]

It probably says something about me that I recognize almost everyone listed under folk*, but a lot of the other albums people were nominating (especially the white rock guys) were unfamiliar to me or not at all to my taste. :/

I'd draw genre boundaries rather differently than you do; I think of Vienna Teng as a folk singer-songwriter, for instance, and there are several people on this list who are on the blurry folk-filk or folk-country borders. I understand that it's difficult to wrangle a big list of albums, though, and impossible to do so without classification problems.

Oh, also - I think you left off the two musicals I nominated? Secret Garden and Les Miserables, neither of which are rock. ;)


*Yes, a good chunk of them were my nominations, but I recognize most of the ones that weren't, too. And now I want to go check out the Australian folk, because my collection is shamefully short in that department.

[automaticdoor]

My list:

Tegan and Sara - The Con (Canadian, queer women, folk/indie)
Dixie Chicks - Taking The Long Way (American, women, country)
Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism (American, men, alt/indie)
Ani DiFranco - Reprieve (American, queer woman, folk)
A Fine Frenzy - Bomb In A Birdcage (American, woman, pop/indie)
Eisley - Room Noises (American, lead=woman, pop/indie)
Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse - The Grey Album (American, men of color, hip-hop)
Metric - Fantasies (Canadian, lead=woman, alt/indie)
Regina Spektor - Far (Russian/American, Jewish woman, folk/rock)
Rilo Kiley - The Execution Of All Things (American, lead=woman, pop/indie)
The Sounds - Dying To Say This To You (Swedish, lead=queer woman, pop/indie)
Stars - Set Yourself On Fire (Canadian, co-lead=woman, pop/indie)
The White Stripes - Elephant (American, male, rock)

This could have more people of color and less North America in it, but I think I'm doing okay on the lady front!

[espresso_addict]

As someone who almost entirely listens to what I usually label as 'contemporary classical' or 'post-minimalist', I found picking out albums that met synecdochic's criteria very interesting. They did exclude a fair amount of material where I loved each composition individually but felt the album didn't hang together as a unit (eg Steve Reich's City Life) but that's life with any selective process.

I do feel a bit bad now that all my selections were written by white males; I meant to include something by Suzanne Vega or Meredith Monk or Laurie Anderson but didn't get around to it.

[zlabya]

Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer are beyond awesome (this from a serious contemporary-folk-music fan). Husband has both those albums and ::speechless:: Dave Carter is one of the best lyricists ever, IMHO.

I'm sad to not see the Canadian folk-music group Tanglefoot--they wrote and performed high-energy bouncy and powerful ballad tunes from about 20 years ago until they finally closed up shop just a couple of years ago. Most of their tunes were based on eastern Canadian history, ancestors, or people they'd met. Music From the Wood and Full-Throated Abandon are my favorite albums.

[stultiloquentia]

I'm wandering in kind of late, but I wanted to say I like this post and the discussion (and an awful lot of your music), especially the bits about who invented albums as a concept. Schubert song cycles, anybody?