tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35004585.post2739421823237823537..comments2023-10-28T04:06:02.174-07:00Comments on Chris LaMay-West, writer in Vermont: Revisiting the 2000s: 20 albums (16-20)Chris LaMay-Westhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998448439377249844noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35004585.post-66242242299863877512013-01-01T17:43:05.956-08:002013-01-01T17:43:05.956-08:00I see what you did to the '80s there.
Maybe y...I see what you did to the '80s there.<br /><br />Maybe you need to shift your categories downward some more. "Good" should mean "adequate" and "adequate" should mean "terrible" and "terrible" should mean "I feel sorry for this band, I really do."<br /><br />To me, I think it comes down to this: if I met somebody who was more or less intelligent but had little familiarity with the popular music of the last 60 years, what music would I recommend to them? And what albums from the '00s would I include in my recommendation?<br /><br />Rolling Stone just recently "updated" their 500 Greatest Albums list by adding several albums from the '00s to it, which now makes me less inclined to recommend the list to people. It's just so awkward seeing Vampire Weekend, M.I.A., and Arcade Fire right next to Roxy Music, Santana, and N.W.A. I just want to shout out to a potential reader, "No! This is not the right list!" To be fair, the highest an album from the '00s ranks on the new list is at 118 (Late Registration?), but honestly, they should have just left the damn list alone.<br /><br />Hey, if writers and musicians genuinely believe that LCD Soundsystem and Wilco deserve to be lumped together with Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, then I guess I just have some lint stuck in my ears. But I really believe that recorded music in the album format simply will not have the cultural and emotional impact it did up until the '00s.<br /><br />All these people are in denial!Little Earlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03415022026000282965noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35004585.post-14219540794547551092012-12-29T13:55:34.573-08:002012-12-29T13:55:34.573-08:00Yaay, Earl! So glad to hear from you. There are th...Yaay, Earl! So glad to hear from you. There are three pertinent things to keep in mind regarding your comments:<br />1. "Perfect" is a hard word to gauge in this context. "one of the most perfect songs I can imagine" is not necessarily the highest praise I have to give. A "perfect" pop song, for instance, will often please me far less than a sloppy low-fi rocker. Conversely, I might call a sloppy low-fi rocker "perfect", meaning it's a perfect sloppy low-fi rocker.<br />2. The ground rules of how I wrote this are such that I only had to think something for a fraction of a second to end up writing it, and once written, it stays no matter what. These are my unexpurgated spontaneous reactions. So, I might retract or contradict any comment as soon as an hour after writing. I may have just been spontaneously generous and joyful at that moment!<br />3. It's interesting, because most of the albums you mentioned (Spoon, Sufjan, TV, etc.) are only in my "good" category, even in the moment I noted they weren't in the top tier of albums I'd reviewed. I'll have some more thoughts on this in my final follow-up, but I definitely had tiers of "great" "good" and "adequate". And there are whole other albums, not on this or anybody else's list, that are among my favorite for the decade. More thoughts on this to come as well. Along a similar line, the best albums of the whole damn decade may very well be only "good" albums in decades that had something going on, like the 60s, 70s, or 90s. Chris LaMay-Westhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13998448439377249844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35004585.post-47389333806798458622012-12-28T20:41:40.225-08:002012-12-28T20:41:40.225-08:00Hi Chris, still been reading these.
You're mu...Hi Chris, still been reading these.<br /><br />You're much more generous with '00s music than I am. To me, Spoon, Sufjan Stevens, and Wilco are all poster children for everything I don't really like about '00s rock. Maybe you genuinely think that "War On War" is "one of the most perfect songs I can imagine," but I'll bet that just seemed more like a fun thing to write than something you really believe. I was expecting you to be more disappointed with most of these albums, but perhaps we just have different taste. I'd like to see you revisit them in a couple of years and write about whether or not they hold up.<br /><br />I've heard a few TV On The Radio songs here and there and they seemed OK. The one album in this bunch I actually like is the Flaming Lips one. Their songs come off as relaxed, melodic, simultaneously weird but touching. Let me put it this way: I could see a band being influenced by the Flaming Lips, but I couldn't see a band being influenced by Wilco or Spoon.<br /><br />But if you like it, more power to you.Little Earlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03415022026000282965noreply@blogger.com