10. Those modern classical/early electronics picks just seem so... perfunctory - like they had a handful of Big Names they wanted to get on there and probably shat themselves when they found a split with both Cage AND Oliveros so that they could fit that other, shitty Kinks album or another release from a soul legend from before soul legends started caring about albums as coherent statements - wait, no, not even listenable packages.
No love for Ligeti, btw? You guys seem like you'd love Kubrick!
9. Can we as a species (by which I mean hack music journalists) just move on from Live at the Apollo and pick a new James Brown live album to fellate, preferably one that's actually deserving of the treatment? It's not just that the first LATO is so early in his career that it's D'Voidoffunk (nothing inherently inferior about a live soul album compared to a live funk album, if it's good) but it's just weirdly polite and it seems like a classic example of a storied early recording of a legendary artist that no one would praise at all if it weren't for what said artist did in the years after the release in question, which contains none or few of he attributes of the later material that made them famous.
8. BIABHA is the only decent Dylan album because it's cartoonish, buffoonish and a mumbly jumble and, in its key moments, it's aware of and poking fun at the fact that nothing this man has ever said anywhere in his career has been profound or made a lick of sense. Or rather, that the stuff that was supposed to be deep was facile and the rest of it was hackneyed Kenneth Patchen-but-bad dumbshow that was only sporadically entertaining. But "Subterranean" and "115th" are Dylan laughing at his own stupidity and that of the audience of bootlickers who would net him the Pulitzer decades later. The great bait and switch and transformation of the album is that having thoroughly skewered and roasted himself and offered us the tender flesh on kebabs, he's free to actually pen and perform a couple of actually good, fairly serious songs. "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" predicts both Leonard Cohen and Pink Moon but exists in its own zonked-out place unlike them or any other Dylan: it's a blueprint for a dozen dozen dozen solo downer folkie outsider albums in the two decades to come more than, y'know, James Taylor. The lyrics are still mostly shit but the melody and strums are subtly insinuating and Zimmerman sounds like he hasn't slept in at least a week and is probably really hungry, to boot - it really isn't about the words here, which is a good thing, being Bobby Z, but I can't say that about anything else I've heard by him.
On HWY61 Dylan will suddenly get po-faced and take the intensity and fun down about eighteen notches while treating further up his own famous anus. "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken!" is his new and improved rewrite of the phrase "fuck you." BoB is an improvement in some ways (mostly from a purely musical perspective) but it also seems like the moment he really earnestly bought his own mythology and That's A Bad. It's also where he dips into the nihilistic and acerbic: as much as I appreciate the manic theatricality of some of his early folk rock material's backing, the insistent "Pink Elephants on Parade" oompah tuba of "Rainy Day Women 12 & 35" is for my money the only example of a truly great, inspired choice in his discography on a purely musical level, but it's a bitter, malicious Dylan that shows up to sing. The mood is carnivalesque but not liberating: it really does seem like Bob's speaking of stoning in the Biblical sense. There's some beauty here, pretty much exclusively in "Visions of Johanna" but even that one gets excessively absurd - and that's the most memorable part - it's also the closest the actual Dylan gets to Dylan Hears a Who, which is a good thing, actually. But it's still mostly flesh-tearing sarcasm and daring us to decipher the drivel he's drooling. And on top of that it's still ADDA, y'know? A Dreaded Double Album. Wunuda foist but that just makes it xxxtra preten(d)-shush. Haha what the hell am I doing i dunno man
point is no one needs more praise less than blob villain bob dylan
7. Similar to Live at the Apollo's placement in the JB canon, Otis Blue has monopolized discussion of Redding's generally splendiferous discography (seven albums bolded on RYM - not that that means anything - not counting his live split with Hendrix, or Sitting On the Dock of the Bay, which apparently got demoted to compilation) for far too long. I was blatantly wrongheaded when I labeled it as obviously worse than the albums that surround it, but almost literally everyone else is just as blatantly wrongheaded when they claim that it's that much better than those albums, or even have the gall to claim that it's the Only Album of his You Need, which is like claiming that you should start and stop listening to Sonic Youth with Daydream Nation or picking one random Odetta album to canonize while blatantly ignoring the rest. I vaguely remember leaving out all of the good Otis albums except the Immortal from my 60s list because I wanted to relisten to them for more accurate placement calibration and that was the only one I got to (there's a lotta music in the world!) Bottom line, if Aretha and B.o.B. get like at least three albums each in the top hundred, then Otis deserves at least more than the Beatles in the top 200.
6. Their Coltrane picks are so MOR! A Love Supreme at number three but no Ascension to be found? Later I'll touch on the lack of maybe my favorite album of the entire decade (John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) but for now I'll just say acting like Trane never went anywhere after ALS is regressive and silly: sure I too prefer Free Jazz and the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra to Ascension but it's a way more solid and fitting pick than Giant Steps, which is the stodgy dodgy conservative moldy fig pick for 60s Trane, even moreso than his (terrible) ballad or (exquisite) vocal album: even My Favorite Things would be a better choice. Having Ole! around 150 is somewhat redeeming but I just wish they'd take a real risk and put Kulu Se Mama at #83 or something, y'know? But that's a general feeling I have about the whole list that's not specific to their treatment of JC.
5. As I just mentioned, just a general lack of real idiosyncrasy or risk taking - even when they break their usual mold (like say with Mary Lou Williams or Eddie Palmieri) it seems calculated to target a demographic or make up for some area in which they're aware they are lacking, or it's just in such Good Taste - it's obvious these people are tokenists, needlessly self-conscious AND worried about what others might think and must save face. In other words, they're white and not-poor. There's only one album that stands out as a "daring!" pick and it's still by one of the most acclaimed musicians in American history - that Mingus piano album, which is occasionally fascinating, though much more so in theory than practice, but also dry and noodly. I guess that Nina Simone album being in the top five is somewhat unexpected and idiosyncratic when the rest of the top five is ALS and PS and VU&N and TB(TWA) but I still claim the presence of so much Nina (who probably never recorded a consistently capital-G Great album even if she has at least a dozen of the best songs ever recorded under her belt) and Aretha (who is both overrated and just too frickin' obvious, entry-level a pick to ever give someone props for) in the top thirty is pretty blatantly an attempt to fend off any accusations of misogynoir, which they just need to own up to the fact that they, like all white music critics and most people in general who aren't woke black women, are guilty of it and just try to do better more organically and maybe realize that the vast majority of sjws don't read the fricking 'Fork in the first place so it's another Stephen Thomas Erlewine vs. Stephin Merritt case of white people casting aspersions at other white people about racism in lieu of any input from actual poc - making it purely performative.
4. It really does look, past the first fifty at the very most, like a tornado went through Pitchfork's staff room and completely reorganized the list they'd be been working on - sometimes it's great! Anybody putting Nina Simone in Concert and Song Cycle directly ahead of the Doors' debut almost makes up for the fact that they put the Doors' debut on their list in the first place, in my book. But sometimes it just seems irrational - I can't decide if it seems more understandable as having been created by group effort or if it more closely resembles the creation of a very muddled individual. A little of both, actually. Or, most likely, a very canon ensemble piece that was dissatisfying and so a handful of people were sought to each go through on their own and snip and add albums or slide them up and down as they pleased, as long as they made the whole shebang look more... cosmopolitan? metropolitan? metrosexual?
3. They need to get better at tokenism - use the two album rule - if you're going to include a genre outside of your usual purview, always include at least two albums, to trick yr audience into thinking there were actually a whole lot of bachata or batucada or banda sinaloense albums vying for a place on the list but you only had room for two, because of all the other genres that your brilliantly worldly-wise hypereclectic globally-minded anti-canon self naturally listens to just as much as folk rock or post-bop. My list was guilty of basically the same thing with gamelan, though I had Golden Rain a lot higher. They also flub salsa even with the presence of two albums, because neither of them is Cosa nuestra.
2. You don't get to praise both Simon and Garfunkel and Eric Dolphy. Or Dusty Springfield and Ornette Coleman. It's like having your two favorite authors be George Jackson and Julius Evola.
(That's bullshit, of course.)
1. CHELSEA GIRL BUT NO MARBLE INDEX!? THAT'S BLASPHEMY! That's like preferring Safe as Milk to Trout Mask Replica or vines of cats eating soup to Cat Soup! Or something. It's like a terrible decision.
0. Oh yeah needs more vocal jazz. Mack the Knife: Ella in Berlin or some Betty Carter of FER FUX SAKE John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.
And now: Top Five Things They Didn't Foul Up, or Good Choice, Forkperson!
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