Monday, February 15, 2021

Top 10 Albums and Cultural Epicentres

I was recently talking about music with a friend and he asked me to list my "Top 10 Albums". It's the classic thing. One of those recurring discussions that crops up amongst music fans quite frequently.

Having perused his list I quickly rolled off my top ten. It wasn't definitive, or indeed ordered, more just the first 10 that occurred to me. Minus a few of the more embarrassing or clichéd ones that sprung to mind.

(my top 10, ..well 9)

I'm sure I could spend all week coming up with a proper top 10, or top 100 even, but what interested me, and why I'm posting here was the release dates of the albums. I added up the dates of my 10 albums then divided them by 10 to get the average, and then did the same with my friend's. Unsurprisingly they both came bang out in our teenage years.

I then asked a couple more friends to give me their top 10 albums. The exact same. It seems when it comes to music we can't quite get away from our teenage influences. No matter how worldly and cool we may think we are.

It's a debate that often comes up when I speak to another friend about music (one of the two I subsequently asked). He insists that music has been universally subpar in the last twenty years, and that the highpoint for music came in the early 90's. When I point out that it surely can't be a coincidence that the "best music" came out when he happened to be 15 years old he dismisses it. "That's just the way it is. Music is terrible now." Like he just got incredibly lucky being born as the apotheosis of all human music was being reached.

There are probably countless reasons why our musical tastes tend to have their epicentre in our teenage years. Part of it is no doubt just how new and fresh and coming of age everything is.

Another thing that plays a big part though is that it's actually hard to listen to new music. It takes time and effort. It's not dissimilar to trying new food. We like what we're comfortable with. What we're used to. "I'll just have chips". If we try something new or foreign we might not like it. So it's wasted effort. Plus, even if we do end up liking it, it often takes a few goes.

The first time there's that tentative; "Okay, I'll try this." Then a bit of umming and aahing as we weigh it up. Familiarising ourselves with it. It's usually only on the second or third time of eating it that we get that comfortable yummy feeling. Though we may kid ourselves - "I've always liked this!".

So it's very rare there's an instant hit the first time we try something. Acquired tastes.

I think it's often the same with music. If the autoplay is running on YouTube and an unfamiliar track comes on the first instinct is "What's this!?" Get my music back on!". You want to click back into the songs you know. That you can sing along to. However, if you persevere in listening, over time you're rewarded with new fruits. The first time you heard that new song it wasn't as fun as singing along to your much-loved favourites, but after a few hearings suddenly it joins the gang. Often you're not even aware of this happening.

We might think we liked a song the first time we heard it. Often though, we've heard it before, we just never picked up on it. Perhaps it was playing in the background of a TV show or commercial. Maybe it was on the radio in the background as you were out and about and doing other things. It's only when you become consciously aware of it that you suddenly think "Wow, I like this." Though it may have been worming its way into your bosom long before that moment.

This is partly why pop music has such an edge on more obscure stuff. As if something's truly obscure it has no way of catching you unaware like this over time.

I think this is why our teenage years are so formative. Partly because we're simply immersed in the culture of the era we grow up in, and there's no previous experience for it to compete with. But also because we have the energy and enthusiasm to invest our time in listening.

For instance, I still listen to new music now, but I don't put the same time into it I used to. My interest has moved to other things (books, history ..politics 😬). Before if I liked a song I'd buy the album, and go through the back catalogue, and learn the names of all the band members. Now I don't go to nearly as much trouble. Often struggling to even take onboard the correct name of the song.

The Actual Albums..

Anyway, I may as well list the albums.

When The Pawn - Fiona Apple
The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
The La's - The La's
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
Modern Life Is Rubbish - Blur
Forever Changes - Love
The Smiths - The Smiths
Jacksonville City Nights - Ryan Adams
Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts - Kula Shaker (don't laugh at that one - it's great !)
In Utero - Nirvana

In a way it worked quite well doing it quickly on the fly. If I had time to think I would've tried to be way too clever. Going for obscure, less honest picks.

The only one that isn't really a good reflection of my real tastes is Nirvana's In Utero. I do really like the album, but Nirvana were never one of my favourite, favourite bands. I was never that angsty and American. I think I picked it either to make the list a little less predictably indie, or to lean in towards the list my friend chose (that's more his genre, so I was maybe trying to be on the same wavelength a little).

It would've been more natural to pick an Oasis album or the Libertines first album. Something like that. I was actually going to add The Masterplan by Oasis at the time, but I wondered if that would count. Obviously greatest hits are strictly forbidden in these lists, but does that go for 'greatest B-sides' too? Either way that probably would've been a more honest reflection of the albums that instinctively sprung to mind. In fact, I've probably listened to Celebrity Skin by Hole much more than any single Nirvana album. Malibu in particular is a song I really like. So that probably says a lot about my preference for things that are a bit more melodic. In fact, it reminds me of when I was doing music at college back in the early 2000's; I used to enjoy winding the more mosher types up by stating, with faux-seriousness, that Celebrity Skin was better than anything Nirvana had ever released.

The Numbers.

The average for my above albums came out as 1993. I was born in 1982, so that would put the epicentre at eleven years old. Not quite teenage. The Love album probably skewed things a little.

I also worked out a range, by taking the average of the three earliest and three latest albums.
That gave; 1980 - 2005.

I'll give what came out for the other three too. Though I won't name them by name. I'm not sure they'd want their tastes to be doxxed this publicly. Or perhaps to be associated with some of the nonsense on this blog lol. So I'll just give the initials. A, R, and P.

A, born 1980.
Epicentre: 1993.
Spread: 1984 - 2001.

R, born 1979.
Epicentre: 1995.
Spread: 1991 - 2001.

P, born 1989.
Epicentre: 2007
Spread: 2004 - 2011.

Interestingly that last person's list included quite a few albums I really like. Albums such as Oracular Spectacular by MGMT and Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by the Arctic Monkeys. So we have similar tastes, though our top 10 albums were still out by approximately the difference in our ages.

It makes me wonder if I would've liked those albums even more had they came out when I was in my mid-teens and not my mid-twenties. Perhaps by my mid-twenties I was too cynical and jaded to take those albums to heart the way I would have had I been younger.

The other two lists were quite different to my tastes (I won't list them all, but bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Counting Crows and Pearl Jam figured heavily). Still, as we're all a similar age, we all had a similar era.

I might do some more posts on music going forward. I can't help but feel this is what lockdown has reduced me to though lol.

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