Today’s Observer has a section containing “the most authoritative poll of its kind” - The 100 greatest British albums. Now obviously taste is varied and the fact that they have The Stone Roses self-titled album as the finest British album of all time is open to debate, although as I was 17 and had just started to go out in Manchester when the album was released I have no problem with that and wonder why the Inspiral Carpets didn’t make the list.
No, the thing that’s annoying about these lists is that they’re created by self-proclaimed “experts”, it’s their elitist tastes, and art school explanations of why songs are on the list; Radiohead’s music for example is “about emotion and arching, engulfing beauty - the quest for soul in a soullessly technologised world .. irritatingly elliptical - lazy shorthand for cliched alienation“. I mean, really. I know they’re critics and did a course on flowery prose at critic school, but I’d just be too embarrassed to write like that myself, it just sounds so wanky - it could only be worse if they’d given the article a Latin title. Add to that a deliberate hang towards the obscure (a significant number of the albums never made the charts) and it makes you think those phone-in polls which invariably have Robbie Williams or the Beatles in first place really aren’t that bad.
German Phrase For Today: “Ohne Glamour oder aufgesetzte Showeinlagen propagierten sie trotz des eher traurig und nachdenklich wirkenden Sounds eine positive Lebenseinstellung und stießen mit den ausdrucksstarken, eindringlichen Liedern in neue poetische Dimensionen der Popmusik vor.” - The Smiths weren’t bad.
Song playing as this was published: Primal Scream - “Come Together”
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