A new list to rip to shreds: Maxim's 30 Worst Albums of all Time.

the 'waah why do critics pretend the ramones mattered more than ratt? fuck this revolution! god save the king (rachtman)!'

anyway i was arguing about the relative superiority of tiffany to debbie gibson! since its well established that the "critical consensus" i rail against considers debbie gibson part of the canon and tiffany worthless teen-pop tripe, then i guess that it was just trying to promote controversy from that gibson-lovin tiffany-hatin' buncha rockist losers.

iirc, though, that's not a golden-age piece, at least not in the "and then it was all ruined" sense you cite above. I thought it was quite a bit overstated but that's not what you're saying.

Blount OTM. Matos is right in that Klosterman does like other stuff but it's insanely amusing how he sorta backs into it (like at the end of the paperback Fargo Rock City -- 'my favorite albums recently are by Radiohead but I CAN'T LOVE THEM LIKE HAIR METAL YOU DEAF BASTARDS CAN'T YOU HEAR THE GLORY.'

Sterling -- what if you hate (or love) both?

oh klosterman is the dude who liked ratt more than the ramones!!! i never read his thing but i loved the thread about it

Same guy, yeah. And good on him for sticking by his guns, bad on him for not getting that others might disagree...

another joke crashes on the shoals of ilm literalis... fuck it.

ned do you hate affirmative action??

sterling you're nuts if you think tiffany's better (musically) than deborah gibson!

I love everything and everyone! I love Sterling for binarism rather than multiplicity!

but Ned that afterward is more an admission that Radiohead can't mean as much to him because he's not a teenager anymore, not "hair metal are better"

the weird thing about tiffany vs. deborah is that deborah's better at dance numbers even though her heart's in ballads and tiffany's better at ballads even though her heart's in dance numbers - cruel, cruel fate!

tiffany finally gave up dance numbers for ballads and she's the better for it (her heart never WAS in dance numbers i think tho).

i'd say more tiffany was APPRECIATED for dance numbers and deborah for ballads. but deborah hand so little range, a comparatively weak voice, and even her dance-numbers were pretty damn go nowhere. (out of the blue was the first tape i ever bought tho and it has a special place in my heart even if for no other reason.)

Dunno, Matos, my reading of it -- and I admit I only read it once -- wasn't quite so clear-cut. Klosterman, for me, comes across as ultimately bitter at his worst by saying that 1) there's a rock canon formed without his consent or input and 2) that people can have different interpretations of something that was indeed huge and omnipresent from what he has. There's a lightness in tone -- not necessarily in terms of the meat of his argument but in style and approach -- that is missing which I think would do him good if it were there. If anything I think his writing since Fargo Rock City is worse in this regard -- almost as if he was hoping that his book would somehow turn a tide. Then both the Ramones and Ratt deaths happen and he flips out that writers would want to talk about one more than the other, and spends his time complaining about that.

"shake your love" was not go nowhere!

Chuck E needs to come in and settle this T-DG thing once and for all

I'm pretty sure he's a Tiffany guy

being 'contrarian' and all

he's a stacy q guy.

Nu Shooz.

Liking Debbie more than Tiffany is like liking Michelle Branch more than Avril.

but that's just crazy-talk!

(isn't shake your love just the chorus over and over and over or am i missing something? i mean granted i love the double-entendre but it only takes you so far. foolish beat was a bit better i recall)

"shake your love" has a breakitdown-builditbackup big beat would give it's left nut for

for the record I like tiffany more than deborah, but "shake your love" is a-ok

also, when I was stationed in Iceland there was this Icelandic girl who would come the Marine bar every week on karaoke night and do "Lost In Your Eyes". Very Paths of Glory.

I did "Pocket of a Clown"

Um....Their debut albums are both better than anything they did later?

(Actually, I compare & contrast them plenty in my second book, and it would take me thousands of words to go into here, but I'm going home.)

And I still don't get how "self-congratulatory let's-hyberbolically-enthuse-over-what-we-imagine-others-think-is-utterly-disposable shtick" is not questioning my integrity. But who gives a shit, y'know?

Okay: At FIRST I liked Debbie better. (Reviewed her debut album in the Voice.) She's got the *rhythm*. But Tiff's got the Voice. And the personality. And the hair. She's like Rayanne Graff and Tanya Harding and Stevie Nicks rolled into one. So I guess that's my answer.

Actually, I'm a Company B guy.
(But NOT in a boogie-woogie bugle way, I swear.)

I remember Spin grilling Deborah about "Shake Your Love"

Oh yeah one more thing (and then I'm really going home, I promise.)

I'm also curious where exactly I do this:

>fail to extricate their like for the music from their desire to make a statement about the value of disposable/etc. Pop Music<<

Can you give me examples of where exactly I've made such statements, Amateurist? (Actually, I HATE most disposable pop, if you wanna know.)

rockist!

Aw fuck, I started making your mix but after a sick triple-time Copywrite track and some Atmosphere and a couple of the less-artsy Def Jux things (Murs, Mr. Lif) I sort of ran out of actually good songs that you might like, and really, how interested would you even be in an MF Doom track that constantly changes tempo at semi-random intervals and samples what is either the Beatles' "Glass Onion" or Scooby-Doo incidental music? So I sort of put it aside for the time being thinking "maybe if I sneak in some Bay Area shit from '98 he won't notice" and then a bunch of people were all "hey I want your '72 thing" so blah blah hem haw excuse

(Also I dream of a world in which "critical consensus" is very very far down on the list of "why music is interesting", somewhere below "what sort of adapter plugs they use for their microphones")

I feel weird setting myself up as Amateurist translator, but Chuck -- and this comes from a pretty much disinterested observer -- he's not saying you're being dishonest, he's saying he gets annoyed by his personal perception that you take pleasure in being the orthodoxy-tweaking scamp to the extent that it interferes with your own ideas. I am not agreeing with this statement, simply explaining it: in your writing that I've read, you've not crossed any such lines to the extent of bothering me.

As for Klosterman, I have not read anything apart from his books, but in the newest (forthcoming?) one, he relies very heavily on the naughty-scamp routine, going so far as to make heavy use of the whole 90s "only a weirdo like me would think this" routine.

With the benefit of Nabisco's having delicately sorted out my good points from my unfortunate sideswipes, I think I'll try to take on some of the 5,000 posts above, albeit in scattershot fashion.

As for the disposable pop thing, you're right that I don't necessarily have a leg to stand on Chuck (maybe 1/2 of a leg, which isn't of much use), and I think I've already granted that I might be mischaracterizing your overall outlook on the basis of a handful of ILM posts. (I also may be confusing your writing with that of the other Chuck, and perhaps a raft of other VV critics as well.)

To try and explain myself, it seems (from my perspective--which means the threads that I read) that you are most interested in defending stray albums from much-maligned subgenres and artists and although you mention Dylan as being a major focus of your book, I haven't noticed a lot of posts on ILM (again, this may be due to my own myopia) about such consensus figures or for that matter many artists/genres that don't have the potential to raise questions about your credulity. I accept your sincerity, in fact, but it's your seeming choice of focus on precisely that music which raises hackles that begins to annoy me. Your celebration of these things (again, on ILM) seem to employ a po-face quite occasionally, such as (made-up example) "Manowar is better than Motorhead," and it's then left to subsequent posters to fill in the reasons behind this. There's a contrarianism here that--again, on selected ILM posts--seems to overwhelm other impulses and emotions. Of course this is not uncommon in general on message boards. Some ILMers have made virtual careers of such contrarianism (some of them are on this thread).

I employ the device mentioned above (let's call it the "Manowar>Motorhead device") sometimes, although I'm not proud of it. This gets at what Sterling says, that I myself am guilty of that of which I accuse others. I've said so myself numerous times on ILM. My musical literacy is woefully inadequate to the task of writing the sort of music criticism (or music study) I like to read. If it's a truism that we single out others for faults that we find in ourselves, I'm a living illustration. But if I've singled you out for criticism (some of it founded, some of it clearly not) it's because you are a convenient representative of the rock criticism establishment (by which I simply mean a popular and well-read and -entrenched published critic) and as such I hold you to a higher standard--and probably hold you accountable for a whole state of affairs for which you far from wholly to blame. That probably sounds insufferably condescending itself.

The contradiction here is that I should judge you on the stuff you actually get paid for. Which I hope to read more of this weekend and hopefully I will be robbed of my misconceptions or at least more nuanced and sensible in my criticism.

[Put another way: When I write I'm simply one guy, with no professional connection to music, who is often bored at a job he's about to leave and prefers this ragged discourse to the endless dotting of i's and crossing of t's. When you write Chuck, from my POV at least, you're writing in your professional identity.]

I probably haven't addressed all the sundry criticisms I've received on this thread, least of all Sterling's which seem in their definitiveness ("you never say anything at all" etc.) an unfortunate echo of my initial statements (now regretted) about him and Chuck. I should add that I feel bad for personally offending you and impugning your sincerity, although I remain unconvinced of the virtues of your writing style and wary of--I'll say it again, just to see if Trife can get more mileage out of it--your insistent puckishness as I've perceived it on ILM.

As for the members of the peanut gallery, it's actually quite amusing to see you graft a whole host of attributes onto me that aren't evident from my posts (and would seem obv false if you bothered to recall my general contribution to ILX outside of these unfortunate lashings out on criticism threads): rockism, anti-hip hop, whatever. I think the protean nature of this thread (starting in one place, quickly moving to another) encourages this sort of thing so in a sense this is another mea culpa.

Whoops, clarification: I didn't impugn your sincerity, but I feel bad that I apparently lent the perception that I did.

ain't no thing but a chicken wing!

Wait, Blount, is that a conciliatory gesture? Because I'm not sure I'm ready for that just yet.

Manowar are SO not better than Motorhead....

(haha)

But that list sure was right about that Milli Vanilli album. It sure is bad. I heard those guys didn't even sing on it.

man, it not for the scandal, John Leland's Milli Vanilli predictions woulda surely come to pass

it woulda been funnier if the list was all Jandek and Shaggs and Langley Schools and other bands that can't play their instruments ho ho ho

agreed!

I wish someone would write a "WORST ALBUMS EVAR" list where every entry either (a) contained at least three glaring factual errors (i.e. "Michael Stipe's bass playing ruins the album") or (b) is about albums that have been out of print for thirty years and therefore can't be easily argued about

such a headache this thread gives me

when 900 posts you make to ilm, feel as good you will not

Tiffany all the way. As fucking if.

Well, you people are are absolutely fascinating. Keep going then.

Nate's idea is really really funny