Post by pacinoyes on Aug 22, 2017 11:57:10 GMT
Um, look I know from the 70s onward our two tastes don't overlap - they love Bowie, Joy Division, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, far more than me and the staff at Pitchfork has never you know had a beer or kissed a non-inflatable girl to understand my love of Thunders, Perrett, The La's, The Exploding Hearts..............and that's ok, because after the 60s the pop world split open and kept splitting open so that you can argue for so much and restructure it - better album What's Going On or Raw Power or Exile on Main Street - whichever you choose you have a lot of ammo to build your case.
But the 60s are much more rigidly defined, where fewer acts dominate the discussion and there's a clearer cultural landscape. So, while there's room for the Velvets and Stooges and MC5 next to the Beatles and Stones in that landscape, there just is no way with a straight face you can argue 13 records are better than Highway 61 or that the White Album is that much higher than Rubber Soul (the FIFTH best Beatles album, right) or the Stones deserve that BS lowball ranking for Beggar's Banquet/Let It Bleed (only 1 of which makes the top 20 - the top 20!!
But even if you take that as part of the deal with lists (The Kinks Arthur barely makes the list at all for Godsakes) some of this is inconceivable by the omissions. There's one legit straight blues record on here (Howlin Wolf) which means something like Hoodoo Man Blues which should be a staple on these kinds of lists is completely excluded, while they are bending over backwards to include Jazz - there's just no way Jazz had that cultural cache over black blues or the white interest in the Blues and eventual mimicking of it but ...............if you read this list you wouldn't think Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton (or Peter Green) picked up a guitar in this entire decade - or didn't do it notably at least - and who cares anyway when they're ranking Hendrix that high repeatedly you can ignore Paul Butterfield or John Mayall or the Yardbirds entirely, wrongly.........meanwhile 2 Led Zeppelin rip offs of Beck's post Yardbirds band and his classic Truth are here so they at least have that base covered and can move on............but the Small Faces and the Creation and the Pretty Things are nowhere to be found either.
I dunno, this is the one PF list that seems like it was trying so hard to be diverse as you go through it - especially at the top (2 females in the top 10, 5 African Americans which is fine, they are great records but it sticks out when you see this list), it just plays as utterly random to me. You can't even get a feel for why they like these records actually and that's something you could never say about well Bowie, Joy Division, Radiohead and Arcade Fire..............