My picks for The Spin Alternative Record Guide. Unlike many of the contributors, I actually restricted my selection to alternative rock and its ancestors / pantheon of influences.
If I was to do it now, following the same self-restrictions, there would be a lot more postpunk and a bit less "years of exile" - and not that much from the 25 years since the book was assembled.
5 comments:
A question. Do you have somewhere Alex Ross top 10 albums list from this Spin Guide? He is more on the classical side, but I know he likes some of the rock stuff, so I wonder what he has chosen then.
By luck I bought The Spin Alternative Record Guide and it’s great. It’s the best on the subject, I think. And I really wish that you contribure much more, because all of your takes are excellent and fun to read. So a little question. If You have to grade, for example, Sonic Youth albums in the same way as in this book, would Evol, Sister and Daydream Nation get 10/10?
It is a good read, isn't it, the Spin Guide. And I think pre-internet (the internet existed but hardly anyone was on it and there wasn't much on it at all, certainly not on music) it provided a lot of useful guidance to people out there.
A funny thing is that the editor of the Guide was strict about 10s - as a writer you were only supposed to give them out very infrequently indeed. So with this gun to my head, I had to refrain from giving certain Can or Aphex Twin or Suicide albums the 10s they deserved! Then the book comes out and it turns out the editor in question has been very free and easy issuing 10 out of 10 marks when writing about his favorite records by his own favorite acts (e.g. the Fastbacks). One rule for them one rule for me, eh?
Of course it's ridiculous, the very idea of attempting to grade albums according to a metric that'll supposedly apply to all recordings. Some albums that get 10 out of 10 are really 100 out of 10, compared to others which get 10. There are records that are flawed or have duff tracks on them but deserve 10 for the ambition and over-reach, whereas perfectly realised records of modest ambition should really get a 6 purely for setting such a low bar and then achieving it.
Still Spin magazine graded its monthly album reviews so the book was structured accordingly.
When invited to apply for the job of albums editor at Spin in 1998, part of my pitch to the editor in chief was that I would make the grades more polarized, in the UK music paper style of rave or rant, hypeful or hostile. So there'd be loads of 10s and 9's and lots of 2s and 1s and the occasional zero! I wanted to abolish the number 6, the very sight of which would make a reader yawn and turn the page, surely? As David Stubbs once said, if something's a 6, it might as well be a Zero. Who's going to buy an album that's got such a middling grade? I got the job as the editor like this idea of a more inflammatory approach generally. But others at Spin were committed to the measured, judicious approach to grading records. They took their responsibility very seriously (perhaps an influence from Xgau's Consumer Guide thing of marking records like class assignments or exams - A minus, Bplus, C, D, F etc). My attempt to "hot things up" was not appreciated.
So yes if we must grade records, then 10 out of 10 for Daydream and Sister.
That's a great answer. " I wanted to abolish the number 6" - Jesus, my friend who is also a film critic, when he sees this number in some reviews (albums/movies/book/whatever), he's close to vomiting. And Stubbs was absolutely right about this grade. I must confess that your approach with polarizing scores, "to hot things up", is much more entertaining and thought-provoking than Christgau's system (I like him very much as a critic, but his method is too complicated for it's own good).
"One rule for them one rule for me, eh?" - well, that's quite appalling from the editor of this really fine book. Personally I would like to score albums by the way I think about them - it's all about integrity, but as you pointed here, unfortunately some persons did make their own rules. Not cool.
"Of course it's ridiculous, the very idea of attempting to grade albums according to a metric that'll supposedly apply to all recordings. Some albums that get 10 out of 10 are really 100 out of 10, compared to others which get 10. There are records that are flawed or have duff tracks on them but deserve 10 for the ambition and over-reach, whereas perfectly realised records of modest ambition should really get a 6 purely for setting such a low bar and then achieving it" - preach Simon, preach. I think probably all the records I've graded 10s got little flaws (is something perfect even possible? You can't admire all the tracks in the same way, there will always be some songs that astonish you more than the rest), but they "kill you" in a good way with their vision, ambition, scale, drive etc. Modest ambition rarely works in any circumstances. As you wrote somewhere - pretension isn't really a bad thing for an artist or band when they have a chance to reach great heights.
Glad to hear that Daydream and Sister are 10/10 for You. Daydream is even my all-time favorite album and Sister is not far behind it. I only wish you wrote on Daydream some bigger article/text/review - there are little bits here and there on your blogs, but sadly nothing longer. Maybe someday there will be a chance for some great essay.
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