AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

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veganvalentine
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

Awesome to see Wish You Were Here crack the top 50! I'm consistently surprised how popular it is with music fans of all stripes, but I'll take it. I could have sworn I voted for Odessey & Oracle in my top 100, but somehow I accidentally left if off my list.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Zombeels »

Nice to see Odessey & Oracle in the top 50 but being my Number one, I would have liked to seen it higher.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by notbrianeno »

Image
"Don't ya worry, get dressed, " cried my mother
As she plied me with bourbon so sour
Pull your socks up, put your suit on
Comb your long hair down,
For you will be wed in the hour
#45. The Rolling Stones | Beggars Banquet (1968)
# of Voters: 38 | Score: 2231.644
Rank in 2014: #30
AM 3000 Rank: #33
Top Fans: RockyRaccoon (#9), Brad (#18), GabeBasso (#20), Gillingham (#22), Zombeels (#29), Andyd1010 (#32), SJner (#35), Babydoll (#35), Harold (#40), RedAnt (#43), Acroamor (#56), Nico (#57), Whuntva (#58), Listyguy (#59), Antonius (#61), Maschine_Man (#72), Dexter (#77), Bruno (#78), ChrisK (#82), BryanBehar (#83), Nicolas (#85), Nick (#86)
The Stones forsook psychedelic experimentation to return to their blues roots on this celebrated album, which was immediately acclaimed as one of their landmark achievements. A strong acoustic Delta blues flavor colors much of the material, particularly "Salt of the Earth" and "No Expectations," which features some beautiful slide guitar work. Basic rock & roll was not forgotten, however: "Street Fighting Man," a reflection of the political turbulence of 1968, was one of their most innovative singles, and "Sympathy for the Devil," with its fire-dancing guitar licks, leering Jagger vocals, African rhythms, and explicitly satanic lyrics, was an image-defining epic. On "Stray Cat Blues," Jagger and crew began to explore the kind of decadent sexual sleaze that they would take to the point of self-parody by the mid-'70s. At the time, though, the approach was still fresh, and the lyrical bite of most of the material ensured Beggars Banquet's place as one of the top blues-based rock records of all time.
--Richie Unterberger, Allmusic

Image
And I'm conquered in a car seat
And I'm looking straight at you
Way up on, way up on, way up on, way up on, way up on, way up on, way up on
The avenue of trees
Keep walking down
In the wind and rain, darling
You keep walking down when the sun shone through the trees
#44. Van Morrison | Astral Weeks (1968)
# of Voters: 41 | Score: 2255.203
Rank in 2014: #48
AM 3000 Rank: #15
Top Fans: Antonius (#1), Acroamor (#3), Babydoll (#10), Chambord (#17), Miguel (#18), Georgie (#28), Spiderpig (#29), Dexter (#34), JWinton (#34), NotBrianEno (#42), Nicolas (#45), Jackson (#46), PlasticRam (#48), BangJan (#50), Nick (#56), M24 (#58), BryanBehar (#62), SJner (#66), ChrisK (#84)
Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"

It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.

When he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling than in the Revealed Word - perhaps much of the feeling comes from the reaching - but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID apprehend that Word; there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. And then there are times when we realize the Word was right next to us, when the most mundane overused phrases are transformed: I give you "love," from "Madame George." Out of relative silence, the Word: "Snow in San Anselmo." "That's where it's at," Van will say, and he means it (aren't his interviews fascinating?). What he doesn't say is that he is inside the snowflake, isolated by the song: "And it's almost Independence Day."
--Lester Bangs

Image
Well when you're sitting back in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
Ah, I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away
#43. The Rolling Stones | Sticky Fingers (1971)
# of Voters: 39 | Score: 2261.507
Rank in 2014: #27
AM 3000 Rank: #42
Top Fans: Listyguy (#5), Honorio (#8), Antonius (#10), GabeBasso (#13), BryanBehar (#17), Brad (#24), SJner (#28), Andyd1010 (#28), ChrisK (#37), M24 (#45), Bruno (#45), JWinton (#46), Spider (#49), Harold (#55), Dexter (#57), LiveinPhoenix (#62), Slick (#66), RockyRaccoon (#79), Nick (#87), Bootsy (#94), Whuntva (#96)
while albums such as Exile on Main Street and Aftermath are riding incomprehensible highs, Sticky Fingers is strung-out on an all-time low. The Stones rarely got darker than on "Sister Morphine", "Sway" or "Moonlight Mile", introspective songs about drug addiction and rock stardom, and these slower, downbeat moments dominate the album. Apart from the opening song, "Brown Sugar" (a pretty evil song in its own right, maybe the purest distillation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll ever put to wax), the massive, heavy jam "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", and the huge, brassy rock of "Bitch", the albums are all the height of the Stones at their most mournful and contemplative, a skill they entirely lost shortly thereafter. "Sway" and "Dead Flowers" are two of the best songs The Stones ever did, in particular "Dead Flowers" their greatest country song, about heartbreak and heroin (and with a nice comic touch parodying the FTD slogan - 'say it with dead flowers'). Sticky Fingers is the Stones' highest achievement, a dark, honest, uncompromising album about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, without all the attendant clichés.
--jshopa, RYM

Image
She's the queen of cool
And she's the lady who waits
Since her mind left school
It never hesitates
She won't waste time
On elementary talk
#42. The Doors | The Doors (1967)
# of Voters: 39 | Score: 2280.814
Rank in 2014: #40
AM 3000 Rank: #27
Top Fans: Victor.Marianoo77 (#11), Babydoll (#12), Panam (#16), SJner (#17), Jirin (#19), Michel (#20), Listyguy (#23), Nick (#34), Romain (#37), Bruno (#39), JWinton (#41), nico (#43), VeganValentine (#45), Whuntva (#45), Slick (#49), Dexter (#53), Spiderpig (#56), M24 (#67), RockyRaccoon (#69), Harold (#74), Nicolas (#76), BryanBehar (#78), Chambord (#94)
The album is the outcome of the fusion of six elements of highly suggestive potential: the coarse skin-tight twitch of blues-rock (sealed by the obsessive beat of Densmore); a personalized baroque interpretation of psychedelia (trademark of the fatuous and eclectic Manzarek's organ that varies from sluggish swing to a peeling of the bells onto majestic liturgical swirls); an accurate plan of exotic infection (Latin and Hawaiian flavors in Krieger's guitar), the seducing and sinister voice of Morrison, the evangelic charm of his personality and the shocking value of his lyrics, halfway between Greek tragedies and Freudian psychoanalysis.

The album begins with one of their most famous tunes, Break On Through, a feisty and irreverent piece with an out-of-control rhythmic session that burns itself, without a single second of pause, in just over two minutes, an epileptic punk-rock anthem before its time. Soul Kitchen is a blues-rock that begins like an experience recalled and stretches itself to a spectacular end, culminating with a demonic invocation during the satanic ceremony in the "kitchen of the souls". The Mephistophelian atmosphere sweetens in the oblivion of Crystal Ship, a perfect little masterpiece on the expansion of consciousness, in which the search for metaphysical freedom awakens simultaneously primordial fears and euphoria ("...the days are bright and filled with pain..."). An acute, irrefutable pain adds strange hues to the piece (the imperceptible undertones of acid) in a mix of dizzy heights ("...we'll meet again, we'll meet again, oh, tell me where you freedom lies...") in which the work evolves to an epic crescendo. 20th Century Fox is a sarcastic hymn to a shrewd woman who "...won't waste time on elementary talk...got the world locked up inside a plastic box...", a feminine portrait worth of the imagery of Dylan and the Jefferson Airplane.
--Piero Scaruffi

Image
Always in a hurry, I never stop to worry,
Don't you see the time flashin' by.
Honey, got no money,
I'm all sixes and sevens and nines.
Say now baby, I'm the rank outsider,
You can be my partner in crime.
#41. The Rolling Stones | Exile On Main St. (1972)
# of Voters: 38 | Score: 2284.419
Rank in 2014: #25
AM 3000 Rank: #8
Top Fans: RickyMathias (#3), Gillingham (#3), Antonius (#4), GabeBasso (#5), Bruno (#7), Nico (#8), RockyRaccoon (#20), Andyd1010 (#21), Nick (#27), BryanBehar (#31), Bootsy (#31), Dexter (#32), M24 (#33), JWinton (#43), SJner (#44), Jirin (#48), Harold (#50), SonofSamIAm (#52), GucciLittlePiggy (#64), Brad (#70), BangJan (#72), LiveinPhoenix (#96), Spiderpig (#99)
There is a downside: Exile, despite being so great (it's the best album of '72), doesn't exactly typify the band at a songwriting peak, because the songs are more centered around the 'stripped blues chant' form - there's none of the more patient, lyrical songs like "Gimmie Shelter" here. This stuff's more rooted in performance - how all that energy sounds, really sounds - than on any kind of strict aesthetic. They base these songs on the form that made them famous, and though they're wounded now and more cynical (than ever) about how the hippie dreams failed, they're picking up the wreckage and rocking the fuck out of it. 'Heading for the overload' indeed.

And what energy! This is energy that's so pent-up that it causes the band to do some absolutely crazy things. When they start with the 'You've got to roll me' build-up of "Tumbling Dice" (or the similar one at the end of "Soul Survivor"), it feels like they have absolutely no idea where they're about to go or what they're going to do with their little hook, but they decide to run with it and end up nailing it to the sky. The part where Mick's voice goes all vibrate-y in the middle of "Rocks Off" is just outright weird, weirder than anything on Their Satanic Majesties Request because the weirdness isn't implied as the norm. Mick's final scream in "Rip This Joint" is shockingly powerful (and LOUD) singing that would shame most hardcore bellowers. And I don't think a brass section has ever had as much muscle on a rock album as the stuff here: when that tuba drops in "Happy" at 1:50, it sounds like a roaring electric guitar chord. Mick's glammy 'Ohhh yeeeeah!' at the start of the album pretty much says it all about where you're about to go. 'Plug in, flush out.' Best road trip album ever?
--LimedIBagels, RYM
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Henry »

Drop the Stones and see the Roll.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Listyguy »

That was a bizarre group. Didn't think all three of those Stones albums would be on top of each other like that (or that Let It Bleed would be the highest ranked Stones album).
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Live in Phoenix
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Live in Phoenix »

Let It Bleed has typically been my favorite Stones album, for the last 20 years. The extra rise in prominence of "Gimme Shelter" could be helping it out. It might be the closest of "the big four" to being quintessential Rolling Stones. Exile is kind of an odd album in comparison.

Meanwhile, it's not difficult to think of OK Computer hitting #1, when In Rainbows hasn't even dropped yet.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Listyguy »

Live in Phoenix wrote:Let It Bleed has typically been my favorite Stones album, for the last 20 years. The extra rise in prominence of "Gimme Shelter" could be helping it out. It might be the closest of "the big four" to being quintessential Rolling Stones. Exile is kind of an odd album in comparison.
I agree with a lot of what you said here. I do love Let It Bleed as well, though I would put it behind Sticky Fingers for my favorite Stones album. Exile probably has the "worst" classic Stones song of the big 4 (according to popular opinion), considering the other three albums have Gimme Shelter, Sympathy For the Devil and Brown Sugar.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Live in Phoenix »

Sticky Fingers wouldn't be a bad substitute at all for best album, and maybe even quintessential album (although it's gloomier than usual). Beggars Banquet, meanwhile, is a little more acoustic than I would like from them, I suppose... not a horrible flaw, but I've always had it #4 out of 4.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Hymie »

Live in Phoenix wrote:Let It Bleed has typically been my favorite Stones album, for the last 20 years. The extra rise in prominence of "Gimme Shelter" could be helping it out. It might be the closest of "the big four" to being quintessential Rolling Stones. Exile is kind of an odd album in comparison.
I don't get all the raves for "Exile." I love the 2 hit singles, but if you like blues there's tons of much better stuff around than the stuff on this album. The next best song is "Shake Your Hips," but that's much better by Slim Harpo IMO.

My favorite Stones album is "Some Girls." I like every track, and the album flows really well IMO. All of their early albums have filler tracks here and there, and the other 70s albums don't hit me like "Some Girls."
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veganvalentine
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

I love classic rock and a lot of Stones songs, but like Hymie I hear some filler in their acclaimed albums (at least upon on one or two listens). I did vote for Sticky Fingers, but Exile in particular I've had trouble appreciating. Even Mick Jagger was somewhat surprised by Exile's acclaim because of the relative lack of hits, but maybe the albums will click with me next time I listen to them.

And props to Radiohead for their upcoming domination. I knew this forum loved them, but In Rainbows' placement is quite impressive.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by notbrianeno »

Image
You are just a thought that someone
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here
And it's so for real to touch
To smell, to feel, to know where you are here
#40. Love | Forever Changes (1967)
# of Voters: 40 | Score: 2330.457
Rank in 2014: #42
AM 3000 Rank: #48
Top Fans: SJner (#2), Harold (#6), Acroamor (#9), Zombeels (#10), Listyguy (#10), Georgie (#14), Chambord (#26), Jackson (#29), BangJan (#30), Bootsy (#35), Miguel (#39), Antonius (#51), JWinton (#54), Honorio (#59), Michel (#65), VeganValentine (#66), Panam (#76), LiveinPhoenix (#80), Nicolas (#80), ChrisK (#83), RockyRaccoon (#85), Spiderpig (#91), BryanBehar (#93)
A band named Love is surely begging the question. Especially in 1967. But the name of Arthur Lee's band is mendacious at best, and this is made most obvious somewhere halfway through "A House Is Not a Motel", the garage-burning second track. "The news today will be the movies of tomorrow", Lee prophesies, before adding that the "water's turned to blood" and inviting you to check your bathtub for proof. He was bringing home the reality that he saw. In Lee's vision of 1967, it wasn't love that filled the hills overlooking San Francisco; it was paranoia, disturbance inbred with existential dread.

Forever Changes is probably best interpreted as commentary on the counterculture of the time. It is a clairvoyant glimpse into the madness brought about by self-delusion, and how fomenting detachment can be just as difficult a way to live. To this end, the lyrics endlessly hint at isolation and despair: on "Andmoreagain", Lee reveals that when "all your secrets are your own/ then you feel your heart beating". The theme even extends to veer on teeming insanity: in a pattern that occurs multiple times over the course of this album, two voices, laid over each other though equally intelligible, speak alternate lyrics.

In interviews years afterwards, Lee has variously admitted that during Love's mid-1967 recording sessions which produced Forever Changes, he thought his death was near. Thus, Forever Changes was intended as a testament. In hindsight, it probably was as prescient as MTV Unplugged was for Kurt Cobain. But whereas Unplugged foreshadowed Cobain's suicide a year later, Forever Changes anticipated the downfall of the counterculture movement, and in a hell of an album. In song after song, Lee proves that he deserves mention alongside Van Morrison or Dylan as among the most lucid lyricists of the '60s. Indeed, it was not until Jeff Mangum surfaced in the '90s that a lyricist combined the same garrulity and intensity in his singing.
--NotEvenWordsHere, RYM

Image
Soma is what they would take when hard times opened their eyes
Saw pain in a new way, high stakes for a few names
Racing against sun beams, losing against their dreams
In your eyes
#39. The Strokes | Is This It (2001)
# of Voters: 42 | Score: 2343.092
Rank in 2014: #37
AM 3000 Rank: #41
Top Fans: Nick (#8), JWinton (#10), OrdinaryPerson (#16), Chambord (#19), JohnnyBGoode (#20), Listyguy (#28), GucciLittlePiggy (#29), Whuntva (#39), LuvulongTIM (#44), ProsecutorGodot (#44), ChrisK (#48), GabeBasso (#50), Andyd1010 (#56), Acroamor (#65), Bootsy (#67), Honorio (#75), Panam (#77), Toni (#83), VanillaFire1000 (#88), BleuPanda (#90), LiveinPhoenix (#92), RockyRaccoon (#99)
The Strokes are not deities. Nor are they "brilliant," "awe-inspiring," or "genius." They're a rock band, plain and simple. And if you go into this record expecting nothing more than that, you'll probably be pretty pleased. See, while I can't agree with the Strokes' messianic treatment, I'd be lying if I said I thought Is This It was anything other than a great rock record.

What's refreshing to me about the Strokes is that, in a musical climate where even the dirtiest garage bands can create the illusion of million-dollar studio techniques through sound filters on mom's Packard-Bell, the Strokes prefer to rock in the classic vein: no laser sounds, no ethereal reverb, no pre-programmed Aphex beats. Their influences are so firmly rooted in the post-punk tradition that it's as if the last two decades had never occurred. The same names are always dropped: the Velvet Underground, Television, the Stooges. And while the Velvets are obviously a major source of inspiration, the Strokes' only similarity to Television and the Stooges is the confidence with which they play.

Frontman Julian Casablancas' vocals bear more than a passing resemblance to early Lou Reed, but where Reed seemed to accidentally dispense life-changing lyrics through a drugged drawl, Julian sings about the simple trivialities of big-city life with stark lucidity. These songs revolve around frustrated relationships, never coming near to approaching anything that might resemble insight. Yet, with Casablancas' self-assured, conversational delivery, and the almost primal energy of the four guys backing him, attention shifts from the simply present lyrics to the raging wall of melody these guys bang out like it's their lifeblood.
--Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork

Image
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife
#38. Talking Heads | Remain In Light (1980)
# of Voters: 41 | Score: 2358.053
Rank in 2014: #17
AM 3000 Rank: #32
Top Fans: OrdinaryPerson (#2), Michel (#3), SJner (#12), Bootsy (#21), Spiderpig (#28), Antonius (#29), Nick (#32), BleuPanda (#34), VanillaFire1000 (#34), Honorio (#34), DaveC (#38), Jackson (#49), RockyRaccoon (#57), BangJan (#61), EmilienDelRey (#64), JWinton (#64), GucciLittlePiggy (#67), Nico (#68), Bruno (#83), Romain (#88)
But the real reason the album has endured despite the constant assault of incessant influxes of fresh blood into my musical world is that it’s really fucking good. It’s moody without being whiny. Danceable, but musically sophisticated. Remain in Light is the Talking Heads’ finest work; the peak before the plateau. It is sandwiched between two live albums, followed by solo projects from all members and only a few more studio albums.

Remain in Light‘s awesomeness was made possible by the formidable talent of the band and the amazing cast of collaborators. Years later, when I entered an “experimental” phase and developed a love for Adrian Belew, I realized he was responsible for many of the guitar solos on Remain in Light. As I read more about some of my favorite artists, many of them cited Brian Eno as an important influence. Wouldn’t you know it, he was there too! Much later, as I explored music from ‘70s and that funky pop masquerading as jazz found on CTI, Kudu, and other now defunct great record labels, who should be playing percussion in Weather Report but Jose Rossy, also the percussionist for Remain in Light. After settling on hip-hop as my preferred genre, I can return to Remain in Light and David Byrne’s post-modern rap about facts, truth and reality at the end of “Crosseyed and Painless”. And now, as I explore the music of sub-Saharan Africa from the West African funk of Fela to Antibalas’ and Tony Allen’s reinterpretations of the same to soukous, Remain in Light stands as an early example of the same explorations by American artists.

The longevity of Remain in Light makes it an essential album for me. No matter how much I neglect it, it always comes back. It’s not my first album; that honor goes to Men at Work and their smash debut Business as Usual. It’s not my current favorite; that changes at least once a week. But Remain in Light‘s eclectic musical intellectualism suits me well, and I will continue to come back to it for as long my ears continue to function.
--Luke Stiles, Popmatters

Image
It's on America's tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
'Cause Lennon's on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
#37. David Bowie | Hunky Dory (1971)
# of Voters: 41 | Score: 2367.395
Rank in 2014: #60
AM 3000 Rank: #66
Top Fans: JohnnyBGoode (#7), Acroamor (#11), Michel (#11), SJner (#11), Honorio (#12), Dudumb (#13), BryanBehar (#15), RedAnt (#22), GabeBasso (#25), Harold (#29), Romain (#32), M24 (#42), Toni (#50), Spiderpig (#57), Slick (#67), ChrisK (#68), LuvulongTIM (#71), Brad (#72), JWinton (#75), Bootsy (#76), Maschine_man (#91), Zombeels (#92), Babydoll (#99), PlasticRam (#100)
Here was music that celebrated uncertainty, rootlessness, inner chaos, difference, otherness, doubt, impermanence. And it did so with beauty, style and charisma. I was hooked by the first line: “Still don’t know what I was waiting for”. By the time I got to “Don’t believe in yourself, don’t deceive with belief”, I was essentially a different person. I just got what the whole thing was about: you’re a hundred things at once? That’s great! Life needn’t be either/or - it can be both/and. In the space of a few minutes, I learned that being mercurial and fluid and unexpected didn’t mean you were gauche or vague or pallid – they meant you were like David Bowie, which I immediately understood was the best thing you could possibly be. It’s OK, he seemed to say. It’s OK. You’re fine.

.... While I feel no pressing need to be an evangelist for my actual religion, I could well imagine myself standing on street corners and proclaiming the good news of David Bowie. As society fragments, as jobs-for-life disappear, as our communities become more diverse, as more of the world is available to us instantly, his is surely the way we should follow. Yes, we’ll get things terribly wrong, but that won’t be the end of us. Mistakes? Make ’em (providing the only person you hurt is you). Life is bigger than most of us will ever know; David Bowie is all those words made flesh.
--Peter Ormerod, The Guardian

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Rock on ancient queen
Follow those who pale
In your shadow
Rulers make bad lovers
You better put your kingdom up for sale
Up for sale
#36. Fleetwood Mac | Rumours (1977)
# of Voters: 38 | Score: 2403.291
Rank in 2014: #32
AM 3000 Rank: #55
Top Fans: GabeBasso (#6), RedAnt (#9), Dexter (#9), JohnnyBGoode (#15), Antonius (#17), Chambord (#18), Slick (#19), VanillaFire1000 (#21), SweepstakesRon (#24), PlasticRam (#29), Nico (#31), DocBrown (#35), Bruno (#36), RockyRaccoon (#42), SJner (#45), Georgie (#48), Nick (#54), Acroamor (#57), JWinton (#63), Whuntva (#65), Listyguy (#66), LiveinPhoenix (#76), M24 (#81), BryanBehar (#81), Andyd1010 (#83), VeganValentine (#96), ProsecutorGodot (#98)
It's still a stellar piece of pure 70s FM cheese, glossier than a Playboy centerfold and with every song imprinted like a cattle-brand on the public conscious from a full thirty years of radio saturation. The sentiment can at times be overbearing, true - the optimistic message of "Don't Stop" has been co-opted by so many political movements in my lifetime that it has begun to come off smug, "You Make Loving Fun" is massively saccharine (but what a great organ part), and "Oh Daddy" just plain insipid, but lord, "Go Your Own Way" and "The Chain" are without doubt the best, meanest soft-rock tunes ever recorded. Rumours is a breakup album by some drug-twisted celebrities undergoing breakups with each other as they made it, and with all the bad blood flowing through their veins, it gives the perfect pop songs a sharp edge you could cut lines with. In "Gold Dust Woman," the line 'rulers make bad lovers' and Fleetwood Mac was a band of rulers. This, their billion-selling pop masterpiece, bears the scars of all that emotional baggage, and it sounds killer on good a hi-fi system.--jshopa, RYM
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Zombeels »

Really thought Love - Forever Changes would be in the top 15. Must be all the youngins'
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

Considering that catchy 70s softish rock (like Hotel California and Breakfast in America) doesn't do very well on these lists, it's always interesting to see how well Rumours does. Go Your Own Way is of course one of the most acclaimed songs of all time, but I could just as easily see it being another overplayed, middle of the road song absent from the AM 6000.

Speaking of catchy albums, I'd be interested to hear fans of Is This It discuss that album. It's certainly a good album, but I've always wondered what makes it AM Top 50 worthy.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by nicolas »

Really thought Love - Forever Changes would be in the top 15. Must be all the youngins'
Well, it's a great album with a great sound and excellent songs, but IMO I don't think it's an all time top 15 album (79 for me). And I'm not a youngin' :D

It's a little overestimated by critics and hipsters just because Love is not as popular as the Beatles, Doors et al., and that quoting that album makes you feel you're part of the ones who know. :D
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Live in Phoenix »

Really, just anytime now, In Rainbows... :angry-tappingfoot:
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Jackson »

nicolas wrote:
Really thought Love - Forever Changes would be in the top 15. Must be all the youngins'
Well, it's a great album with a great sound and excellent songs, but IMO I don't think it's an all time top 15 album (79 for me). And I'm not a youngin' :D

It's a little overestimated by critics and hipsters just because Love is not as popular as the Beatles, Doors et al., and that quoting that album makes you feel you're part of the ones who know. :D
I disagree with your last paragraph. Forever Changes features a beautiful, unique sound and consistenly interesting lyrics and mood, and that's why it's highly thought of, not because people thinks it makes them cool. Given that there are five Beatles albums yet to come I don't think you can say that this album is overrated compared to the Beatles... ;)
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notbrianeno
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by notbrianeno »

Image
The glass is cut
The bottle run dry
Our love runs cold
In the caverns of the night
We're wounded by fear
Injured in doubt
I can lose myself
You I can't live without
#35. U2 | The Joshua Tree (1987)
# of Voters: 38 | Score: 2411.923
Rank in 2014: #31
AM 3000 Rank: #39
Top Fans: ChrisK (#3), StevieFan (#9), Dexter (#10), Renan (#10), Whuntva (#11), RockyRaccoon (#12), Nico (#12), Bruno (#14), M24 (#32), GucciLittlePiggy (#33), GabeBasso (#35), Toni (#38), Profeta (#39), Andyd1010 (#40), Nick (#44), BonnieLaurel (#48), Slick (#48), LiveinPhoenix (#54), Michel (#55), BleuPanda (#70), Gillingham (#73), Karla (#86), Bootsy (#97)
Funnily enough, while The Joshua Tree once and for all catapulted U2 to permanent superstardom, the album marks something of a conscious refinement of the group's sound. The album was nowhere near as strident as War or as radically overwrought as The Unforgettable Fire (which was, lest one forget, recorded in a frickin' castle). Reunited with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, it's as if the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years and applied those musical and cultural observations to its songs. It's an album made for dusty, empty flyover country.

U2 have always flirted with charismatic Christianity, and the Joshua Tree songwriting process finds the band in a particularly reflective mood; "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and" "With or Without You" are steeped in religious imagery, but even their constant radio rotation hasn't robbed these introspective songs of their potency or effectiveness. Smartly, U2 balanced those personal songs with more universal tracks, often with an emphasis on forgotten people and forgotten places around the globe: "Red Hill Mining Town" (about the mid-80s UK miners strike), "Exit" (inspired by Norman Mailer's Gary Gilmore tome The Executioner's Song), "Mothers of the Disappeared" (about Argentina's murdered political dissidents), and "Bullet the Blue Sky" (about U.S. meddling in Central America).

"Bullet" is one of the few Joshua Tree non-singles to remain a live U2 staple-- its bluster hints at the band's current broad aesthetic-- but it's slightly out of place among a record mostly characterized by its grace, subtlety, introspection, and beauty. That holds especially true for its more mysterious (or at least less overplayed) second half, which roughly begins and ends perfectly with the ballad "Running to Stand Still" (about heroin addiction) and gentle outro "Mothers of the Disappeared". In between, "Trip Through Your Wires" is the rare blues track to prominently feature co-producer Eno's favored novelty, the Omnichord, while "One Tree Hill" and the apocalyptic "Exit" showcase wickedly screwed up and uncharacteristic guitar solos from the Edge.
--Joshua Klein, Pitchfork

Image
Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
I'm not sure all these people understand
It's not like years ago
The fear of getting caught
Of recklessness and water
They cannot see me naked
These things, they go away
Replaced by everyday
#34. R.E.M. | Automatic for the People (1992)
# of Voters: 39 | Score: 2421.285
Rank in 2014: #20
AM 3000 Rank: #46
Top Fans: VanillaFire1000 (#2), ChrisK (#4), BleuPanda (#9), Listyguy (#15), Toni (#18), Nick (#24), Spiderpig (#31), RockyRaccoon (#32), DaveC (#37), RickyMathias (#39), DocBrown (#42), Schaefer.tk (#46), Spiritualized (#48), GabeBasso (#49), GucciLittlePiggy (#49), Dexter (#52), HonoriO (#53), BryanBehar (#57), LiveinPhoenix (#59), Bruno (#63), OrdinaryPerson (#65), RedAnt (#68), Nico (#76), SJner (#76), Harold (#80), Karla (#85), Brad (#96)
It’s not my intention to rag on R.E.M.’s more direct texts, but revisiting Automatic For The People, the sideways smile seems to catch me more than anything else. But then there’s “Nightswimming,” which could have been a killer closer for any of a thousand alt-rock hopefuls. It’s a sweet memory rubbed raw, built around Mills’s forceful, major-key piano progression, one that resists treacle at every turn. (In Johnny Black’s Reveal: The Story of R.E.M., Mills is quoted as saying he recorded on the same piano used by Jim Gordon on Derek And The Dominos’ “Layla.”) For his part, Stipe surges through his lines, grasping desperately for the next verse, as if worried the memory will evaporate unless spoken. He’s declared that the lyrics are more invention than remembrance, but the expertly deployed details (the photo on the dashboard, the fear of getting caught) stand in sharp contrast to the projected deathbed scenario of “Try Not To Breathe.”

I had forgotten that “Nightswimming” and “Find the River” combine to form an aquatic coda. Where “Drive” opened with a salvo directed at a younger generation, “Find The River” appears to be aimed at the band’s peers. On “Everybody Hurts,” the singer counseled a friend not to throw his hands. Here, he stands at the water’s edge, wanly noting that “there’s nothing left to throw.” The piano turns from a minor key on the verses to a sort of soul-gospel figure on the refrain, while Mills and Berry chip in backing vocals. Berry keeps to a low croon, Mills goes for abandon, and both men neatly sidestep any churchy sentiment, apropos for a song that sees Stipe fight his way back to an Eden of sense-loss. He catalogs the fragrant foliage he encounters (bayberry, bergamot, vetiver), and Berry’s poignant melodica line carries its own practically palpable sweetness.

Of the differences between singles and albums, perhaps the greatest is this: the right single takes you to another time, while the right album reminds you how much time has passed. Immersed in rock history (the band famously traces its origins to a Stipe-Buck meeting in an Athens record store), R.E.M. were canny craftsmen of both. Of the post-hardcore boom, no band played the system better, reaping fortune and freedom in equal measure. Automatic For The People was, perhaps, a confounding move on paper: a deeply meditative follow-up to an album that found room for KRS-One, Kate Pierson, and massively popular treacle (“Shiny Happy People,” natch). 1994’s Monster would be the rock album R.E.M. had intended to make; they served themselves from their bottomless well of compassion, and for their trouble, they got mistaken for honest-to-God rock stars for a time. But there was no such problem on Automatic For The People; R.E.M. stepped boldly into the ocean, and it was a wondrous thing to witness.
--Brad Shoup, Consequence of Sound

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Turn me on to phantoms
I follow to the edge of the earth
And fall off
Everybody leaves
If they get the chance
And this is my chance
#33. Radiohead | In Rainbows (2007)
# of Voters: 39 | Score: 2435.614
Rank in 2014: #73
AM 3000 Rank: #94
Top Fans: Gillingham (#1), OrdinaryPerson (#1), JWinton (#2), NotBrianEno (#3), DepecheMode (#5), GucciLittlePiggy (#12), ChrisK (#15), Toni (#16), SJner (#16), JasonBob4567 (#20), Andyd1010 (#22), JohnnyBGoode (#25), Maschine_Man (#26), Dudumb (#36), GabeBasso (#36), Chambord (#39), Nassim (#48), Antonius (#50), Whuntva (#56), Spiderpig (#61), Nick (#62), ProsecutorGodot (#65), M24 (#66), BleuPanda (#66)
This does not sound like a band clutching their brows and wondering what to do next. The lyrics may be as neurotic as ever ­you're never that far from an infrastructure collapsing or the lights going out or being eaten by the worms - but as it flows seamlessly along it sounds supremely confident, like a band who know they're at the height of their powers. There's nothing tentative even about its more experimental moments, possibly because even its more experimental moments -­ 15 Step's clattering beats, the unsettling electronic pulse behind House Of Cards -­ are pressed into the service of fantastic melodies: the closing Videotape proceeds at the pace of a Soviet state funeral, but the tune is so glorious, it sounds graceful rather than lethargic, dreamy rather than dreary. Radiohead sound like they're enjoying themselves, not least on Bodysnatchers, which features a geefully propulsive bass riff. In the parlance of the middle American sports stadium crowds with whom Radiohead have such a troubled relationship, it rocks.

The most heartening thing about In Rainbows, besides the fact that it may represent the strongest collection of songs Radiohead have assembled for a decade, is that it ventures into new emotional territories: their last album, 2003's Hail to the Thief, had its moments, but it was scarred by the sense that the band's famed gloominess was starting to tip into self-parody and petulance. Here, there's wit - at 15 Step's conclusion, Yorke's patented end-is-nigh keening is undercut by a childrens' chorus merrily crying "hey!" - and warmth. With its strings and swooning guitars, Nude sounds lushly romantic. So does All I Need, which, moreover, ends in a fantastic, life-affirming crescendo. Witty, romantic, life-affirming: you don't need to be an expert in the minutae of their back catalogue to know that these are not adjectives readily associated with Radiohead. But then, in the years since OK Computer propelled them to superstardom, you could say the same about the phrase "consistent album", yet that's precisely what In Rainbows seems to be. Whatever you paid, it's hard to imagine feeling short-changed.
--Alexis Petridis, The Guardian

Image
This machine will, will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under
Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again
#32. Radiohead | The Bends (1995)
# of Voters: 40 | Score: 2453.757
Rank in 2014: #44
AM 3000 Rank: #93
Top Fans: M24 (#2), DaveC (#4), JohnnyBGoode (#4), Chambord (#9), Slick (#11), Andyd1010 (#11), GabeBasso (#22), Brad (#32), PlasticRam (#33), ChrisK (#34), Victor.Marianoo77 (#35), Dudumb (#39), Panam (#40), Zombeels (#40), DepecheMode (#42), DocBrown (#45), GucciLittlePiggy (#51), Nick (#53), BryanBehar (#54), Spiderpig (#58), Nico (#60), Harold (#61), Listyguy (#75), Nassim (#81), Dexter (#86), Bruno (#90), JWinton (#97)
Radiohead never fit in with the Brit-pop crowd, even in their early days they seemed a little more sturdy and sure of themselves than the hordes that were desperately scouring The Beatles, David Bowie and Badfinger albums for riffs that no one else had used in the last twelve months. As reasonably good as Pablo Honey had been though, they had been lumbered with one hit wonder status due to the runaway success of "Creep". The Bends changed all that though, as it quickly became obvious that it was one of the most thrilling guitar-heavy albums in years.

The Bends is the album that put Radiohead firmly on the map as an important rock band, though admittedly a morose and moody rock band seemingly designed to appeal primarily to morose and moody audiences. Songs like "Fake Plastic Trees", "High And Dry" and the title track were lyrically subtle enough for poorly-dressed student types to stroke their chins and nod along to as they stared down at their Dr Martens or Converse trainers. Thom Yorke, while prone to occasional whining, can actually sing and much of his finest vocal work is found here. The three-guitar assault on the senses can be utterly overwhelming in places, but the playing throughout The Bends is an undoubted highpoint of Radiohead's career. The rhythm section suits the music well, as it can swing from deceptively complex to simple and effective as the song requires.
--p_q, RYM

Image
Storm, in the morning light
I feel
No more can I say
Frozen to myself
I got nobody on my side
And surely that ain't right
#31. Portishead | Dummy (1994)
# of Voters: 44 | Score: 2459.407
Rank in 2014: #45
AM 3000 Rank: #63
Top Fans: Chambord (#2), SweepstakesRon (#4), DaveC (#7), Nassim (#12), NotBrianEno (#12), JohnnyBGoode (#13), Schaefer.tk (#16), Acroamor (#22), Michel (#22), Gillingham (#24), OrdinaryPerson (#31), Slucs (#37), BleuPanda (#40), Dudumb (#42), Slick (#57), Jackson (#58), Bootsy (#59), DocBrown (#63), BonnieLaurel (#63), Antonius (#70), HonoriO (#71), Spiderpig (#93), JWinton (#94), Nick (#99)
I still remember the peculiar, nightmarish videos that accompanied this album, such as the one with Gibbons on an operating table. There is so much cold menace in these songs. "Sour Times" with its clamorous chimes and spaghetti western guitar is timeless, elegant, and indicative of their harsher current sound. There is a stark contrast between this album and their new material, in that this has a throwback feel, shades of tiki lounges, spy movies and Scott Walker in its dark and oppressive electrified jazz-brood sound. This album was definitive of trip-hop, along with the debuts of Tricky and Massive Attack, and all who followed were mere copyists, so for new listeners it will have lost a great deal of its impact over the years (particularly in the crackling dusty aura of the sampling, and the record-scratching which brings to mind a prehistoric Kid Koala).

Of course, I am omitting the eerie, immaculate, stunning vocals of Beth Gibbons, which are every inch the driving force of this album, whether bringing a mood of inspiration to "There's a Fire" or doomed romance to "Roads" or incredible despairing tension to "Sour Times" Gibbons exudes soul, menace, and tough beauty all at the same time. It is this startling beauty, in the midst of the ragged, defeated sound of the music, that creates the tenuous balance that makes Portishead great, and still mesmerizing after all these years of imitators.
--jshopa, RYM
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Harold »

Biggest surprise here might be that, after not placing any album higher than #41 in 2014, Stevie Wonder will place two in the top 30 this time.

Largest leap into the top 30: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, #69 in 2014.

Most albums in the top 30: Take a wild freakin' guess.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Listyguy »

Harold wrote: Largest leap into the top 30: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, #69 in 2014.
It's making the jump everyone thought it would make three years ago. Top 20 is definitely possible.
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Rob
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Rob »

Harold wrote: Most albums in the top 30: Take a wild freakin' guess.
Megadeth? I mean, no album of theirs has yet shown up, which means that they must have done really, really well this time around.
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Listyguy
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Listyguy »

I just noticed that I had every album in the top 30 on my list. In fact, only four of the top 50 didn't make my list: Odyssey and Oracle, Remain in Light, In Rainbows and Dummy.
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andyd1010
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by andyd1010 »

Listyguy wrote:I just noticed that I had every album in the top 30 on my list. In fact, only four of the top 50 didn't make my list: Odyssey and Oracle, Remain in Light, In Rainbows and Dummy.
Wow, I didn't even think of that before this post, but I voted for every single one of the top 50!

That's really surprising, because I didn't vote for 8 of the AM top 50 (including 3 of the top 20). I guess it does make sense though, because a lot of the trends you guys have noticed have been in line with my tastes.

I also put the top 4 Stones albums in the same order, just 10-20 spots higher.
Album | Me | AMF
Let It Bleed | 16 | <31
Exile on Main St. | 21 | 41
Sticky Fingers | 28 | 43
Beggars Banquet | 32 | 45
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Jackson »

Dummy at number 31 is an awesome placement. I had forgotten that one hadn't dropped yet.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Gillingham »

Could those speaking about albums that still haven't showed up yet please post in the prediction thread (which I ignore)? I try to really not think about what is still in the bag and what not, that way it's much more fun (for me anyway). Of course there are some obvious ones, but still.

Thanks!
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by nicolas »

I totally agree with Gillingham.
NO SPOILERS please, if you want to drop names of albums which haven"t showed up please go to the prediction thread ! :angry-nono:
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Live in Phoenix »

Holding out hope that Rebel Yell knocked one of the usual suspects 970 spots down the list...
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Harold »

nicolas wrote:I totally agree with Gillingham.
NO SPOILERS please, if you want to drop names of albums which haven"t showed up please go to the prediction thread ! :angry-nono:
Apologies. All due respect, though - I don't think any of the albums that are left are going to be a surprise. It's not like after the poll is completed we're going to be saying "I was not expecting Human Clay to end up in the top 30!"

Also, Rosebud was the (redacted), (redacted) was actually Keyser Soze, and Bruce Willis was (redacted) the whole time!

Edited after posting for spoiler redaction.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Jirin »

Guess narcissism is in this year, both in politics and our poll.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Nick »

Jirin wrote:Guess narcissism is in this year, both in politics and our poll.
Calling the album I'm sure you're referring to "narcissistic" is a huge stretch. Is the creator narcissistic? Sure. Is the album braggadocious? Certainly. But there's a big fat line separating everyday braggadocio from full blown narcissism.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by notbrianeno »

Image
Good morn or evening friends
Here's your friendly announcer
I have serious news to pass on to everybody
What I'm about to say
Could mean the world's disaster
Could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain
#30. Stevie Wonder | Songs in the Key of Life (1976)
# of Voters: 44 | Score: 2526.615
Rank in 2014: #55
AM 3000 Rank: #47
Top Fans: Bruno (#2), BonnieLaurel (#3), ProsecutorGodot (#5), Profeta (#6), Bootsy (#9), Nico (#10), Dexter (#18), RickyMathias (#19), NIcolas (#20), Georgie (#23), Moonbeam (#26), Renan (#37), Slucs (#40),
Jirin (#46), BleuPanda (#46), RockyRaccoon (#47), Henry (#64), Antonius (#72), SonofSamIAm (#75), LiveinPhoenix (#75), M24 (#91), Dudumb (#92), Harold (#98)
“You can’t please everybody” is one of the oldest clichés in show business, but it’s more that just a salve for bruised egos—it’s an obvious truism that applies to practically everything. One of the few exceptions is Songs In The Key Of Life, a double album packaged with a four-song EP that was released on Sept. 28, 1976 after (what was considered at the time anyway) an interminable two-year wait. Wonder was already on a major roll; his recognition as the No. 1 guy in pop music came in the form of Album Of The Year Grammys for Innervisions in 1974 and Fulfillingness’ First Finale in ’75, and a lucrative $37 million record contract with Motown, the biggest for an artist at that time. Wonder’s elevated status was acknowledged by his fellow luminaries: When Paul Simon won an Album Of The Year Grammy in 1976 for Still Crazy After All These Years, he famously thanked Wonder for not putting out a record that year.

Songs is a hard, bold swing for the fences, employing more than 100 backing musicians and working on a canvas that incorporated pop, jazz, rock, and classical music. Wonder fearlessly wrote about inner-city degradation, both with a stately synthesized string-based backing on “Village Ghetto Land” and a relentlessly funky snap on “Black Man.” He’s religiously pious on “Have A Talk With God,” and lightly romantic on “Knocks Me Off My Feet.” He delves into jazz-rock jamming on “Contusion,” and then pulls back for the disciplined, feel-good pop of “Sir Duke.” Many of the songs leisurely run into the six, seven, or even eight-minute range, but they’re always guided by Wonder’s unerring sense for hooks. Wonder had the power and prestige to fully bend the ’70s superstar machine to satisfy his every creative whim, and he was determined to pull off a supremely grand gesture on a very large and public stage.

Songs was the rarest of beasts: It was expected to be nothing short of a masterpiece that also did blockbuster numbers, and it absolutely delivered on both counts. The album went to the top of the Billboard pop albums chart for 14 weeks, sold 10 million copies, spun off two No. 1 singles (“I Wish” and “Sir Duke”), won the Grammy for Album Of The Year (Wonder’s third in four years), and took the top spot in the Village Voice’s annual “Pazz & Jop” critics’ poll.

Out of all the albums I’ve written about, or possibly could write about, Songs In The Key Of Life seems to have achieved the broadest kind of popularity imaginable. I can’t think of another record that ranks among the best-selling albums of all time and produced multiple enduring singles and won Grammys and wowed a broad selection of critics. Usually satisfying just one of those criteria is enough to qualify as a popular work of art, but hitting on all four is a truly singular (and almost bizarre) achievement. Songs In The Key Of Life was a record that was adored by seemingly every single person who came into contact with it.
--Steven Hyden, AVmusic

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Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
#29. Mavin Gaye | What's Going On (1971)
# of Voters: 46 | Score: 2628.141
Rank in 2014: #28
AM 3000 Rank: #7
Top Fans: Schaefer.tk (#2), Bruno (#5), Nicolas (#6), Nico (#7), Honorio (#15), EmilienDelRey (#16), Bootsy (#20), VanillaFire1000 (#23), DocBrown (#24), Georgie (#24), JasonBob4567 (#29), GabeBasso (#34), Dexter (#35), VeganValentine (#38), M24 (#39), SonofSamIAm (#41), RickyMathias (#45), Slucs (#45), Spiderpig (#46), BonnieLaurel (#46), Nick (#50), Karla (#51), BleuPanda (#56), BryanBehar (#67)
Forty years of ubiquity have made the title track commonplace, so it's easy to forget that the song was the "most avant-garde hit Motown ever had," according to Ben Edmonds' thorough album history What's Going On: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound. With this album, Gaye wished to sidestep the sound that made him and others famous during Motown's untouchable 60s run, trading in that trademark big, bright beat for laid-back grooves inspired by Duke Ellington, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Santana. And not only was the album a coming-out party for Gaye as a producer and songwriter, he found his signature voice-- soft, floating, airy-- on What's Going On, too. "I felt like I'd finally learned to sing," he told biographer David Ritz. "I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud." The record and its creative revelations led to his stunning 70s auteur period, which birthed three more classics: 1973's Let's Get It On, 1976's I Want You, and 1978's Here, My Dear.

Much has been made of What's Going On's political bent, and it's true that the music was partially inspired by Marvin's brother Frankie, who had come back from a three-year tour of Vietnam, along with troublingly violent episodes like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kent State shootings that saw four students killed by national guardsmen. Songs like peace-espousing title track and "What's Happening Brother", which finds Gaye expressing a war veteran's helplessness upon returning home, show Marvin's dismay toward his country and government. But this album isn't just a protest time capsule. Far from it. Gaye's disappointment isn't just societal, it's personal as well. During this period, the singer had lost his duet partner and dear friend, Tammi Terrell, and his marriage to Gordy's sister Anna was violently breaking down, and he was being tailed by the IRS for unpaid back taxes. His resulting depression is evident throughout; What's Going On isn't a fiery album filled with timely sloganeering. Part of its long-lasting appeal involves an element of true-to-life resignation. "Who's willing to try to save a world/ That's destined to die," he sings on "Save the Children", pinpointing an American melancholia-- a mix of world-saving power and funereal inevitability-- that endures today.

But the album doesn't wallow, either. It hums and glides on the effortless, multi-tracked Marvins that swoop through the stereo spectrum like ghosts. Gaye's signature vocal ad libs started here and have endured through R&B and hip-hop ever since. His marijuana-soaked delivery, along with the album's mutating, percussion-fueled rhythms, majestic strings, and jazzy horns, give the affair levity. Perhaps this smooth front also has to do with the fact that Gaye was "hardly an activist in the traditional sense," according to Edmonds. While his Vietnam-battered brother was an emotional catalyst, Gaye had neglected to send him one letter during his army stint. And though he was certainly aware of the Detroit race riot that left 43 people dead in 1967, he viewed the sad display on TV from his cushy home on the outskirts of town. Not to say Gaye didn't wholeheartedly believe in the progressive observations found on What's Going On, but his relative distance from his subjects allows him to fly over top of them, providing a healing pulse to the disarray below.
--Ryan Dombal, Pitchfork

Image
Music sweet music,
I wish I could caress, caress, caress.
Manic Depression's a frustrating mess.
Well, I think I'll go turn myself off an' go on down.
#28. Jimi Hendrix | Are You Experienced? (1967)
# of Voters: 44 | Score: 2633.101
Rank in 2014: #29
AM 3000 Rank: #14
Top Fans: Jirin (#3), RockyRaccoon (#3), Listyguy(#3), Slick (#15), Nico (#15), Bruno (#17), Chambord (#22), Dexter (#23), Slucs (#24), SJner (#29), Bootsy (#30), Harold (#31), GabeBasso (#31), Panam (#32), LiveinPhoenix (#34), Romain (#35), Nick (#40), M24 (#63), Dudumb (#64), Schaefer.tk (#69), RedAnt (#71), ProsecutorGodot (#75), Henry (#92), Andyd1010 (#93), Brad (#98)
One of the most stunning debuts in rock history, and one of the definitive albums of the psychedelic era. On Are You Experienced?, Jimi Hendrix synthesized various elements of the cutting edge of 1967 rock into music that sounded both futuristic and rooted in the best traditions of rock, blues, pop, and soul. It was his mind-boggling guitar work, of course, that got most of the ink, building upon the experiments of British innovators like Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend to chart new sonic territories in feedback, distortion, and sheer volume. It wouldn't have meant much, however, without his excellent material, whether psychedelic frenzy ("Foxey Lady," "Manic Depression," "Purple Haze"), instrumental freak-out jams ("Third Stone from the Sun"), blues ("Red House," "Hey Joe"), or tender, poetic compositions ("The Wind Cries Mary") that demonstrated the breadth of his songwriting talents. Not to be underestimated were the contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who gave the music a rhythmic pulse that fused parts of rock and improvised jazz. Many of these songs are among Hendrix's very finest; it may be true that he would continue to develop at a rapid pace throughout the rest of his brief career, but he would never surpass his first LP in terms of consistently high quality.
--Richie Unterberger, Allmusic

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Sally ,take my hand
Travel south crossland
Put out the fire
Don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together
Before we get much older
#27. The Who | Who's Next (1971)
# of Voters: 43 | Score: 2635.043
Rank in 2014: #21
AM 3000 Rank: #34
Top Fans: Henry (#2), Harold (#4), RockyRaccoon (#4), RedAnt (#5), Victor.Marianoo77 (#9), DocBrown (#10), Nico (#14), BleuPanda (#14), Bruno (#22), PlasticRam (#24), Whuntva (#27), LiveinPhoenix (#29), Listyguy (#31), GabeBasso (#33), ChrisK (#36), Nick (#38), Nicolas (#51), VanillaFire1000 (#53), Andyd1010 (#55), Dexter (#60), M24 (#68), OrdinaryPerson (#71), Slick (#76), Brad (#82), JWinton (#86), Panam (#90)
Few albums in the pantheon of classic rock recordings embody the greatness of an artist more than 1971’s Who’s Next. Arguably the Who‘s finest effort, the album came at a time when the group was at its creative peak. Fresh off the monumental success of the rock opera Tommy in 1969, the band had ridden a wave of critical acclaim for the album and subsequent live performances of its material, highlighted by memorable gigs at the Metropolitan Opera House, Woodstock, and the Isle of Wight. The scope of Tommy had drawn attention to Pete Townshend’s emerging genius as a songwriter, and in the process set a standard that he would be measured by throughout the Who’s illustrious career. The viability of Tommy as a recorded and live vehicle had given Townshend renewed confidence in his own abilities, and had motivated him to take on larger challenges. His primary focus post Tommy came in the form of the Lifehouse project, a grandiose look at the possibilities of music in a futuristic setting.

Townshend’s idealized views on rock and roll as an element of one’s being, laid the groundwork for an elaborately sophisticated creation consisting of a feature film, expansive album, and interactive live concerts. While plausible to Townshend, the intricate blueprint for musical salvation proved to be a logistical impossibility, and the project gradually unraveled into disarray. In spite of its failure to reach fruition, the Lifehouse project yielded enough quality recorded material to assemble the nine-song album Who’s Next. At the time, no one could have foreseen the magnitude of this release, particularly Townshend himself who had viewed it as a commercial compromise of his Lifehouse vision.

Despite Townshend’s initial misgivings, the magnitude ofWho’s Next is undeniable. The scope of its grandeur is evidenced by every track having become an FM radio staple, with much of the album’s material incorporated into the Who’s long standing concert set list. While each song is memorable in its own right, most notable are “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, which has reached rock anthem status, and the John Entwistle penned “My Wife” that proudly displays the bassist’s skills as a songwriter. Simply put, it is as close to perfect an album as could be imagined.
--Adam Williams, Popmatters

Image
I saw her today at the reception
In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands
#26. The Rolling Stones | Let It Bleed (1969)
# of Voters: 45 | Score: 2727.366
Rank in 2014: #34
AM 3000 Rank: #36
Top Fans: Victor.Marianoo77 (#6), Andyd1010 (#16), Profeta (#16), Bruno (#16), Antonius (#19), GabeBasso (#19), Bootsy (#22), Harold (#26), Dexter (#28), Nico (#28), JWinton (#31), Listyguy (#32), Maschine_man (#35), BonnieLaurel (#36), RockyRaccoon (#37), Brad (#40), LiveinPhoenix (#45), RedAnt (#50), Whuntva (#52), SJner (#61), PlasticRam (#65), Nick (#75), Dudumb (#83), OrdinaryPerson (#86), Honorio (#99)
If 1968's Beggars Banquet struck the template for the Stones as we now know them, Let It Bleed cast it in stone. Featuring some of their most iconic material (and a cake on the cover baked and decorated by Delia Smith), it's the record that featured original leader Brian Jones' final appearance and new guitarist Mick Taylor's debut with the band. It's a murky, dark and chilly record that, although assembled from sprawling sessions across 1968 and 1969, has greater unity than Beggars Banquet.
Gimme Shelter is a startling introduction, with Keith Richards' opened-tuned guitar circling like a bird of prey over the corpse of the 60s, and Mick Jagger's brooding vocal one of his very best. The Stones' subject matter had always seemed adult in comparison to, say, The Beatles, but on this opening track, they were bleak and portentous; a tale of rape and murder being "just a shot away".
Although Country Honk is a trifle pointless, Monkey Man is a sinister update of the blues. Midnight Rambler, often extended to snapping point live, referenced the serial killer the Boston Strangler. You Can't Always Get What You Want concludes the downbeat air surrounding the record, beginning with the angelic voices of the London Bach Choir and ending in a climatic cacophony.
The shows to accompany the album placed the band in the new world of the scaled-up 'rock' tour. The performances climaxed at the Altamont Speedway in San Francisco. The subsequent death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of Hell's Angels exposed the Stones to be out of their depth in the world of devil-courting rock'n'roll.
--Daryl Easlea, BBC
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Dexter »

What a splendid collection of classic rock and r&b albums.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Bruno »

Dexter wrote:What a splendid collection of classic rock and r&b albums.
Agreed!
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by letmeintomyzone »

So, MDBTF, out?

Or Top 25 mention?
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Harold »

letmeintomyzone wrote:So, MDBTF, out?

Or Top 25 mention?
Prediction thread! Prediction thread!
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

StevieFan letting me down by not voting for Songs in the Key of Life. What is the world coming to?
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

andyd1010 wrote:
Listyguy wrote:I just noticed that I had every album in the top 30 on my list. In fact, only four of the top 50 didn't make my list: Odyssey and Oracle, Remain in Light, In Rainbows and Dummy.
Wow, I didn't even think of that before this post, but I voted for every single one of the top 50!

That's really surprising, because I didn't vote for 8 of the AM top 50 (including 3 of the top 20). I guess it does make sense though, because a lot of the trends you guys have noticed have been in line with my tastes.

I also put the top 4 Stones albums in the same order, just 10-20 spots higher.
Album | Me | AMF
Let It Bleed | 16 | <31
Exile on Main St. | 21 | 41
Sticky Fingers | 28 | 43
Beggars Banquet | 32 | 45
Which 8 in the AM Top 50 did you omit from your list?
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by notbrianeno »

Image
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.
#25. Bob Dylan | Blonde on Blonde (1966)
# of Voters: 44 | Score: 2729.116
Rank in 2014: #10
AM 3000 Rank: #9
Top Fans: RockyRaccoon (#2), Honorio (#3), SJner (#4), LiveinPhoenix (#7), Jirin (#11), RickyMathias (#11), Antonius (#18), GabeBasso (#18), PlasticRam (#19), Nico (#20), Bruno (#20), DocBrown (#23), Dexter (#27), Nick (#30), ChrisK (#33), Harold (#37), Brad (#39), EmilienDelRey (#44), M24 (#46), Gillingham (#50), Spiderpig (#65), Georgie (#68), Schaefer.tk (#71), DaveC (#74), Jackson (#75), BryanBehar (#94)
Released on May 16th, 1966, rock's first studio double LP by a major artist was, as Dylan declared in 1978, "the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind... that thin, that wild-mercury sound." There is no better description of the album's manic brilliance. After several false-start sessions in New York in the fall of 1965 and January 1966 with his killer road band the Hawks – "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" was the only keeper – Dylan blazed through the rest of Blonde on Blonde's 14 tracks in one four-day run and one three-day run at Columbia's Nashville studios in February and March 1966.
The pace of recording echoed the amphetamine velocity of Dylan's songwriting and touring schedule at the time. But the combined presence of trusted hands like organist Al Kooper and Hawks guitarist Robbie Robertson with expert local sessionmen including drummer Kenneth ­Buttrey and pianist Hargus "Pig" Robbins created an almost contradictory magnificence: a tightly wound tension around Dylan's quicksilver language and incisive singing in barrelhouse surrealism such as "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," the hilarious Chicago-style blues "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and the scornful, fragile "Just Like a Woman," still his greatest ballad.
Amid the frenzy, Dylan delivered some of his finest, clearest songs of comfort and desire: the sidelong beauty of the 11-minute "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," recorded in just one take at four in the morning after an eight-hour session, and "I Want You," the title of which Dylan almost used for the album.
--Rolling Stone

Image
Chicago, the New Age
But what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?
Oh, Columbia
Amusement or treasure
These optimistic pleasures
Like the Ferris wheel
#24. Sufjan Stevens | Illinois (2005)
# of Voters: 46 | Score: 2756.304
Rank in 2014: #32
AM 3000 Rank: #95
Top Fans: BleuPanda (#4), GucciLittlePiggy (#5), Michel (#6), Nassim (#10), Spiritualized (#12), Andyd1010 (#18), JohnnyBGoode (#22), Honorio (#25), VanillaFire1000 (#27), EmilienDelRey (#27), NotBrianEno (#29), Harold (#32), SweepstakesRon (#33), VeganValentine (#34), Toni (#34), Jackson (#45), JWintoN (#48), Nick (#49), Panam (#52), Miguel (#55), Nicolas (#64), Jirin (#66), Romain (#89), SJner (#93), Spiderpig (#96), Henry (#99), Whuntva (#100)
Stevens has always been a folk singer more in theory than in practice. He routinely ditches folk's scrappy, stripped-down aesthetics, but consistently embraces its stories-of-the-people unanimity. Consequently, Illinois is less about place than spirit. Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study.

Musically, Illinois is strange and lush, as excessive and challenging as its giant, gushing song titles. Despite employing a small army of backers (including a string quartet, the Illinoisemaker Choir, drummer James McAllister, trumpeter Craig Montoro, and a pile of extra vocalists), Stevens is more forefronted than on the comparably solo Seven Swans. Manning nearly every instrument in his arsenal (and some beyond-- Stevens recorded the piano parts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn), Stevens conducts his friends with impressive grace. Stevens' pipes quiver generously; his vocals could be easily (perhaps accurately) read as precious, but they're really more intimate than emo, and always beautifully echoed by his backers.

The colossal "The Black Hawk War" cartwheels slowly into a climax of strings and horns, gurgling and pushing, ostensibly signifying (with much aplomb) the violent return of the Sac and Fox Indians to Illinois. Stevens may be deploying state propaganda, or validating Black Hawk's push home, but no matter how grave its reality, the moment still lands like a giant, neon-cased WELCOME TO ILLINOIS billboard. Trumpets blare, submission looms, our eyes widen, it makes sense: Illinois. Is. The. Greatest. State. Of. All. TIME!
--Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork

Image
Let's have a toast for the douchebags,
Let's have a toast for the assholes,
Let's have a toast for the scumbags,
Every one of them that I know
Let's have a toast for the jerk-offs
That'd never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can
#23. Kanye West | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
# of Voters: 42 | Score: 2784.811
Rank in 2014: #69
AM 3000 Rank: #70
Top Fans: GucciLittlePiggy (#1), NotBrianEno (#1), JasonBob4567 (#1), SweepstakesRon (#1), Luis15Fernando (#2), PlasticRam (#9), GabeBasso (#11), JWinton (#11), BleuPanda (#13), Nick (#14), Renan (#16), Andyd1010 (#17), M24 (#23), Harold (#23), VanillaFire1000 (#25), Acroamor (#25), Babydoll (#37), BryanBehar (#42), Maschine_Man (#44), OrdinaryPerson (#45), Nassim (#46), Bootsy (#51), Listyguy (#52), Slick (#52), Slucs (#53), Bruno (#53), Honorio (#65), Whuntva (#66), ProsecutorGodot (#66), EmilienDelRey (#88), Dudumb (#98)

The effort to canonize My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as one of hip-hop’s all-time high points is already underway, and I’m confident that Kanye’s new album can weather the backlash that all potential classics must confront. That said, insisting, on whatever grounds, that Kanye has released one of rap’s great milestone’s doesn’t do the album justice, at least insofar as doing so invites impossible challenges (is it really better than Fear of a Black Planet or Illmatic? Who could definitively say?) without drawing due attention to the strengths on which the album might meet them. So let me offer the following, slightly less generous superlative: No rap album I’ve heard can boast better production than this one. The music is exhilarating, often abrasive, never predictable, at times stunningly gorgeous. These are the finest tracks that any group of rappers has yet to rhyme over, and if the album doesn’t make Kanye any more of a contender for the title of Greatest MC than he was two years ago, it handily confirms that he’s rap’s greatest producer.

Even when Kanye was working as an in-house beatsmith for Roc-a-Fella, he showed a savant-like knack for sample-based hip-hop. It turns out that was only the earliest manifestation of a much more encompassing talent. For Kanye, the internal logic of pop music must be nearly transparent: He doesn’t seem to get what makes every genre work, nor does he get all of them as well, but he has an intuitive sense of how to construct more kinds of songs than any other producer working today. He looks good in grimy hard rock on “Hell of a Life,” pulls off arena-sized pop pomp on “All of the Lights,” and still finds time, with the posse cuts “Monster” and “So Appalled,” to kick out the two hardest rap tracks of his career.

Even when Kanye looks back, the results can be stunning. On “Devil in a New Dress,” he perfects the sampling style he invented, manipulating the pitch and tempo of Smokey Robinson’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” until it crawls luxuriantly out of the speakers like wine poured in slow motion. It’s a gorgeous slow burner that turns tragic in its third act, as Kanye’s rhymes swap lust for heartache before distorted guitar lines and a muscular verse from Rick Ross close it out (that’s Kanye acting tough, but it’s clear he’s really hurting).

Wisely chosen as the album’s centerpiece, there’s no question that the following track, “Runaway,” is Kanye’s most arresting showcase as a songwriter. The self-lacerating lyrics, including a filthy first verse (“She find pictures in my email/I sent this bitch a picture of my dick”), are far too off-putting to count as anti-hero posturing, much less as self-pity. The sense of uncomfortable proximity, that maybe Kanye isn’t aware of just how much he’s oversharing here, is reinforced by his unpolished and sometimes tuneless singing. After three verses plus a chilling interlude from Clipse’s Pusha T, apparently as ruthless a boyfriend as he is a coke dealer, Kanye sounds drained.

The “Runaway” single ends there, but the album version undergoes a remarkable transformation, as the lonely piano figure that introduced the song is joined first by menacing cello and then, surprisingly, by an utterly weightless violin section. When Kanye returns, he’s singing through a vocoder, and where his voice strained and cracked before, it now becomes a purely melodic instrument capable of making its own joyous contribution to the track. Kanye sounds disembodied, as though “Run away from me, baby” wasn’t a directive to a mistreated lover, but the cry of a man trying to exit the black hole of his own implacable ego. The coda to “Runaway” is a fantasy of escape through pure catharsis, with the vocoder literalizing Kanye’s ability to transform his personal shortcomings into art.
--Matthew Cole, Slant

Image
We talked until two
And then she said
"It's time for bed"

She told me she worked in the morning
And started to laugh
I told her I didn't
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
#22. The Beatles | Rubber Soul (1965)
# of Voters: 46 | Score: 2858.011
Rank in 2014: #36
AM 3000 Rank: #29
Top Fans: BryanBehar (#1), JohnnyBGoode (#5), RickyMathias (#6), Whuntva (#8), Andyd1010 (#10), Brad (#15), Listyguy (#20), GabeBasso (#21), RockyRaccoon (#21), Harold (#22), SweepstakesRon (#25), ProsecutorGodot (#27), PlasticRam (#28),
BonnieLaurel (#32), Babydoll (#33), Zombeels (#34), Nick (#35), VanillaFire1000 (#35), VeganValentine (#43), Bruno (#47), Dexter (#48), LiveinPhoenix (#51), Nico (#56), Maschine_man (#63), Miguel (#65), Nicolas (#68), M24 (#70), Spiderpig (#70), Acroamor (#84), Honorio (#93), Toni (#94), Georgie (#99)

To modern ears, Rubber Soul and its pre-psychedelic era mix of 1960s pop, soul, and folk could seem tame, even quaint on a cursory listen. But it's arguably the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career-- the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter. It's also the record that started them on their path toward the valuation of creating studio records over live performance. If nothing else, it's the record on which their desire for artistic rather than commercial ambition took center stage-- a radical idea at a time when the success of popular music was measured in sales and quantity rather than quality.

Indeed, at the time the Beatles did need a new direction: Odd as it seems today, the lifespan of a pop band's career in the early 60s could often be measured in months, sometimes in years, rarely in three-year increments. And by 1965, the Beatles were in danger of seeming lightweight compared to their new peers: The Who's sloganeering, confrontational singles were far more ferocious; the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was a much more raucous, anti-ennui cry than the Beatles' "Help!"; and the Kinks beat the Beatles to both satirical, character songs and the influence of Indian music. By comparison, most of the Beatles music to date was either rock'n'roll covers or originals offering a (mostly) wholesome, positive take on boy-girl relationships.

Above all, Bob Dylan's lyrical acumen and the Byrds' confident, jangly guitar were primary influences on John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively (and the Byrds had been influenced by the Beatles, too-- Roger McGuinn first picked up a Rickenbacker 12-string after seeing A Hard Day's Night). Dylan and the Byrds' fingerprints had been left on Help!-- Lennon, the group's biggest Dylan acolyte, played an acoustic rather than electric guitar throughout most of that record. Even Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" found him strumming an acoustic. (All this at a time when Dylan was beginning to move in the other direction and fully enter his electric period.) Harrison was growing more serious on the political "Think for Yourself", while "If I Needed Someone"-- his other contribution to Rubber Soul-- is practically a Byrds pastiche and his chiming, sure-footed solo on "Nowhere Man" also displays a debt to that band. His deft touch is all over the record in subtle ways-- appropriate for an album full of finesse and small wonders (the ping at the end of the "Nowhere Man" solo, Lennon's exhalation in the chorus of "Girl", the "tit-tit-tit" of the backing vocalists in the same song, the burbling guitar in "Michelle").

The most lasting influences of Dylan and the Byrds on the Beatles, however, were likely their roles in introducing the group to recreational drugs: Dylan shepherded the quartet through their first experience with pot, while the Byrds were with three-fourths of the Beatles when they first purposefully took LSD. (McCartney sat that one out, avoiding the drug for another year, while Harrison and Lennon had each had a previous accidental dosage.)

Marijuana's effect on the group is most heavily audible on Rubber Soul. (By the time of their next album, Revolver, three-fourths of the group had been turned on to LSD, and their music was headed somewhere else entirely.) With its patient pace and languid tones, Rubber Soul is an altogether much more mellow record than anything the Beatles had done before, or would do again. It's a fitting product from a quartet just beginning to explore their inner selves on record.
--Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork

Image
Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head
See, the sea wants to take me
The knife wants to slit me
Do you think you can help me?
#21. The Smiths | The Queen is Dead (1986)
# of Voters: 44 | Score: 2869.833
Rank in 2014: #13
AM 3000 Rank: #24
Top Fans: DaveC (#5), Maschine_Man (#6), BleuPanda (#6), JohnnyBGoode (#6), PlasticRam (#7), Honorio (#7), ChrisK (#8), EmilienDelRey (#17), OrdinaryPerson (#18), Michel (#21), Dudumb (#22), Spiderpig (#23), Listyguy (#25), M24 (#25), Nick (#26), Slucs (#27), LiveinPhoenix (#27), GucciLittlePiggy (#28), Toni (#29), JWinton (#30), Chambord (#34), Jirin (#61), Bruno (#67), BangJan (#70), Slick (#72), BryanBehar (#73), Nico (#77), SJner (#77), Moonbeam (#87), Whuntva (#92), Schaefer.tk (#99)

Has the world changed/or have I changed?" Morrissey asks on "The Queen Is Dead," the opening cut on the Smiths' third U.S. album, and for once it's not a rhetorical question. Not that he's forsaken his hobbies or anything: this LP has songs about being buried alive, picnicking in cemeteries, Mom, Oscar Wilde and the comforts of total isolation. There's no mistaking Morrissey's Edith Piaf-on-the-dole vocals or Johnny Marr's wall o' guitars, but the Smiths sound different somehow — self-assured instead of self-obsessed.

It's hard to imagine Morrissey poking fun at himself, but here's the same self-righteous lettucehead of Meat Is Murder singing a song called "Bigmouth Strikes Again." As pedaled guitars stretch and yawn (wah-WAH) through tumbling drums, Morrissey comes clean, acknowledging how an articulate wit can slip into glibness. He seems to have opened his eyes a bit, or at least the windows of his bed-sit.

"The Queen Is Dead" parodies media fascination with the royal family over bombastic guitar bursts and an aggressive bass line, while "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" is a lark, an ambitious gofer's resignation set to a light, Kinks-like shuffle. "Vicar in a Tutu" has a countrified steel guitar wildly inappropriate to Morrissey's very English diction, but that twang does render the song's central image indelible: a preacher raging behind the pulpit in full drag. What would Johnny Cash make of that?

As expected, Morrissey dons his misery-goat costume for "I Know It's Over" and "Never Had No One Ever" (except for Mom, natch). But when he's at his most pretentious, pitting Wilde against Keats and Yeats in a battle of the bards on "Cemetry Gates," Morrissey sounds clearer and more melodic than ever before, wafting unlikely lines to high heaven. Like it or not, this guy's going to be around for a while.
--Mark Coleman, Rolling Stone
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Live in Phoenix »

Oh my, what on earth happened to Dylan. I thought for a moment that we had suddenly reached the top 10 countdown...
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Listyguy »

Live in Phoenix wrote:Oh my, what on earth happened to Dylan. I thought for a moment that we had suddenly reached the top 10 countdown...
My thoughts exactly...what an unfortunate turn of events this poll has been for Dylan...
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by nicolas »

Kanye West above What's Going On is quite a shock :o
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Gillingham »

Listyguy wrote:
Live in Phoenix wrote:Oh my, what on earth happened to Dylan. I thought for a moment that we had suddenly reached the top 10 countdown...
My thoughts exactly...what an unfortunate turn of events this poll has been for Dylan...
Ouch indeed! And that in the year after his win of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by andyd1010 »

veganvalentine wrote:
andyd1010 wrote:
Listyguy wrote:I just noticed that I had every album in the top 30 on my list. In fact, only four of the top 50 didn't make my list: Odyssey and Oracle, Remain in Light, In Rainbows and Dummy.
Wow, I didn't even think of that before this post, but I voted for every single one of the top 50!

That's really surprising, because I didn't vote for 8 of the AM top 50 (including 3 of the top 20). I guess it does make sense though, because a lot of the trends you guys have noticed have been in line with my tastes.

I also put the top 4 Stones albums in the same order, just 10-20 spots higher.
Album | Me | AMF
Let It Bleed | 16 | <31
Exile on Main St. | 21 | 41
Sticky Fingers | 28 | 43
Beggars Banquet | 32 | 45
Which 8 in the AM Top 50 did you omit from your list?
Never Mind the Bollocks - Here's the Sex Pistols
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Horses
Sign o' the Times
Blue Lines
Closer
Live at the Apollo
Kind of Blue
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

andyd1010 wrote:
veganvalentine wrote:
andyd1010 wrote: Wow, I didn't even think of that before this post, but I voted for every single one of the top 50!

That's really surprising, because I didn't vote for 8 of the AM top 50 (including 3 of the top 20). I guess it does make sense though, because a lot of the trends you guys have noticed have been in line with my tastes.

I also put the top 4 Stones albums in the same order, just 10-20 spots higher.
Album | Me | AMF
Let It Bleed | 16 | <31
Exile on Main St. | 21 | 41
Sticky Fingers | 28 | 43
Beggars Banquet | 32 | 45
Which 8 in the AM Top 50 did you omit from your list?
Never Mind the Bollocks - Here's the Sex Pistols
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Horses
Sign o' the Times
Blue Lines
Closer
Live at the Apollo
Kind of Blue
I didn't vote for those either, but Kind of Blue may grow on me over time, since I did vote for Bitches Brew.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Jackson »

I wish Sgt. Pepper's had been the album to take a surprising drop instead of Blonde on Blonde and Exile on Main Street...I think the Beatles are in for redemption after Arcade Fire beat all of their albums last time around.
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by notbrianeno »

Image
Got hips like Cinderella
Must be having a good shame
Talking sweet about nothing
Cookie I think you're
Tame
#20. Pixies | Doolittle (1989)
# of Voters: 44 | Score: 2879.522
Rank in 2014: #18
AM 3000 Rank: #45
Top Fans: Spiderpig (#2), BleuPanda (#3), Michel (#4), Maschine_Man (#4), Jackson (#5), SJner (#6), BryanBehar (#9), StevieFan13 (#11), JohnnyBGoode (#12), DaveC (#12), LuvulongTIM (#13), Brad (#16), Jirin (#21), Harold (#24), Honorio (#26), M24 (#27), Nick (#28), Dudumb (#31), VanillaFire1000 (#32), Listyguy (#43), JWinton (#45), Slick (#59), GucciLittlePiggy (#65), Bruno (#88), BangJan (#95), Spiritualized (#97), DocBrown (#100)

It's so difficult to find the right words! Above all, when you have to describe crass joy. And that's what this work gets to provoke. This armoured pop, fisureless punk classic. The ultimate summit for the band of the 80s and 90s. That's what happens when you rule the barren interzone. That's what happens when you are the owner of the rough melody and the cotton wool heartbreak, the songs with no solos but full with shades that make them fresh at every listening. A planet to discover any time one explores it. It's rejoicing to play this album and lie down, yell, jump, never stop.

Pixies achieved to make themselves a name that causes an almost religious respect and devotion. And they did it by huge songs and angular, fleshy albums. With not much sense, they could express it all. A vortex of power and unconditional support. They raise all this to heaven in a both imperfect and unbeatable work. That's what happens with emotional affection. JOY in an already eternal classic...
--laranra, RYM

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I'm not one who make believes
I know that leaves are green
They only turn to brown when autumn comes around
I know just what I say
Today's not yesterday
And all things have an ending
#19. Stevie Wonder | Innervisions (1973)
# of Voters: 47 | Score: 2934.053
Rank in 2014: #41
AM 3000 Rank: #50
Top Fans: SonofSamIAm (#2), Bootsy (#4), Slucs (#4), Toni (#5), Honorio (#9), Dudumb (#10), Bruno (#11), Jirin (#13), Renan (#13), Nico (#17), Panam (#17), RickyMathias (#18), Listyguy (#19), Henry (#22), SweepstakesRon (#27), Antonius (#28), Profeta (#31), BryanBehar (#32), RockyRaccoon (#35), Babydoll (#38), BleuPanda (#45), Nicolas (#49), Nick (#72), Dexter (#73), BonnieLaurel (#78), Harold (#79), DaveC (#88), Slick (#91), ChrisK (#97)

Innervisions was something of a departure because Wonder, who was previously more than content to allow his lyrics—both bitter and sweet—to apply to simple love scenarios, had discovered a desire to tap into a larger reserve of collective emotion: in this case, the disenfranchised rage of America’s Nixon era. Unlike 1972’s Talking Book, which opened with the edging-on-insipid upward whole-tone progressions of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” Innervisions’ opening salvo, “Too High,” begins with a jangling cymbal and a bass-heavy minor-key riff that immediately segues into a frightening vocal break before repeating the cycle. Wonder enters singing the obtusely-metered phrase “Too high, I’m so high, I feel like I’m about to die,” which, incidentally, descends down the whole-tone scale in an inversion of “Sunshine.” Hobbling along, the protagonist of Wonder’s anti-drug screed finds himself (or herself) lost in a musical labyrinth that threatens to loop itself into a whirlpool of insanity. Clearly this was a different Wonder than the kid who just two years earlier had a major hit with the clap-happy “If You Really Love Me.”

The overt scare tactics of “Too High” melt into the soothing and gentle utopian ruminations of “Visions.” Wonder has frequently claimed that of all his songs, “Visions” is perhaps his favorite, and it certainly fits his personality: both politically conscious and still optimistically obsessed with a better future. A song as wispy and ephemeral as “Visions” would’ve been lost on any other album, and probably dismissed by critics as flakey. But one less-heralded tenet of Wonder’s genius on Innervisions is his intuitive mastery of song sequencing. Nestled in between “Too High” and “Living For The City,” Wonder’s fiercest moment, “Visions” has a calming effect. Wonder is occasionally targeted for being a tad too milquetoast as a funkateer, but even George fuckin’ Clinton would probably shy away from the astringency of “City,” which tells the story of a black man who grows up poor, attempts to make a life for himself in the city, is arrested immediately upon his arrival, spends 10 years in jail and winds up a grizzled, homeless, gritty-footed walking corpse. Wonder scores the man’s descent to a basic blues progression; hollow moog synthesizers and a low droning bass once again induce a surprising sort of terror (made all the more powerful following “Visions”).

“Living For The City” is the album’s centerpiece, and remains one of the only moments in Wonder’s career as a politically-minded pop star where he allows himself to come face to face with utter pessimism and caves in to it wholesale (check the avant-garde, atonal parody of patriotic leitmotifs that underscores his final howl of “No!”). The sweet reward of following Wonder down the path of his own personal hell is “Golden Lady”—the light at the end of the tunnel, the rebirth of Wonder’s optimism, whatever cliché you wish to attach to it. What can’t be denied (even if you’re put off by the bi-polar bait-and-switch routine that characterizes Side A, and find yourself cynically alienated by the song’s joyful denouement) is that the rich, gorgeous chord progressions of “Golden Lady” make it a soul sister to Songs In The Key Of Life‘s unparalleled “Summer Soft,” and both remain the best case for giving in to Wonder’s uniquely charming brand of joie de vivre.
--Eric Henderson, Slant

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The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grisly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller
#18. Michael Jackson | Thriller (1982)
# of Voters: 49 | Score: 2989.277
Rank in 2014: #33
AM 3000 Rank: #26
Top Fans: Bruno (#1), Nico (#1), BonnieLaurel (#1), Renan (#1), Felipinho (#2), Profeta (#3), Victor.Marianoo77 (#4), Bootsy (#6), Schaefer.tk (#6), Georgie (#8), JohnnyBGoode (#11), Dexter (#12), Babydoll (#13), Jirin (#14), LiveinPhoenix (#16), SweepstakesRon (#17), M24 (#19), Karla (#20), Slucs (#26), Nick (#29), PlasticRam (#49), Honorio (#52), Whuntva (#57), ProsecutorGodot (#73), EmilienDelRey (#74), LuvulongTIM (#75), Listyguy (#78), BryanBehar (#79), RockyRaccon (#91), Nicolas (#93), Dudumb (#97)

To be honest, he never really registered in my consciousness as being a person; Michael Jackson was the androgynous sexual panic of "Billie Jean," the breathless seduction of "P.Y.T.," the thrilling kitsch of "Thriller," the chattering afro-popisms of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." The idea that he had a human body, one that needed food and air and sleep, never really clicked in my mind. But then again, I guess that's to be expected. I mean, how can a mere human being really be thought to be capable of creating something as monstrous, as mechanical, as all-encompassing, and as awesome as Thriller? This kid wasn't the king of pop; he was the whole damn kingdom. And we, the audience, are not his loyal subjects; we're just reading the travel brochures.

The point is, Thriller is one of the greatest moments in the history of pure pop. Which is to say, it's plastic, mass-produced, jugular-grabbingly commercial, and completely unconcerned with originality, artistic merit, or honesty. And goshdarnit, I wouldn't have it any other way! With songs and performances as irresistible and ecstatic as the ones found here, artfulness will only get in the way. Because when you have a song as swooping, as ethereal, as hypnotic, and as unashamedly romantic as "Baby Be Mine," there's really no need to question its validity. Just let those labyrinthine keyboards and yearning vocals carry you away to a shiny place. And when "Beat It" comes roaring out of the gates, it does so with such force and brutal eloquence that you completely forget how absurd it is for Michael Jackson to take on the role of a street-smart hoodlum. As a vision of ghetto reality, it's a nonsensical failure; but the important thing to remember is that, on a purely visceral level, it sounds more convincing and more immediate than its more authentic counterparts.

And then there's "Billie Jean," whose lyrics are either shockingly amoral or completely uneventful, but which still manages to be one of the most magical, irresistible, and emotionally charged moments in the history of music. And if we found ourselves getting annoyed by the idea of having to root for a child-abandoning father, then we can just remind ourselves that it's only a pop album. An stunning pop album, to be precise.
--telephone_junkie, RYM

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There's a feeling I get
When I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen
Rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who standing looking
#17. Led Zeppelin | IV (1971)
# of Voters: 45 | Score: 3038.871
Rank in 2014: #15
AM 3000 Rank: #28
Top Fans: RedAnt (#1), Listyguy (#1), Jirin (#2), Dexter (#5), Slick (#5), Whuntva (#5), Luis15Fernando (#6), Acroamor (#6), JWinton (#7), Bruno (#8), RockyRaccoon (#10), Profeta (#13), GabeBasso (#14), Victor.Marianoo77 (#15), Bootsy (#16), Nick (#22), OrdinaryPerson (#25), Harold (#28), Andyd1010 (#30), Nicolas (#34), DaveC (#35), Spiritualized (#37), Honorio (#47), M24 (#49), Brad (#49), VeganValentine (#54), LiveinPhoenix (#55), ChrisK (#56), Panam (#59), Spiderpig (#69), ProsecutorGodot (#90)

There are only eight tracks and Zeppelin never put out singles but at least half of these songs play such a fundamental part in the soundtrack of our times that they would be immediately identifiable by most listeners from just a few bars. Has there ever been a greater opening phrase in rock history than Robert Plant’s wail over the hum of warmed up amps on Black Dog? “Hey, hey mama, said the way you move / Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.” It is a threat and a promise that the album resolutely keeps.

Black Dog is an ultimate riff, the driving sexual impulse of blues based electric rock boiled to its essence, a crowd baiting call and response between Plant’s keening, crowing stud and Jimmy Page’s sinuous guitar-slinger, the lock tight rhythm section of bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham pushing that truncated riff as hard as it will go. And you don’t have a moment to recover before dashing into the thrilling high speed drum roll of Rock And Roll, in which Zeppelin reimagine the already nostalgic style of their youth with the most urgent, exuberant, utterly thrilling 12 bar blast ever heard. “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled,” roars Plant as the band put that to rights in a brash flash of a track featuring a ridiculously dumb, sloppily brilliant solo.
And then there’s Stairway To Heaven. I won’t hear a word against Zeppelin’s epic anthem, though there was a time in the late Seventies when it became synonymous with rock’s bloated journey into pretension and excess. In a way the song has been a victim of its startling originality and intense emotion, overplayed on rock radio, badly imitated by legions of lesser bands and worn out by ham fisted buskers. But clear your mind of cliché by association and it’s still a mind-blowing piece of music, building from delicate folksiness to urgent rock intensity and spiralling upwards into a symphonic guitar fantasia, with a message of mythic truthfulness at its core.

And what else? The overall sense of Led Zeppelin IV is of swaggering, heavy rock by a band of alpha musicians in full flow, and they certainly riff it up over the percussive shuffle of Four Sticks and let it all hang out on the funky trip of Misty Mountain Hop. But there are other dimensions to the sound that ensure the listener’s ear is not dulled by relentless attack, the strange folky yearning of The Battle Of Evermore and the wistful beauty of Going To California, where mellifluous acoustic guitars and mandolins frame one of Plant’s most touching and expressive vocals. And then it all comes to a fantastic, stomping, grinding, earth shaking conclusion with their reinvention of Memphis Minnie’s When The Levee Breaks, built on Bonham’s half tempo thud, Jones’s rolling bass, Plant’s hyperventilating harmonica. By the time Jimmy Page cracks open his solo and Page wails about going down, you feel like this is the sound of a dam actually crumbling before your ears, washing everything away.

Led Zeppelin IV sounded amazing in 1971 and it sounds amazing now. It has an essential purity, four towering musicians locked together, making music that is setting their spirits free. It arrived at a moment in pop history when rock was reconfiguring itself. The Beatles had broadened the scope of popular music to such an extent that it is not really possible to consider them purely as a rock band but, in their wake, there were a lot of bands trying both to get back to the more primal drive of the original electric music that had inspired them and to carry it into bolder, more adult places. Jimi Hendrix was pushing the guitar towards the sonic outer limits, Pink Floyd were concocting lush space age soundscapes, The Who were adding keyboards and sequencers to their gobsmacking hard rock crunch, The Rolling Stones were digging down into the music’s bluesy roots, David Bowie and Mick Ronson were waiting in the wings with their glam sci-fi inventions. But when it comes to the absolute essence of power, sexiness and rhythmic attack of guitar, bass, drums and voice, Led Zeppelin were the band in the driving seat. They had essentially already invented the genre of heavy rock and were at the height of their confidence, creativity and youthful ambition. Led Zeppelin IV threw down the gauntlet for a whole generation. Even when punk came to knock down everything that came before, this album was left standing.
--Neil McCormick, The Telegraph

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You're just a sinner I am told
Be your fire when you're cold
Make u happy when you're sad
Make u good when u are bad
I'm not a human
I am a dove
I'm your conscious
I am love
All I really need is 2 know that
U believe
#16. Prince | Purple Rain (1984)
# of Voters: 45 | Score: 3042.806
Rank in 2014: #23
AM 3000 Rank: #43
Top Fans: StevieFan13 (#3), Slick (#3), Felipinho (#4), JiriN (#5), M24 (#6), SonofSamIAm (#6), RockyRaccoon (#6), ProsecutorGodot (#9), NotBrianEno (#14), JohnnyBGoode (#14), Romain (#14), Dexter (#15), LiveinPhoenix (#15), Nico (#19), Bruno (#21), Profeta (#22), Slucs (#23), Bootsy (#29), Moonbeam (#32), Nick (#33), Honorio (#36), ChrisK (#39), JWinton (#39), Whuntva (#40), VanilaFire1000 (#41), SweepstakesRon (#41), BryanBehar (#49), EmilienDelRey (#49), Harold (#49), Babydoll (#63), Nicolas (#72), Spiderpig (#76), Toni (#77), BleuPanda (#87)

Prior to Purple Rain, the backstory Prince had created for himself was that of a sex-obsessed R&B groove superstar, a multi-instrumentalist and prodigious musical upstart who used his considerable powers for the sole purposes of getting the club lit the fuck up. He presented himself as a kind of raunch alien bringing the divine soundtrack to your coke-fueled, crushed velour orgy, the musical equivalent of a fog machine and a black strobe light. He refused interviews and shied away from press profiles. He famously stonewalled music press royalty—even kingmaker Dick Clark on his own show. You were not to know who he was or where he was from. You were not to fully comprehend his race nor his gender. You were not to find pictures of him in Teen Beat buying apples and milk at the grocery store in sweatpants and a baseball cap. He was most decidedly not just like us. He was from some alternate dimension where it was always 2 a.m. on a misty full moon. You were to believe that he was as mysterious as god, something conjured, perhaps from your fantasies, a magical apparition descending from funk heaven, arriving on a cloud of purple smoke and adorned in little more than a guitar, a falsetto made of glitter, and a deeply intractable groove.

But as the wildly creative are wont to do, by 1983 Prince was looking to switch that whole thing up. Despite his acute talent, he was still viewed by the industry at large as little more than an extra-funky urban novelty act, someone in league with the likes of Rick James and Lipps Inc. His most successful song to date, “Little Red Corvette,” had peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, which simply was not good enough for the man who once described the musical training he received at the hands of his father as “almost like the Army.”

In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was devastating the country with the spare and stark depictions of a bankrupt American Dream on his darkened opus Nebraska. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet band were doubling down on white-man soul with the basic but wildly popular “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and Michael Jackson was re-wiring the industry with an album composed almost entirely of number 1 pop hits that spent 37 weeks lording over the Billboard charts. Prince’s keyboardist, Dr. Fink, recalls that during the 1999 tour, his band leader asked him what makes Seger’s music so popular. “Well, he's playing mainstream pop-rock,” Fink told him. “If you were to write something along these lines, it would cross things over for you even further." Prince had already been carrying a purple notebook with him on the tour bus in which he had been scribbling the ideas, notes and images that would become his next movement. (Prince didn’t make albums, he made environments) and he was looking for something new.

That “something new” was Purple Rain, a sonic and visual experience that cracks open the shell of his reclusive sex alien persona to tell something of an origin story, one slightly more than loosely based on Prince’s real life. The film, directed by an unknown, produced by first timers and starring a bunch of people who had never acted in a movie before, has become an astronomical and enduring success against overwhelming odds. But it does so because it’s a film about America, about revolution and youth and anger and fucking. About not being like your dad. That is to say, it’s about rock'n'roll. It’s the tale of a kid from an abusive home in a cold, working-class city who has a shitload of talent and a dream. And he has to figure out, through tortuous trial and error, exactly what he needs to destroy in order to achieve it. Purple Rain is rough and vulnerable, common and funny, and at times even cute. It is the exact opposite of everything Prince had been before it.

With Purple Rain, Prince bursts forth from the ghetto created by mainstream radio and launches himself directly onto the Mt. Rushmore of American music. He plays rock better than rock musicians, composes better than jazz guys, and performs better than everyone, all without ever abandoning his roots as a funk man, a party leader, a true MC. The album and film brought him a fame greater and more frightening than even he imagined and he would eventually retreat into the reclusive and obtuse inscrutability for which he ultimately became known. But for the 24 weeks Purple Rain spent atop the charts in 1984, the black kid from the midwest had managed to become the most accurate expression we had of young America’s overabundance of angst, love, horniness, recklessness, idealism, and hope. For those 24 weeks at least, Prince was one of us.
--Carvell Wallace, Pitchfork
luvulongTIM
Different Class
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by luvulongTIM »

...and there we have it for the 1980s. Funny that the 2000s outscored the 80s. I thought I was the only one who preferred that decade to the 1980s.
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andyd1010
Keep On Movin'
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by andyd1010 »

luvulongTIM wrote:...and there we have it for the 1980s. Funny that the 2000s outscored the 80s. I thought I was the only one who preferred that decade to the 1980s.
Definitely not the only one! I didn't rank any 1980s album higher than 40th (The Joshua Tree), and I ranked 11 albums from the 2000s in my top 40, including my No. 1 (and 6 more from the 2010s).
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Jirin »

2000s were a strong decade for indie rock, absolutely. Most of the bands we hotly anticipate new releases from now originated in that decade. Arcade Fire, The National, St Vincent, LCD Soundsystem, Sufjan Stevens, Joanna Newsom.
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Moonbeam
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by Moonbeam »

The 2000s are great, though they're no match for the 1980s for me.

I had the following decade breakdown in my list (top 50/top 100/top 500):

1960s: 1 / 2 / 18
1970s: 7 / 21 / 101
1980s: 20 / 41 / 207
1990s: 9 / 12 / 43
2000s: 10 / 20 / 95
2010s: 3 / 4 / 36
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veganvalentine
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Re: AMF Favorite Albums of All-Time -- RESULTS

Post by veganvalentine »

Moonbeam wrote:The 2000s are great, though they're no match for the 1980s for me.

I had the following decade breakdown in my list (top 50/top 100/top 500):

1960s: 1 / 2 / 18
1970s: 7 / 21 / 101
1980s: 20 / 41 / 207
1990s: 9 / 12 / 43
2000s: 10 / 20 / 95
2010s: 3 / 4 / 36
Only 18 60s albums in your top 500! :o I only had eight 80s albums in my top 100, and only three (two by Dire Straits and one by Marillion) even made our top 1000.
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