This is from a piece by Paul Morely in the Observer Music Monthly last week. I post it here not so much for what he says but for the fact that he seems to be saying it all
in the course of a single sentence. I can only assume that he was doing it to win a bet. The article is called 'Showing off'.
QUOTE
It was going to be next October's OMM column, I think, when I started to wonder, without any particular agenda, about the relationship between the best albums of 1970, when rock was relatively young, and the mass media and the mainstream alternative media not so obsessed with it, when it wasn't a mostly commercial effortlessly purchased arrangement, and the best albums of 2010… a column that could have been taken up simply with a list of the albums from that year that, just in terms of their sound, the fashions, the energy, could still easily claim a place in the 2010 list, with momentous space explorers Autechre, gothic sensualists These New Puritans, Gorillaz, Tunng, Four Tet, Errors, Lonelady, Arcade Fire, Acoustic Ladyland, New Young Pony Club, Xiu Xiu etc etc naturally high on my list, and Hot Chip, Beach House, Spoon, Midlake, Joanna Newsom, Fleet Foxes, Ting Tings, the Strokes, Liars, She and Him, Watson Twins, Yeasayers etc etc knocking around on others, and I obviously was not pointing this out in a sentimental nostalgic way, but simply to examine that even though there has been so much change in technology, history, innovation, trends, generational shifts, snobbish list making, revising, hyping, web life democratisation, media shape, how rock style music is now made and listened to by people born up to 20, 25 years after this 1970 music was released, and yet all of it, whatever the genre label, whatever machines, drugs or budgets it was made on, however it's been distributed, whatever the social and cultural circumstances it reflects or shuns, can be heard/glimpsed forming, or sometimes found fully formed, inside Tim Buckley's Lorca, Janis Joplin's Pearl, David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World, Soft Machine 3, Captain Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off Baby, Crosby Stills Nash and Young's Déjà vu, Magma, Pentangle's Cruel Sister, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, Led Zeppelin III, The Last Poets, Nick Drake's Bryter Later, Evan Parker's Topography of the Lungs, Peter Green's The End of the Game, MC5's Back in the USA, Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditation, Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon, Neil Young's After the Goldrush, Nico's Desertshore, Frank Zappa's Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother, Marion Brown's Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Van Der Graaf Generator's The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other, The Kinks' Lola Versus Powerman…, Iggy and the Stooges' Funhouse, Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs, Who Live At Leeds, Aretha Franklin's Spirit in the Dark, Randy Newman's 12 Songs, Kraftwerk, Rod Stewart's Gasoline Alley, Family's A Song For Me, Linda Perhacs's Parallelograms, Can's Soundtracks, Frank Sinatra's Watertown, Deep Purple in Rock, Fotheringay, The Carpenters' Close to You, Shirley Collins's Love, Death and the Lady, Dark, Robert Wyatt's The End of an Ear, Velvet Underground's Loaded, Stephen Stills, The Band's Stage Fright, Spirit's 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, Groundhogs' Thank Christ for the Bomb, Faces' First Steps, Grateful Dead's American Beauty, Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, Amon Düül II's Yeti...
That article in full:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jan/2...ley-showing-off
