immanence

The recent social media meme listing 10 concerts people have attended accompanied by one they didn’t (“find the lie!”) has incited me to complete a list that started out as a “50th anniversary of the concept album” brainstorm over drinks one night last year. The question here is a little different: What are the most formative and significant albums of the album era? 

(Note: This is version 2, with a handful of additions and tweaks made to the original list. One could endlessly tweak such lists, so somebody take away the controls, please. I should mention that this list is being made in time for the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s — mentioned below, but not listed in the top 10 — with deluxe editions of that album being planned for release on May 26. Happy birthday to Sgt. Pepper and to that year, notable for several albums listed below.)

From the perspective of a process-relational* ecocultural aesthetic, the best art is that which brings together disparate elements in novel ways to open up new channels for creative expression — channels that in turn enable novel ways of appreciating beauty, responding to social and ethical challenges, and understanding the ongoing evolution of the universe (in its local and regional variations).

In the era of the long-play album  — an era that only really came into its own about 50 years ago, and that continues only in muted (and mutated) form today — music has had to respond to multiple challenges: these include war and poverty, sexual revolutions and social unrest, racial conflict and cultural diversification, national identity struggles and ecological reckonings. The best albums have addressed some of these challenges (occasionally even all of them) and addressed them well.

While “concept albums” can be dated back much further (perhaps to Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads of 1940), the idea of an album as a total work of art — musical, poetic, aesthetic, philosophical, and physical/material — could arguably be dated to roughly 50 years ago, with the 1966 release of a trio of albums: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, and The Kinks’ Face to Face. These albums set precedents to be matched and topped over the coming decade by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Who’s Tommy (1969) and Quadrophenia (1973), Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd, 1973), The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Genesis, 1975), Tales from Topographic Oceans (Yes, 1975), and others. To concept album aficionados, holding an album cover while listening to the album straight through (getting up only to lift the stylus and turn the vinyl mid-way) was akin to beholding a sacred object: the cover could be read and re-read, held and caressed, admired and marveled at as one listened to the music and plunged into the album’s sonic, aesthetic, and metaphysical world.

With process-relational criteria in mind, the following is my attempt to propose a “ten greatest albums” list of the album era’s classic period, which I would date from roughly the mid-1960s until the mid to late 1990s or so. Great albums continue to be made (head nods to OutKast, Beyoncé, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Bjork, Sufjan Stevens, and Bon Iver, among many others), but the practice of sitting down to listen, with care and single-mindedness, to an album “straight through” has become a retro activity for connoisseurs with time on their hands that most of us no longer have. Or so it seems.

I grew up in the heyday of the concept album, so several of those listed fall either into that or the looser “song cycle” category. This can hardly not be a subjective list; these are albums that, to one extent or another, have shaped my own appreciation of music and its possibilities, which accounts for its eccentricities.

Here, then, are my nominations for the 10 Greatest Albums of the Album Era’s Classic Period. Starting from the top; all (mostly) here, no clickbait, no ads.

1. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970): Start with a phantasmagoric stew of musical and artistic influences from previous epochs of African, jazz, and blues musics to the rock, R ‘n B, and funk explorations of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone, to the “free jazz” that seemed to have passed Miles by, but which he now showed thorough mastery of. Add a stellar entourage of musicians, many of whose solo careers took off flying from this hothouse of musical exploration: John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Jack DeJohnette, Bennie Maupin, Tony Williams, Dave Holland, Larry Young, and others. Throw in the studio-as-compositional-tool mastery of producer Teo Macero, the Afro-futurist artwork of Abdul Mati Klarwein, and the temper of the times. Coming at the apex of his creative swerve from jazz to something completely uncategorizable (which nowadays simply gets called “electric Miles”), this record of expansive voodoo brilliance — infinitely open in its possibilities, beautifully cohesive in its interplay, but always tied to a kind of (at once) earthy, sinuously riverine, and interstellar groove — provided the impetus for what later got called jazz-rock fusion (or jazz-funk), but nodded in so many other directions, opening up new strata on which musical life could spread and flourish. Its achievement in that respect was, to my mind, unparalleled.

2. Brian Eno & David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Sire/Warner Bros., 1981): An album with few precedents, it helped pioneer the plundering of the world’s music and sound for fun and insight (leaving the profit mostly to others). Titled after a 1953 novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola that chronicled a series of possessions and dispossessions “in the bush of ghosts,” the album melded Afro beats and ethno-grooves with found sounds and field recordings sampled (pre-digitally) from what we might imagine as the world’s cosmic radio — evangelists, exorcists, gospel singers, and storytellers — and mixed into a fine alloy through Eno’s electronic and studio wizardry. In this sense, the album captured a moment pregnant with possibility: America’s “waiting for a message of one kind or another,” as the first track put it, at the beginning not only of the waves of “world beat” and “world music” (as marketing categories), but of pentecostal religion’s sweeping of the globe (check the recorded exorcisms on “Help Me Somebody” and “The Jezebel Spirit”), of Islamism’s rise into western consciousness (notably in “Qu’ran,” left off the 2006 reissue due to a legal challenge), and of sampling and remixing becoming the norm rather than the rule in music-making across multiple genres. If Eno collaborator Jon Hassell was inventing a “coffee coloured” music of the future with his “fourth world” sonic strategies, this was the double espresso. The rhythmic and compositional precision of tracks like “Moonlight in Glory,” in all their analog glory, have hardly been matched by any turntablist or electro-scraper since. On the morally ambiguous side, questions of appropriation and cultural colonialism raised in similar contexts — say, regarding Paul Simon’s Graceland, Michael Cretu’s Enigma project, or sampling and remixing more generally — arise in relation to this album as well (as Steven Feld has shown), making it a useful teaching tool in addition to an enjoyable listening experience.

3. Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (Elektra/WEA, 1968): If Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (which never got captured in a satisfying single-album form) emblematized the “old, weird America” Greil Marcus wrote about (see #5 below), Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter aimed for a kind of old, weird Britannia (as did Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief, for instance), but then exploded it into a thousand flowers that world had rarely seen before. The result was a wild kaleidoscope of pantheistic delicacies cross-breeding an earthy, rural psychedelic sensibility with Indian and Middle Eastern instruments and modes, exquisite arrangements, and gentle, humorous, lyrical beauty. Shakespeare’s Caliban might have been describing that island when he said:

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.”

From the drone-raga mysteries of “Three is a Green Crown” to the tender harmonies of “The Water Song” and “Nightfall,” the synthesis of disparate elements here sounded as natural and unforced as they sounded artificial in other artists. The cover photo captures the spirit of it as well as anything (which is perhaps why others have “covered” that cover, so to speak, with their own takes of back-to-the-woods gallantry — see, for instance, Current 93’s Earth Covers Earth, Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow, or even Trout Mask Replica‘s — see next item — foldout inner cover). Henceforth, folk music would no longer be constrained to its traditionalism or to its political solemnity. It could be anything.

4. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band – Trout Mask Replica (Straight, Reprise, 1969): Along with its follow-up, the musically more satisfying Lick My Decals Off, Baby, Trout Mask Replica constituted a kind of darker, more crazed vision of that “old, weird America” that Greil Marcus attributed to Bob Dylan’s “basement” recordings with The Band — the backcountry “playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes.” Beefheart’s (Don Van Vliet’s) weirdness is more rooted in the blues, in backcountry hollers and slave wails, and in apocalyptic outsider-artists pursuing acid visions in the desert. Like some slave-driving outsider-artist-turned-cult-leader himself, Van Vliet, in a legendarily intense eight months of communal living, squeezed out of his musicians a mangled train-wreck collision of sounds — herky-jerk polyrhythms, wailing sax excursions, vocal wildness, surreal eco-apocalyptic lyrics, and a jangling, machinic groove of electric guitar, drums, and bass. Produced by Frank Zappa, the album stands as a unique achievement in the history of American rock.

5. Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (Verve, 1991): Most pop bands develop their schtick and stick with it. With ’80s electropop bands one could hardly hope for anything different. Talk Talk did the opposite: with 1988’s Spirit of Eden and, more so, with this final album, they fled from their stardom into a musical no-man’s-land that resembled nothing of their former selves — a realm of turbulent, introspective exploration, free jazz and orchestral experimentation, chunky guitars and sublime chord changes, complex turns of rhythm and phrase, texture and emotion, all folded into impossibly lengthened spaces and unpredictable convergences, and at times reaching a sublime beauty the likes of which I’ve never heard before. As in the ten minutes of “New Grass,” which I would take as my soundtrack for the journey through the between-lives Bardo. (What Wagner was to orchestral music, “After the Flood” and “New Grass” are to the two-verse song.) “Lifted up.” It doesn’t matter what Mark Hollis is singing; the voice says all it needs to say. Earlier influences (Can, among others) get filtered into something entirely new (which others, like Radiohead, later pick up on; see below). My first listen to this album left me dumbfounded. [Note: Full album here, but the sound has been deleted; check again to see if it’s returned.]

6. The Velvet Underground and Nico (Verve, 1967): Enough has been written about how this album shaped so much of what came after it: art and glam rock, punk, new wave, no wave, indie and alternative in all their varieties. The album brought together New York City’s experimental classical scene (especially the minimalism of LaMonte Young, in which Cale participated) with the street poetry of Lou Reed and the artistic, aesthetic, and sexual circus that was Andy Warhol’s Factory. As Frank Zappa was doing on the west coast, the Velvets helped ground-truth any Sixties illusions about brotherly love and psychedelic revolution. Anthems abound here (“All Tomorrow’s Parties”), but it’s the marriage of Reed’s poetic street observations and Cale’s and Reed’s screeching, noisy energy that marks the album’s most lasting pieces (“Venus in Furs,” “Black Angel’s Death Song,” and perhaps the most sublime rock song of all time, “Heroin”).

7. Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde (1966): How do you choose from the string of albums Dylan made between 1962’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and this, his climactic double-album? Each of them contains brilliant songs, some of them having become anthems of much more than just Dylan’s generation, their polemics retaining their force today (think “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” all from Freewheelin‘). But there’s a poetic, emotional, and musical richness to Dylan’s output in these years that has been arguably unmatched by anyone, and its imprint lies on practically all the rock music that’s come since then. Blonde on Blonde minimizes the political gesturing and opts for a visionary exuberance mixed with a reflective, romantic fleet-footedness (“I Want You,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “One of Us Must Know,” “Fourth Time Around,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Visions of Johanna”). Emotionally, this album is up there with 1975’s Blood on the Tracks; musically, it’s probably as good as Dylan ever got.

8. Can – Future Days (1973): Each of Can’s three Damo Suzuki era studio albums (Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi, and Future Days) has its supporters for being the band’s most important album, and together they constitute a groundbreaking trilogy. The first two albums threw together their experimental music roots (two of the band members studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen) with free-form improvisation, interest in world rhythms and in found objects (including shortwave recordings and “ethnological forgeries”), and a druggy and often manic, Rolling Stones-ish sensibility, helping to engender swaths of post-punk and the indie rock that followed it. (Even punks like John Lydon/Johnny Rotten and Mark E. Smith and rappers like Kanye West have acknowledged Can’s influence.) Ege Bamyasi is arguably the tightest and most essential of the three albums. Future Days takes the more experimental and ambient side of the band’s work (featured first on the side-long “Aumgn” from Tago Mago) and morphs it into a collectively improvised sonic wash that anticipates everything from jazz-funk to trance techno to Eurodisco to post-rock, while retaining a kind of sunny organicism that most of those lacked. Which of the three albums to include in this list is a toss-up: perhaps Ege‘s green bean can cover should be the decisive factor, but I find myself returning to Side One of Future Days much more often. “Spray” may mark the pinnacle of these great musicians’ exhilarating musical interplay.

9. Radiohead – OK Computer (Capitol/Parlophone, 1997): Since I think Kid A is actually a more interesting album, take this as a head nod to consensus reality (i.e., to what other people think). Radiohead remains one of the most inventive, creative, and expressive rock bands of the last 25 years, and while some of their later work ventures much further beyond their five-piece rock roots — both into experimental regions that presage late electronica’s more intriguing twists and turns (most obviously on Kid A and Amnesiac), but also into more fully realized pieces of concept, musicianship, and orchestration (including on their more recent albums), OK Computer is still the album that presented their most dramatic step forward and that defined their musical trajectory. Concept albums of this ambition were a little out of fashion at the time (its theme harkened back to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, with a turn-of-the-century twist), and to the extent that they have again become fashionable, Radiohead deserves a fair bit of the credit. Stadium rock almost never got as intelligent as this.

10. Henry Cow – LegEnd (Virgin, 1973): What “progressive rock” always aimed for, yet rarely delivered, was a highbrow concoction of rock energy, classical form, and musical virtuosity modeled on jazz chops. Growing equally out of the Cambridge and Canterbury rock scenes as out of the Marxist politics of the time, Henry Cow delivered far more than that: their classical was actually up to date (rooted in twentieth-century composers like Bartok, Messiaen, Henry Cowell, and John Cage), their jazz was as free and radically improvisational as it gets, and their rock posturing was both politically and sonically motivated, not at all mere posturing. Some of their later work remained musically exacting, and more groundbreaking and exhilarating at times (parts of In Praise of Learning in particular, and of Western Culture), but its politicized severity could get a little overbearing. This first album remains richly compelling and satisfying: Geoff Leigh’s sax solos burn (see middle section of “Nirvana for Mice”), Fred Frith’s guitar plucks, pokes, darts, swims, smears, dances, and flies all over (see “Teenbeat Reprise“), Chris Cutler’s percussion showers everything with an infinite array of propulsive variations, the rhythms topple and trundle over each other like a menagerie of animals in some kaleidoscopic dance, and Tim Hodgkinson’s compositional intricacies perplex and delight (on the Dadaesquely political “Nine Funerals of the Citizen King” and on “Amygdala,” perhaps the most complex composition to be found within the annals of rock music). Despite their commercial unviability, Henry Cow went on to orchestrate an impressive international network of “progressive” musicians under the Rock in Opposition moniker (which included Italy’s Stormy Six, Sweden’s Samla Mammaz Manna, Belgium’s Univers Zero, the Art Bears, and others), whose “progress” was not only musical but political. If there is an “avant” to rock experimentation, Henry Cow virtually defined it.

Honorable mentions (in chronological order):

• Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (1959)
• Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959); Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961)
• Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963); Bringing It All Back Home (1965); Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
• John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1965); Ascension (1965)
• The Mothers of Invention – Freak Out! (1965)
• Leonard Cohen – Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
• Pink Floyd – Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
• The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967); The Beatles (“The White Album“) (1968); Abbey Road (1969)
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland (1968)
• Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)
• Rolling Stones – Beggars Banquet (1968); Let It Bleed (1969)
• Soft Machine – The Soft Machine (1968); Volume Two (1969)
• Fairport Convention – Liege and Lief (1969)
• The Grateful Dead – Live/Dead (1969)
• Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)
• Funkadelic – Funkadelic (1970)
• Sly & the Family Stone – There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971)
• Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On (1971)
• Faust – Faust (1971); So Far (1972)
• Can – Tago Mago (1971); Ege Bamyasi (1972)
• Keith Jarrett – Facing You (1972)
• David Bowie – The Rise of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars (1972)
• Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
• Gong – Angel’s Egg (1973)
• Magma – Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh (1973)
• Van Morrison – Veedon Fleece (1974)
• Robert Fripp & Brian Eno – Evening Star (1975)
• Parliament – Mothership Connection (1975)
• Bob Marley & The Wailers – Exodus (1977)
• David Bowie – Low (1977)
• Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express (1978)
• Throbbing Gristle – Second Annual Report (1977); D.O.A.: The Third and Final Report (1978)
• Pere Ubu – The Modern Dance (1978); Dub Housing (1978)
• Talking Heads – Fear of Music (1979); Remain in Light (1980)
• Jon Hassell – Earthquake Island (1980)
• Jon Hassell & Brian Eno – Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics (1980)
• Meredith Monk – Dolmen Music (1981)
• La Monte Young – The Well-Tuned Piano (1981/1987)
• Arvo Part – Tabula Rasa (1984)
• Prince – Sign of the Times (1987)
• Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)
• Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation (1988)
• Current 93 – Thunder, Perfect Mind (1992)
• Jan Garbarek & the Hilliard Ensemble – Officium (1993)
• Ani DiFranco – Not a Pretty Girl (1995)
• Bjork – Homogenic (1997)
• Radiohead – Kid A (2000)
• OutKast – Stankonia (2000)

Appendix 1: An apologetic note on gender: Yes, I know it’s mostly guys on the list above (but at least not all white dudes). This is my own limitation. When I think of great women musicians, I think more of songs and voices (Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, Aretha Franklin, Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny, Diamanda Galas) than of albums. The ones that come to mind as great albums tend to be from the last couple of decades (Bjork’s Homogenic and Biophilia, Ani DiFranco’s Not a Pretty Face and Revelling/Reckoning, Joanna Newsom’s Ys, and others by Amy Winehouse, Beyonce, Cat Power, et al.), so they mostly fall outside of the parameters of the exercise. Among the other women who come to mind are composers like Pauline Oliveros (her “I of IV” was important to my own growth as an electronic musician, as was her approach to sound more generally), Meredith Monk (listed above for Dolmen Music), and Annea Lockwood. There are, of course, great albums by Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams, Kate Bush, Madonna, Laurie Anderson, K. D. Lang, and so many others; and fabulous women in the world of music whose vocal and musical artistry deserves to be celebrated aside from any such lists of best albums — Umm Kulthum, Billie Holiday, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, Cesaria Evora, and on and on.

Appendix 2: Out-takes (things that got written but didn’t make the cut; if this were a top 20 they’d be there somewhere):

Funkadelic – Funkadelic (1970): Where to begin, from the string of albums George Clinton produced with his ever-changing entourage of musicians working under the names The Parliaments (going back to the mid 1950s), Parliament, Funkadelic, the P-Funk All-Stars, et al.?  I’d start with Funkadelic’s debut, a dense, trippy flow of Afrofuturist acid rock, funk, and soul. But one could enter the stream almost anywhere: with Maggot Brain (1971), with its “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up” opening and the “[play it] like your momma had just died” guitar-solo dirge title track; or Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), or the platinum-selling One Nation Under a Groove (1978). The influence of Parliament-Funkadelic’s 1970s output on urban music of decades to come has been profound. And while a lot of other creative geniuses, from Sun Ra to Octavia Butler, helped build up the Afrofuturist aesthetic, Detroit was arguably the place where it generated its most fertile synthesis of image, music, style, and futuristic-diasporic sensibility. Clinton arguably shaped that more than anyone else.

Magma – Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh (1973): From Afrofuturism to something even more bizarre: François Couture’s Allmusic review captures the essence of this terrific, if a little terrifying, album, which, with its two 1974 follow-ups, Köhntarkösz and Ẁurdah Ïtah, represents a creative peak for this terrific and terrifying band. Calling it “a new form of progressive devotional music — extraterrestrial gospel,” he notes that MDK is “one giant creative blow to the guts, and unsuspecting listeners will be left powerless at the end of its onslaught of mutated funk, pummeling gospel rock, and incantatory vocals in a barbaric invented language. It remains one of Magma’s crowning achievements (together with Köhntarkösz) and the best point of entry into Christian Vander’s unparalleled musical vision.” Drummer and bandleader Vander is not without controversy, for reasons not unlike that found in the darker shades of black metal. (He’s been accused of fascistic proclivities, rather like John Cage once called Glenn Branca’s massed electric guitar symphonies “fascist” in spirit, but with perhaps a tad more substance to the accusations here.) It’s because of that and the band’s somewhat divisive and exclusive musical legacy that I don’t include it in the Top 10. Ultimately, I’m not sure if it “open[ed] up new channels for creative expression,” or if it represents a kind of logical end point for expression beyond which none can venture. Whatever the case, all the metalheads in the world couldn’t conspire to create a music as stupefyingly rich as this, drawn on equal parts Carl Orff, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, an ecstatic brand of Philip Glass-style minimalism, the energy and drive of punk, and Vander’s austere vision of apocalypse and extraplanetary renewal. What Damanhur’s Oberto Airaudi is to art, Vander may be to music.

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* I say “a,” not “the,” process-relational perspective to indicate that it is only one of many — my own process-relational ecosophy, or “pre-G” — but I believe it’s more or less consistent with other articulations of Whitehead-inspired, process-relational philosophy.