A final note on the dead hand of musical history

Having tried and given up compiling my own top 20 albums of all time, never mind my own top 500 (see my comments on the NME's efforts), I find myself confirmed in my view that the problem lies less with the critics and more in the notion of a musical canon.

If I was to write a list of my favourite acts right now, for example, it would read a little like this - some rock classics, sure, but far from just the usual suspects.

Deep breath: Scritti Politti, Altaar, Talking Heads, Ulver, The Velvet Underground, Wolves In the Throne Room, Lambchop, Hercules & Love Affair, Husker Du, Gram Parsons, Negativland, Alcest, Om, Elbow, Earth, James Blake.

Yet the minute I start thinking about the best albums evah, I'm drawn back to including things I haven't listened to for years, cassettes which gave up the ghost  years ago and which I haven't replaced.

It's not that those old tapes of Revolver, The Smiths or Protection didn't contain good albums, very probably great ones. The problem is being pulled too strongly towards them not by your own personal inclination, but by the wisdom of crowds, by the gravity of conferred status, by mythology and reputation. The older the music, the greater the reputation.

So how about this experiment in closing: what if we played, wrote, thought, loved music as if there was no canon at all? No pantheon but each with their own passions and influences? 

For today, for ad bloody astra?

Indie in crisis: have all the innovators gone metal?

An aside on metal from Simon Reynolds in Totally Wired: Post-punk Interviews and Overviews.

In some ways, if you can see an inheritor of post-punk's confidence in speaking out and shouting down power and the effectiveness of words, it's heavy metal. Which is not genealogically or genre-ologically part of the punk/post-punk/alt-rock lineage at all. 

Maybe a few genes have drifted over from Goth or industrial, but historically there's really hardly any link. As was mentioned before, metal was the enemy, as far as post-punkers were concerned. 

But now, through its own evolution through thrash and death and black metal, it's reached a place where much of what characterised post-punk - the darkness, the dread, the wordiness - can be found in its vital contemporary form only in the metal underground.

You'll also find there that whole set of ideals to do with musical progression and fusing different styles together. Extreme metal is totally committed to ideas on innovation and genre-splicing

Interesting in light of yesterday's reflections on the NME's top 500 albums of all time. Is modern day indie is so locked into resurrecting the the past that - individual auteurs aside - the innovators, those holding up a mirror to modern life have largely moved on, whether that's metal, hip hop, electronic music or elsewhere?

A wasteland of curators: the NME's top 500 albums and the problem with indie

I know, it's a little unfair to judge the NME's best 500 albums of all time on its Top 10. The full list is a lot more eclectic.* 

And I appreciate the Top 10 will represent an aggregation of music writers' opinion en bloc, rather than what any one of us might individually consider to be truly great albums. Passions are individual, taste is collective.

But if these ten records are the cream of the canon - the set musical texts for indie rock - then we have a few problems.

1. The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
2. The Beatles - Revolver
3. David Bowie - Hunky Dory
4. The Strokes - This Is It
5. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
6. Pulp - Different Class
7. The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
8. Pixies - Doolittle
9. The Beatles - The Beatles (White Album)
10. Oasis - Definitely Maybe

The obvious point to begin with is that this top ten are pretty male, pale and stale. For every nine men in the bands, I make it roughly one woman, for example. While the Top 20 is marginally more diverse - bringing in Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Public Enemy, these are all well-established exceptions to the rule. 

And only one album here was released after 2000 - if The Strokes have made the best album of the twenty-first century then I'll eat my flat cap.

To make these points is not to argue for a quota system. Yet they begin to show how narrow the doors to classic status have become for a magazine like the NME. Or, if you like, indie-rock as a whole. And this mono-culture is symptomatic of a broader lack of ambition and narrowness of taste that the choice of albums displays. 

When the Beatles and the Velvet Underground are as experimental as your Top 10 gets, then you know you've got serious ancestor-worship problems. Especially when another three of your slots are taken up with late 80's and early 90's variations of the Fab Four and NY art-punk templates (hello Oasis, The Strokes and The Stone Roses), you're talking about a very narrow canon indeed.

And if Bowie, Pulp and the Roses are as close as this records get to soul and electronic music, it's fair to ask whether this list is afraid of dancing as it seems to be.

If you think I'm calling this a bad list - you're missing my point. I love Hunky Dory, Revolver and the first VU record. I might feel they picked the wrong Smiths record, and that the Pixies are a trifle overrated, but they're good picks from the 80's underground, allowing for the nature of lists.

What the problem really is here is that the NME is advancing the kind of terrible orthodoxy I'd expect from guilty-pleasure 'old man magazines' like Uncut and Mojo. 

Indie or whatever you want to call it has long risked becoming fundamentally backward-looking - a wasteland of curators - mostly white, male, middle-class - who prize recreating the past over experimentation, style and seeming over personal truth (See Simon Reynolds' excellent Retromania for more on this). Lists like this do nothing to correct the impression of ossification.

* Although: no Stereolab ?!? Seriously?