best album ever?

[bran]

shitty list.

my favorite album of all time is black sabbath- heaven and hell.

[bacardimayne]

Abbey Road

[Randy Lahey]

Sticky Fingers would have been a good numero uno.

[Zeppelin]

Thriller.

[wasted]

Problem with Bollocks is most people dont identify same with Nevermind. Even AFD. Even Morning Glory. Theres songs on each, well not Bollocks.

For normal people they are too fighty. Most people and slumped in melancholic fail.

[DieselDaisy]

I do not quite understand. Bollocks has its standout 'hit' tracks (Anarchy in the UK, Pretty Vacant, GSTQ) and also has its 'deep cuts' (Bodies) - just like most of the famous 'great' albums really.

[wasted]

Just in general its too nasty, its not a common experience. Albums like Darkside somehow crossover so you gran listens to it. Seems to me thats what guides that top ten. Oasis and Blur should be ahead of Coldplay and Keane even Radiohead, not mention Stone Roses, the Pistols and Clash ahead of U2. But it has a pop soft rock slant.

[Guest Len B'stard]

DieselDaisy, on 03 Apr 2013 - 10:17, said:

I do not quite understand. Bollocks has its standout 'hit' tracks (Anarchy in the UK, Pretty Vacant, GSTQ) and also has its 'deep cuts' (Bodies) - just like most of the famous 'great' albums really.

Well, firstly right, musically, it's just absolutely perfectly produced. A really really really tightly wound pop album. Multiple overdubs make the guitar sound really really fucking muscular. A lot of that has to do with Steve Joneses thick and dense downstrummey playing, it's pop to the point of being bone-headedly simple but it's just so fucking catchy. There are few albums guitarily that sounds so fucking tight and well polished and that i think, was REALLY important. As much as i love Johnny Rotten (and he'd admit this himself and has done before now) if it had been up to him how that album sounded it would've been 'unlistenable' but it's just one of those perfect not a note out of place albums. The pace of it is so fucking important to, unlike your typical idea of what punk is supposed to be it's not raging fast, it's actually really slow if you listen to it, Paul Cook is like a fucking metronome on it and Matlock just slots in there with his poppy basslines giving it like, just this perfect balance.

And Rotten is just fucking perfect, possibly the most impressive vocalist i have ever seen, the perfect vocalist for this album/this music, he just sounds so fucking lairy and deranged and...i dunno, just impossibly nasty. If a voice is truly as good as it's ability to communicate emotion then John Rottens one of the best i've ever heard and am ever likely to hear.

Musically alone it was just completely fucking perfect, i mean people cite albums like Nevermind or AFD or Definitely Maybe but quite honestly, as good as those albums are they don't quite meet the mark as Bollocks does. For a start neither of them are as perfect as in the songs aren't as good, i mean all of em are like not a bad song on em albums but every song ain't a 10 out of 10 like Bollocks is. DM, as good as it is, has a really recycled and familar feel to it, Nevermind, as great as it is, is kinda soft as albums go, i mean it's as pop an album as Bollocks is but it doesn't feel as powerful, it feels like rock radio, or as close to rock radio as that kind of music can get and AFD, as great as it is, is very remote from what EVERYBODY can identify with, it's almost like aspirational for wrong uns Bollocks wasn't like that, Bollocks was...very specific to it's time but it's directly plugged into very broad emotions and based on that is/can be relevant to just about any-fucking-body.

And the cover art, God, it's so fucking severe and nasty and tacky looking, these horrible colours, in an age where album covers were like...grey pastelley fuckin' jaundiced looking things this was like...bright fucking neon, it was just so wonderfully minimalist and ugly and severe and yet really with these really bright colours, kid colours it was just, again, perfect.

And in terms of like, impact, God, has any album been more impactful? Has any album stirred so much shit? I mean it's almost ridiculous nowadays to really like...look back and quantify just how provocative that album was, EVERYBODY had something to say about it. I mean REALLY, an MI5 blacklist?!?! For a rock n roll band?!?! Discussing in parliment whether a lead singer should be bought up on charges of treason for writing a song, being banned across the country, being attacked in the street...and all the while having done absolutely nothing wrong and nothing that amounts to anything more than exercising your freedom of speech and expression? For a rock n roll band to manage that based on the music they make, that is it, isn't it, thats like, the fucking nth degree, thats about as much as rock n roll ever promised us, that it could change something, affect people, affect society and it's attitude.

They even had to go to court to defend the right to use the word 'Bollocks' on the front cover of the album. Now you name me one album that has ticked all those boxes like that, what, Sgt Peppers? Not even close...

And there's just a straightahead honesty to it that you will find nowhere else in rock n roll, rock n roll is all about posing when it comes to the crunch, these people that others live vicariously through and try to smoke their cigarettes like but there was none of that to The Sex Pistols and by extension Bollocks, i mean, Rottens singing alone, it's HIS voice, uniquely HIS voice in HIS North London accent right, love it or loathe it it's honest, there was nothing admirable about them and i don't mean that as an insult i mean, they could've been your mates, when you hear em in interviews giggling and taking the piss and contradicting themselves and just taking the whole thing completely unseriously or sounding bored or whatever it was just totally totally real.

All this is filtered into a totally totally unique album that had absolutely no prescedent. The Sex Pistols did that...not The Beatles or The Stones or The Who or Bob Dylan, none of em, you can't cite a single album by any of those bands and seriously try and tell me that any of em had that kind of impact cuz it didn't. Overall, as a band/cultural phenomenon The Beatles clearly lead them but like, in terms of like ONE Beatles album having the impact of Bollocks? Nope, sorry, just didn't.

And the fallout from that album effected like...everything. an entire generation of artists, filmmakers, musicians, people in fashion, the media, television EVERYBODY was effected by it. I mean just look at the world around you, look at the way people dress, the haircuts they have these days, how much of it would've been possible were it not for the groundwork laid by punk and Bollocks was THE punk album and still is THE punk album and will forever remain THE punk album. After Punk and The Pistols, across the board in popular culture album there was a neo-everything, new comedy, new music, new art, it was like a border drawn in time like, after THIS everything is different.

The rules were different after Nevermind the Bollocks, for better or worse i guess is up to the person in question assessing it but say what you like, it changed popular music for good, so many people from so many diverse aspects of music (and culture too but lets stick with music) cite Nevermind the Bollocks as a seminal album, i mean dance music people, rock music people, everything new and of note that occured after punk cited punk as an influence, even to the point of effecting a society to a degree where people were more openly able to criticise the establishment through mainstream media, for as free as a society we claim to live in most establishment criticism was done through veiled satire before punk, Nevermind the Bollocks pulled back the veil and showed us exactly how free we're not and exactly how free we should be, the right to sing songs like God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK is a precious one and should never ever be taken for granted.

Taking all that into account, i don't see how any album could compare And all from four soppy little herberts with a twinkle in their eyes

[wasted]

I just cant see my nan doing her knitting to Bollocks. Whereas Automatic for the people might keep the needles twitching.

[Guest Len B'stard]

Bollocks'll keep her lively, AFTP might flatline the old dear, lull her into a coma

[JKKDARK]

/END OF THREAD

[Guest Len B'stard]

Simmos really putting his back into fuckin up that bass eh?

[DieselDaisy]

Original is better:

[Guest Len B'stard]

Y'know what i never cottoned onto that until years after. A lot of theorising goes on about it, read some weird stuff like, that was the first proper rock n roll album and the guitars pointing up and London Calling was the last and the guitars coming down and all this malarkey.

[Randy Lahey]

I generally don't think about rock and roll history when I'm listening to an album. You have to be in a particular mood to listen to Nevermind the Bollocks, but I can listen to Sticky Fingers in almost any condition.

Edited April 3, 2013 by Randy Lahey

[Guest Len B'stard]

I generally don't think about rock and roll history when I'm listening to an album. You have to be in a particular mood to listen to Nevermind the Bollocks, but I can listen to Sticky Fingers in almost any condition.

I kinda need the history bit to narrow it down to one otherwise i could name albums that i thought didn't have a bad song on em all day.

[machinegunner]

[machinegunner]

Michael Hutchence had been reeling from a motorbike near-death experience and was driven to create this later-career masterpiece - 40minutes of urgent genius with barely a pause, one great song after another. Great grooves and rhythms and hooks, great songwriting and singing and playing. Just fucking great.

Btw, there are also music videos that exist for each song because the band got film students onboard for that and they are pretty cutting edge and wild. There was a documentary aired on aussie tv at the time featuring all these videos and interviews w the band about the songs in between - I wish they would make this available for a quality theatre setup sometime.

Edited April 4, 2013 by machinegunner

[Guest Len B'stard]

I suddenly feel like masturbating

[machinegunner]

_{Did i mention that it is quite homoerotic at times?}

[Lithium]

Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In

[sweetness]

Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In

there really is no other correct answer to this question

[username]

Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In

there really is no other correct answer to this question

There really is no right answer to this question.

....but this one is just plain wrong.

[sweetness]

Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In

there really is no other correct answer to this question

There really is no right answer to this question.

....but this one is just plain wrong.

you must not have given it a fair listen

[Lithium]

Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In

there really is no other correct answer to this question

There really is no right answer to this question.

....but this one is just plain wrong.

Shut your mouth.