The dreaded best albums list starting at #60
It seemed fairly obvious that after the government was caught snooping in my private life that I could no longer keep this list a secret. As we count through the days of summer, what better time than to spend moments careening over my 60 best albums of all time. Unlike a Greatest Hits listing this is a Best Of which means it’s going to be better quality than a greatest hits. For example, if you were to ask someone how you did on a task, and you got “You did great!” that is not as good as “You were the best”.
Secondly, this is better than a top 100 listing in that there are 40 less spots so this makes it just that much tougher.
I made this argument fairly recently that best of lists are more than just showing off my record collection but rather provides a gauge in terms of how I felt about music in 2013. Now of course I have been working on this list on and off for over a year and I realized that at some point I needed to stop fucking around and actually post something.
I decided to spend time and do something fairly substantial because at the time I had started this list, I was only a “Father-to-be” and wanted to share something with my son that I enjoyed and that was music. That and I am in my 40th year and I wanted to come back to something years from now to see how right or wrong I was. I wanted to see what albums pushed up the ranks and which ones fell down.
There has not been any typical rules per se, other than being albums that I listened to. There might be situations where the actual tracks were different on import releases or the disc changed on later versions so my rule was that I stuck with what I listened to.
No soundtracks are included although I have to give kudos to “Until the End of the World” which was the only soundtrack that could even be close to consideration.
Every day or so I will try to post my next album on the list counting down from 60. And drumroll please…….
Number 60: R.E.M. – Out Of Time
Part of me wanted to lead off with this album just to fuck with people. I guess if you live in the R.E.M. world as I do, there is part of me that finds moody Michael dancing around with Kate Pierson pretty hilarious. While Stipe at this time was not Morrissey and writing songs about unhappy birthdays I surely would not call him Mr. Congeniality either. That being said ‘Shiny Happy People’ has a certain dated quality on this album and might work better as a hilarious B-Side. Another B-Side would be Radio Song which leads off with KRS-1 intermixing a bit of rap. There is a song somewhere buried here but the song feels too much like 1991. For every Radio Song there is a song like “Country Feedback” for which Neil Young wished he wrote himself and arguably their best song ever written.
I would make the case that people that think that “Shiny Happy People” sucks also think that “Losing My Religion” has anything to do with the literal translation in the title.
For me it was not the singles but the subtle moments on this album with album tracks like “Low”, “Belong” and “Me in Honey” that really begin the delve into an album on relationships, something that Stipe had not attempted much before this.
Lastly, the reason that the album made the list is that it was the album that pushed my fandom onto a different level. The album came out just before I went to college which meant access to better record stores and well we know the end of this story.
Oh yeah, this one too..