Based in Sydney, Australia, Foundry is a blog by Rebecca Thao. Her posts explore modern architecture through photos and quotes by influential architects, engineers, and artists.
I’ve been told it’s irrational, this disdain I have for ‘Sir Paul’, but every time I see his image, hear his music or have to listen to his grating, annoying voice I have a reaction akin to stubbing my toe.
On a particularly mediocre rock.
Which isn’t to say his is a mediocre history.
Of course not. Abbey Road, the White Album, etc, etc are all decent albums, with some good songs.
But…they’re also fifty years old.
(Incidentally, I just looked up when Abbey Road was released and discovered it’s 50 years old this September — get ready for the fawning!)
In my mind, he’s now a parody of the irrelevant ‘rocker’, desperately clinging on to modernity as a way to extract every ounce of youth he was promised.
A relic of an irrelevant age, evidence of an enduring sense of entitlement that simply won’t fade away.
He makes me think of a stage, littered with hopefuls auditioning for a role, any role in a new production.
But the star — who, for contractual reasons, the producers can’t upset — simply won’t relinquish the spotlight, hamming it up to try and snag every role in the whole production.
Why share the spotlight, after all, when you can just sing your old songs louder?
So when I see him singing in that car with James Corden, I roll my eyes.
When I see he’s done a duet with Kanye and Rihanna, I involuntarily groan.
And when I read that the Beatles have made the greatest album in history, I kick back.
It was this final point that ultimately triggered my (admittedly-pointless) McCartney indignation.
Back in 2003, Rolling Stone — at the time, my primary source of music ‘news’ and information — released a list of the ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’.
I enjoyed reading it, I have to admit, with some pithy observations on a range of albums I was unfamiliar with.
There were, as to be expected with this magazine, very few of the albums I was listening to, or that I thought were great/important/worthy.
Which was fine because everyone knows the best music was made before the 90s.
Or so said the myth I had bought into.
Because there I was, reading this magazine while I listened to an album Ithought was great.
But that these ‘authorities’ said wasn’t in the top 50 ‘ever made’. Which must have meant I was wrong.
Right?
These doubts persisted — driven by a youthful reassurance that these guys (and it was almost all guys — of the 17 writers credited with writing up the citations for the voted records, 3 or 18%, were women) — knew what they were talking about.
But when I came to the top 10 and realised that the most ‘modern’ album was London Calling (1979) I went away with a few questions in my head:
- How is it possible that music ‘peaked’ with the not-terribly good Sgt Pepper’s?
- Pet Sounds was, at the time, 37 years old. There haven’t been any albums released since that were ‘better’ than this quite-good album?
- Are these writers really saying that 40% of the top ten albums of all timewere by the Beatles?
Now, I know now of course, that these lists are inherently pointless exercises in collating subjectivity. That the fun comes in reading the reviews and putting together your own counter-lists.
But for 19-year-old-me, my main revelation was that the writers and creators of this magazine — and, at the time, broader music journalism — saw the music that meant something to me, my friends, my generation and everyone else as simply not as ‘great’ as what’s come before.
So, why bother?
Just cue all of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye on your iPod and join the fantasy that the 1960s were the peak of popular culture and dismiss everything else created since.
Ossify and condescend!
* * *
But.
But the music I was listening to was amazing!
It was challenging, layered and complex.
The lyrics were in tune with the world I was living in, not the one my parents grew up in.
The instrumentation was pushing well and truly beyond what had gone before.
These artists were exploring and expanding and discovering sounds, melodies, rhythms and meaning that was brand new.
Chief amongst these was Radiohead.
I’d missed the ecstasy around the release of OK Computer, so Kid A was my introduction to these freakishly talented and curious guys from England.
I remember opening the CD on the bus ride home. It was a weighty package — the liner notes were printed on some serious paper — and I took out the book.
And it told me nothing.
It was an assortment of esoteric images, filled with harsh imagery and a sharp bleakness.
I got home and put the CD on and sat back to hear this thing I’d heard was so good.
And, by god, I hated it the first time I listened to it.
What the hell is this?
Where’s the guitar, the drums? Where’s the bloody music?
Nope, this is rubbish, and I walked off to get something from the kitchen.
And when I came back, I caught the end of the title track.
The distorted lyrics — that I still don’t really understand — over a propulsive dance beat and this reluctantly tinkling piano line.
Then in comes what I can only assume was the bird Thom Yorke made Johnny Greenwood hold until it squawked into the microphone.
A short breath and into the throbbing guitar line of The National Anthem.
Onwards into How to Disappear Completely, through the cathedral echo of Treefingers and into the still-sounds-sarcastic Optimistic.
The glitch sway of In Limbo, where Thom Yorke reminds you that, yeah, of course he can still sing, but using that voice to demonstrate pure feeling is boring now which so why not pump it through computers and pick ups and loops.
Then the absolute earthquake shock of Idiotheque which, when pumped through good headphones, sounds like the digital equivalent of a foreign invasion.
Morning Bell, Motion Picture Soundtrack and closing with the mystery of Untitled, the 53 seconds of closure they give you, almost as a pitiful thanks for making it all the way through.
This music — attuned to the forlorn cynicism of the world I was living in, the constant struggle between hope and disappointment, the destruction of the old but the absence of confidence in the new — these sounds resonated with me.
The complexity of this music, melding music and beauty together with technology and experimentation, pushed my understanding of what music was, what it meant, what it could do.
By every measure that I could think of, objective and subjective, this was, to me, a far better album than Sgt bloody Pepper’s.
* * *
And, so it was that Radiohead killed Rolling Stone, the Beatles and album lists for me.
Which I’m grateful for.
Because this album captured in these weird, distorted, familiarly foreign sounds the world I was growing up in.
The uncertainty and discovery that the internet would mechanise, corporatize and fetishize over the coming years.
It helped me work out that the music underpinning my experiences does matter, that it has meaning and it is great.
Because ‘greatness’ in music can only ever be a subjective assessment.
Perhaps it’s the arts degree talking, but we need to better define this idea of ‘greatness’ before we can have a real discussion about the merits of these pieces of art, these expressions of feeling.
What I realised after reading that list was that by ‘greatness’, those Rolling Stone writers were talking about the impact these albums had on their lives and their experience of music.
And by making this list through that keyhole, they were undermining the inherent value it held for everybody not in that cohort.
(Which is why the criticism around the list — that it ignores women, music outside the Anglo-American axis, etc — is so credible.)
It is, of course, the fact that it was wrapped in the certainty of the commercial imperative that left me so confused, as though abandoned by a not-particularly interesting acquaintance.
And by relinquishing that connection — I’ve never bought another Rolling Stone and I’ve only ever skimmed a copy at the airport, waiting for a (delayed) flight — it gave me the confidence to back my own opinions and thoughts about music.
Without being tethered to the tunes of generations past.
