BS Album Draft: Judges' Corner

[minorthreat]

The final decisions haven't been made, but this is where they will probably be posted. In the meantime, I'm going to do a few lists a la the Movie Draft.

minorthreat's Top Ten Unpicked Artists
1. Charlie Parker
2. Louis Armstrong
3. Howlin' Wolf
4. Nina Simone
5. Wire
6. T. Rex
7. Leonard Cohen
8. Depeche Mode
9. Elton John
10. Any or all of Wu-Tang Clan

minorthreat's Top Ten Unpicked Albums
1. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Okay, so Closer went, but this was really the better and more important of Joy Division's only two albums and served as a massively influential portrait of urban decay and alienation. It's nearly flawless.

2. The Quintet - Jazz at Massey Hall
Due to contractual obligations to their respective record companies, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, and Max Roach were forced to record this live album under the unassuming and totally anonymous name of "The Quintet." However, the music itself is anything but unassuming. This is the finest live jazz performance ever recorded.

3. Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Okay, so there's been some love shown for pure pop throughout the draft. But no love for the finest album by one of pop music's biggest titans? That's tough to believe.

4. The Stooges - Raw Power
The name of the album says it all, really.

5. Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express
A lot of you laugh at what I say about Kraftwerk, but this is one of the most important albums ever made and arguably their finest hour. Its influence is simply massive.

6. Stiff Little Fingers - Inflammable Material
There were some great punk picks, to be sure, but we somehow missed out on this gem. These Belfast lads were not only fiercely political but blessed with a great sense of melody, resulting in one of the masterpieces of the first wave of British punk.

7. Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet
Fight the mother********ing power.

8. New Order - Power, Corruption, and Lies
obie already touched on this, I think, but I have to reiterate for the third time how crazy it is that we had to sneak New Order in through the back door via a compilation pick.

9. Black Flag - Damaged
And ditto with Black Flag. There's been a lot of love for hardcore in this draft (Minor Threat, Fugazi, and Bad Brains all went), but none for Black Flag? Granted, I'm always hesitant to give California, and especially Southern California, credit for anything, but come on...

10. Slayer - Reign in Blood
Yes, I'm dead ********ing serious. There are only a handful of albums in the history of the medium that can claim to be the single greatest work of an entire genre, and this is where thrash metal - and quite possibly all of metal - reached its apex. Nothing heavier was recorded before it, and nothing heavier has been recorded since. An incredibly brutal record in a genre that had made brutality a virtue.

Honorable mentions go to Wire - Pink Flag, Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, Michael Jackson - Off the Wall, The Misfits - Walk Among Us, Depeche Mode - Violator, Queen - A Day at the Races, and Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On.

minorthreat's Best Picks Per Round
1. drknow - The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground and Nico
2. Via_Chicago - Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
3. SirManchester - Black Sabbath - Paranoid
4. Bluto11 - Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come
5. drknow - Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
6. drknow - Kraftwerk - Autobahn
7. Quango - Leadbelly - Take This Hammer
8. Michael K. - Jeff Buckley - Grace
9. Michael K. - Love - Forever Changes
10. MikeLastort2 - Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

And now some totally unofficial and hopefully humorous awards.

The Homer Award - a tie between Toon_Toon (why, yes, he's English, how could you tell?) and bojendyk (oh, really, you're from Seattle?)

The Pitchfork Media Award - Ghost

The Stop ********ing Reading minorthreat's Mind Award - GringoTex

Stay tuned...

[Dr. Know]

Black Flag I feel First Four Years is better than Damaged and went through their early years when they were really kicking ass. Let me add that I hate Rollins so that might influence me also.

I don't think Trans Europe Express is Kraftwerks finest by a long shot.

I love Stiff Little Fingers and that album rules. Same goes for New Order.

It was between Raw Power and Fun House for me but I went with Fun House cause I like it more and those jams are ********in crazy.

As for my list of unpicked albums I posted it in the other thread but I'll post it here again:

Black Flag- First Four Years
Patti Smith - Horses
Fania All Star- Live at Yankee Stadium
Minutemen- Double Nickels on the Dime
Lou Reed- Transformer
Brian Eno - Another Green World
King Crimson - Larks Tongues in Aspic
Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come
Bill Evans - Waltz for Debby
Coil - Horse Rotorvator
Captain Beefheart - Troutmask Replica
Wire - 154(Way better than pink flag and charis missing imo)
Pop Group - Y
Neil Young - Harvest
Nas - Illmatic
Tricky - Maxinquaye(Better than any Massive Attack album)
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
New York Dolls - S/T

[bojendyk]

Good call on Slayer. Not sure I'd agree on T. Rex's importance, however.

As far as the Stooges go, I just can't get past the awful engineering on Raw Power. Fun House is my favorite of their three records.

And as far as Kraftwerk go, well, they may have been important, and the long, hypnotic title track is pretty good, but that particular record also contains that stupid "looking glass" song, which is so awful that even thinking about it makes me cringe.

[ForeverRed]

Ah minor.....there is the metal love....although there are other metal albums I would prefer to represent the genre ahead of RIB, its influence and thrash factor is undeniable. You guys know that the guys from def jam used Slayer samples when they started up with the whole hip hop thing? I thought that was pretty funny because slayer and rap are looked at as such extremes.

I do think Megadeth and Testament are better thrash and metal bands than Slayer, but Slayer's sheer brutality and panzer like aural assault more than make up for their technical inefficiencies.

I was actually going to pick Violater (depeche mode) and trans europe express but it completely blew by me in time for my picks.

[minorthreat]

Revised after Gringo pointed out a huge omission.

Heh, and the wood goblin just lets my pot shot go. :D

[minorthreat]

King Crimson - Larks Tongues in AspicThe one Rush album aside, this draft had a definite fear of prog.

[Crimen y Castigo]

So, this was ultimately an impossible exercise.
You can’t begin to cover all styles or music or countries or even global regions with 10 albums. And nobody wants a tourists guide to the didgeridoo, the vihuelon, the thumb piano, and zither music just for coverage sake.

But I hesitated from commenting on too many individual selections because basically any record could be a good choice depending on the list. As Carl Weathers would say, as long as a disk has some meat on it, take it home, throw it in a pot with some tropicalia, a few beats, some guitars – and baby you got a stew going.

There were 10 albums that I had not heard at all, but I’ve been listening to as much as I can find. And without doing the math I think I can honestly say that I flat out love a slim majority of albums chosen, and that I'm pretty fond of many (if not most) others.

So it’s all about choices.
Here’s a few notes on how I’m looking at the list.

Diversity:
I could easily argue that Thelonious Monk Trio, Bill Evans: Live at the Village Vanguard, Duke Ellington: Money Jungle, and Brad Mehldau: Day is Done are four wildly different albums (because they are)—but at the end of the day, they are still four piano trio albums. And picking, say, more than one of those in a list of the only ten albums to survive for all eternity might be considered a bit of a waste.

So when I see lists with more than two – let alone more than 5 – guitar driven pop/rock albums, I just gotta shake my head.


Connections:
Only a few people made any mention of explicit connections between selections. Say, a few albums of devotional music plus a few inspired by social struggle plus a few inspired by doing the nasty or whatever. And I don't think anyone made any specific links, like taking two wildly different versions of the same song. Which was just kinda surprising.

Lyrical content:
In my world, the aliens/future races/cockroaches finding these disks will be simultaneously omniglots and language-free – meaning that the lyrical content is important and the music will have to stand completely on its own merit. I expect you to not only embrace this paradox, but to make sweet, hooting, primate love to it.

My tastes:
While completely eliminating my personal taste from any judging is impossible, I will be trying to minimize it as much as possible.

For example, even though I despise Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” it will certainly turn out to be an infinitely better pick than many, many albums selected that I truly love. Just because it drives me up the wall doesn’t mean it doesn’t represent that type of music extremely well. It just has to part of a good list.

If it’s combined with two Weather Report albums, a Pat Metheny disk topped off with some Spyro Gyra – or with the Einsturzende Neubauten, Wesley Willis, and Machine Metal Music – well, I’d have a lovely time breaking them all up into kindling and browning the drafter over a toasty flame.

But if I’m looking at two lists that are neck and neck, and one has “Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane” and the other has “Underground,” I’m going with the Coltrane disk because a) Charlie Rouse also drives me up the wall (which is a drag because Monk worked with him so much) and b) the Coltrane disk has Art Freakin Blakey.

(Of course what I’m really thinking is why the hell didn't you take “Monk’s Music” which is basically a much better album from the same Coltrane sessions.)

Similarly, when I’m looking at a list that picks The Stone Roses’ muddle of a second album instead of their crystalline debut, I have to simply close my eyes and look away lest my face melts like that nazi in the Indiana Jones movie.

So, yeah, my taste will play a part.

[minorthreat]

I agree with a lot of what CyC says and will be going on a lot of the same criteria. The problem with some of these lists is summed up in the words of a member of an act that could easily have been drafted - you gotta diversify your bonds, *****.

One thing that makes judging this thing hard is that there are a lot of people that have mostly brilliant lists and yet one pick where they completely screwed the pooch.

[servotron]

I declare shenanigans that the Hip Hop Draft has gone this far without anyone picking Sex Packets.

[nicephoras]

I just kept waiting for Yellow Brick Road or Depeche mode to go. Then waiting, and waiting, and waiting...............

The one shenanigans I'd call is the total lack of Eastern European music. A draft sans Okudzhava's Paris recordings? Or something by Visotsky? The USSR official music publishing house released an album before his death, and his funeral was attended by more people than the last Pope's. Beat that, Elvis.
P.S. Plus, Vysotsky is a childhood favorite because of his "the giraffe is big, he sees better" is a lot of fun as a kid and yet gets oddly more subversive as you grow up.

[afgrijselijkheid]

The one shenanigans I'd call is the total lack of Eastern European music. A draft sans Okudzhava's Paris recordings? Or something by Visotsky? The USSR official music publishing house released an album before his death, and his funeral was attended by more people than the last Pope's. Beat that, Elvis.
P.S. Plus, Vysotsky is a childhood favorite because of his "the giraffe is big, he sees better" is a lot of fun as a kid and yet gets oddly more subversive as you grow up. problem is i have no idea who those guys are

[minorthreat]

I just kept waiting for Yellow Brick Road or Depeche mode to go. Then waiting, and waiting, and waiting...............

The one shenanigans I'd call is the total lack of Eastern European music. A draft sans Okudzhava's Paris recordings? Or something by Visotsky? The USSR official music publishing house released an album before his death, and his funeral was attended by more people than the last Pope's. Beat that, Elvis.
P.S. Plus, Vysotsky is a childhood favorite because of his "the giraffe is big, he sees better" is a lot of fun as a kid and yet gets oddly more subversive as you grow up.What, we were supposed to pick tATu? The only Eastern European I thought of in this draft was Lucien Ginzberg, aka Serge Gainsbourg.

[MeridianFC]

I'm really struggling to pick my best lists. There's a lot of good music there and this is a tough assignment. That said a decision is required and a decision will be rendered. My tastes are over the place and it's easier to describe music I don't like than music I do.

Trying to come up with a set of objective criteria to pick the list that best serves the contest as stated, that is music for posterity for those who might know us and those who definitely do not, is tricky business. From the beginning we said this is different than a 10 desert island disc operation and it's certainly not just pick from the established cannon either. Certainly well regarded, critically lauded, and popular recordings have attained status for a reason and there is something to an album being proved by time, but if I've said it once I've said it, well a whole bunch, "the ear is the court of last resort". If it sounds good it is good.

I was looking for a list that answered some basic detective questions for me:

Who: is this artist/album the best representation of a particular thing with the contest restraints?
What: is the sound, uniqueness, angle, being brought to the table as an individual recording and a part of limited 10 recording list?
Why: what does this recording do that another can't? does it work with the list?
Where: is some of the geographically mandated cultural diversity of the earth getting a nod. I didn't expect this to be a world music cage match, but I expect at least a nod beyond England and the United States.
When: music has been recorded for a long time and is naturally very indicative of the time is was made, was some love given to more than one decade?

I was a bit taken aback by how some kind of bailed on the theme early. Like the movie draft I found that it appeared that there wasn't some forethought in a few quarters.

10 Albums that could've or should've made the draft by artists not picked:

1. Tom Waits - Closing Time

For the life of me I can't figure out the bashing that's going on in the other thread. Waits has half a dozen records that could've made the list, not the least the critically lauded "Swordfishtrombones", which to be honest is a stellar choice and nice demarcation between beat/crooner Waits and raving lunatic in the shed Waits. A towering giant of the American musical forms. The man has covered a lot of ground.

2. MC5 - Kick out the Jams

Equal to, if not better than, the Stooges in any department you care to measure. Sonically so balls out molten that you can get 3rd degree burns just handling the disc. The vinyl kills small animals on sight. Laid the groundwork for much hard rock, punk, and metal that followed. If you want to smash things this is what you should reach for.

3. Various - Urgh! A Music War [comp pick]

I was utterly stunned that no one thought to nab this. You get one of the best selections of punk/new wave ever. Sure there's some crap, hell if I never hear the Kalus Nommi or Skafish tracks from here I'd be a happy man, but how can you deny Echo & the Bunnymen, Members, Au Pairs, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Fleshtones, X, Magazine, XTC, the Cramps, John Cooper-Clarke, Dead Kennedys, Steel Pulse, etc. all contained in one recording. A ********ing bargain.I I'd thought about some other famous punk and new wave comps ("Burning Ambition, etc.) but this is too powerful and all encompasing.

4. Various - Green Linnett 20th Anniversary Collection [comp pick]

Sure I may have a bit of a personal agenda behind this one, but if I was going to burn my 2nd compilation pick I could do far worse than this. First off I'd get arguably the greatest Irish group of all time, the Bothy Band, on the board but I'd also get inumberable other great players and even some related, but outside the British Isles (Milladoiro), music. 48 tracks of music for what would be a stellar party. I tip this one slightly above the other big GL comp "Joyful Noise". Great bang for the buck.

5. Oliver Nelson - Blues and the Abstract Truth

There's certainly plenty of Miles, Monk, Ellington, etc. left but I'm thinking of a player, writer, arranger that covered a bit of ground. An outstanding recording, with a hauntingly melancholy opening track ("Stolen Moments"). This does just about everything I need a jazz recording to do. Not as sweeping as later projects not as intimate and experimental as some of the smaller group recording by previously mentioned artists, but try this one for size: Evans, Dolphy, Haynes, Hubbard, and Chambers. That's pretty ********ing mighty my friends.

6. Jerry Lee Lewis - Live at the Star Club

I was more than a bit taken aback that the Killer didn't get his due. With this you get the manicness of punk, the twang of rockabilly, and the unstoppable beat of Ur-rock n' roll. There could be a good case made for Little Richard occupying this spot but I've made my choice.

7. Sylvain Chauveau - Nocturne Impalpable

In a world between electronica, ambient, and classical, plus I get a bit of the Gallic thrown in there for good measure. Probably one of the best records for the chill out mode that I can think of. The KLF, Aphex Twin and others were some I thought would've gone but it seems like a different field of electronica was mined.

8. Kodo - Ibuki

It doesn't get more primal and basic than the drum. With Kodo you get the primitive and yet a much higher level of musical thought. Whilst I'd love to substitute a live perfomance for the limitations of the recorded form in their case, I think this can still get the idea across. If you ever get to see the chance to see them perform live, you must go. You have no choice.

9. Peter Tosh - Legalize It

Funky, skanky, naughty, militantly political, but the whole album just cooks. This is like a simmering pot (no pun intended) of music that would satisfy the minds and souls of any future generation or vistors from beyond. This is bit towards the rock for a reggae offering (though if this is the current reissue you at least get a taste of version, however disappointing the one of offer is). I'm surprised that King Tubby/Augustus Pablo didn't get taken. "King Tubby Meets the Rockeres Uptown" would've been my 2nd choice.

10. Amalia Rodriguez - Um Casa Portugesa

I wanted a bit more of the female artistry than is on offer in the Green Linnett selection. Probably the greatest known exponent of Fado. As Paul Vernon said, "The Fado speaks with a quiet dignity born of the realisation that any mortal desire or plan is at risk of destruction by powers beyond individual control." If that doesn't describe the human condition I don't know what does.

I'll report back in a bit with my choices for best list (or should I send them to minor or cYc?)

[Crimen y Castigo]

7. Sylvain Chauveau - Nocturne Impalpable



I've tried to find that album no less than a dozen times in a store.

Yes, I could just order it online. But I'm a luddite when it comes to record shopping.

[MeridianFC]

You'd be lucky to find it at all. I looked for it for over a year (this was some time ago). In the interim I've gotten to meet the man and have seen him twice. Even sat around drinking eau de vie at 3 in the morning talking shop.

If you can't find it I can sort you out.

[minorthreat]

10 Albums that could've or should've made the draft by artists not picked:11. Velocity Girl - Copacetic
What?

[nicephoras]

problem is i have no idea who those guys are

Oh, I know. I wasn't expecting anyone to take them, although nico may have once heard of them somewhere.

[TheSlipperyOne]

What, we were supposed to pick tATu?

Gogol Bordello!!!

[MeridianFC]

11. Velocity Girl - Copacetic
What?

I wouldn't even pick that.

[minorthreat]

I wouldn't even pick that.I'm ********ing with you. :D