In celebration of the the fiftieth year of the British pop album chart, The Observer struck a panel of “experts” (ames Bennett, Kitty Empire, Dave Gelly, Lynsey Hanley, Sean O’Hagan, Elle J Small, Neil Spence) to pick the 50 albums that changed music.
Here’s the Top 10 of The Observer‘s list along with their reasoning (see link below for the full list):
1 The Velvet Underground and Nico
The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)
Though it sold poorly on its initial release, this has since become arguably the most influential rock album of all time. The first art-rock album, it merges dreamy, druggy balladry (‘Sunday Morning’) with raw and uncompromising sonic experimentation (‘Venus in Furs’), and is famously clothed in that Andy Warhol-designed ‘banana’ sleeve. Lou Reed’s lyrics depicted a Warholian New York demi-monde where hard drugs and sexual experimentation held sway. Shocking then, and still utterly transfixing.Without this, there’d be no … Bowie, Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Jesus and Mary Chain, among many others.
SOH2 The Beatles
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)There are those who rate Revolver (1966) or ‘the White Album’ (1968) higher. But Sgt Pepper’s made the watertight case for pop music as an art form in itself; until then, it was thought the silly, transient stuff of teenagers. At a time when all pop music was stringently manufactured, these Paul McCartney-driven melodies and George Martin-produced whorls of sound proved that untried ground was not only the most fertile stuff, but also the most viable commercially. It defined the Sixties and – for good and ill – gave white rock all its airs and graces.
Without this … pop would be a very different beast.
KE3 Kraftwerk
Trans-Europe Express (1977)Released at the height of punk, this sleek, urbane, synthesised, intellectual work shared little ground with its contemporaries. Not that it wanted to. Kraftwerk operated from within a bubble of equipment and ideas which owed more to science and philosophy than mere entertainment. Still, this paean to the beauty of mechanised movement and European civilisation was a moving and exquisite album in itself. And, through a sample on Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal ‘Planet Rock’, the German eggheads joined the dots with black American electro, giving rise to entire new genres.
Without this… no techno, no house, no Pet Shop Boys. The list is endless.
KE4 NWA
Straight Outta Compton (1989)Like a darker, more vengeful Public Enemy, NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) exposed the vicious realities of the West Coast gang culture on their lurid, fluent debut. Part aural reportage (sirens, gunshots, police radio), part thuggish swagger, Compton laid the blueprint for the most successful musical genre of the last 20 years, gangsta rap. It gave the world a new production mogul in Dr Dre, and gave voice to the frustrations that flared up into the LA riots in 1992. As befits an album boasting a song called ‘Fuck tha Police’, attention from the FBI, the Parents’ Music Resource Centre and our own Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad sealed its notoriety.
Without this … no Eminem, no 50 Cent, no Dizzee Rascal.
KE5 Robert Johnson
King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961)Described by Eric Clapton as ‘the most important blues singer that ever lived’, Johnson was an intensely private man, whose short life and mysterious death created an enduring mythology. He was said to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi in exchange for his finger-picking prowess. Johnson recorded a mere 29 songs, chief among them ‘Hellhound on My Trail’, but when it was finally issued, King of the Delta Blues Singers became one of the touchstones of the British blues scene.
Without this … no Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin.
SOH6 Marvin Gaye
What’s Going On (1971)Gaye’s career as tuxedo-clad heart-throb gave no hint he would cut a concept album dealing with civil rights, the Vietnam war and ghetto life. Equally startling was the music, softening and double-tracking Gaye’s falsetto against a wash of bubbling percussion, swaying strings and chattering guitars. Motown boss Berry Gordy hated it but its disillusioned nobility caught the public mood. Led by the oft-covered ‘Inner City Blues’, it ushered in an era of socially aware soul.
Without this … no Innervisions (Stevie Wonder) or Superfly (Curtis Mayfield).
NS7 Patti Smith
Horses (1975)Who would have thought punk rock was, in part, kickstarted by a girl? Poet, misfit and New York ligger, Patti channelled the spirits of Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and Rimbaud into female form, and onto an album whose febrile energy and Dionysian spirit helped light the touchpaper for New York punk. The Robert Mapplethorpe-shot cover, in which a hungry, mannish Patti stares down the viewer, defiantly broke with the music industry’s treatment of women artists (sexy or girl-next-door) and still startles today.
Without this … no REM, PJ Harvey, Razorlight. And no powerful female pop icons like Madonna.
KE8 Bob Dylan
Bringing it All Back Home (1965)The first folk-rock album? Maybe. Certainly the first augury of what was to come with the momentous ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. Released in one of pop’s pivotal years, Bringing it All Back Home fused hallucinatory lyricism and, on half of its tracks, a raw, ragged rock’n’roll thrust. On the opening song, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, Dylan manages to pay homage to the Beats and Chuck Berry, while anticipating the surreal wordplay of rap.
Without this … put simply, on this album and the follow-up, Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan invented modern rock music.
SOH9 Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley (1956)The King’s first album was also the first example of how to cash in on a teenage craze. With Presleymania at full tilt, RCA simultaneously released a single, a four-track EP and an album, all with the same cover of Elvis in full, demented cry. They got their first million dollar album, the fans got a mix of rock-outs like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, lascivious R&B and syrupy ballads.
Without this … no King, no rock and roll madness, no Beatles first album, no pop sex symbols.
NS10 The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds (1966)Of late, Pet Sounds has replaced Sgt Pepper’s as the critics’ choice of Greatest Album of All Time. Composed by the increasingly reclusive Brian Wilson while the rest of the group were touring, it might well have been a solo album. The beauty resides not just in its compositional genius and instrumental invention, but in the elaborate vocal harmonies that imbue these sad songs with an almost heartbreaking grandeur.
Without this … where to start? The Beatles acknowledged its influence; Dylan said of Brian Wilson, ‘That ear! I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.’
SOH
Here’s the full list, and as usual with this sort of thing there’s lots of fun to be had arguing about the selections.50 albums that changed music
Fifty years old this month, the album chart has tracked the history of pop. But only a select few records have actually altered the course of music. To mark the anniversary, Kitty Empire pays tribute to a sublime art form, and our panel of critics argues for 50 albums that caused a revolution. To see the 50, click here
Kitty Empire
Sunday July 16, 2006
Observer
A longside film, the pop album was the defining art form of the 20th century, the soundtrack to vast technological and social change. Once, sets of one-sided 78rpm phonograph discs were kept together in big books, like photographs in an album. The term ‘album’ was first used specifically in 1909, when Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite was released on four double-sided discs in one package. The first official top 10 round-up of these newfangled musical delivery-modes was issued in Britain on 28 July 1956, making the pop album chart 50 years old this month.
Singles were immediate, ephemeral things. Albums made pondering pop and rock into a valid intellectual pursuit. Friendships were founded, love could blossom, bands could be formed, all from flicking through someone’s album collection. Owning certain albums became like shorthand; a manifesto for everything you stood for, and against: the Smiths’ Meat is Murder , Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
Before lasers replaced needles, albums had sides. They were a game of two halves, building towards an intermission; more than the sum of their constituent songs. At least, the good ones were. Some of them still are, except they can now last 70-plus minutes, over twice as long as their vinyl forebears. Is this bloat, or value for money? The debate rumbles on.
Entire lifestyles built up around albums, smoking dope to albums, having sex to albums. You lent your favourite albums out with trepidation; you ruefully replaced them, on CD, when they didn’t come back. Getting hitched paled into insignificance next to merging record collections with your loved one. Getting rid of the doubles made divorce unthinkable. Elastica once sang, of waking: ‘Make a cup of tea, put a record on.’ That’s how generations of hip young (and not so young) people have lived.
But for how much longer? Downloading favours the song, not the album. MP3 players favour personal playlists or shuffling. Listeners are already tiring of keeping company with an artist for an hour or more, as an album meanders beyond mere singles.
The album as we know it might not last another 50 years, maybe not even another 10. But just as artists show groups of paintings in galleries, songs will continue to be written in clumps, connected by theme or time, and presented to a public, just as the Nutcracker Suite once was.
On these pages are 50 clumps of songs, in descending order of importance, that we think caused a sea change in pop music, not always for the good, but without which many bands or entire genres would not exist. They are the sets of songs which have had the greatest lasting influence on music.
It was agonising, having to pick only 50. Why did we include NWA, but not Public Enemy? Probably because their influence was more pervasive. Why Fairport Convention and not The Incredible String Band? Because we had to plump for the single most influential album in British folk rock. And why no Rolling Stones? Because, brilliant though they are, they picked up an established musical idiom and ran with it rather than inventing something entirely new.
Our panel: James Bennett, Kitty Empire, Dave Gelly, Lynsey Hanley, Sean O’Hagan, Elle J Small, Neil Spencer.
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