Most accessible albums - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

LoneStarRebel

Cojo7 wrote:

What do you guys think is the most easily likable and accessible album to a casual music fan? I'd choose Remain in Light or Kind of Blue.

So albums that are easy to listen to and understand, but to a casual music fan - I think that is where some are missing out. I mean how many casual music fans are even going to know Miles Davis' or Patti Smith's music? They might now who Miles Davis is and that he does jazz, but Patti Smith? Probably not at all. The casual music fan of today, they'd know who Adele is and might have an album or two, maybe more. Let's face it, but to a casual music fan, the most accessible albums are the ones that contain the music that radio plays over and over.

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

NOW!
This is what I call music: 6198151689716958165

jackbrown8786

albums that click right away are always simple for me and don't get better upon repeated listens but eventually get worse - they get "burnt out." albums that I don't immediately like, that everyone says are good, get better each time. I find something additional to like each time I hear it - Portishead's Dummy, Radiohead's Amnesiac, the National's Boxer are a few that are growing on me lately that I didn't like at all the first time I heard them. I thought Dummy was gimmicky, amnesiac was just weird, and boxer was a lou reed ripoff, lol. these are albums I can't wait to listen to again now though, whereas I've heard Let It Bleed a million times and while I won't say dummy is better than any of the Stones' great albums (lol), I can say that I'm not really looking forward to listening to Let It Bleed again. there's just no more to find on any of the Stones albums. they're still fun as hell, but I mostly listen to them (and led zeppelin for that matter) when nobody's around and I can blast music as loud as I want. that's just a different listening experience entirely from finding new music, especially "new music" in things I've already heard b4 but haven't formed any thoughts on yet. one is just in the background and the other is a study.

weezer is kind of silly, and I remember not liking it due to its casual nature, it just seemed pointless to listen to over more "serious" albums. why listen to pinkerton when you can listen to dark side of the moon? and then you hear DSOTM a hundred times.... that wasn't enough to appreciate something like weezer though - I had to like captain beefheart and frank zappa first... I feel like that was the bridge to weezer for me.

a whole lot of "indie rock" since the late 90's still escapes me. I imagine I just have to hear enough animal collective, vampire weekend, beach house, wilco, arctic monkeys, white stripes, strokes until I get it. I really haven't given any of it enough of a chance. I'm sure there's just one that I need to start with, after which the others will be more easily connected with.

you mentioned a few rappers you got into, but there was def a certain rapper you got into first - a rapper that, had you not listened to and "got" rap, you wouldn't have gotten Outkast afterwards. every act has to start somewhere and sometimes it's just derived from something that's derived from something else and w/o any experience with the roots, the derivatives don't make enough sense. the "rap is a joke" comment is easily related to, I once just either thought that rappers took themselves too seriously or else I took music too seriously to bother. I didn't understand the difference between sampling and ripping someone else off. the "fun" dynamic - the dj/emcee relationship, the art of dj'ing, the whole concept of "flow," these things don't make sense when you've been listening to music for decades as compositions with instruments. the whole idea of using bits and pieces from other musical sources to create a "beat" (a 3 second long combination of noises repeated over and over) so that someone else could talk smoothly, cleverly, and rhythmically over it to get a message across, show off skill, tell a story, or just have fun, isn't easy to grasp just upon hearing the result. but one day you just start nodding your head to it and wonder what was so hard to get.

benpaco

Who's gonna watch you die?

Age: 28

Location: Missouri

jackbrown8786 wrote:

albums that click right away are always simple for me and don't get better upon repeated listens but eventually get worse - they get "burnt out." albums that I don't immediately like, that everyone says are good, get better each time. I find something additional to like each time I hear it - Portishead's Dummy, Radiohead's Amnesiac, the National's Boxer are a few that are growing on me lately that I didn't like at all the first time I heard them. I thought Dummy was gimmicky, amnesiac was just weird, and boxer was a lou reed ripoff, lol. these are albums I can't wait to listen to again now though, whereas I've heard Let It Bleed a million times and while I won't say dummy is better than any of the Stones' great albums (lol), I can say that I'm not really looking forward to listening to Let It Bleed again. there's just no more to find on any of the Stones albums. they're still fun as hell, but I mostly listen to them (and led zeppelin for that matter) when nobody's around and I can blast music as loud as I want. that's just a different listening experience entirely from finding new music, especially "new music" in things I've already heard b4 but haven't formed any thoughts on yet. one is just in the background and the other is a study.

weezer is kind of silly, and I remember not liking it due to its casual nature, it just seemed pointless to listen to over more "serious" albums. why listen to pinkerton when you can listen to dark side of the moon? and then you hear DSOTM a hundred times.... that wasn't enough to appreciate something like weezer though - I had to like captain beefheart and frank zappa first... I feel like that was the bridge to weezer for me.

a whole lot of "indie rock" since the late 90's still escapes me. I imagine I just have to hear enough animal collective, vampire weekend, beach house, wilco, arctic monkeys, white stripes, strokes until I get it. I really haven't given any of it enough of a chance. I'm sure there's just one that I need to start with, after which the others will be more easily connected with.

you mentioned a few rappers you got into, but there was def a certain rapper you got into first - a rapper that, had you not listened to and "got" rap, you wouldn't have gotten Outkast afterwards. every act has to start somewhere and sometimes it's just derived from something that's derived from something else and w/o any experience with the roots, the derivatives don't make enough sense. the "rap is a joke" comment is easily related to, I once just either thought that rappers took themselves too seriously or else I took music too seriously to bother. I didn't understand the difference between sampling and ripping someone else off. the "fun" dynamic - the dj/emcee relationship, the art of dj'ing, the whole concept of "flow," these things don't make sense when you've been listening to music for decades as compositions with instruments. the whole idea of using bits and pieces from other musical sources to create a "beat" (a 3 second long combination of noises repeated over and over) so that someone else could talk smoothly, cleverly, and rhythmically over it to get a message across, show off skill, tell a story, or just have fun, isn't easy to grasp just upon hearing the result. but one day you just start nodding your head to it and wonder what was so hard to get.

I mean this as peacefully as I can say it, but we're just not going to see eye to eye on this one. I can't imagine listening to The National in an environment other than "when nobody's around and I can blast music as loud as I want". That's not great party fair, per say, and hanging out with friends is still going to be something a little less ... crushing. I think it's fair to say Portishead is better than The Stones' albums if you enjoy it more, that's just up to you - I'm not a big Portishead guy and I think The Stones really only had one good full album so that's a hard comparison for me to make.

As for Weezer ... I'm just lost completely here. You can go after any of their self titleds, hell, any of their albums almost for just being dumb fun rock, but Pinkerton? Pinkerton is like the one more serious thing they have. I still enjoy The Blue Album more but that's just me again. As for the connection to Captain Beefheart or Zappa, I guess you've lost me on where that even really connects at all to enjoying Pinkerton over DSOTM.

And for the rap ... I guess I sort of see what you're going for, but I'm gonna be honest and say what got me into rap was really terrible pop rap. B.o.B, Low by Flo Rida, that one T Pain song with Lily Allen on, Billionaire and whatever the other Travie McCoy one with Adam Levine was, and Give Me Everything by Pitbull being on VH1 was my first experience listening to any rap that wasn't either parody or gangsta (due to that one friend who was cool and edgy and listened to that when we were young). I guess I'd heard Linkin Park? Didn't really like them that much. I mean if you wanna trace my roots directly I can tell you that it's that terrible pop rap (though Flo Rida's put out some fun stuff and if BoB wasn't nuts I'd probably defend some of his stuff then) straight to Madvillainy once I hit this site and was curious about the top albums. From there I asked for recommendations of similar albums on here and elsewhere in life and got pointed towards Jonwayne and Jeremiah Jae. From there I had a larger pool and started looking for roots. So I guess there wasn't really any rapper that got me first so much as I heard that really overdone in the late 2000s style of "I'm a rapper but I got this well known pop singer to do the hook woo" that got me curious what else existed. The beat thing was the bit of rap I enjoyed, ironically, as someone who at the time was making INCREDIBLY cringeworthy mashups in his free time and religiously following the likes of Mashup Germany and DJ Earworm. (somehow I didn't find DJ Shadow or The Avalanches until years later, which is a pity cuz young me would've had some much sooner epiphenies). It was more the fact that the rap that I had heard had such stereotypical lyrical content and that the music still wasn't up my alley either that things didn't click til I heard dem pop vocalists come in I guess.

I dunno. I guess my overall thing is just that maybe albums for me have a greater staying power than for you. Not always - I had 2 Floyd albums drip off my chart as I cared less about objectivity as well as simply getting less enjoyment out of them. But there's other albums I can't imagine burning out or fading away - Rubber Soul being the real example there for me. I think it's just a person by person thing and that this whole thread assumes too many universal truths.

On the other hand though, I've yet to meet anyone that doesn't enjoy at least a part of GDFR. Like I'm sure they're out there, and I'm sure they might exist on this forum even, but like that song has come on in so many different situations and just about regardless of who I'm with or the circumstances it brings a life back into the room.
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