Greatest Albums of All Time (Rock & Jazz)

[DommeDamian]

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Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. --Lester Bangs

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The most astounding and important work of art ever to appear on a phonograph record. --Langdon Winner

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That record has an aura of "art-rock" that the previous albums don't have. The savage spontaneity of the warped blues in Mirror Man is transformed into an artistically conscious program, albeit just as spastic. The humor of Safe As Milk is abandoned in favor of an eccentric but serious humor reminiscent of Erik Satie. The infernal fumes of Strictly Personal evolve into complex and angular harmonies. What comes out is one of the most creative, courageous albums of all time, decades ahead on the rest of rock music. In many ways this record is the equivalent of the Fantasia in Schumann's career. Adorno wrote that the Fantasia only seems the product of a madman, while in reality it is the expression of the madman one second before folly takes over.

The work is so innovative and complex as to be nearly indecipherable. The rhythm section sounds so polyrhythmic that all rhythm is lost. The singing , vaguely interested in music, travels within alien universes. The guitar acts as atonal contracanto. The counterpoint of the ensemble is something halfway between the orchestral chaos of Charles Ives and the audacity of John Cage. The chaotic but rational improvisation is reminiscent of the frenetic geometry of Ornette Coleman, who in turn was influenced by Van Vliet. The heterogeneous meter that Van Vliet produces are to melody what the free poetry of the 1900's are to rhyme. But free-jazz and avant garde music are only alibis, pretexts to freely vent the leader's anarchical compulsions. The album is by all accounts an anthology of chaos in all its musical forms. For as deeply varied as they are from one another, these twenty-eight cuts are many versions of the same scene of devastation. Trout Mask Replica is above all a collage of abstract paintings, each different from the other in color, intensity and contrast, yet they're all homogeneous in their "abstraction".
Most of the songs are miniatures of dense, dark and crackling sounds that present themselves as a white man's rhythm and blues, but are in effect delirious episodes of psychosis. They preserve a shadow of bloodcurdling melody in the unbalanced bacchanal of the instruments, but is like the gasping of the moribund trying to articulate a phrase but only succeeding in putting together a blabbering mess...

Trout Mask Replica is a monumental experiment in irregularity and an impressive catalog of vocal acrobatics. Raucousness, gargling, heavy breathing, whispering, falsetto, etc. are needed in order to dismantle the art of singing and transform it in a degraded emission of beastly verses. The dominant instrument is the clarinet that pops up everywhere in a "hit and run" guerrilla mode. The overall meaning of the pandemonium in Trout Mask Replica is not only playfulness, or the negation of a meaning. The allegorical messages of Van Vliet's masterpiece are multiple, hidden by layers of abstractions that allow a cosmic-metaphysical interpretation, despite the author's pretense of illiteracy. These interpretations redirect the listener toward a form of apology for madness, to the primordial stages, and to chaos, counterposed against the monolithic order of technocratic society. Beefheart uses the Delta blues as a pretext, but dismembers its structure, rhythm, harmony, tonality and melody, and then reassembles the pieces randomly, injecting it with free-jazz and casual improvisation. Beefheart is the first musician to perform an avant garde operation of such capacity without the least intellectual pomposity. --Piero Scaruffi

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[StefanR10]

For The way beefheart sound he is in an Other category like The Other artists. But When you think trout is The best Album for you i agree . For me it is a Demonstration of Avantgarde.

[geologist]

I know you've gotten a lot of Scaruffi comparisons already, but I'd be interested in hearing the reasoning behind some of your biggest differing opinions on rock albums, specifically "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" and "Hosianna Mantra". I think that both of these albums represent a beautiful, transcendental type of self-expression and "spiritual" epiphanies and existential crises. You clearly prefer ITAOTS, and Scaruffi prefers Hosianna Mantra, do you accept this as a cultural difference or is there something else different in your criteria that makes you prefer ITAOTS?

Another topic of interest would be the importance of lyrics in music, which I haven't seen you mention yet. In your criteria, you have "emotional" and "conceptual" significance, but to what extent can lyrics alone meet these criteria? ITAOTS is an album driven by its lyrics, and Hosianna Mantra is an album driven by its instrumentation. These are two very different methods of expressing their concepts.

I think you would be interested to read Scaruffi's preface to his book "The History of Rock Music", where he states: "My bias is towards the music, not the lyrics: it is called "rock music", not "rock literature". And there's a reason: as literature, it is worth very little. Even the greatest rock lyricists are, at best, mediocre poets. No surprise, therefore, that i rarely mention the lyrics of a song. The overall feeling is, in general, much more important than the literal message." How much do you agree with his assessment? How would your list change if there were no lyrics in any of the albums?

This was just one thing I really wanted your opinion on, as "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" seems out of place on your list. I think it's a great album too, and I'd like to hear what you think about it.

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[baystateoftheart]

What is your favorite album that Scaruffi has never assigned a score to?
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