Before I am mauled down: these were albums I once adored or otherwise played the heck out of, but every time I try to revisit those youthful feelings things are a little awkward, like having coffee with your high school crush ten years down the line, and all she wants to do is show you her stretchmarks.
Nirvana-In Utero
To say that Nirvana captured all the angry loserish desperation of rejects of all stripes is boring, done, and true. I will also say that I rocked hard to
“Nevermind” (still do). But “In Utero” is diminishing returns, and if you’re being honest to yourself, “Milk It,” “Very Ape,” “Tourette’s,” and “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” are not strong songs. They were not meant to be, sure, but that’s a lame defense. Of course, that does leave a nice bunch of healthy tracks, and at least one (”All Apologies”) that will still move me 50 years from now. I just never thought that I would skip forward on this one when I was 17.
(And there’s no use ragging on “Bleach.” No one has put that on their player since Cobain’s funeral.)Nirvana’s so much of my youth, but looking back sometimes I hear little more than the severely troubled growling of a junkie that really dug his Pixies records.
Pearl Jam-VS
Another great grunge album that I wore down with love, (you should see the mangled state of the case), and yet… Now I find myself skipping tracks, particularly the self-righteous liberal put downs:(”Police stopped my brother again”? Eddie, please, you’re whiter than cum on tissue.) Then there’s that one annoying song about blood, and the other annoying one abour rats, and GOSH will “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” just END? It’s a 3 minute song that feels longer than a Neal Pert drum solo.
Weezer- The Self-Titled, Blue Album, the One that Wasn’t Hideous.
Knowing how low things would go afterwards makes revisiting “The Blue Album” with all its poppy poses really tragic, because it’s obvious that Rivers Cuomo had nothing to say- EVER. It just sounded like he did. Hard to shake “Undone” and “In the Garage” from my consciousness, but I can’t sit through this one anymore, and I’m guessing you can’t either.
Dave Matthews, “Crash”
Once upon a time, I swear this was cool. I tried listening to it just the other day, and every single track works hard to impress you with the fact that they’re too jazzy to cohere into anything as plebeian as a song.
Radiohead- OK Computer
Probably the first album I heard that obviated all use of illegal substances with its technical wizardry… And yet I go to it now, and its obsession with being prodded by alien androids and all that nonsense is silly, isn’t it? “Karma Police” is still great, and maybe if my devotion to this band hadn’t been so ill-rewarded with Thom Yorke’s subsequent bleep-addled wankery I would feel differently. I was one of those people who defiantly pretended that it was possible to enjoy “Kid A” without being mentally impaired by serious chemical dosages, but by the time that horrible live album came about, the jig was up. They’d lost me as a fan, which I suppose was what they intended to do all along. I wasn’t hard core enough.
Aerosmith- Get a Grip
You may roll your eyes, eyes no doubt schooled in obscure, sophisticated indie balladry and avant-garde German techno-jazz, but back in 1994 my timid high school version had a choice between Aerosmith, Metallica and 2Pac. Or The Spice Girls, if I had been leaning that way. I chose, and had my first make-out session to this.(Don’t do the math: it came pretty late.) “Get a Grip” made a kid feel like he could walk into a bar, start some shit, and still walk away with a stripper in tow. If that’s not rock and roll, what is? Unfortunately, now I listen more closely: in one of the bonus tracks you actually hear Steven Tyler snorting Peruvian White through a rolled-up thousand-dollar bill.
TWO GIRLY ONES
Jewel’s Pieces of You and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom. I really really loved these albums. Both of them are liberally peppered with crap, unlistenable crap.
Nadirs: Jewel’s “Adrian”, a 27 minute long opus about a dying crippled kid with cancer, AIDS, irritable bowel syndrome and anything else that can bring tears to your eyes. No Doubt’s quasi-instrumental 41 minute long ska-fest, “The Climb.” Those might not be the actual track times, but then again they might.
One last minute addition: “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.”
Oh, who am I kidding, even back then I could not make it through both discs.
As with Dylan, I don’t have time these days to listen to Neil Young’s canonical works — especially the early seventies albums, on which his melodic gifts compete with remnants of hippy poesy (he’d begin to purge them on Harvest and be done with them completely on Time Fades Away). As familiarity has worn the pleasures of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, I find large chunks of After the Gold Rush simply indigestible. Young found his voice on near-classics like On the Beach and Zuma; by the time of Rust Never Sleeps he’d transformed into a sinister demi-urge, coldly noting the decay of fellow hippies, signaling that he’d caught The Wages of Fear in a repertory theatre, expressing ambivalence over the relation between Elvis and Johnny Rotten (in the still-too-little understood “Hey, Hey, My, My [Into the Black]“).
