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What are the 5 most overrated rock albums?

1. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. The songs on this album are nowhere near as memorable as those on "Revolver" and "Rubber Soul". For that matter, this album is nowhere near as innovative, nor ultimately as influential, as either "Pet Sounds" or the first Velvet Underground album. I'm not the first to point out that blame for such artless excess as all seventeen minutes of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida rests primarily with Sgt. Pepper.

2. Pink Floyd: The Wall. All of the criticisms usually applied to late 70's stadium rock, i.e., that it was pretentious, bloated, pseudo-intellectual,and self-indulgent; apply doubly to this crock opera. If you want witty and insightful philosophizing on the human condition, read Nietzsche, H.L. Mencken, or Michel Foucault. To seek such wisdom from pop music, a genre defined by its righteous Dionysian folly, is the greatest folly imaginable.

Pearl Jam: 10. Johnny Rotten was bang on when he described Pearl Jam as "bloody awful" and as sounding like "Joe Cocker singing for Black Sabbath." To my ears, this sounds like so much bland 70's rock (e.g., Bad Company). As The Monkees are to The Beatles, so are Pearl Jam to Nirvana.

4. U2: The Joshua Tree. I don't know where to begin. These guys plagiarized Joy Division, and set their sublime riffs to dumbass lyrics bespeaking the most niave sort of Oprah Winfrey meets Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms bourgeois liberalism. I've said it before, I'll say it again: If you make me listen to a record by someone named Bono, his first name better be SONNY.

5. Bob Marley & The Wailers: Exodus. Not only was Bob Marley not, by a long shot, the best pop music figure to come out of Jamaica, he wasn't even my favorite member of The Wailers. The monomaniacal cult of personality surrounding the deceased Robert Nesta Marley comes at the expense of all the other, far more exciting, music to come out of that poverty-stricken island. As Lester Bangs put it:

"Toots and the Maytalls, who never got promoted properly, are the real heat from a Stax/Volt kitchen, whereas Marley always struck me as being so laid back he seemed almost MOR. Rastaman Vibration was the last straw: an LP obviously calculated to break Disco Bob into the American Kleenex radio market full force, complete with chicklet vocal backdrops chirping 'Pos-i-tive!'
tweakgeek
curbach
84 posts
 
Hey, this thread died too quickly. I would say generally that double albums by "major artists" are almost invariably overrated by fans and critics. It is a very rare event when there is truly enough first rate material to justify a double album. "The White Album", "Exile on Main St.", "Blonde on Blonde", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "London Calling" to name a few, all could have benefitted from some judicious trimming.

On a related note, I think the increased capacity of cds is a major problem with modern recordings. It seems bands feel compelled to put too much material on their albums simply because they can. An album just doesn't need to run much longer than 40-45 minutes without a darn good reason. I can't count how many potentially great albums have been sabotaged in this way. For god sakes, exercise a little quality control. At the very least separate out the dreck and label it as outtakes/bonus tracks at the end of the cd.
suits_me
121 posts
 
"Layla" means "feces" in Inuit...or "that's what I heard."
jkaway
93 posts
 
Tweek , it made my evening to read your post on J.Mitchell (was that not very strange when she made that album with Charles Mingus?).Still think of her hideous rendition of Annie Ross's "Twisted" in thick accent--"I didn't listen to his jive,cause I come fom the same hometown as Gordie Howe". Pretentious maximus. John K.
twl
3,251 posts
 
I like Joni Mitchell. Any group known as the "pogues"(slang for gay) can go butt-surfing as far as I am concerned. The 80's? A decade of stinking crap, including Clash, and the rest of the so-called British Wave. Talentless thrashers. Anything that was on MTV sucked.Techno-pop, hideous. Vitually everything post-1980 should be put in a time capsule and ejected to the far reaches of the universe. Of course, the '80s were only exceeded by the disgusting '90s which heralded such "greats" as Nirvana and Ice Cube. Total waste of cheap plastic discs. Perhaps this "art form" should be re-named "Unbridled angst of untalented, uneducated, disenfanchised, walking adolescent hormones", and placed in a museum which would be appropriately marked with warning signs.
rcprince
3,070 posts
 
I wish you'd stop sugar-coating your opinions, Twl! Despite that, I tend to think I lost interest in rock and gravitated more to classical by the mid 70s in part due to disco and the subsequent lack of interesting rock--even when my son was a teenager, there were only a few bands that interested me from what he was listening to (Matthews Band, a little Soundgarden (sp)). Most groups seem to lack the virtuoso instrumentalists I had access to when I listened to rock (Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Hendrix, Clapton--notice 3 ex-Yardbirds?), and I think the genre is worse for it. Plus I'm just older, and really can't relate to the message behind the music anymore.
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