Worst is Nevermind. Nirvana missed out bit of the country as we only had top 40 radio. I only heard them mch later the fuss, and decided I had heard better rock.

First must be Dark Side. I love it. Their most focussed album, and one of the most focussed albums on the prog era.

Most Recent is Remain in Light. I’d heard a lot of Talking Head singles, but it took me ages to stumble across an album. I once heard David Bowie called the best backing vocalist in the world. I’d liike to nominate Eno as the most unexpectedly successful backing vocalist in the world.

Tom – maybe you could run the same list again in a fortnight and see how many of the albums people have actually listened to?

Some strange choices on that list which kept my score lower too: ‘Closer’ but not ‘Unknown Pleasures’, ‘Remain In Light’ but not ‘Fear of Music’ and ‘London Calling’ but not ‘The Clash’ – there’s at least 2 I would have picked right there.

Worst? Oh, ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ by a length. I could say Beefheart but he exists on some planet I don’t understand which is a different thing.
First? I’d say ‘Born To Run’ but I didn’t tick that one and ‘A New World Record’ wasn’t on the list.
Most recent? Jesus, I have no idea. I’m old me. ‘Sticky Fingers’ maybe but it were a while ago.

@Tom, 5. What’s astonishing about you & Led Zep IV? That you like it as much as you do? Or that, as it were, you’ve only very recently come around on it?

@jonathan bogart, 10. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t listened to Joshua Tree in years because the sound’s never gone away! Certainly for the last ten years or so, at any given time, a couple of warmed over Joshua Tree tracks have been in the charts.

Well I didn’t actually count those ones, it was more noting that even though I’ve never heard eg a Marvin Gaye album, I am fairly sure I’ll like it given what I’ve already heard by him, how much I love a lot of artists influenced by him – how is this bonkers?!

Answers!

1) The Doors, The Doors, this has to be The Doors.
2) The three Dylan albums, as part of a real actual canon-on-three-C90s at college, along with Bringing It All Back Home and Oh Mercy.
3) Probably Remain In Light – it took me ages to move on from More Songs… to the rest of Talking Heads.

Worst: I don’t know about worst, but the one whose appeal to me is most opaque is Blue Lines. It’s so far off my radar I had to look it up and go “oh, right, them” when I saw the cover. I honestly don’t think there’s a bad record on here.

First: The Joshua Tree. U2 was my baptism into secular music as a teenager. Haven’t listened to it in years, but the memories are fond.

Most Recent: Purple Rain. I’m not sure why it took so long for me to get into Prince, but there are only so many listening hours available to one pair of ears and someone has to bat cleanup.

2. I went through a “believe what the critics suggest you believe” phase before I knew better, about a decade ago. I bought and loved “The Velvet Underground and Nico”, “Pet Sounds”, “What’s Going On”, “Innervisions” and “Marquee Moon” pretty much simultaneously.

3. One album from that period I didn’t like at all which I’ve recently re-evaluated is “Astral Weeks”, after having my roommate harp on about it and play it over and over. It’s actually a fairly good record!

There are a few other categories here. For instance, as Kat alludes, albums you used to love but haven’t actually played in about 10 years. Do you really still love them? I guess so. Why not? But then there are albums you USED to love but now you don’t. You might even actively despise it, drawing a line in the sand between your former self and your current one. I see a few on this list that fit that description.

And then the Lex’s bonkers category of albums you’ve never heard, yet which you love. ??

1. Astral Weeks, as I said on the other thread.
2. I played Sgt P’s a lot when I was 8 or 9 but I didn’t love it – it was just the only record my parents owned I liked at all. So the first one would the The Queen Is Dead, I guess.
3. Led Zeppelin IV! I’m as astonished as anyone.

1. Sgt Pepper UGH
2. Blue Lines or Blue, both of which I first heard circa 1995-96
3. Innervisions, which I first heard about two years ago

1. There were several I’ve heard but didn’t tick, but would be reluctant to call the worst… they just didn’t click for me. London Calling, maybe.

2. First one might be Purple Rain, but it’s possible I’d discovered the White Album by mid-1984. Or even Never Mind the Bollocks, now that I think of it.

3. It would have to be OK Computer, because it was released after I’d heard all the others. Most recent attempt to get into one which I haven’t cracked yet was What’s Going On a few years ago.

@97 I remembered the Sgt Peppers turning point being 1987, coincidentally enough, when all the 20th anniversary CD release hype (with accompanying TV documentaries) sent a whole new generation scurrying to hear it and left many thinking sure, it’s good, but it’s not BEST ALBUM EVER good. It had “A Day in the Life”, but even Magical Mystery Tour had an “I am the Walrus”. That was around the time Revolver became my firm favourite, after initial infatuations with Abbey Road and the White Album – possibly because it felt like the fulcrum on which early Beatles and late Beatles turned, bringing together the best of both.

Hunky Dory>>>Ziggy Stardust, for sure.

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2010/03/the-friday-fun-canon-discussion-and-monster-poll/

Sign O’The Times is still tops though.

I think another reason for my aversion to ‘classic albums’ is that if I buy ‘Kind of Blue’ and say I like it, the response will be ‘Well, Duh!’ I want to think my tastes are more discerning and individual than they really are.

Oh, and I loved ‘Rabbit Fur Coat’ as well

Prince’s canonicity mostly not helped by, er, Prince. But he’s still very much in there I’d say.

I have that 200 albums book, it’s in France though.

I do this with writers, I read all of Orwell’s other novels before I got to 1984. I think this goes with the music fans dread of wanting to seem obvious – like picking Sgt. Pepper for greatest album ever made (Rosie, for years it pretty much topped every single list I ever saw – it was the Citizen Kane of albums. It was the aftermath of punk that knocked it off it’s perched as people’s perspective on intricate concept albums changed and they switched to the more pure-pop pleasures of ‘Revolver’)

Double thumbs up for ‘Rabbit Fur Coat’ from me too. I bought it on red vinyl the other week (already had the CD too)

Canon formation is interesting and tricky. Consdier the recent fortunes of country/alt-country/bluegrass. Soome of my favorite records of the last ten years have been from this area, esp. Loretta Lynn’s Van lear Rose and Jenny Lewis’s Rabbit Fur Coat. I fricking loved and still love those records…. and I *thought* everyone else did too (they got *record of the year*-type reviews when they were first released), and I thought they were well on the way to being canon. I was very surprised then when end-of-decade lists came out late last year to see them hardly mentioned.

What’s happened? I conjecture that over the same period, as part of the same increased general interest in country/bluegrass, the Carter family and Johnny Cash are now much more canonical for general/rock/pop music fans than they used to be. Everyone listens to and likes and really *gets* that stuff now whereas even in the ’90s only a much narrower group really listened to or knew about any of it. This new deep enthusiasm and canonization may have, somewhat perversely, drained away much of the original enthusiasm that attended Jenny Lewis, et al..

I *think* something similar may have happened with Prince in the ’80s etc.: stuff that seemed evidently canonical at the time ended up undermining its own status over the next ten years or so because it inspired lots of people to dig deeper into james brown and p-funk etc., and then,for a lot of people ‘who needs prince?’ became a very good question. My strong sense is that Pet Sounds, Forever Changes, and Odyssey and Oracle has similar trajectories: for a decade or two after their initial semi-successes they were relatively obscure records that musicians freely strip-mined, then they got great cd releases in the 90s at which point they became truly canonical and all the strip-miners (everyone from lloyd cole to kravitz to weezer) suffered a serious downgrade. Or something.

@89 Rosie. (i) I think a *lot* of people prefer Rubber Soul to Sgt Pepper (I do). I fact, I think it’s pretty hard not to end up rating Rubber Soul over revolver. RS is pure joy, and if one rejects SP for its pretension etc. then almost inevitably R starts to get tarred with the same brush. RS, however, is complete paydirt and is at the bottom of the slippery slope away from SP’s alleged pompousness and calculation. (ii) I played the first 5 songs or so from Tapestry at a party recently and it almost drove people completely mad! Everyone knew the songs, but had no idea who it was, and indeed couldn’t remember why the songs sounded so familiar…. So, I gather Tapestry isn’t at all on the radar of anyone born after, say, the mid ’70s. The Bacharach and Carpenters waves of appreciation of the last decade or so haven’t helped that record at all apparently. Maybe Glee will resurrect it.