Desert Island - 5 Albums

I honestly don't think that's the case at all here. "Life's Rich Pageant" is an absolutely remarkable album. For some reason the songs don't get as played out as the other ones upon repeated listenings, particularly the opening 1-2 punch of "Begin the Begin" an "These Days."

 

I'm not saying it's not a good album. I do assert that sales on occasion make an album less credible here. And I stand by my assertion that in real life, LRP would finish third at best

 

So you're questioning people's sincerity? That doesn't seem very fair. Almost like a character judgment. FWIW, LRP is my favorite R.E.M. album. Here, in real life and anywhere in between.

 

I'm not linking anybody to child molestation or anything. I just think a bit of music snobbery comes out when we do these exercises.

 

But LRP is about the most straight-forward album they ever made. It's every bit as accessible as the major label efforts. I don't know. I guess we can agree to disagree. For some reason, I think LRP holds up better over repeated lessons. Hence its presence on a desert island. FWIW, I also have this battle with my brother all the time because he thinks I basically listen to Son Volt and Steve Earle instead of Tim McGraw and Big & Rich as some sort of hipster affectation.

 

Actually, I'd be astonished if many REM fans picked "Document." It had a couple of their first mainstream hits but wasn't very good. "Out of Time" had bigger hits, but overall still wasn't one of their best.

And really, I would contend the best-known, best-selling albums are rarely the best -- they just happened to be the ones that had something with broad appeal. The Rolling Stones sold 3 million copies of "Steel Wheels" in the US, and one million copies of "Exile on Main Street." You want to find someone who thinks "Steel Wheels" is a better album?

"Pet Sounds" was the Beach Boys' 11th album. 8 of those previous 10 albums charted higher in the US than "Pet Sounds." "Pet Sounds" is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, is light years better than anything else they ever did, and it's not one of their 10 highest charting albums in the US. I doubt you'll see many people list "Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)" over "Pet Sounds."

 

So people wouldn't take something with them that appealed to them? And Beach Boys is a bad example. Plenty of people would take one of the early albums; many of them were perfectly awesome in their own right. The one with Help Me Rhonda and Wendy on it was particularly very good. Pet Sounds is a musicians' and aesthetes' Mecca, but not particularly your normal Beach Boys fan's Mecca.

And I didn't say sales were the be-all and end-all. Breakfast in America outsold Supertramp's other albums combined, probably, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be a choice of those who still care enough about Supertramp to take one to a desert island.

And the music market and basic affluence of people were a lot different from the time of Sticky Fingers to the time of Steel Wheels.

And your second graf begins with the snobbery I'm talking about. It doesn't anger me, it just makes me chuckle.

 

Why is this the one thing in American life that people get accused of being a "snob" about if they don't bow to the mainstream?

If someone started a skiing thread or a bicycling thread, I doubt we'd have people jumping in to tweak them about how they actually were all closet NFL fanatics. No one does that to the hockey fans. But this particular corner of American life seems to bring out the skeptics and charges of insincerity. I don't get it.

 

Apples, meet oranges, Waylon. Cyclists, skiers and hockey fans don't denigrate others for the sports they like, as a rule. Many music snobs do bust the chops of others for the music they like. These music snobs usually bust on people who like music that is considered more popular, and often by extension less worthy, than the music the snobs like. If Shottie were still here, he could articulate this concept better than I. And it just seems this board has a high proportion of folks with at least a touch of the snobbery. I know at least one person here will take Modern Lovers' first album to the island.

 

Just for the record, the only one denigrating something that someone says they like on this thread has been you.

 

I'm glad I amuse you.

You are the one arguing that people wouldn't choose the album that appealed to them. You're suggesting that it's snobbery to pick "Life's Rich Pageant" instead of "Document," which implies that we all like "Document" more, but think it's hipper to go with an album that didn't have as many hits on it. Well, sorry, I don't like "Document" more.

I am an REM fan and have been since "Murmur" came out. Why should anyone think I would prefer an album that appealed to a Top 40 audience? Is "Out of Time" a better artistic achievement because it had a single that appealed to people who buy albums by 50 Cent and Lady Gaga, while "Reckoning" didn't? "Out of Time" was bought by a lot of people who don't give a shit about REM. I don't think that makes it an album that REM fans are more likely to enjoy.

 

Yeah, I'm just making up that there are plenty of people who have written in thousands of music magazines over the years about how some artist who has sold albums to his family and friends and hardly anybody else has to be better than someone who has sold millions of albums.

And PC, there are plenty of REM fans who are fans of REM based on Document, Green and Automatic for the People, and may have heard Radio Free Europe. Not everyone is a cataloguist. And it's strange that for the cataloguist, the biggest-selling albums always seem to be the ones that are most suspect. I'm not going on about this as a scold, I'm truly fascinated by this as a sociological phenomenon.