For years R.E.M. was number one on my list, and there are two reasons why I bumped them down. The first is that their output in the 2000s, save 2008's Accelerate, has been phoned in. Even the band has admitted as much. While doing press for Accelerate, guitarist Peter Buck said to Spin magazine, "It was kind of like the war in Iraq—we didn't know why we got in [the studio], we don't know how to get out, and we don't know what we're trying to accomplish. If [2004's Around the Sun] had been the best record we'd ever made and everyone said it was Pet Sounds, I could put up with eight months in the studio and the frustration. But it wasn't." Buck is right, because the seminal Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds was crafted with care and Brian Wilson's killer intentions of besting the Beatles. In fact, Wilson had a nervous breakdown when the Beatles took up his challenge and followed Pet Sounds with their own release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. One hardly gets the idea that R.E.M. was trying to best even themselves with the records they made in the 2000s.
I'm all for growing and experimenting, which is why I'll stand by their critically panned late-'90s output, but as a fan I don't appreciate the release of material a band doesn't care about but that got recorded for the sake of money or running out a record deal. If the magic's not there anymore, the band should break up or take a moment and pull itself together, not insult the fans with albums they can barely be bothered to work on. Far too many bands stay together past their sell-by date and ruin the value of their back catalog by releasing progressively worse music as they get older. It's painful, and I couldn't help but take it as a personal affront when I realized one of my favorite bands might be doing exactly that.
The second reason for downgrading R.E.M. is entirely personal. In the course of interning for and working at MTV, I attended two interviews with R.E.M. Their obnoxious attitudes at the tapings were a complete turn-off. Granted, I was very new to the music industry then and did not yet understand that everyone hates the interview circuit, where they're asked the same five questions about making their album over and over again for days on end. They were clearly so unhappy to be doing the interviews on both occasions that it turned into an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. I found the band members to be rude, dismissive, and arrogant. It was such a blow to my idea of them that I couldn't even listen to their records for two years. Meeting your musical heroes is a real risk. Sometimes it is better not to look behind the curtain.
R.E.M. remains at number two on my list for now, but my disappointment in them has admittedly chilled the air between us. We'll see how it goes.
RULE #3: UPDATE YOUR TOP FIVE LIST OFTEN.
This seems obvious, doesn't it? I think a lot of people balk at creating a Top Five list because they think they'll have to stick by it forever. You won't. Your list is fluid and should be revisited as often as necessary. You don't ever have to feel like you're married to a Top Five. But I bet that once you've figured out a few of your core artists, they'll always be on your list. If you ask me to name my Top Five again a year from now, it's likely that I'll have completely revised it. Well, okay, Elvis Costello will still be number one, barring any massive exposé of his life as a monster who eats babies. But the other four slots are subject to revision.
I only recently realized that Sleater-Kinney had earned themselves a place in my Top Five, knocking out longtime favorite Neil Finn (a great New Zealand artist in his own right and the lead singer for Crowded House and his brother, Tim Finn's, band Split Enz). I first checked out Sleater-Kinney after I saw their picture on the cover of the Dallas Observer in 1999 for the release of The Hot Rock. I was a college student at the time, and finding female voices in music felt important. I'd heard their name in conjunction with the record label Kill Rock Stars, but I had never listened to their music. Knowing only that they were a staunchly feminist band and that two of the girls used to be a couple, I went out and bought a copy of the album. I loved it. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein screeched at each other through dual vocal performances that felt immediate and angst-filled; after all, it was a breakup album full of resentful songs. It quickly became one of my favorite albums of that year.
I didn't immediately buy their earlier albums, though, or feel any particular need to. I picked up All Hands on the Bad One in 2000, and that was when their feminist message smacked me in the face. It's an album of songs about how it feels to be a woman in a band, a woman in the music industry, and a woman in American society. Those lyrics could have been ripped out of my head from my own feelings about rock music at the time. Mainstream female images are often watered down to focus on love and girly stuff. This band wasn't about that. These were the days after the riot grrrl movement had cooled, when the only female-fronted rock bands that could get on the radio were No Doubt and Garbage. I was working at the alternative rock radio station in Dallas, and the question of what female artists they played weighed heavy in my consciousness every day. I interviewed the station's music director for a feature in my college paper and asked him why they didn't play more female artists. He explained that they thought too many songs by women would alienate their predominately male listeners, so they never played two female voices in a row and kept the number of songs by women added into the rotation each week to a minimum. The geniuses behind corporate radio were absolutely sure men didn't care to hear women singing. All Hands on the Bad One conveyed how annoyed lots of women, myself included, felt by the culture surrounding rock music in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
I've slowly accumulated all of Sleater-Kinney's albums. I keep going back to them when I need to reassure myself that other women see what I see in our culture and that there is another point of view outside of the hypersexualized pop tartlet or the acoustic guitar hippie feelings girl, neither of which are my speed. Most guys don't realize how shortchanged women have been by the predominately male retelling of music history. We're segmented to the level of specialty audience and programmed to in a cloud of pink fairy dust. I don't want another Rihanna. I want to know this: Where's the female equivalent of the Foo Fighters?
It's taken a while for me to realize it, but Sleater-Kinney has become the band I respect for their message and politics as well as their music.
RULE #4: DIVERSIFY YOUR TOP FIVE WITH ARTISTS FROM SEVERAL DECADES.
This rule has a "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" quality to it. It was originally developed because I realized I thought less of people whose entire Top Five list was comprised of artists from the same decade. It's my own little music snob prejudice. If your list is all recent bands, then I assume you don't know much about music history. If it's all bands from the '80s, then I assume you've stopped listening to new music since C+C Music Factory. Either way, you're boring. It's a rule that forces me to dig deep into my own record collection to find artists whose music I like. It motivates me to listen to things I otherwise might not (lately that's been Neil Young and jazz legend Helen Humes). It's less about diversifying your list for the sake of looking smarter and more about making yourself listen to a wider swath of music in a smarter way. I find it easy to slip into thinking only of new artists whose albums I'm listening to lately and forgetting about those with whom I've had a long-term love affair or who inspired the newer bands I like.
When you think of Fleetwood Mac, you're most likely thinking of the post-1975 band lineup that included Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. That version of Fleetwood Mac released a trio of the best-selling albums of all time, including Rumours, which became a historical marker in California soft rock and is one of the most confessional pop albums ever. To this day Rumours remains a fascinating document for rock music historians, not just for the great pop songs but also for the rich band history, which was the basis for many of the songs on the album: Stevie and Lindsey break up; John and Christine McVie divorce; and, Mick Fleetwood ends his marriage to Jenny Boyd (who was the inspiration for Donovan's "Jennifer Jupiter").
I discovered and subsequently fell in love with Stevie Nicks when
I was six years old. Fleetwood Mac's terrible Mirage album had come out in 1982 and her solo album The Wild Heart followed soon after. "Gypsy" and "Stand Back" were on the radio constantly. A friend of my parents was an amateur photographer who shot the odd concert here and there, and he supplied me with multiple action shots of Stevie, blown up and framed to feed my hero worship. To me she was beautiful and weird. I was obsessed with her beaded lace skirts and witchy-woman persona. Her hippie facade was already outdated in a world of new wave, but the spookiness she brought to the stage was enough to make her seem more than original—she seemed like a woman possessed. It suggested a depth beyond what Bananarama and Madonna had to offer me.
There were manifestations of Fleetwood Mac before the Buckingham-Nicks era. They started out as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, a revered blues band. Green was the troubled genius—with guitar skills rumored to rival Eric Clapton's—who wrote the original "Black Magic Woman," later popularized by Santana. The first album from the original Fleetwood Mac lineup was a big UK chart hit, but never quite made an impact in the States. I was never much of a fan of the bluesy pre-1971 Fleetwood Mac, but after Christine Perfect (soon to become McVie) joined the group and Peter Green left, things started to go in an interesting direction.
At some point in the '90s my stepdad started playing the 1972 album Bare Trees in heavy rotation on the family CD player. He had hundreds of vinyl records, and the transition from records to CDs took years—he was quite upset when I told him that vinyl was back—so his motivation may have been simply that he'd recently re-bought the album in a new format. To my knowledge it was the first pre–Buckingham-Nicks Fleetwood Mac work I'd heard. Repetition made me quite fond of the title single "Bare Trees" and the extremely sappy "Sentimental Lady."
By the time Fleetwood Mac released their next album in 1985, I didn't care anymore. This apathy continued until Hole covered "Gold Dust Woman" in the '90s. I really thought anything Courtney Love did was genius for a while there, but we have significantly diverged since. Just the same, between public praise from Love and all-over-the-place promotion for Fleetwood Mac's reunion, I was inspired to go back to them. I was living an Angela Chase–esque, hypersensitive existence at the time, and the wide variety of songs about rejection resonated with me. I got deep into the 1975–79 Fleetwood Mac catalog (the "Little Lies" era still sucks) and eventually gained an appreciation for Christine McVie's songs like "Over My Head" and "Don't Stop."
I didn't listen to Fleetwood Mac during the eight years I lived in New York City, aside from the occasional spin at karaoke. (I do a mean "Gold Dust Woman" when I'm in the right voice.) I also overdosed on "Silver Springs" during a dumping, but I've since retired that song and emotionally torture myself with it no more. I don't think Fleetwood Mac's music is the kind of thing you can listen to while living in NYC, because the ambiance of the music is contradictory to everything happening around you. It may sound silly, but there just isn't enough sunshine to warrant listening to Fleetwood Mac. Also, it felt like there were more exciting things going on musically in my backyard, with the Strokes, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all breaking out in the local music scene, so why revisit bands from my childhood? Thinking about how insular I was in my listening habits at the time is actually what inspired this rule. While it's important to keep up with the new, it's never good to get lost in any single decade. Understanding the influences of the past only leads to a greater appreciation for the music made in the present.
Someone told me not long ago that he was obsessively listening to Tusk and that he thought it was underappreciated. When I revisited it myself, I realized I really only like the Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie songs on that album. Tusk is largely a boy's album, dominated with percussion-heavy Lindsey Buckingham material with an almost uncomfortably aggressive tone. It's an album dominated by machismo. I'd rather hear Rumours, with its big pop songs, any day.
When I moved to California I drove through Joshua Tree National Park with Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks (and a bit of Gram Parsons) as my soundtrack. With the change of atmosphere, they jumped back into my Top Five and back into my everyday consciousness.
RULE #5: ALWAYS BE PREPARED TO DEFEND YOUR LIST.
One evening in college, the aforementioned High Fidelity–loving guys were sitting on the porch of their shared house in Denton, Texas, and making a list in which they ranked the movies in the Star Wars series in order of preference. I wasn't contributing much to the conversation that evening. In fact, I was barely paying attention. My friend Josh noticed my uncharacteristic silence and asked me what my favorite Star Wars movie was. I said Return of the Jedi, because it was the first thing that popped into my head. He nodded at me very seriously and said, "It's because of the Ewoks, isn't it?"
I nearly did a spit-take. The Ewoks were the teddy-bear-like inhabitants of Endor featured in the sixth (third if you count in order of release date, but apparently sixth overall in this geekiverse) Star Wars film. I knew, from being subjected to several mindnumbing conversations on the topic, that Ewoks = death to Star Wars nerds. Depending on whom you ask, Ewoks fall just above or just below Jar Jar Binks on most Star Wars fanboys' lists of things they despise about the franchise. I had made a serious misstep in forgetting about the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi and so, knowing I was going to be mocked anyway, I decided to mess with the guys.
"Yes," I replied with as much false integrity as I could muster, "I loved the Ewoks. They were my favorite thing in the Star Wars films. They're just so cuddly." This was met by a chorus of groans. Those dorks never asked me about Star Wars again, thank God. Ever since, I haven't shied away from having an artist who is the equivalent of Return of the Jedi, the chick flick of Star Wars movies, in my Top Five—even if it will either completely offend the sensibilities of the person I am talking to or cause them to out themselves as sympathetic to what I consider an underappreciated artist.
It is inevitable that any person who asks you who your Top Five artists are will also want to critique your list. That's part of the fun of list-making for music nerds. Fiona Apple is probably the artist on my list who is a musical boner-killer for most guys. She certainly wouldn't get the approval of the Star Wars fan club from that night.
If you're a fan of Apple, then you're probably already thinking, "What's to defend, that's just good music!" If you're a guy (especially a guy I hung out with in Denton, Texas, in the late '90s) you're probably thinking, "She's crazy." That is the impression Apple creates with her ranting, cathartic songs about fucked-up relationships and bad ex-boyfriends. It is a huge part of her appeal to me, but if you mention that to a guy, there's every chance he'll think it means you're melodramatic, needy, and going to go crazy on him.
Maybe that assessment isn't entirely inaccurate, because I'm most likely to play a Fiona Apple record when I feel I have been seriously wronged in love. Her album Extraordinary Machine came out right around the time I hooked up with this guy I'll forever regret. He dropped a bold pick-up line on me at my friend Josh's wedding. We circled each other through the reception but couldn't seem to find any privacy, so we stuck to holding hands, kissing, and agreeing to e-mail. When his band came to my town a month later, he was all over me with the hand-holding and kissing and making eyes that led to a "Let's make out at your place?" And since he was a friend of my friends, I assumed he was a stand-up guy.
I found out six months later from another friend that after I left the wedding he'd found some privacy with another girl—in the parking lot. It seems that after he'd decided I should be his wedding fling, someone else swooped in with her own wedding-fling plans, which involved her knees on gravel. By the time all of this information came to light we'd moved on to being friends and he didn't understand why I was still pissed off by this incident. Several songs on Extraordinary Machine were on high rotation on my iPod during the fallout from this bombshell and will forever remind me of my unabated loathing for him. (To clarify: I hate him because he refused to apologize or admit that his behavior
was straight out of the skank-boy handbook. Is it really too much to ask that someone who holds your hand could keep his man bits out of another girl's mouth for the duration of that same evening? I bet Fiona Apple is with me on this one.)
I have stories just like this one to complement the music on her first album, Tidal, from my freshman year in college and my misguided crushes on boys who did dumb stuff like ask out my best friend instead of me. To go with her second album, When the Pawn..., I had a crush on a guy at work that led me in the wrong direction and a fling that ended in disaster. Apple is my go-to for romantic situations where I feel helpless. She's with me when the lines are blurred, ready to sympathize and growl about her own love breakdowns.
Apple's songs are an emotional force of nature surrounded by beautiful instrumentation. It doesn't help her reputation as ambassador to crazy girls that she spent much of her early career shunning fame in such a way that made her seem erratic and, well, a little crazy. She aired her beef with how Spin magazine presented her in the form of a single from her second album called "Limp." It was a bold strike against the mainstream media for a twenty-two-year-old girl, as well as an attempt to break out of the velvet Lilith Fair shackles that the music press wanted to put on her. I can't help but admire her bravado, especially when it seeps into her music. She always seems to definitively be who she wants to be; that's something I aspire to.
Any sort of outspoken expression of emotions from a woman seems to give dudes a free license to call you crazy. In Apple's case it gives music nerds room to question her credibility, even though she's obviously a talented musician, songwriter, and singer in a world of disingenuous pop stars who try to get by on hair extensions and scary makeup. A lot of guys don't feel comfortable with women expressing raw emotion in any format: sung, spoken, or via a homemade arts and crafts project. Would I be as into Fiona Apple if I didn't make tons of terrible choices in men? Possibly not. Maybe she is crazy. Maybe I'm crazy too. At least we crazy girls have each other to lean on. Just know that if you catch me hiding under the covers and crying along to a Fiona Apple record, I most likely didn't get there on my own. Some guy probably drove me there.
Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time Page 2