Swinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection

The listing impulse in music criticism is, well, hard to like. Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, ruined it, perhaps, at a time when it was going to be ruined anyway by reason of overuse. The self-evident conclusion about listing as a trope is that it belies the role of subjectivity in these matters of taste. Every top-ten list I have ever made is equally invalid, and almost all of them could easily have been changed the next day, if not within hours. The dwelling-within of subjectivity, the welcoming of error, the tolerance for whim and passing fancy, the labile tendency that inheres in critical pronouncements, these are all concealed in the list, by and large, as practiced so voluminously elsewhere.

Finding a way to include the faultiness of the list, however, to make a list that is self-evidently a failure, and invites amendment, might get you to a better and more genuine place. It was in this spirit that I recently tried, in a certain social media website context, to assemble with a passel of friends a list of “perfect albums.” It should be obvious, first, that “perfect” is a loaded word, and very hard one to lay claim to. Every perfect album has its sort of bad track (“The Way Young Lovers Do” on Astral Weeks, arguably, or “The Overload” on Remain in Light) and my idea of an execrable album (U2, The Unforgettable Fire) is someone else’s idea of an absolute masterpiece. But in attempting to compile this list I simply asked people to indulge in their wildest most irrational and partisan thoughts. We could err, I wanted to say, we could start to see perfection everywhere, instead of, in an era of trolls, always tearing stuff down, we could see the flaw as the flaw that proves the perfection of creation, we could see the wabi sabi of it all, another aspect of perfect artistic practice, we could try to believe instead of trying not to believe, and then failing we could try again.

The list sort of took off as a thread, and like many things on social media, it became unwieldy and impossible to follow, people kept not reading the thread and then putting Joni Mitchell on there again (usually Blue or Court and Spark, but not exclusively), and then after I felt like it was done, people kept adding things, for a good ten days more, so that the list is sort of a thing that will never end, or will, as all lists should, continue to change and morph. I had a friend attempt to type it up, and because it kept changing, this was sort of an impossible task, and, of course, I decided it had horrible omissions, and added a few more albums. You will now find some version of the list below. It is imperfect. You should add some more.

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10cc, Sheet Music

Gregg Allman, Laid Back

The Allman Brothers, At Fillmore East

Oren Ambarchi, Grapes of the Estate

American Music Club, California

Amon Düül II, Yeti

Louis Armstrong, Hot Fives and Sevens

The Beach Boys, Endless Summer

The Beach Boys, Friends

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds

The Beastie Boys, Check Your Head