Fuck the Grammys, man.

The first part of this week’s column will upset Josh Rogers, my friend in England. He writes, “I enjoy your columns more when you’re not wasting your breath on things that will never be less stupid than they are.” That’s a fair point. The Grammys, and in fact most awards shows, will never be less stupid than they are. It’s a failing of my character, I guess, that ignorance makes me mad, and supposedly authoritative ignorance makes me self-righteous. The next few paragraphs are a full-on bitch session, and if you don’t feel like reading someone raging against something that will never be less stupid than it is, you can join Mr. Rogers in skipping about 400 words. (Sorry for the unintentional children’s television joke there…)

So, as I said, fuck the Grammys, man.

The Academy made a few major mistakes along with the usual slew of minor ones. First, it was insulting enough to Shelby Lynne to nominate her for Best New Artist after six albums and 13 years in the biz, but to actually award it to her was just silly. She handled it well, and doubtless she’ll never get this much nationwide attention again, but really. That’s like naming John Glenn Best New Astronaut.

Of course, I’m most upset about Steely Freakin’ Dan. Even if you disagree with my assessment of Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP as album of the year, you had to be surprised at the Academy’s conclusion. Two Against Nature was the weakest album of the lot, exhibiting zero artistic growth from the duo’s last album in 1979. Even Radiohead’s Kid A showed more daring and musicianship than Steely Dan’s effort. Sadly, Dan had the safest album of the lot as well. Leaving Eminem’s foul-mouthed role-playing aside for a second, both Radiohead and Beck made culturally warping works aimed at the fringe, and Paul Simon presented a sparkling, mature record that taxed those with limited attention spans. Two Against Nature was the easy-listening, soft-rock cop-out that the Academy seems to need every year.

But then they went and made a huge deal about Eminem’s performance on the show, going so far as to have the president of the RIAA introduce him with a stirring speech about freedom and artistry. That speech alone made the three-hour broadcast worth watching, and the performance that followed was simple and understated, a refreshing change for the Grammys. All the press marveled at Eminem’s restraint. What did they think he was going to do, step to the mike and say, “Thanks for the fuckin’ Grammy, and by the way, I hate gays?” What the hell are they so afraid of? Awarding The Marshall Mathers LP Album of the Year wouldn’t be an endorsement of its content, just of the artistry that went into crafting it. Or something like that, since I’m paraphrasing, of course, from the RIAA president’s speech. The Academy’s learned to talk the talk, and now they need to learn the other half of the cliche.

Okay, Josh, you can start reading again.

I first heard the Dave Matthews Band in a record store. I was browsing, and every once in a while my ear would be drawn to some snatch of melody or tone color from the speakers. I didn’t think much of it until “Jimi Thing,” track nine on DMB’s studio debut, Under the Table and Dreaming, started up. I’d never heard anything quite like it, and I bought the record at once. This was two months before “What Would You Say” burned up the airwaves, and until that happened, I never imagined the Dave Matthews Band would be stars. They were too quirky, too organic, too musical to make a dent in the charts.

Silly, silly me.

Eight years into a decidedly unorthodox superstar career, I still don’t see the Dave Matthews Band as your typical popular act. Their lineup has always been acoustic guitar, bass, drums, sax and violin. Their songs have often twisted into 10-minute workouts that made you sweat just listening to them. Three years ago they put out the second-best album of 1998 with Before These Crowded Streets, a huge, sprawling mess that showcased just how good these musicians really are. In fact, it’s been my experience that the Dave Matthews Band has spent most of their career being underrated because of their chart success. Streets was like a mission statement – “Yeah, we’ve had four top 10 hits, and all the women love us, but listen to this.”

Three years later, and DMB has just released Everyday, the album on which they’ve decided to start playing down to expectations. They’ve hooked up with human hit factory Glen Ballard, the guy who made Alanis Morissette into a household name, and they’ve discovered the electric guitar. The result is a fuzzed-out short pop album chock full o’ number one singles. The unfortunate side result is that it sounds anonymous. While there are only a few groups on the planet who could have played the songs on Streets, on Everyday they sound like just another band.

Ballard co-wrote all the songs with Matthews, and you can hear his touch all over this thing. The arrangements are thick and oversaturated, especially when Ballard piles on the synths and drum programs. (Yeah, electronic drum patterns, the current alt-rock rage. My feeling is, if you have Carter Beauford for a drummer and you use a drum machine, that’s an incredible waste of resources. That’s like landing John Coltrane for your jazz ensemble and having him play the triangle.) The songs all revolve around verse-chorus-verse flowchart patterns, and almost every track ends abruptly, as if the band kept playing for three or four minutes after Ballard chose to stop the tape. No song breaks the five-minute mark, which by itself isn’t a bad thing, but many of the songs are too weak to even sustain five minutes.

“Sleep to Dream Her,” for example, is the first DMB song I’ve ever found myself fast-forwarding through. It’s one part reggae and two parts crap. I never again want to hear a song called “Angel,” especially one this trite and boring. I also never want to hear another song sung from the point of view of a child asking his parents why the world is a mess, like “Mother Father.”

There are some good moments on Everyday, though when I first heard “I Did It,” the now-ubiquitous single, I never thought it would be one of my favorites. Sadly, it is, even though it bores me to tears. The second single is supposed to be “The Space Between,” an infinitely better song. I’d have preferred the stripped-down arrangement the band played on Saturday Night Live to the over-produced version on the album, but it’s a nice tune. So is “If I Had It All,” the album’s one moment of musical and lyrical depth. “Fool to Think” allows the band to strut their stuff, if only for four minutes, and its time signatures are pretty cool. (Standard four-four cuts to a chorus in nine-eight without missing a beat.) The closing title track is hummable and pleasant as well.

Still, most of Everyday is only one or two steps removed from later-period Sting. The tragedy is that there’s another DMB album, one they had completed before scrapping it to revamp their image and work with Ballard. One hopes that the unreleased effort holds all the musicianship and energy that Everyday is missing. Chances are this album will do very, very well sales-wise. It’s just discouraging that after eight years of outplaying their chart brethren, the Dave Matthews Band has chosen to prove all their detractors right.

I’ll be back in praise mode next week, with a surprisingly good disc that just came out. At least, I was surprised. Thanks to everyone who’s written me, and I’ll try to send replies by the end of the week. Honest, I’m just really busy.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s the 2/27 column, on 2/27! How do you like them apples?

Computer’s back, my health is strong, and it should be smooth sailing until another unforeseen disaster derails everything. I even have a choice of topics this week. I’ve recently picked up three really cool albums (Midnight Oil’s Capricornia, Neil Finn’s live album 7 Worlds Collide and Cerberus Shoal’s Mr. Boy Dog), but I’m not going to deal with any of them this week. I also have to write a massive review of the Alarm 2000 box set, which just arrived from Wales this week, but I’m not quite done absorbing that yet, so it won’t be this week.

No, I’ve chosen to write about the most annoying and frustrating of this week’s new releases, Alanis Morissette’s Under Rug Swept. This is simply because I relate to the second track, “Narcissus,” and enjoy causing myself great pain.

I first heard Morissette’s 15-quadrillion-googolplex-selling debut Jagged Little Pill on a bet. It wasn’t the first time I’d head the distinctive caterwaul of Ms. Morissette, though – like everyone else on the planet, I was unable to escape her trio of breakout singles in 1995. As people who knew me then can attest, her singular inability to even approximate the right notes on “All I Really Want” nearly caused me to burst both my eardrums with a sharp pointy stick. As each day wore on, I prayed that the general public would start to notice how brain-splittingly awful those singles were and come to its senses.

Because they’re the general public, however, they did the exact opposite and made Morissette a superstar and a poster child for whiny anger. “You Oughtta Know” basically boils down to, “My boyfriend left me and I’m REALLY MAD,” and apparently this sort of surface-level soul-baring struck a chord with most of America, and began the onslaught of one-hit ready-made confrontational females with not an iota of talent between them. (Remember Meredith Brooks? Didn’t think so.)

And then my old friend Jeff Maxwell, writer of e-column Twitch, bet me that I’d like the rest of the album. He in fact offered to pay for my copy of Jagged Little Pill if I didn’t dig it. As I said before, I like causing myself pain for some reason, so I bought it and prepared for 55 minutes of sheer sonic agony.

But it wasn’t like that at all.

Oh, the singles still grated, but Jeff was right. The rest of Jagged Little Pill pointed towards happiness instead of dwelling in miserable rage, and the songs were well-constructed enough that I could see the mature songwriter Morissette might one day become. Maxwell even predicted the phenomenal hit potential of “Ironic,” which incidentally contains almost no irony whatsoever. He was right. Morissette was worth my attention.

Had Pill not been a 60-times-platinum icon of suppressed fury, it might have been considered a decent start. The production is a bit too slick sometimes (except on the vocals, of course), the songs all have that “here comes the chorus” feeling that producer Glen Ballard brings to all of his work, and the lyrics occasionally slip into the silly, but it’s not bad. Regardless of the quality of her album, though, Morissette had to be dreading the eventual, inevitable backlash. Even though she had it all over people like Brooks and Tracy Bonham and Natalie Imbruglia, the originator of the trend found herself grouped in with it.

The harshest critics called her a product of her record company (Maverick Records, owned by the best manipulator of public taste around, Madonna), and postulated that without Ballard to co-write and produce her work, she’d fall on her face. She didn’t even need to ditch Ballard to prove them right with her follow-up album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. An extremely long and stream-of-consciousness effort, Junkie took several steps forward in every area but popularity. Thing is, it was considerably more sophisticated than its predecessor. It was risky and confident and occasionally mangled, but it was undoubtedly not the work of a record company product.

All of which brings us to the syntax-impaired Under Rug Swept. Morissette has finally left Ballard behind, electing to produce 11 new songs herself. And surprise, she’s actually better at capturing her own sound than Ballard was. If Pill was a mission statement to millions and Junkie was an overreaction to its popularity, then Swept is just a pop album, and that’s the way it ought to be. If you strip away the hype from her first two efforts and listen to them as pop albums, Swept is her most balanced and concise collection.

You’ll have to trust me on that and just bear with the first three songs, though, because they suck. “21 Things I Want in a Lover” is just a list put to boring and repetitive music, “Narcissus” tries to spice things up with a megaphone and fails miserably, and “Hands Clean” is just godawful. (As a quick side note, it doesn’t quite surprise me that “Hands Clean” is her most successful single in ages, because it copies almost everything I hated about her big hits. In fact, it almost seems like she got in a time machine and visited her 1995 self to ask for another chart smash.)

Ah, but starting with track four, Swept turns into the mature, almost satisfying album it thinks it is. “Flinch” is perhaps the most flat-out lovely song she’s penned, with “That Particular Time” in the running as well. Also noteworthy is “You Owe Me Nothing In Return,” a spooky number that revisits some of the lyrical themes of “Still,” which remains the best song in her catalog. For six straight tracks, Morissette stays afloat, eschewing her typical wail in favor of subtle singing and occasionally surprising songcraft. That the album crashes and burns with its last two tracks, especially the all-too-earnest “Utopia,” is a shame, but with my luck they’ll be the two next hit singles.

The only other sticking point, and it’s a big one, is Morissette’s tongue-twisting lyrics. Too often the words seem disassociated from the music, like they were two separate thoughts. It’s kind of amazing that music was written to “21 Things I Want in a Lover” at all. A sample stanza: “Do you derive joy from diving in, and seeing that loving someone can actually feel like freedom? Are you funny? A la self-deprecating? Like adventure? And have many formed opinions?” It feels like she composed a want-ad for her local newspaper, and then grabbed the wrong piece of paper on her way to the studio.

Even the best songs on Swept suffer from overlocution, which is actually a good example of a word she might try to shoehorn into a song one day. “That Particular Time” is a somber piano piece reminiscent of Counting Crows’ “Colorblind,” but when she gets to the line, “That particular month we needed to marinate in what ‘us’ meant,” it nearly sinks the mood, not to mention the fact that it doesn’t fit the melody very well. If there’s anything Morissette needs to work on, it’s sculpting the lyrics to complement the music.

The sad part is, she’s getting there. She’s starting to break her cocoon and stretch her wings, but because of the success of Pill, her fans are expecting another angry testimony that speaks to their own so-called pain. Swept speaks to no one’s pain but Morissette’s, which may be its downfall in the sales department. By the end of it, you feel more like her therapist than her comrade in arms, and though it’s obvious that Morissette considers herself a bit of a modern-day Joni Mitchell, even Mitchell gazed outward every now and then. Swept, though musically far better than its predecessors, remains self-obsessed, effectively closing Jagged Little Pill‘s audience out.

That’s too bad, because the fun of following someone like Morissette lies in watching her develop. She’s obviously taking baby steps on a long-term path, and if she can escape the blandness of half of this new album, she may get there. The question is, will our short-term-memory culture let her get there, or have they already moved on to the next singer willing to speak with their voice instead of her own?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m almost ready for the Oscars.

This year I had the worst ratio of seen to unseen films (two films out of five for Best Picture) in many a moon, because I deemed most of what the studios lobbed my way in 2000 crap. The Best Picture category this year is the most random-seeming selection I can remember – a Roman gladiator epic, a Chinese-language martial arts picture, a bio-pic about a woman on a crusade, a grungy drug saga and a simple, sweet love story. Before last week, I’d seen only Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Gladiator is inspiring drama on the big screen and murky melodrama on the small one. Crouching Tiger is a sweeping film that will probably suffer the same problem, but it’s leagues better than its main competition.

I still haven’t seen Chocolat, but I plan to remedy that this weekend. Last week, though, I saw the Steven Soderbergh pictures, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. If he keeps up this standard, Soderbergh could easily find himself with a body of work to rival that other filmmaking Steven. Brockovich is serviceable and entertaining, with even Julia Roberts coming off well. (Usually, she’s the deal-breaker with me.) It has no business being nominated for Best Picture, especially over Almost Famous, but it doesn’t make a false move.

Traffic, now, that’s a wonder to behold. This film currently holds the spot The Insider occupied last year for me: it’s a terrific film that will most likely get robbed of its deserving award. Unlike The Insider, there are no bold, sweeping strokes in Traffic. It’s two and a half hours of moments, subtlety and character that combine to form a comprehensive and damning argument against the so-called war on drugs. Even the form the film takes is part of that argument. By its conclusion, Soderbergh has shown that bold, sweeping strokes will not make a difference. You can only fight this war one person at a time. This film should win Best Picture, and when it doesn’t, I’ll be upset, but I won’t be surprised.

Geez, look how I’ve rambled on. And I even have an honest-to-gosh new CD to review this time as well. Special thanks again to Bull Moose in Portland, Maine. My package containing Jonatha Brooke’s new album, Steady Pull, arrived today, and it was worth the wait.

Brooke started off as one half of the Story, with Jennifer Kimball. The duo made lovely, complex acoustic pop music, but the best songs were Brooke’s, so it was no surprise that when she went solo with Plumb, she made a perfect pop record. (To be fair, Kimball’s solo album, Veering From the Wave, is quite good in its own right.) It was her fourth album, 10 Cent Wings, however, that truly established her as a formidable songwriting voice. It’s one of those records on which each song, as it’s playing, is your favorite. It takes retrospection to find a standout track. For my money, though, that standout is “Because I Told You So,” a simple, elegant acoustic number that should have sent Brooke’s career into the stratosphere.

Instead, because MCA Records had no idea what to do with an album this good, the song wasn’t even released as a single. 10 Cent Wings languished unpromoted, a common story with an increasingly common result: Brooke bailed on major labels all together. Last year she followed Aimee Mann, another literate pop songwriter with a history of uncooperative record companies, into the realm of independent distribution. Brooke’s personal label is called Bad Dog, and her first release was Live, a collection of… well, live tracks.

Now, when an album is as good as 10 Cent Wings is, I don’t usually expect much from the follow-up. Oh, sure, I hope that an artist can recreate previous creative success, but it usually doesn’t happen. I call it the Sarah McLachlan Effect: two good albums followed by a stunner, and then a return to making merely good albums. McLachlan will most likely never make a record as good as Fumbling Towards Ecstasy again. I expected a similar pattern with Brooke (who, by the way, deserves McLachlan’s success more than McLachlan does), so it’s a pleasure to report that Steady Pull is just as good, if not better than, 10 Cent Wings.

For the first time, Brooke has produced herself here, and the creative freedom shows. The first single and leadoff track, “Linger,” is decent if uninspired, but from there the record soars. Brooke excels at crafting lush pop music that never goes where you expect it to. Following the twists and turns of a song like “Walking” is a constantly engaging surprise. The 12 songs on Steady Pull actually sound like they sprang from the pen of Neil Finn, a songwriter Brooke has obviously learned a great deal from. I’d accept any of these tunes (even “Linger”) from Finn, which from me is a high compliment.

Finn himself shows up on “New Dress,” which is about as delicate as this album gets. Brooke has expanded her sonic range here, which might upset some fans of her older, more acoustic material. She’s never recorded a full electric rave-up like “Out of Your Mind” before, and on 10 Cent Wings, she reserved the acoustic-to-electric dynamic for the epic “Crumbs.” Here that dynamic appears all over the place, most effectively on “Digging,” whose chorus makes better use of just two chords than any in recent memory. Elsewhere, Brooke sets up grooves and slips lovely melodies on top of them, like she does on the title track and “How Deep Is Your Love.” These tunes find her stretching her voice farther than she’s taken it before, to great effect.

And again, I have a favorite, but only on retrospection. It’s a statement of purpose buried near the end called “I’ll Take It From Here.” For all her righteous indignation, Aimee Mann has never written a declaration of independence this clear: “I’ll take it from here, I’ll succeed or I will fail but I will decide, Catch my breath and count to 10 and open my eyes again…” It’s brief, but it all but defines this set of songs. Despite how difficult it must have been to watch an album like 10 Cent Wings wither on the vine, Jonatha Brooke has delivered on her own confidence. She’s proven throughout her career that if one group of songs doesn’t bring her the recognition she deserves, she can always write more that are just as good. That’s something no label executive could ever do.

Oh, and I am going to make two copies of this album and deliver them to the managers of the record stores in my town that refused to stock it, just so they can hear what they’re missing. It’s a silly hope, I know, but maybe hearing how good Steady Pull is will change their minds. If not, well, at least two more people got to hear it. It’s the least I can do.

Hey, if your local record store doesn’t carry copies of this disc, you can always go to jonathabrooke.com and order them directly. I hear Brooke will even sign ‘em for you.

Let’s hope this is a portent of the year to come. We’ve got Dave Matthews, Duncan Sheik, Amy Ray, Semisonic, Our Lady Peace and Sepultura coming up, and if they’re as good as Jonatha Brooke’s album, I’ll be a happy boy.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Yeah, I know, I’m late. You should see the first draft.

I’m a bit angry this week, and I feel that it’s important to get these feelings out while they’re still fresh. I find that if you let these little frustrations bottle up without spewing them out in some (hopefully) harmless way, then they fester inside and cause bleeding ulcers and painful, early death. It’s crucial, I feel, that one finds an outlet (like, say, a weekly column) through which to vent these venomous, bitter emotions.

Like I said, you should see the first draft.

What’s got me upset? At the risk of sounding like Michael Moore, corporate America. Here’s my stupid story.

As I promised last week, the new Jonatha Brooke album, Steady Pull, came out yesterday. I live in a town with two music stores, so I thought I’d call both of them a week in advance and ask, quite nicely, if they’d order me a copy of the album. Both stores (corporate-owned mall-type stores, by the way) said they’d have it on the release date. Neither of them did.

A trifling annoyance, you may say. To me, though, this is indicative of a larger problem, one that I don’t want to overstate, but which seems like a big deal to me. People talk about the increasing availability of music these days, what with MP3s and Napster, but the truth is that most people still go to the record store to buy CDs. Like most things, the record shops are becoming more and more corporate, with larger chains overtaking the smaller stores and driving them out of business. This is bad because the corporate owners don’t give two rat’s butt cheeks about music, just the financial bottom line.

This attitude extends beyond the ordering process. One thing that I’ve always loved about small music stores is that the owner(s) almost always work in the shops themselves. You don’t start your own record store unless you really like music. Just as you’d expect the staff at a car dealership to know more than a little bit about cars, I expect the staff at a music store to have more than a passing interest in music. In smaller stores, the owner(s) do the hiring, and they base their decisions partially on knowledge of music. That just makes sense. If a customer has a question about an artist or an album, the customer service rep should be able to answer it.

Not so in huge corporate chain stores. If you have a pulse and can work a cash register, you can work in a huge corporate chain store. This is because, if a particular title doesn’t sell eight million copies in its first week and get three-times-an-hour rotation on MTV, the huge corporate chain store doesn’t care about it. Not only did neither corporate store have the disc I specifically requested, not a single staff member of the four total that I talked to knew who Jonatha Brooke is. Now, while I wouldn’t call Brooke mainstream, I certainly wouldn’t call her underground either. She has six albums, two with the Story, and four of those are major-label releases. If you know who Aimee Mann is, you probably know who Jonatha Brooke is.

I should mention that I finally tracked down the album. I called Bull Moose in Portland, Maine, a small chain that’s privately owned (and where I worked for a few months). I spoke to Katie, who not only knew who Jonatha Brooke is, but knew her whole history. Bull Moose had several copies of the album on their hit wall, and sold me one over the phone. I patronized Bull Moose for eight years while I lived in Maine, and I’m afraid they’ve spoiled me against other music stores. If I wanted something, they ordered it. If I had a question, they could answer it. If more stores were like Bull Moose, Amazon.com wouldn’t be nearly as profitable.

The truth behind corporate conglomerates is that quality of service doesn’t matter as much as quantity of profits. There are people, believe it or not, who don’t care about Jennifer Lopez’s ass or which Backstreet Boy has the best-primped hair. There are albums, believe it or not, that are still incredible works, regardless of how miniscule their sales figures turn out. There are artists, believe it or not, who go 30 years without selling what Britney Spears does in an afternoon, and yet have the ability to change the world with one note and one turn of phrase.

There’s no doubt that I get too worked up over this stuff. I just wish the good stuff was more readily available. Ah well. Let’s see how hard it’ll be for me to get the new Orb album in two weeks.

I wanted to mention the Oscars, because I’m terribly disappointed. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Best Picture nomination was a welcome surprise, and even though I haven’t seen Traffic (my town’s one multiplex hasn’t opened it yet, even though they’re still wasting theater space on What Women Want), I’m glad it got nominated. No, I’m disappointed that the best movie I saw this year, Almost Famous, didn’t get a nod. That means it won’t get a re-release, and those of you that haven’t seen it will have to make do with the video and DVD release in March. I highly, highly recommend it.

There was one nomination I heard about this week that gave me a warm feeling all over, though, and it had nothing to do with the Oscars. One of the best comic book novels I’ve ever read, Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me, got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Literature. (The only comic ever to win was Art Spiegelman’s Maus.)

Pedro and Me is Winick’s examination of his time on The Real World in San Francisco, focusing on the life of AIDS educator Pedro Zamora. This has left him open to charges of exploitation in crafting this book, and if he needs any vindication (which those who’ve read the book can attest that he certainly does not), the Pulitzer nomination provides it many times over. Pedro and Me is one of the warmest, most human, and most accomplished graphic novels ever published. It’s hard to believe it’s Winick’s first novel. You can get Pedro and Me at any bookstore (or comic book store), and of course, I recommend that you do.

This is gonna sound familiar, but next week, it’ll either be Jonatha or controversy.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I had this great dream the other night.

I dreamed that there were five (count ‘em, five) new flavors of Trix, and that they were these indescribable, intergalactic-sounding fruity flavors, and that I could try each one, and the world was a much better place. Then I woke up to find that I was still stuck with generic, boring old one-variety Trix. Life has just been like that lately.

I had two things to talk about this time, and each feels like a large enough topic to fill a column by itself. One is controversial, one is not, and as much as I’d like to think I’ll get to one this week and one next week, I know that the new Jonatha Brooke album is coming out next Tuesday (2/13), and I’m sure I’ll want to wax something or other on that. For some reason, I’m not feeling all that controversial tonight, so I’m going to discuss VH-1’s latest exercise in debate-starting, the 100 Greatest Albums of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

As I’ve said previously, I like lists. I like the idea of rating one artist against another, and I also like seeing how people view their art. Everything’s subjective, and no one’s opinion matters any more than anyone else’s. (In fact, one could make a strong case that in matters of art, no one’s opinion matters at all, but for obvious reasons, I’m not going down that road.) When a semi-official source claims to have ranked the top 100 anything, though, a certain weight is added to that opinion. Take, for instance, the American Film Institute’s naming of Citizen Kane as the best film ever made. That film is 60 years old at this point, and the idea that no one’s topped it is debatable, but people for some reason paid attention to the AFI list as if it were gospel.

Here’s something I learned in Dr. Kasper’s religion class: even the Gospel is debatable.

These lists, nifty as they are, should in no way substitute for your own opinion based on your experience. If you watch Citizen Kane and all you see is murky black-and-white images acting out a boring plot about some newspaper guy, you’re entitled to that. If you think Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo is a finer film overall, you’re entitled to that, too. Many people (myself included) would tell you that you don’t know shit, but if that’s what you like, you shouldn’t let us culture snobs sway you.

That said, we culture snobs love artistic debate. An argument over music, film or any other form of artistic expression usually consists of one-upmanship in terms of knowledge and ideas. For instance, if you know that Citizen Kane was the first film to use deep-angle lenses to keep the foreground and the background in focus at the same time, you’ll likely be off to a decent start in the above debate. The merits of any given art form are, at this very moment, being dissected and argued relentlessly by lovers of that art form everywhere, right now, and will continue to be dissected and argued about until art is banned by the government, and even then we’ll do it in whispers in back alleys where they can’t find us.

There’s nothing like an “official” list of the best of anything to start such debate, and the first step down that road is realizing that VH-1’s opinion is worth no more than yours. Or, for that matter, mine. To prove that, I have a few issues with their list. Feel free to jump in at any time with your own gripes. (If you haven’t seen the list, it’s available at vh1.com, and can be seen, oh, like ALL THE TIME on their channel.)

Gripe number one is obvious, but glaring: OK Computer deserved to be higher on the list. In fact, any slot below 40 or so is too low for the best album produced in the last 20 years. Yeah, I mean that. The ‘80s and ‘90s have been surprisingly low on the creativity meter, except for Radiohead’s masterpiece. It’s a compositional and emotional stunner that pisses on everything after 1979. If we’re rating the absolute best, as opposed to the most popular or the highest selling, Radiohead needs to be ranked higher.

All in all, VH-1 did a decent job of not falling into the popularity trap. You’ll see no Elvis Presley on their list, thank Jesus, and some critical favorites made the list that on some lists get overlooked. The Velvet Underground and Nico is a good example, as is the Stooges’ Raw Power. They even did the service of including Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, the first jazz album to incorporate rock styles and to acknowledge rock ‘n’ roll as a musical force.

It’s also telling that the Beatles don’t show up until the top 10. I can’t exactly argue with Revolver’s place at number one. It’s a terrific album, and every song on it can still be heard regularly on radio stations everywhere. I think they’re wrong, though. In my humble opinion, the best album of rock ‘n’ roll can be found six slots down on their list: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Here’s my argument. Revolver is a great group of songs, no question. In fact, up until that point, albums were just that: groups of songs. Even the wonderland of brilliance that’s at number three, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, is just a group of songs. Sgt. Pepper, released in 1967, was the first album of the rock era that was meant to be heard from beginning to end. Sgt. Pepper introduced the album concept, songs linked thematically and sonically to form something greater than the sum of its parts. The Beatles not only rewrote the rules of pop and rock songwriting, they also created the rulebook for album sequencing, a book that people are still stealing from to this day.

With Sgt. Pepper, the Fab Four presented the studio record as a work of art to the general public for the first time, refusing to tour and release singles so that the focus would be squarely on the album as a whole. If Citizen Kane is the best film ever made because filmmakers have been pinching ideas from it for 60 years, then Sgt. Pepper more than deserves top honors in the rock album category. Not only have artists been stealing from it for more than 30 years, they still have yet to catch up to it. Revolver is marvelous, but it’s definitely a prelude to the three albums that came after it, starting with Sgt. Pepper. (The other two, by the way, are also on the list: the “white album” and Abbey Road.)

Still, I can’t really complain about Revolver hitting the top spot. No, my big (and I mean big) complaint lies with the number two choice. If you’re gonna call your list the Top 100 Albums of Rock ‘n’ Roll, people are going to assume you mean the 100 best. By “best,” people are also going to assume you mean the albums that stand out in terms of composition, delivery and production. In fact, most of VH-1’s list bears this out. So what the bloody blue hell is Nirvana’s Nevermind doing at second-best?

Nirvana was a sensation, no doubt. They threw the doors open for heavy, guitar-based music on the charts, no question. At best, though, they were a typical three-piece grunge-pop group, and one that fell far behind their peers (Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) in terms of ability. Nevermind is largely accepted (even by the band members) as the group’s worst effort, it being far glossier than Bleach and far less musically advanced than In Utero. No, it just happened to be the most popular. Listen up, folks: the voice of a generation can’t necessarily carry a tune.

Its presence on the list would be bad enough, but at number two? Think about that. VH-1’s panel of judges thinks Nevermind is a better album than Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds, Abbey Road, Electric Ladyland, Exile on Main Street, and (yes, I have to say it again) OK Computer. As John Travolta says in Pulp Fiction, that’s a bold statement. If eight million of you hadn’t bought the album and Saint Cobain hadn’t ventilated his own head, I promise you, you would not see Nevermind on this list. That’s a lot like the above example of rating Deuce Bigalow above Citizen Kane. Sure, you’re entitled to that opinion, but good luck backing it up.

Of course, that’s just what I think.

I love these debates, and I love the big, stupid lists that often spark them. Kudos to VH-1 for even undertaking this project, and for doing a decent job at it all around. Of course, they forgot Frank Zappa entirely…

Okay, I’m all out. Next week, Jonatha or controversy, depending on how I feel.

See you in line Tuesday morning.