Listening to certain
records, it’s sometimes hard to believe that they’re as old as they are. There
are the obvious game changers – Sgt. Pepper’s, The Wall, Electric Ladyland, Highway 61 Revisited, Kind of Blue, I Feel Love, Nevermind, Dusty in
Memphis, to name a few – but there somewhat less obvious records that have helped
to shape modern music. After a lot of narrowing down, I settled with these five as my personal picks.
·
Rapper’s Delight – The Sugar Hill Gang
Released
in 1979, this ground-breaking hip-hop track sounds like something straight out
of the nineties. Nurtured from freestyle created at a hip-hop event in the
Bronx in ‘78, it has gone on to be, arguably, the first song to bring rap into
the mainstream. The track features a bass line from Chic’s ‘Good Times’ and has
influenced huge hits from Blondie’s hip-hop-inspired ‘Rapture’ to essentially
Grandmaster Flash’s entire career. Fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds of
pure old-school bliss.
·
Oxygène – Jean Michel Jarre
Not
unlike some of Brian Eno’s ambient material, Jarre’s album Oxygène, notably Oxygène
IV, released in 1976, helped to popularise synthesizers for what would become
the electronic eighties: “the album that led the synthesizer revolution of the
Seventies.” Marrying electronic and classical in atmospheric ecstasy, Oxygène is as danceable as it is eerie. Also not to be outdone in the live stakes, Jarre
donned an almost Guetta-like getup to play to a crowd of a million at Place de
la Concorde in the centre of Paris, three years after Oxygène's release. And that's no mean feat.
·
Autobahn – Kraftwerk
German
pioneers Kraftwerk are undoubtedly one of the
most influential bands in history. After a series of tentative instrumental albums, Autobahn brought experimentalism coated with pop sensibilities to the masses,
paving the way for new wave, techno and modern EDM in the process… way back in
1974. David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of albums and Tubeway Army’s ‘Are Friends
Electric?’ have Kraftwerk written all over them, and they’ve been sampled by
everyone from Madonna to Coldplay. Once thought of as soulless in an age of
long hair and prog rock, the sound of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn is now everywhere.
·
The Velvet Underground & Nico - The
Velvet Underground & Nico
A
commercial flop upon its release in 1967, a wise soul (Brian Eno) once said
that “everyone who bought it [the album] formed a band”. The Velvet Underground
& Nico is a noisy yet often lullaby-like art rock masterpiece which fuses
blues and avant-garde and has acted as the launch pad for acts as diverse as R.E.M.,
Portishead and Iggy Pop. Exploring the themes of hard drugs, BDSM as well as
Andy Warhol’s Factory stars, the album has gone on to form the cornerstone of
alternative music, with a timeless feel to it that wouldn’t seem dated or out
of place on the independent albums chart today.
·
Marquee Moon – Television
Television’s
1976 debut, with the throbbing guitar of its title track, sounds as fresh now
as it did forty years ago. A trail-blazing record for the New York post-punk
scene, Marquee Moon comprises headily intellectual garage rock tunes and is
often cited as the starting point for indie rock and American punk. The sound
of fellow New Yorkers The Strokes recalls that of Marquee Moon-era Television,
and it shows that what on the surface seems like a fairly straightforward collection
of songs can have a genre and generation-spanning influence.
Comments
Post a Comment