It just occurred to me that I did not load a single track from Elvis Costello & The Attractions‘ Armed Forces onto my iPod. I love EC & The Attractions – everybody loves ’em – and Armed Forces is a strong record featuring some killer songs, but I rarely if ever feel the need to spin it. I’ve felt this way for most of the years that have followed the release of Get Happy!!, my all-time favorite album (period, not just among EC albums). I feel like I’ve got nothing to learn from Armed Forces. The arrangements lack mystery and unexplored nooks and crannies for me to stumble upon. The lyrics seem to have nothing more to reveal to me. I never found it to be a very emotional album, and what emotions I once felt for the album have long since passed from my daily routine (eg, “Party Girl”). It’s a closed book. A very good book, but closed for me.
Do you have an album or albums like I’ve described, albums you know you like by artists you definitely like yet that you have zero interest in playing?
S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things.
I feel like I should spin this one way more than I actually do.
TB
For me, probably Sgt Pepper.
cher, along these lines, i jumped to the comments section to post “Abbey Road”.
there are so many for me.
I like Neil Young but have no interest in playing one of his albums.
Any Flaming Lips record. I like ’em all, really, but for some reason never spin them.
I just picked up the remastered Armed Forces and gave it a good 2 days of “spin”
Quadraphenia – I know I love it, but I just never play it. Plus the ipod has killed my attention span.. 4-5 songs and I’m back to “shuffle”
Bob, I’m the same with the Flaming Lips!
TB
Highway 61 Revisited is pretty much unrevisited for me. Blonde on Blonde too.
Some albums I just have pretty much memorized, you know? It’s funny with my kids… I have no desire to hear songs like “I heard it through the gravevine” or “respect”, but then I realize that if I never play this stuff for my kids, they won’t know it. An old saw for me is totally new to them. This is probably why my daughter likes Sparks, Kraftwerk and Xtc. Oops.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon. The former is too dark for my modern state of mind, the latter too pedestrian. In either case, I have every note memorized.
This is a damned good question! I’ve thought about it all day, and for the most part it seems to boil down to two things for me. Albums I know well enough already and don’t care to own myself, and albums I own that I never play.
I don’t own many things I never play. Granted, my Missing Persons Greatest Hits cd doesn’t get out much, butevery now and then Mental Hopscotch really seems to call out to me. I’ve got a few other things like that. Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. Sure, it’s good, but it’s certainly not great. I don’t need to listen to anymore Jimi Hendrix than I seem to soak up secondhand, so my Isle of Wight CD seems to just sit there.
The bulk of the Classic Rock canon is stuff I don’t even want, even if I like it. AC/DC, you can have them. Even with Bon Scott. Sure, I like them a lot, but why would anyone get an urge to actually listen to them on their own? I like Nirvana, but I don’t own Nevermind. I like their other stuff enough that I should own it, but I just don’t. I’m wierd that way, I guess.
I think there’s a lot of music I’m supposed to own that I skip over. I hear it enough for me, I guess. I don’t own any Marvin Gaye or James Brown. I don’t have the cool albums by The Kinks (in fact, my cd of their ep’s from the 60s is really everything I need), I hardly have any Who albums and only a few Dylan albums. I like them, but I just hear them enough, I guess.
It seems scandalous to admit, but Patsy Cline and Otis Redding are two such artists for me.
I think because they both died young they didn’t get much of a chance to change up their games. Much of their catalogs are repetitive and slight, there just doesn’t seem to be much more to get out of them. I did listening to both tons in my twenties.
Nobody needs to ever play that first Violent Femmes album ever again. And I mean nobody!
There are a bunch of Parliament/Funkadelic albums that fall in this category for me. “Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome,” “Clones Of Dr. Funkenstein,” “America Eats its Young,” and maybe “Let’s Take It To the Stage” are the only albums I’ll listen to on purpose. That leaves a *lot* in the virtually unlistened-to pile, despite the fact I’ll go to the mat for most any P-Funk album. “Maggot Brain” excepted. I never cared for that album, which I realize makes me a heretic in the P-Funk fan community.
I don’t listen to most of my record collection to be honest. Wouldn’t think of parting with them though.
I don’t listen to Elvis Costello at all anymore. I still greatly admire his records– they had a huge influence on me in the early 80s, but I can’t remember the last time I played one of them. But I do remember them fondly.
Actually, not all of them. A few of them I think I outgrew (not sure that is the right word). At one point I really thought Imperial Bedroom was a ‘Masterpiece’. Later on, I was convinced that that was where it all started to go wrong. All wrong.
Seeing the Armed Forces jacket though at the top of this post made me want to listen to that one again. Get Happy and Trust too. Those three.
Yah, the majority of the Classic Rawk cannon is dead to me now. Don’t need to hear “Axis: Bold As Love” – “Hunky Dory” – “Dark Side o’ the Moon” – “Everybody Knows This Nowhere” – “Live At Budakon” anytime soon.
Even some of my all-time standards are dead to me now jus’ due to aural over-saturation. “The Cars” – “Skylarking” – “Discipline” – “Hounds of Love” – “Whatever.” Interesting, this second list consists almost entirely of gateway drug albums: first purchase of respective artists, excluding King Crimson & XTC.
It’s also interesting, to me at least – how those gateway albums stack up after near 40 years of ever evolving listening habits.
I’m sure some of you must of had the experience of getting a copy of something you haven’t listened to since your teens or 20’s. All excited to listen to something that RAWKED your world as a youngster. And then after you push play, once you’ve given the music a chance to sink in, your first response is “Huh?” or “What was I thinking?” Not that this happens often, but it has happened enough for me to notice it.
I need a name for this phenomenon. Anybody?????????
Good call on Skylarking, Townswoman Gray. That’s a Great album I don’t really want to listen to anymore.
Good question, jeangray. If someone comes up with a name we may need to define it in the RTH Glossary. I’m sure there are albums that fit this bill for me, but most of the time I find myself able to tap back into my 20-year-old listening habits. The first Clash album, top to bottom, may be the one that I loved the most and need to work the hardest to feel the way I used to feel it.
“The Rising” although I would have to confess that I thought the album could have been five or six songs shorter even days after I heard it.
There are some great songs on it, such as “You’re Missing” and the title track, but they don’t carry the same immediacy as they did back in ’02.