All that is solid will melt into air; or why my all-time top 20 music list is immune from criticism

The list that no-one was asking for from the blogger whose views no-one cares about. Yeah man, it's the Niluccio twenty golden greats list. The best of the best. The stuff that transcends all the rest. Or at least the transcendental greats in the deluded, opinion-addled place I (laughingly) call my mind. God knows why because it's the cheesiest music thing in the world, but lately I've been pondering all this. The Big List thing. On the one hand, this pantheon-creating urge is obnoxious - just clickbait fodder for social media. "What are your all-time greats?" etc etc. So, yes, I generally hate this approach to appreciating music (or anything else). In the main, this endeavour is extremely conservative (looking back ...) and almost custom-designed to suppress interest in new stuff. Then again, as I think John Peel would occasionally remark, it's also obviously important to have a few mental benchmarks if you're in the business of making judgments about music. In practice, you've got to compare anything new you're listening to against earlier stuff that you know is good (know in the sense that it's more or less stood the test of time, at least in your view). Taste and judgments change, not least your own, so nothing's fixed in stone. Five years ago I would have come up with a different 20, ten years ago an even more different one. And so on. In even a few months' time I could easily bump at least one of these off the list (if I can ever be bothered to look at this boring list again, that is). Whatever. Good stuff - or superlatively good stuff - is a big part of enjoying music, so it probably deserves to be named (and listed) from time to time. At the same time, it's only fair to say that listening to music that's great on all sorts of levels but just not - somehow - quite at this level, is also a huge part of the pleasure of music. A song (to take a random example) like Jilted John's Jilted John is just as superlatively good in its own way as anything made by any of the artists on this list. Ditto Big Break's The Gaffer, Crass's Bloody Revolutions, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's The Message, Dark Thoughts' Without You, the Modern Lovers' Roadrunner, LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge, the Musical Intimidators' Double Struggle, Herman Düne's My Friends Killed My Folks, dozens (hundreds?) of jungle and breakbeat tunes, and  ... blah blah blah (add another 10,000 examples of your own). Anyway, shoot me now but here's my all-time top 20. Scientifically selected and completely beyond reproach or any meaningful criticism whatsoever. All killers no fillers ... 

Rare shot of Niluccio after he's been racking his brains to come up with an all-time top 20 list that will prove

 once and for all that he has better musical taste than anyone else

Fats Waller

Still one of the funniest people in the entire history of recorded music, Waller is surely one of the key links between ragtime and early pop. Fats is great, yahs yahs yahs.

Woody Guthrie

No Guthrie, no Dylan, but Guthrie's righteous and often very moving blasts of pro-union, pro-worker hillbilly-country still sound fantastic in their own right. 

Nina Simone

Am listening to a double-CD comp (Gold) even as I bash out this tawdry blog offering and - once again - the super-distinctive nature of Simone's huskily-beautiful voice is immediately hitting home. Sounds like her stuff was expertly recorded as well, as it still sounds vibrant and clear.  

Bob Dylan

A few years ago I would have scoffed at the idea of Dylan being on any personal best-of-the-best list, but - for fuck's sake - his 60s output is so good I've had to reconsider. Recent appreciation here. 

The Velvet Underground

Back in the day I think I over-absorbed a Marc Riley & The Creepers line about not playing my VU records "into the ground" and consequently swerved away from listening to the Velvet Underground & Nico LP (an obligatory post-punk 80s purchase) and tapes of the other albums. No more! Reading a lot of Warhol in recent years has also reignited my interest. Surely one of the greatest rock bands, full stop.

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Not uniformly brilliant (who is?) but er, far more brilliant than most lesser mortals. Along with the Velvet Underground, Beefheart and his lunatic blues weirdos were so far ahead of plodders like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones that it's positively embarrassing.  

Nico 

Great on the first VU album, her solo stuff with John Cale is otherworldly. I must admit I hadn't listened to this until a few years ago (stimulated by reading James Young's excellent Nico book). The Marble Index and Desertshore are, I think, incredible albums. Dark and haunting. Goth before goth.   

 

Iggy & The Stooges

Kinda obvious given how long they've been firmly installed in the proto-punk firmament, it's still incredible to hear er, the raw power of the Stooges rock sound alongside Iggy's scorchingly-simple thug-delivery. Iggy says he picked up a lot from the Chicago blues players and I think you can hear that.  

Fela Kuti

Politicised call and response, propulsive rhythms that hold back, hold back ... and then hold back some more, Fela Kuti and his band are totally on fire in some of his recordings. At school one day, one of the teachers said we should all be listening to Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice. We all sat there bored, thinking teacher don't teach me nonsense. 

King Tubby

Seventies reggae was awash with talent and Lee Perry (among others) must run King Tubby close, but KT's pioneering dub experimentation basically changed music forever and created some incredible stuff like Augustus Pablo's King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, so yeah, all hail the king. 

 

Kraftwerk

German jokers (yeah, German people are very funny), Kraftwerk's 70s stuff must be some of the most original electronic music ever made. Famously influential on the hip hop and early Chicago house scenes, Kraftwerk's mesmeric electro-pop leaves pale imitators like the Pet Shop Boys for dead, and even New Order (good as they were in the 80s) often sound a bit tame by comparison. 

Public Image Limited

Let's hear it for the all-conquering 1970s, because the decade also produced PiL's excellent early output, true dub-metal machine music (especially the searing Metal Box and Death Disco). It's still fairly amazing that Lydon helped pump this stuff out so soon after the chaos of the Sex Pistols. It surely shows that there was once a real music brain operating in that now clownishness figure who keeps popping up and embarrassing himself.  

The Fall

A new face in hell (or on this list), I think The Fall from (roughly) 1977-87 were in a league of their own when it came to post-punk rock spleneticism. All that curdled social commentary and surreal wordplay (shades of mid-60s Dylan maybe) spat out alongside Steve Hanley's relentless bass throb was pretty irresistible. A couple of semi-curdled, semi-skimmed appreciations of my own, here and here. 

Felt

Achingly-beautiful and mysterious-feeling pop music by one of music's great outsider-wishing-he-was-an-insider-but-almost-certainly-being-better-off-as-an-outside-ers. Or something. Maurice Deebank's delicate and ethereal guitar playing was a big part of what made them good, plus Martin Duffy's keyboards later on. And Lawrence's portentious way of intoning his very poetic lyrics.  

Low

Woah, more achingly-beautiful and mysterious-feeling pop music (or not-quite-pop music). Think I first heard these on John Peel when he played stuff from their 1996 The Curtain Hits The Cast album. It put me in mind (if I remember correctly) of the Velvet Undergound's Pale Blue Eyes-ish stuff. Anyway, it was definitely a stop everything you're doing and listen to this moment.

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci

And yet more achingly beautiful pop music (seems I've got a weakness for it). Euros Childs' heartbreakingly-beautiful voice matched with piano and violin chords cascading through lovely psych-pop-country arrangements could definitely take the listener into some great Neil Young-esque territory. And the Welsh lyrics often sounded great too. (Btw, where's Neil Young on this list? An outrage!).   

David Thomas Broughton

Kind of a one-off (but aren't a lot of the best artists?), David Thomas Broughton's looped and darkly-beautful voice/guitar arrangements need to be heard to be believed. Soaring (tortured?) Yorkshire-inflected vocals that come from some ancent-sounding folk tradition, listening to DTB is often a spine-tingling experience. Check out his The Complete Guide To Insufficiency.  

The Rebel

Still going strong (stronger than ever?), The Rebel's acidly-misanthropic country-noise drone sounds great in its present form, which involves a lot of crunching beats for him to interact with as he juggles his ten gallon cowboy hats. The Country Teasers were great, The Rebel is better. More tiresome Niluccio on noise appreciations here, here and here.   

Etran De L'Aïr

Super-infectious desert-blues stuff from Niger. Listening to what sound like very complex poly-rhythms in their endless wedding music jams is like being transported to another planet. They're somehow ultra-relaxed and effortlessly mesmeric. Check out their Agrim Agadez, which takes ages to get going but slowly coheres into something that sounds like it'll never stop. Slow-burners.    

Plus, whoever's sounding good to me this week  

Possibly the most important one of this top 20 list, this is whichever band/artist I've recently taken a shine to (new or old, but especially new/newish). This week I've been enjoying Jackie Trash, Oort Clod and Charlie Mingus, among others. 

In conclusion and as a way of correcting against all this infantile list-making, I reckon it's important to remember that lists have a horrible habit of solidifying. If you allow them to become too fixed then the contents metamorphose into something "beyond question", which is when the rot sets in. When this happens you're likely to sit back, endlessly admire your top ten or top 20 in all its glory and ... stagnate. After this you'll hardly ever (never?) listen to anything new, completely convinced that nothing can match the artists you've self-satisfiedly placed on your all-time-greats mantelpiece. Yes, THESE are the best. Now I can relax. Where's that Jam greatest hits album again? No man, don't do it! Nothing in life is certain and all idols must come crashing down (the strange idols pattern and other short stories, as Felt would say). Sure, I've now also committed the unforgivable sin of creating a top 20 list but at the same time I also want it to come tumbling down. To evaporate as new stuff leaves these so-called giants looking stale and old. In music (as in life?) it's all about endless revolution (45 revolutions per minute). Yep, all that is solid will melt into air ...