For the Thirty Years of Influence question, with the caveat that I've been living in the past for years so know dick all about what's influenced the last ten or fifteen years worth of music, I'll throw out in no particular order:

1. Big Star, Radio City. Yeah, I know 1974 is more than thirty years ago, but barely. And this album is son of "only 1000 people bought it, but every one of them started a band.
2. Talking Heads, Remain in Light. This is slightly arbitrary as it's really an Eno pick more than a Talking Heads pick. I almost picked Another Green World. Coulda been one of his Bowie collaborations. Or another Heads production. Or The Joshua Tree. Eno's sonic fingerprints are all over.
3. Chic, Risque. Another slightly arbitrary pick. The Rodgers/Edwards production team was hugely influential, as was 'Nard's monster bass line for "Good Times," so I'll go with this album.
4. Prince, 1999. Picked because it was the real commercial breakthrough. I think he was already quite influential among musicians and producers (Janet Jackson might have had a career w/o Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis but it sure wouldn't have been the same one) but this really set him up for the takeover. Took a while to realize since Thriller was such a monster, but when the smoke cleared the decade blonged to the purple one, not the gloved one.
5. Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Chuck and Flav are great, but this is really the Bomb Squad's triumph. Too bad they lost the fight in "Caught, Can I Get a Witness". Check out Greg Tate's review in Flyboy in the Buttermilk if you can find a copy. Mine is in storage, & I don't know when I'll be back at work, otherwise I'd put it up at Buffistarawk.
6. Something by LaFace productions. You pick: Babyface, Boyz II Men, Toni Braxton, TLC. Smokey Robinson, part deux.
7. Nirvana, Nevermind. I don't know from indie cred, but it is a great album -- a bit frontloaded IMHO, but I blame that on CDs & the loss of album sides and programming -- and, once again, the commercial breakthrough matters. It's a popular artform and selling ten million copies matters, especially when the bulk of sales comes in a big explosion. (The Eagles' Greatest Hits may or may not have surpassed Thriller's sales, but there's NO comparison between the impact of the two.) It changed the pop equation in the early and mid nineties.
8. Garth Brooks. I don't know the name of any of his albums or any of his songs, but I remember when I worked for a music conference & we had a bunch of the trades lying around the house, and for big chunks of 1994 and 1995 he had multiple albums in the top 10, sometimes in the top 5. It was pretty mindblowing. I also remember looking at the top 5, which was something like Garth, Van Hagar, Ace of Base, Snoop, and Mariah Carey, and thinking, "Everyone of these is multi-platinum, huge hits, but could the audiences be any more fragmented? How much of Garth's audience was familiar with Van Halen or Snoop Dogg? How many Van Halen fans had heard "Loser" or "The Sign," the big Ace of Base hit? Was there ANYONE who owned Mariah's and Garth's CD?" Which is why I was harping on the importance of Nevermind's moment in the sun. Even if I'm kinda contrary and averse to crowds, metaphorical as well as literal, I see and understand the value of a pop moment.

And so ends my long-winded, only slightly better than ill-informed spiel.

ETA the part that got lost.

I don't get the connection...

It's a show where scenes are based off the music brought by the audience. The freakier and more obscure tends to be the best-- it's like an incredibly detailed suggestion.

Took a while to realize since Thriller was such a monster, but when the smoke cleared the decade blonged to the purple one, not the gloved one.

A year or so ago, VH-1 had the Top 100 Rock Artists, and I was really pleased to see MJ get stuck around 70 or so, and Prince get ranked somewhere in the teens. Definitely showed that they knew at least something about rock influences and quality.

Definitely showed that they knew at least something about rock influences and quality.

I wasn't trying to bust on Michael. God knows he has enough problems, many caused by himself, without me piling on. Thriller came by its success honestly: it's a terrific album. Not sure anything "deserves" to become the biggest hit ever but as well it as another. I don't know if it was possible to be in high school when it topped the charts and not think it was overplayed, but the last few times I heard "Beat It" I was shocked at how good it was. "Billie Jean" never lost its appeal. I could live happily w/o seeing the title track's video again -- but it would be more shocking in retrospect if it hadn't been overblown. Hard to blame a guy for hubris and delusions of grandeur when his previous album sold eight million copies and his current one passed the eight million mark before it was close to breaking a sweat, much less getting winded. Just as it was hard to see clearly through the unprecedented success of Thriller I think it can be hard to see (and more important to hear) through the long, long, long and ineffably freaky public meltdown. Did he have as much to give as an artist as Prince? IMO, no, but between the J5 hits ("I Want You Back" can stand up to any single of the rock and roll era), Off the Wall, Thriller, and some of his late 80s work (what was the animated video -- "Leave Me Alone"? -- that was done like some Talking Heads video -- "And She Was"? -- or vice versa? Not to be vague or anything. Anyway, it was pretty great.) you're talking a monster talent with a huge impact. As long as I don't have to look at any post-1980s picture of him ever again everything will be alright.

A lovely review of Kim's Neutral Milk Hotel Book.

Sorry if this has been posted before, but here's an album of Queen / 50 Cent mashups that I'm liking so far: [link]

eta: If you're curious, I suggest starting with "Under Pressure All the Time" or "21 Flash Questions."

eta²: IOUnrelatedMusic, I just bought Laura Veirs's album Year of Meteors, which I am also loving. And thanks to Hec/Kim, I also got that Neutral Milk Hotel album....

My skimming tells me 33 and 1/3 books are still the topic of the hour. I just finished Franklin Bruno's on Armed Forces and it is just excellent. I am only a casual Elvis Costello fan so there was obvioulsy a lot I was unaware of - but - it's mostly devoid of academic jargon, intricately aware of each and every note of the album and incredibly engaging even for a casual fan. Bravo! Ohh - and I definately need to get the In the Aeroplane book pronto.

Now back to catch up...

not because I'm looking for a bunch of {{}}s

Still - that sucks. Hopefully, you are better for good.

Tina, glad you liked the moose. Send me your address & I'll send you a copy.

Aww shucks, joe, insent. I love Woody as well. I downloaded all they had on emusic - but what they hav is not his stand up as much as it is him talking about stand up. Still interesting, but two very different things.

I was a Michael Jackson psycho-fan as a kid and I rediscovered my love of Off the Wall and Thriller at a punk bar in Lawrence thanks to a great great DJ during the summer of 2002. Current-incarnation-MJ freaks me out - but I can't help it, I still have the love of his music.

I also got that Neutral Milk Hotel album....

I kid you not, I have given it to half a dozen people or so since I fell in love with it and it's never right away, but eventually, sometimes five or six months, sometimes two years down the road, they write/call and tell me that it's become an important part of a certain period of their lives. Never fails.

Go Home Productions did the Blondie/Doors mashup. I highly recommend the Christina Aguilera/Velvet Underground mashup. My favorite is "Making Plans for Vinyl" (Tweet/XTC). It's still listed but the mp3 is no longer up. I'll send it to Buffistarawk tomorrow. It's really great. There are a bunch of new ones I want to check out, esp. all the Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Stones ones. (He uses "Gimme Shelter" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash," it would take work to fuck that up.)

I don't remember if I've recommended Jerry Jazz Musician before but it's a wonderful site. Here's a really interesting interview with Terry Teachout about his upcoming Louis Armstrong bio. This part especially makes me want to read the biography. JJM has just asked Teachout about comments (e.g., "amateur appraisals") he had written about several critics, including Gary Giddins, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch.

I know music as a performer from the bottom up. This doesn't mean that I necessarily feel things about music more accurately than what Gary [Giddins] feels or what Albert Murray feels, but it does mean that I have a kind of equipment that allows me to understand why certain things happen, and to explain them in a way a person without musical training can't always do. And if you're writing what I hope will be a highly serious primary-source biography of the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century, I think perhaps you ought to have a musical background in order to best understand what he went through musically.... Put it this way: I speak the language of music, therefore the hard part for me is to translate that discourse into the language of words. And it can be done. But if you don't speak the language of music to start with, then you're going to be fumbling around in a world you don't fully understand.

The way I've excerpted it it sounds kind of arrogant, but taken with other parts of the interview it seems simply descriptive. He says in so many words that music is ultimately about feeling and that musicians aren't necessarily better at understanding that feeling nor at discussing it. His claim is just that, as a musician, he has analytical tools at his disposal and a language in which to express how the music gets a certain feeling across. That was awkward but I hope I made myself clear. Anyway, as a non-musician who loves music and wishes I better understood the mechanics of the songs and performances I love I hope Teachout puts his money where his mouth is and dishes up some hardcore analysis in language I can understand.

Here's JJM's "Reminiscing in Tempo" feature, which asks musicians and critics questions such as "what's the greatest saxophone solo ever?" and "what musical recording(s) changed your life?" Soundclip links seem way more reliable than in the Teachout interview.

I love this comment from Salim Washington in response to the greatest sax solo query:

[A]fter a certain point the level of excellence achieved by some artists is so great, that the profundity of their contribution to the record of human feeling and experience renders it meaningless to subject their work to an hierarchical evaluation that is more akin to a sporting event than an artistic endeavor.