It’s the tentpole that keeps the whole rickety, if charming, structure upright. I Can See for Miles is so hungry and explosive that it sounds as if it’s trying to break out of the album and find a better, heavier one where it would have some suitable company and not have to hang around with whimsical tosh such as John Entwistle’s Silas Stingy. It dabbles too long in psychedelia, for which, like the Rolling Stones, the Who had little affinity and which they would quickly leave behind. Notwithstanding lovely highlights Tattoo, Our Love Was and I Can’t Reach You, Sell Out sounds studio-bound, fussy and thin, fattened up with gimmicks and gewgaws. Nor is the sheer power that was the Who’s main attraction on stage. Consistency is not Sell Out’s strong point. Even the Who get fed up with the idea by the end, wrapping up with the mini-opera Rael 1 & 2. Like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Sell Out is only pretending to be a concept album. Rolling Stone retrospectively called Sell Out “the most successful concept album ever”, which is bizarre considering that most of the songs bear no relation to the jingles: the first, the on-the-nose psychedelic escapism of Armenia City in the Sky, wasn’t even written by a member of the band. Under pressure from manager Chris Stamp to record the Who’s third album in a hurry, Pete Townshend “needed an idea that would transform what I regarded as a weak collection of occasionally cheesy songs into something with teeth”, he told one interviewer. Sell Out’s ersatz commercials and pirate-radio jingles must have been quite a revelation in 1967, but the concept originated as a desperate attempt to paper over the songwriting cracks. Inspired by their own dalliance with shilling for The Man, the Who were way ahead of the game in satirising the idea of rock’n’roll as a consumer product. (The nature of the canon, which is still dominated by male rock artists from the 60s and 70s, is a whole other issue.) The question is how these albums manage to be great despite their flaws. The aim is certainly not to slaughter sacred cows, which has become as much a cliche as the canon itself. It would be like Moby-Dick without the long disquisitions on the uses of whale blubber. A flawless single-disc re-edit of the White Album wouldn’t be the White Album. And it excludes double albums, which are meant to be ragged sprawls. This isn’t about masterpieces flawed by a single track, a phenomenon the writer Andrew Mueller calls “ Jazz Police Syndrome” after the solitary clanger on Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man. Here are five albums that regularly appear on those best-ever lists despite their (in my subjective opinion) inconsistency. A much chewier proposition is a record with as many troughs as peaks. It completely fails to reach the finish line and yet it remains one of hip-hop’s defining albums, thus raising the question: how patchy can an album be and still be ranked in the pantheon of classics?Īnybody who, at a curious age, has investigated a list of the best albums ever will have found some they dislike. (.A thought occurred while listening to Dr Dre’s landmark album The Chronic, which starts out like the most fantastic party but somehow devolves into a grim trudge towards the reprehensible final track Bitches Ain’t Shit. Straight Outta Compton: 10th Anniversary Tributeġ5 Most Influential Albums. Explicit Content Only by Evan Roth ( multimedia artist)
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