Five Albums That Were Way Ahead of their Time
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Originally published at http://kristensinclair.blogspot.com on January 9, 2015.