CONTENTS:
Intro & The AV Club's #50 - #31 — The AV Club's #30-#11
The AV Club's Top 10 & Afterword — Alan Greenspan Presents Our Top 10
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Note: we, the good people of
Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, recognize that many readers will derive little of value solely from a list of negatives without an accompanying list of positives. A mere litany of displeasures offers no perspective unless leavened with the sincere enthusiasms of the critic. Surely someone who excoriates Wordsworth's style can be dismissed out of hand as an anti-Romantic, but if he or she is also an ardent admirer of Byron, then one must read his or her opinion more attentively.
Likewise, we do not wish to be dismissed: we refuse the mantle of Philistines, hatas or bustas. That we are much exercised by the
AV Club's list should be manifest by now, but we submit that our criticisms come not from a knee-jerk compulsion to gainsay the hip, the mainstream or the voice of an authority but rather from a sincere, supple and multi-dimensional appreciation of all genres of music. We like many artists similar to the ones dismissed above, just as many of you might dismiss the artists you see below while celebrating their contemporaries.
To show that we are human beings with loves and hates and passions just like yours — that we are men and women who've been born and still yet live and, however so unfair, will surely die — we asked each regular and guest contributor to
Mr. Destructo to compile his or her list of the ten best albums of the decade (#1 being the best and #10 the tenth best) and tabulated this consensus staff list. These are the rhythms and verses that syncopated our steps and gave voice to our hearts.
Now, to give voice to our thoughts about these tremendous works, we turn to former Federal Reserve Chairman and
clarinetist at the Juilliard School, Alan Greenspan:
Top 10 Albums This Decade That I Totally Woulda Knocked Up Your Old Lady To
by ALAN GREENSPAN
I thought
when I wrote for these idiots it was gonna be a one-and-done thing, but apparently all these assholes know about
writing music is which one of the Rock Band buttons they hit with their fat fucking monkey hands. That's why they called in the big guns, because they know what you're thinking: "This bunch of jackasses I don't know anything about just ripped on 50 albums in a row. Why???"
Mr. Destructo book and film reviewer Mark Brendle attempted to answer this question, and eventually I tagged in to try my best to help understand these often accidentally funny, alarming and vulnerable people. It's at once a heartening and disheartening spectacle. People yearn to connect, dazzled by the possibility of finding accidental celebrity just for being themselves — educated by a television culture that runs on such a self-evident and free-form paradigm — but they lack the means to make a connection, as well as ideas alluring enough to establish one with others. Also, the videos are pretty funny.
I had to bend over backwards to be able to take the video the slightest bit seriously. Neither man made any significant effort to disguise himself as Alvin Greene or campaign staff, and the contents of the video — song lyrics, music style and editing — made every attempt to seem as corny as possible. It was a hoax that worked without the requisite intent, a misdirection achieved by such an absence of effort at deceit that calling it half-assed overestimates the ass fraction by probably an ass factor of forty.
It's always tempting on these trips to try to scan the AM dial and see if I can replicate the Simpsons' "Itchy and Scratchy Land" experience and skip to the next item on the Signs of Evil Countdown. Black oil gradually destroying significant economic engines — fishing, tourism — for each of the Gulf states certainly offers a key ingredient for approaching the apocalypse like David Letterman.
The group took their name from the American insurgents in the delusional right-wing fantasy and unintentional comedy classic Red Dawn. This seems only fitting, because, as we explained, these people are homophobic, racist, loathsome and insane, on loan to freedom from World Net Daily, the internet's #1 resource for Birther conspiracies and trying to figure out how the Toyota recall fits into the bigger picture of America's takeover by the New World Order. These are also the sort of people who would grow a skullet, wear a black bandana, dye a handlebar mustache and spray paint "nWo" on people's backs to protest the NWO and think it makes sense.
This is pretty much the least essential album anyone's ever heard, so of course it's on the AV Club list. If you were wondering what happened to Cat Stevens and Fisher Stevens' improbably orders-of-magnitude-lamer lovechild, this album is your answer. Meaningless gimmickry is the name of the game in indie music, and this gimmick is the most meaningless in recent memory: album conception via Rand McNally. Still, it's great to hear Zamfir getting work again in pointless one-minute instrumentals. And the lyrics? EVERY ONE A MASTERPIECE:
"Alligator is The National’s third full-length, but the first that introduced a fully realized vision of the Brooklyn band: brooding, smart, and uniquely capable of soundtracking the ennui of rainy city life. It’s been accused of being boring, but it absolutely isn’t." Thanks, AV Club! Here's an idea: any time you feel compelled to frontload a single-paragraph blurb review of an album by addressing a common charge of it's being boring, it's boring. Just the fact that it's pretty much the first thing that comes to mind after placing the album in the band's chronology and placing the band geographically is a huge indicator that whatever point you're making is already a loser. "Brooding" and "soundtracking the ennui of rainy city life" are like two different rock-review variations on, "You're gonna love this girl! She's got a great personality."
I thought when I wrote for these idiots it was gonna be a one-and-done thing, but apparently all these assholes know about writing music is which one of the Rock Band buttons they hit with their fat fucking monkey hands. That's why they called in the big guns, because they know what you're thinking: "This bunch of jackasses I don't know anything about just ripped on 50 albums in a row. Why???"