Most Influential Modern Rock Albums, Part 1

I haven’t had much time late­ly to think about post­ing much — in fact, I’m sure my Mac is feel­ing neglegt­ed…

But, one thing I can do while work­ing and dri­ving to work, is lis­ten to music on my iPod. When I read Jason Kottke’s reac­tion to some recent Crit­ics’ picks for the best albums from the last twen­ty years, I start­ed think­ing about my own list.

First, it seems arbi­trary to draw a line at 20 years — I pre­fer to put the seper­a­tion between clas­sic rock, and mod­ern rock, since most of the impor­tant music of the past 20–30 years, (for me), falls into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry.

For the next 5 days, (week­end exclud­ed), I will post my list for the Most Influ­en­tial Mod­ern Rock Albums, in no par­tic­u­lar order. Here is my first choice:

Blur, Park­life : Though today I more admire the ear­li­er Mod­ern Life is Rub­bish, I can’t deny that Park­life was a trans­for­ma­tive album for me. Released in 1994, when I was still in high school, it came to rep­re­sent every­thing that want­ed to be — clever, artic­u­late, sar­cas­tic, pop-aware, and para­noid.

Drawn large­ly on Mar­tin Amis’ char­ac­ters, espe­cial­ly from the nov­el Lon­don Fields, the album rev­elled in pre-Mil­lenial malaise, and got me to sing along… la la la la.