sloopjohnc wrote:Guy E wrote:solarskope wrote:like garage punk, it was the 7" single which defined the genre.
whilst most of the essential albums have been listed here, this thread does highlight why very few soul albums make top ten lists. imo.
The reason Soul albums don't make Top 100 lists in rock magazine polls is because virtually all music fans start with a racial bias in their listening habits and try as one might, it never gets completely erased. I'm a big fan of Soul music, but this is true for me too... there's always a trace feeling of being an outsider. Albums by black artists never sold particularly well to white audiences and most of us have discovered the music retroactively, which makes it less "essential" on an emotional level. It's also something of a crapshoot as to what albums people have investigated, so there's not a clear consensus among white listeners as to what the "essential" albums are within the pantheon of Soul artists.
It's probably better to just think of the music separately rather than as a competition...
The Blue Nile are better than James Brown! The charts have always been separate, the audiences are generally segregated... there's no need for MOJO et. al. to feign objectivity in these matters. It just makes them look silly.
But you could say the same thing about C&W albums not appearing in Top 100 lists. I don't recall ever seeing Red Headed Stranger in Top 100 lists.
Both are essentially jukebox or single genres. There are some exceptions, like Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, but most of my favorite Soul and C&W albums are greatest hits compilations.
I'm not saying that Country and Soul weren't "singles" mediums, maybe even primarily so, but I think it's a bogus justification for the non-appearance of those genres/artists in polls that pretend to include them. They just shouldn't bother... have a separate sub-poll or something.
There are plenty of people who like
Best ofs in any given genre of music, but a lot of times people assume that there's nothing past the hits. Personally, I find comps misleading; a George Jones hits collection does not paint a balanced portrait of his work; the same goes for Tony Joe White and Al Green (all people I discovered via
Best ofs). Rock fans tend to dabble in non-rock genres and I'm no different; I stopped exploring Willie Nelson after not liking
Red Headed Stranger very much.
In Soul, just look at the HI label. Al Green made three or four CLASSIC albums in the early 70's, but they never make any lists. Why? Too solid a run for a consensus to develop about just one? I suspect it's a style of music that just doesn't strongly appeal to the average rock crit/fan and people just haven't listened to them (not that they'd necessarily like them as well as
Pet Sounds or
Funhouse or
Marquee Moon if they did). And Green wasn't the only person recording for the HI label in Memphis; Otis Clay and Ann Peebles also made great albums during the same period, Syl Johnson made a couple very good ones and Willie Mitchell produced a couple of stone classics for O.V. Wright in 1971 and 1973 that came out on another label. There are standout albums from every regional scene. A music fan could get lost in Chicago Soul and while The Chi-Lites may have never created a classic long-player, Curtis Mayfield certainly did. But
Curtis and
Superfly never get mentioned in Top Lists.
I mentioned MOJO's
100 TOP ALBUMS OF ALL TIME critics poll from the mid-90's in the Bowie thread... it had some real doozies. As far as black artists went, Stevie Wonder and Sly & The Family Stone logged-in five albums between them, but there wasn't another album by a Black American artist that made the cut. That reflects a demographic and an attitude towards music consumption on the part of the voters, not the quality of the music itself.
