During my years on the ‘net, I’ve been a member of various E-mail lists and participated in countless discussion forums, and if there’s one recurring theme that never fails to rankle me, it’s when people so emphatically hold up an artist’s early work as the gold standard of their career that they refuse to acknowledge their later albums as being anything other than complete and total dogshit.
There’s a statistical likelihood that most of these people will fall into one of two categories: Elitist Dickheads or Old Fogies. The Old Fogies at least have the excuse of having been around since Day One of the artist’s career, and having been there when the early work was actually released, you can understand why they’re particularly partial to it; the Elitist Dickheads, however, tend to pay attention to the more pretentious music critics – many of whom happen to be Old Fogies – and presume the artist’s later work is crap not because they’ve actually heard it but, rather, because their favorite Music Bible tells them so.
Man, I hate that.
Maybe I’m just overly sensitive about this because I discovered the Beatles in the early 1980s. If this comment doesn’t provide you with a sufficient explanation for my sensitivity, consider this: any music geek worth his or her salt who’s in the midst of falling head over heels in love with a band is going to seek out solo efforts by the various members of that band. This means that, as a result of the time frame of my discovery, I ended up starting my solo Beatles collection with…
• Paul McCartney, Give My Regards to Broad Street
• George Harrison, Gone Troppo
• Ringo Starr, Stop and Smell the Roses
Don’t worry, I have neither the time nor the energy to sit here and attempt to compose a valid argument that those albums are the best that those guys’ careers have had to offer … mostly because they aren’t. (At ALL.) I’m just saying that it’s easier to find something enjoyable about Gone Troppo when you’ve never heard All Things Must Pass…and even once you finally have heard All Things Must Pass, you don’t necessarily abandon the things you liked about Gone Troppo.
Okay, enough back story. Where was I going with this? Oh, right: I was going to defend the most recent — and possibly final — Prefab Sprout album, The Gunman and Other Stories.
