9. Pink Floyd - Animals (1977)
Prior to 1999,
Animals was a great album. It has one of the strongest themes in music and represents a huge cry for the victims of industrialization and imperialism. It was released during an era in which people weren't sure when the end would come; Roger Waters' lyrics fall heavily upon politicians in England and across the world, and he used impressive symbolism to deliver the message. Although the album was primarily a work of Waters, Gilmour helped craft the iconoclastic "Dogs" and contributed some of his most expressive guitar work throughout the entire album. Overall, it was a fantastic album, and this alone could have immortalized Pink Floyd in the annals of musical history. And I love it.
But between its release and the new millennium, there wasn't much hype for
Animals. Yes, it sold well. It achieved a peak position of #2 on the US Billboard charts and stayed on for quite some time. But it came during a period of transition -- between the bittersweet
Wish You Were Here and the cult classic
The Wall. Not to mention the preceding success of DSOTM kind of capped its presence. It was great, but not that great.* Then, come 1999, something so blatantly uncalled for and irretrievable happened.
Pitchfork reviewed it.
It was a tiny review, not even four hundred words. But the author, James P. Wisdom (irony at its best), decided to usher in a new era of mind-numbing collective consciousness: he gave it a ten. By Pitchfork standards, a ten basically means that even the silence separating songs is enough to deliver an erection for the world at large. And you know what? All those people, all those sheep, the ones that
loved Dark Side of the Moon and felt ambivalent towards the 1977 album, two paragraphs beforehand -- now loved
Animals. That was it. That's all that happened to make this album such an icon amongst kids everywhere who happened to skim the boldfaced ratings at the top of the page.
Today, I can hardly hear the beauty in
Dark Side without having a brainless maggot quip about how "it's no
Animals." I imagine on that fateful day, the author was sitting on a plush armchair laughing his head off.
Yessss, he says.
Let's make them trip over themselves. They thought Pink Floyd was good, but they never realized they were a ten!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!