359. Big Star, "Radio City"

 

Influence is a funny thing.  We say stuff all the time like "oh, this band definitely influenced this other band" or "for their new record, Band X was clearly influenced by the sounds of Bolivian folk music," but it's not often that a major influence spreads its way through a huge segment of modern music and is completely forgotten.  Ladies and gentlemen, Radio City by Big Star.  Not only did it directly influence some of the most important bands in the history of American music, like R.E.M. and Cheap Trick, along with lesser-known but still great bands like the Replacements and the Posies and Teenage Fanclub, it more or less (along with Big Star's other albums) created the genre of power pop, a genre that remains close to my heart to this day.

Big Star was a miserably-selling and little-known band in their prime.  This album sold about 20,000 copies when it came out, which sounds bad today but was absolutely abysmal when the only way to hear a song you wanted to hear was to buy the record.  NEVERTHELESS, it is still a fucking great album.  It opens with a blast of guitar on "O' My Soul," a melange of funk, soul, and pop, before wending its way through a set of songs that are so wildly imaginative and immediately familiar-seeming that you start to think that Alex Chilton must have had a time machine but then you remember that all those later acts based their songs on these, not vice versa.

If there's any song on here you've heard it's probably "September Gurls," which is, of course, great, but I'm not even sure it's one of the best songs on this album!  Check out "You Get What You Deserve":


Case in point: this video has about 41,000 plays.  Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" has over 591 million, and it's in the top 5 worst songs of all time.  

There's also a personal connection for me; Big Star was a huge influence on Game Theory and Loud Family, other forgotten bands I love and have championed for years.  (I wrote about their lead singer, Scott Miller, on my other blog when he died.)  It's amazing how much of this I can hear in Scott's work; the chiming guitar sounds, the reaching melodies, the singalong choruses.  The influence even extended into the real world; remember Mod Lang records in Berkeley?  Yup, named after the opening song of side 2.  

We have previously seen Big Star on this list, at number 474, and while #1 Record is certainly great, it doesn't reach the ethereal pop heights of this album.  It's still kind of crazy to me that Big Star placed two albums on this list, and makes me think that this list isn't just dumb BS after all.

Alex Chilton died in 2010 after a, to put it mildly, eccentric life that saw him live for a time in a tent in Tennessee and be rescued by helicopter from Hurricane Katrina and live to enjoy a renaissance of interest in his music.  (There's a biography called, fittingly enough, "A Man Called Destruction" that I should get around to.)  Anyway, here's to you, Alex.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Oh God yes.

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