Spin‘s 25th offers lesson in critical distance

I haven’t looked at Spin magazine on a consistent basis for years, but there was a short time when it was the most-reliable voice on music in my life. Sometime between discovering Rolling Stone back in high school and discovering music ‘zines at the hip record store in college, Spin delivered what I couldn’t get anywhere else. Remember, kids, this was before blogs, Internet radio and e-mail, so short of talking with friends or watching Kurt Loder on MTV news, outlets like Spin were it when it came to learning about bands and records.

Spin has been on an inexorable slide toward irrelevance, but for a while, it was sort of the Pitchfork of its day. That’s why its 25th anniversary coverage is so illuminating. Looking only at its new list of the 125 best albums of the past 25 years, one sees how silly it is to offer qualitative judgments about fresh work.

Consider the album reviews found in the Dec. 1991 issue. The lead review goes to U2′s Achtung, Baby, arguably the biggest album released at that time. It was a somewhat middling review (in Spin’s then taxonomy, it was given a yellow light, defined as “whoa, slow down pal. This record is pretty good, but you can’t buy everything in the store. Can you?”) in which Jim Greer calls it “an ambitious failure and by almost any standard an excellent record.” In the same issue, Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque is given a green light (“Go directly to your record store. Buy this record. Kill if you must.”) in a review where Greer writes, “Bandwagonesque is a movable feast. Jump on it.” Nirvana’s Nevermind (wow, that was a stacked month) also is covered. It, too, earns a green light, the short review toward the end of that section calling it “a little bit punk, a little bit metal, a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. What the hell more do you want?”

Fast forward 19 years, and the album that earned the yellow-light review, Achtung, Baby, is named the best of the past 25 years, while Nevermind comes in at #3.  Bandwagonesque, meanwhile, which Spin named the best album of 1991 (Nevermind was #3, behind R.E.M.’s Out of Time) is #111.

Somewhere in the cauldron of context, history and critical hindsight one can likely find the true value of any of these albums. In 1991, Nevermind was a shocking step forward for a decent grunge band, Bandwagonesque was a perhaps even more shocking step forward for a grungy pop band and Achtung, Baby was an interesting evolution for the biggest band in the world. Today, it’s impossible to hear Nevermind without all of its baggage getting in the way, Bandwagonesque is an early indication of future achievement that has too much filler and Achtung, Baby is the last great album from a still-entertaining but no-longer vital band.

Does all of this mean Spin got it wrong in 1991? Yeah, probably. Does that mean the new list is wrong, too? Sure, in spots. The Breeders’ Last Splash isn’t the 79th best album of the past 25 years (though “Cannonball” is probably one of the 125 best singles of that era), and it’s surprising that given the critical distance afforded this exercise that anyone would think otherwise. But that critical distance allows for a more clear-eyed view, and thus the analysis in general is more spot-on than the understandably over-exuberant reviews afforded the bright, shiny objects released in any given month.

Music and Spin are not the only relevant tags here, of course. Any criticism of something new almost without exception is going to be different (and usually, more shallow) than what comes after. Without context, without the ability to see how something stacks up when compared to its peers and the career of the artist in question — let alone how it weathers repeat listens/views/experiences — a review can only scratch the surface. That won’t keep me from reading reviews, or writing them. It just means that as time passes, the merit of anything and everything evolves.