The Suburbs - Arcade Fire

The Suburbs is a great description about life in, well, the suburbs, but Trailer Park Boys is arguably better.

Cool stuff have come from Canada lately.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn - Pink Floyd

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was Pink Floyds first album, and the only one with Syd Barrett as leader of the band. Roger Waters is coauthor in only two songs. The eternal and futile question asked by members of the band is how the band would have been different had Barrett remained in it.

The first albums of Pink Floyd are very different from their most famous works. From a purely musical perspective, The Piper of the Gates of Dawn has nothing to do with albums like The Wall, or The Dark Side of the Moon other than the spirit of innovation that can be heard in every song. This is not a good introductory album to the Floyd, but it is definitely a great album.

I have argued before that the way technology is shaping the way of producing and understanding music would have limited bands like Pink Floyd, which understood their albums as a whole rather than as a collection of singles. While this is evident for productions like The Dark Side, The Wall, or even Wish You Were Here, this also applies to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. With songs 10 minutes long and lyrics that really don't make too much sense,  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the testimony of an age more than anything else. I don't say this to demerit the album. Quite the contrary. For instance, in "Pow R. Toc H." you can appreciate how rock is a byproduct of jazz. "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" is also another example of how bands in the sixties discovered the possibilities offered by electrical instruments.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - David Bowie

"There's a starman waiting in the sky"

-David Bowie , "Starman"

Concept albums were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall are probably the most known examples today -thanks to Roger Waters' endless World tour, which is nothing else than the rock version of Cirque du Soleil.

David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust is a vague concept album about some kind of alien who lives in the Earth, which will disappear in 5 years as a result of ecologic exhaustion. Concept albums are disappearing. The main reason is the business model inherent to music in MP3 music, which tries to sell as many units of a song as possible instead of albums. But probably there is something about the existential vacuum lived by people since the Berlin Wall came down: people simply don't have any stories to tell since we are now living in the End of History.

Though Ziggy Stardust is inevitably included in any list of the best albums ever recorded, some of the songs now sound like Wayne's World, which is partly a tribute to Bowie.

Ziggy Stardust represents Bowie's glam period, which can be summarized as shiny and stretchy clothes wrapping an extremely skinny body jumping around the scenario and singing happy songs.  Bowie's success in the 70s was a consequence of his dressing style as much as it was of his music. Marylin Manson would try to copy glam's visual style in Mechanical Animals 25 years later.

Ziggy Stardust must be in anyone's Ipod, if anything else because of its tremendous reputation, and also because it represents an interesting period in popular music: a transition between the happy 60s and the most retrospective 70s. Hang Onto Yourself is probably the best testimony of a song made up of happy music and sad lyrics:

The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

There will be no bands like Pink Floyd. Ever.

MP3 killed the idea of seeing music as a self-containing concept. Now, it's all about releasing a single, make some millions, open a bank account and pay whores with the interests earned.

And I will not post any videos when I post Pink Floyd. Just buy the albums.