A few months ago, I wrote a piece called “The Five-Albums Test” that some people loved, some people hated, and everybody seemed to disagree with—which was pretty much the response I was expecting. But there was one part of the essay that I was surprised nobody said anything about. It dealt with the concept of great “bad” records, and how it relates to albums released by the Rolling Stones in the ’70s. What’s a great “bad” record? It’s an album distinguished by “the degraded quality of the songwriting and musicianship and an overall feeling of boredom, detachment, or extremely undisciplined self-indulgence that’s palpable in the...
Read the entire article at A.V. Club: http://avc.lu/1qS3unG
