The second most important album of all time.  I choose my words carefully – not greatest, not best, not most original but most important.  One disclaimer before I get to my argument, this argument was developed six beers and a shot of Jack into a Slash show at the Fillmore.

Not the 2^nd most important album

Most important – if this album didn’t exist, its absence would have the most significant impact on music and popular culture (positive or negative).  Let’s get the obvious candidates for “second most important album of all time” out of the way.  If the Beatles had never recorded Sgt. Peppers, would the music or pop culture landscape be much different?  We would still have 13 Beatles albums to shape modern music.  Sgt Peppers is just one of four Beatles albums on the Rolling Stone’s list of the top ten albums of all time for god’s sakes.

With disco being largely a “singles” genre, if the Bee Gees had never recorded the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack there would have been little impact to disco.  If there were no Exile on Main St,  we would still have Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and the first 8 Stones albums (excluding the awful Their Satanic Majesties Request)  to establish the blues based rock-n-roll that was the contrast to the Beatles pop genius.  If the Velvet Underground had never recorded Nico, we would still have four other wildly overrated records to launch the crappy art rock movement.  If Nevermind never was, you would still be listing to Bleach, In Utero plus albums from Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney all of which did their part to reinvigorate the flannel industry. This same argument dismisses like albums from Dylan, the Dead, Ramones, Elvis, Pixies, Michael Jackson,  Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Led Zepplin etc; and yes as I revisit this without the aid of Slash and beers,  I am realizing how pointless this argument is, but at some level not having a point actually becomes the point in itself.  If you lost only one of the albums from these artists would it have much of an impact on music and/or pop culture given their full body of work and other like bands?

The second most important album of all time is Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.  This album started the demise of the rudderless, soul sucking vortex that was 80’s popular music.   As Axl said at the time “a lot of those rock bands are too fucking wimpy to have any sentiment or emotion” (shame he didn’t remember this when recording the Use Your Illusion albums). Released in ’87 this Trojan Horse of a record came out as just another in a long line of poser hair band records (Cinderella, Poison, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, etc) and debuted at #187 on the album charts.  The public recognition of this album was a slow burn.  It took over a year from its release to reach #1 on the album charts.  Unlike the hair metal albums of the time, what made Appetite for Destruction unique was adding the power of garage punk, white band blues, and funk rhythms to the straight forward heavy metal that was dominating the charts at the time.

Original Banned Cover

Nirvana may have pissed on the hair metal corpse four years later, but it was the release of Appetite that was the terminal blow, dead band walking.  The hair metal music of the 80’s sounds ridiculous today, bloated and forgettable, but at the time it took the contrast of a raw punk, blues, hard rock band with no synth beats or reverb on the snare to illustrate how awful these 80’s bands were.  The garage punk of Appetite helped set up the mainstream success of the Grunge bands to follow a few short years later.  If only GnR could have delayed bloating into clichéd rock stars for at least two more albums we could have had an American Rolling Stones, and we would be looking for a different candidate for “second most important album of all time”.

So what is the most important album of all time you ask?  Well it’s not this month’s 12” selection (as good as it is…)