“Our mission: to come up with a list of the 50 Most NYC Albums Ever; albums born of the five boroughs that best capture what it’s like to live, love, struggle, and exist in the sprawling, unforgiving, culturally dense metropolis we pay too much to call home.”
That’s from last weeks Village Voice, the one where we all stop kidding ourselves and admit that the Village Voice, our Village Voice, is long long long gone. I never thought much of the Voices best of NYC yearly round up, stolen off the late lamented and much much wittier New York Press, but as an easy stopgap between heavy hitting articles about Donald Manes and New York Babylon, at least you could say, who needs Wayne Barrett all the time, right? Or Jack Newfield? Take a breather with the best place to buy an egg cream East of Houston.
But 2014 is a shell of itself, not even a shell. Death would be better than this lousy giveaway, they should be ashamed of themselves.
Which leads me to last week’s atrocious cover story. Forget the idiocy of including Lana Del Rey (recorded in London) and Ciccione Youth (played by L.A.ers) and wonder what on earth Mountain is doing there.
But, OK, it isn’t the worst list ever compiled, I guess it is a list and it is long, and it has some interesting ideas, and whatever you might think, I’ll take Illmatic at # 1, so fair enough. You can imagine, I dunno Stereogum, or we ourselves, compiling it. But the voice of socialist New York, up against the wall, left wing, stood up to Murdoch, world beater Voice. That is just sad.
Here is the Spotify list.