Last year, Beck selected a bunch of great album covers and wrote an article on them for Vanity Fair. Sometime later, I started thinking about album titles: How are they important? What effect does a title have on your buying the album sound unheard? How does a title influence your impression of an album after you've heard it? Most important, what makes a title good or bad?
This would have remained a vague train of thought to be idly boarded from time to time had it not been for Jennifer's clarion call to produce more content for PizzaPants.com. In response, I decided to choose a few albums that I knew as a teenager and try to see what made their titles tick.
Five Great Titles of Albums I Listened to as a Teenager
Second Helping--Lynyrd Skynyrd has had a bad rap in the college-educated rock world for at least the past 15 years. People have forgotten that they were genuine Southern rebels in that they rebelled against damn well anybody and everybody: Neil Young, snooty rock critics, and their own Southern brethren, including a former gym teacher. Wearing long hair and playing the devil's music was still a dangerous business in the South in the early '70s, when men still groomed themselves like Floyd the barber and listened to Marty Robbins, but despite the jeers and threats they no doubt received, they were proud of being good ol' boys. Nothing reflects their Southern manners better than the title of their first album, which graciously taught listeners how to pronounce their unusual moniker. The title of the follow-up, though, was an even funnier acknowledgment of their Southerness: "Y'all liked the first one? Have another!"
Are You Experienced?--Iím cheating a bit here, since I first owned this album under the title Smash Hits (the album knocked off a couple of the weaker songs in favor of some B-sides for a premature best-of). No matter, the impact was almost the same. In seventh grade, some of my friends raved about the drug songs and ridiculed the sex songs as dumb jokes. Silently, I disagreed. I'd have much rather tried to stand next to some girl's fire than wander around in a purple haze. My 13-year-old answer to the question posed by the title? "Not yet, sir, but I hope to be one day."
Led Zeppelin IV--In the post-Rocky world we're doomed to live in, a number after the title of a movie implies mediocrity. The same goes for albums (see below). But it's not hard to imagine a world in which slapping a number after a title didn't imply corporate entertainment's laziness and unwillingness to rock the boat, but rather a great band's brazen disregard for such promotional niceties as catchy album titles. That certainly seems the case with Led Zeppelin, who pumped out four flawed but classic albums in exactly two years' time: bang, bang, bang, bang. To rock listeners at the time, the sequentially numeric titles must have implied progression, not repetition. Led Zeppelin IV certainly sounds like the culmination of their work and of the hard-rock genre Zep largely originated. Of course, IV is not the real title of the album, which consists of four Celtic runes that defy modern pronunciation. Itís better than the alternatives, though: Zoso (stupid), Runes (unimaginative), and Led Zeppelin (just plain wrongheaded, considering that they already had an album with that title).
All Mod Cons--We jump to the other end of my teens for this Jam album. At the time, I knew enough to realize that the title was a reference to the fact that The Jam and their ilk were mod revivalists, the originals being The Who and The Small Faces, among others. As a not-too-worldly 19-year-old, what I didn't know was that "all mod cons" was British real estate-speak for "all modern conveniences." In the U.S., these would include air conditioning and a backyard swimming pool. In the U.K., I believe they would range from indoor plumbing to the proximity of a Pakistani-owned fish-and-chip takeaway. In any case, it's a jolly good play on words, and if the pun soared over my head at the time, at least I got the joke.
Sucking in the Seventies--Imagine this happening in today's lame rock world: a very commercially successful band releases an end-of-the-decade best-of and calls it Sucking in the Seventies. You think Melissa Etheridge would title a best-of Negligible in the Nineties? How about Creed releasing a collection called Mediocre at the Millenium? Not likely. Of course, the Stones could get away with it for two reasons: 1) The were pretty much being honest when they referred to themselves as "The Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band on Earth" and 2) according to most fans, the '70s was actually their best decade. (Geeky sidenote: I bought this album in 1982 in a record store in the tiny town of Clinton, Missouri, which is where most of my mom's family is from. Turns out it was a Philippine import with different cover art from the U.S. version. How cool is that?)