Five Awful Titles of Albums I Listened to as a Teenager
Fables of the Reconstruction--Has any major band been worse titlers of albums than R.E.M.? They got off to a good start with the first two, Murmur (intriguing) and Reckoning (ultra-serious). After that, it all went downhill. What the hell does Fables of the Reconstruction (the cover also allowed it to be read "Reconstruction of the Fables"--big deal) mean and why should I care? Since I loved the first two albums, the answers to those unsettling questions were irrelevant. The album was just as equivocal and disappointing as its title, and I pretty much ceased to be a fan. Subsequent titles--Life's Rich Pageant, Document, Green, Monster, Up--failed to pique my interest, but Out of Time (can be read two ways) and Automatic for the People (awkward but interesting) were a lot more compelling. They were also the only R.E.M. albums I bought after the Reconstruction fiasco.
Chicago 17--For the record (no pun intended), I did not own this record. However, it was a huge hit in my teens and I heard many of the songs from it on the radio more times than I could ever wish. (My sister may also have owned it on cassette.) Anyway, this is the perfect antithesis to Led Zeppelin IV: crappy corporate rock with a lame numerical title.
90125--Yes, the biggest art-rock band ever reunites to do an album with significant promotion behind it and what do they choose for the title? The album's catalog number. This is just so lame that I can't bear to comment further.
Songs From the Big Chair--Something about this album title bugs me, though it's arguably better than Tears For Fears' first album's title, The Hurting, which is just too obvious. Songs From the Big Chair is supposedly a reference to primal scream therapy, but I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. Which is a shame, really, since the album, especially the single "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (sadly now a staple of Lite Rock playlists), is actually pretty good.
You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can't Tuna Fish--This REO Speedwagon album title has got to be the worst in history. (The cover is just a bad: a close-up of a fish head with a tuning fork jammed in its mouth.) Again, this is not an album I ever owned (disclosure: I did own the slightly later and much more successful Hi Infidelity, which had a cheesy but effective pun for a title), but I saw it all the time in the record racks as I looked for those elusive art-rock albums that people had stopped buying a good five years earlier. I'd take a break when I came across this album and ponder sheer awfulness of what I beheld. (This was the pre-irony '80s course of action. In the current day, the thing to do would be to buy it because it was so awful and then proudly display it someplace--your bathroom at home or your cubicle at work.)
So, what have we learned from this analysis of a small sampling of album titles? First of all, it seems that titles do tend to reflect the quality of the music contained on the album. All of the well-titled albums I chose are classics, whereas there are probably only a couple of standout songs (at most) on the poorly titled albums. We've also found that album titles do have an impact on whether or not someone will buy them, since I owned all of the well-titled albums but only two of the poorly titled albums (and of those one was a clear mistake). Finally, we've learned that the best titles often reflect not only the quality of the music, but the uniqueness of the experience (Are You Experienced?, Second Helping, Led Zeppelin IV). Or else they consist of a clever joke (All Mod Cons, Sucking in the Seventies). Poor album titles are lazily titled (90125, Chicago 17), obscurely titled (Fables of the Reconstruction, Songs from the Big Chair), or just plain stupidly titled (You Can Tune a Piano, But You Canít Tuna Fish).
Now it's your turn: If you know of any album titles that are particularly good or bad, send 'em in to Pizza Pants and tell us what makes them that way.
Michael Ribas
October 4, 2002