Rumours By Decade, Part 1: A Primer
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more"
On August 12th, 2015 in Long Beach, CA a man lit a fire that still burns and the discussion that we have come to know as #RumoursByDecade1 was unleashed.
Welcome to the Rumours Rabbithole. You can check out but you can never leave.
Hypothetical questions with no real answers are something I often end up using a decent amount of thought power on, but rarely has something rattled around the old brain box as long as this one. I can’t really pinpoint why, exactly. It’s just a really fun concept and also it includes Rumours, a record that I love without any trace of irony. I don’t know if this concept would have taken flight with me if Casey chose any other record. May I suggest listening to it while reading this?
Earlier this week, I had a thought that sent me into a re-litigation of the Rumours of the ‘90s and almost immediately I decided to scrap the post I had planned for this week, skip all of the other posts on my idea list and jump directly to making #RumorsByDecade part of the Negative Progression world. When reached for comment, Casey noted: “Rumours By Decade is for the children.” We thank him for coming up with the idea and for granting his blessing for me to run with it.
Today, I’m going to cover the progress made to date and then in future entries, I plan to dig into each decade. I truly hope to get gather input from all of you, as well. This thing only lives because of the ideas that we all have.
So, what do we have so far? Honestly, not as much as you’d think, given its been SIX YEARS since thing started. We have the guiding principles. We have some minimal common ground. The hashtag remains an easy place to review some of our work to date. Unfortunately, there are also tweets out there that don’t include the hashtag.
As noted up top, the genesis of everything is the 1990s, with Casey’s selection of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. (And, as we’ll get into, the Rumours of the 90s is my personal bête noir2.)
We do have some key contenders for each of the decades.
1980s: Appetite For Destruction (Guns N Roses); Sports (Huey Lewis and the News); Born In The USA (Bruce Springsteen); Joshua Tree (U2); ...And Justice For All (Metallica); Brothers in Arms (Dire Straits)
1990s: Blood Sugar Sex Magik (Red Hot Chili Peppers); Nevermind (Nirvana); Tragic Kingdom (No Doubt); No Way Out (Puff Daddy); Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette); Morning Glory (Oasis)
2000s: American Idiot (Green Day); Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (OutKast); The Marshall Mathers LP (Eminem); Is This It? (The Strokes); By The Way (Red Hot Chili Peppers); Parachutes (Coldplay)
2010s: TBD! In 2016, I suggested that 2021 was the earliest year that we could start the 2010s conversation. Hey, what do you know, its 2021 now! Its also a decade in which I have little-to-no handle on the pop-culture world. It should be a fun challenge.
1950s/1960s: My take on this is that there isn’t a Rumours for a decade before the ‘70s because of time paradox reasons. I might be alone in that opinion. I might also just be making a clever excuse because I need some help on these decades?
The Research Report: In September of 2015, your humble author also attempted - and ultimately failed - to write the definitive argument for each decade by using sales data and other such “research”.
While it will serve as a useful reference point, upon review I see multiple flaws in the arguments presented. It was hubris on my part to try and use ‘data’ for such a subjective matter.
One thing of value that the Research Report does provide is a write up of Rumours, which serves both as a helpful reminder of our guiding principles and a benchmarking exercise on what exactly it is that Rumours brings to the table.
I am quoting from it here:
Guiding Principles
Lavish Production / High Craft
Cultural Ubiquity
Dubious Taste
Rumours of the 1970s – “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac
Recording/Production notes – The Mac are notorious for their studio largesse. Whilst this isn’t the Tusk sessions, there’s still plenty of stories out there. To quote from Wikipedia: “Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent; sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album's production. Chris Stone, one of the Record Plant's owners, indicated in 1997 that Fleetwood Mac brought "excess at its most excessive" by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions; he stated, "The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn't do anything, they'd start recording.”
Worldwide Sales / Cultural Ubiquity – 40 million by 2009; Rumours is the sixth best-selling album in US history
Dubious Taste – No. There is a reason this records sold 40 Million+ copies. It’s great!
There are two other Guiding Principles that I think are worthy of secondary consideration. (Perhaps as potential tie-breakers?)
1. Weird Intra-Band Dynamics. For Rumours, this is the famous “some band members sleeping with each other in the wake of some of them breaking up with each other3”. dynamic. But given that’s a rarity (although say hello to Tragic Kingdom) we can expand that a little wider to more generally fucked-up band relationships. For example, Metallica, Guns’N’Roses, Oasis and No Doubt.
2. White Drugs. Now, I’m definitely not advocating that hard drug use is a requirement, but it probably does need to be acknowledged as an active ingredient in a lot of the contenders, for example RHCP, Nirvana, GNR, Oasis and Eminem.
In summation: we have our guiding principles, we have a list of contenders and we have nothing but time to waste on this. So, fire up your Hot Take machine, strap on your nostalgia glasses, do whatever you need to do to get in the zone and get ready for the ride.
Help me solve this problem, friends, if for no other reason than so I can free up a kernel of brain power for something else.…
Also sometimes #RumoursByTheDecade as your pal CW can’t keep a hashtag straight
The fuckin 90’s, man. Too many choices, all of which have great arguments in their favor. Every time I think I have this thing figured out, the 90s fucks it up again.
These 5 people are all insane. Truly, how did they even make this record under these circumstances, let alone make one of the biggest hit records of all time? Also, calling the record Rumours? That’s such good stuff!
I'm not exactly happy to see Sublime S/T to be struck from the record, although I believe it's budget was likely much lower than BSSM. But in that context, Nevermind wasn't a big budget record either...