Quote:
Originally Posted by TrueFaith77
I consider TUSK the greatest album of all time--three distinct perspectives on romance at their artistic peak aligned, not by the radical soap-opera narrative of RUMOURS, but by the buoying sound of a strings-like harmonizing. It constitutes a total social vision.
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In formalistic terms, is
Tusk completely successful — does it achieve or even exceed all its aesthetic goals? Or does its greatness lie at least in part in its folly: in its excesses, its miscalculations, its exhausting grandeur? (The critics at the time hinted at this by comparing it, as you know, to the Beatles’ fractious 1968 studio album
The Beatles.)
To me, the link between form and content in
Rumours seems insoluble. There is no loose formalistic thread whose teensy bit of unraveling subverts the album’s content. Even the botched production treatment of “Songbird” doesn’t undercut any of the album’s statements (I say it’s botched because, taken by itself, it sticks out sonically like a sore thumb — it lacks the tight compression of the hermetic studio environment and the Appalachian mountain music alchemy of the multitracking, yet it’s still weirdly and entirely of a piece with the rest of the album).
But in
Tusk there’s a distracting tension between the work itself and the maze of incompatibilities feeding our aural, visual, and intellectual sensibilities (most often attributed to the differences among the three writers and their aging voices). Does the album’s greatness as a cultural artifact lie in its boastful display of incommensurates?
Tusk feels like a folly — many of rock’s most influential works are glorious follies that push the borders of the art outward. And should “Not That Funny” have been . . . well, funnier?
Say, this is fun!