The album Janis Ian thought was perfect: “There wasn’t a bad song on it”
We’ve all got a different inclination as to what constitutes a perfect record, but despite how many different perceptions we all seem to have, each individual person is likely to only have a couple that they would put forward as their own idea of pop perfection.
Perfection may well have been achieved by The Beach Boys on Pet Sounds, or by John Coltrane on A Love Supreme; two hard-to-deny classic albums with a completely different sonic backdrop. There’s no prerequisite to making something that others consider to be perfect, other than fulfilling the very definition of the term itself.
It’s obviously a loaded term that comes with differing points of view depending on whoever you ask, but as long as you’re able to explain exactly why it fits your parameters for being perfect, then there’s absolutely no reason why something can’t have it applied as a description, whether it be a long or short-form demonstration.
For someone like Janis Ian, one of the most unfortunately underrated folk singers of her generation, perfection is often in both the arrangement and the lyrical content, and on some of her most celebrated songs, such as ‘At Seventeen’ and ‘Society’s Child’, she expertly delivered her own interpretation of what perfection could be.
Despite not having ever gained anywhere near the amount of attention that she deserved, often getting overshadowed by the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, who were thought of as the superior female folk artists of her generation, her influences all seem to stem from a similarly diverse range of places, encompassing pop, jazz and progressive political action.
One such artist who always managed to tick all three of these boxes as far as Ian and plenty of others are concerned is Nina Simone, someone who has often been labelled as one of the greatest vocalists, pianists and arrangers not only in the world of jazz, but as a general high mark of all musical output.
Not only was Simone thought of as being a tremendous example of someone who could merge all of these different facets of musicality, but like Ian, she was a prominent voice in the world of social justice, using her art as a platform for speaking out against racial divides and sexism. For Ian, it was one of Simone’s records that stood out as being an example of perfection, and it is something that has not been surpassed since she first heard it in childhood.
“Growing up, one of my favourite albums was Nina Simone’s Wild is the Wind,” she would later confess in the documentary, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence. ”There wasn’t a bad song on it. There wasn’t a bad vocal lick, there wasn’t a bad piano note, there wasn’t a bad arrangement. It was this wonderful blend of songs like ‘Four Women’ that were instinct married to tremendous harnessing of her own talent and craft.”
It’s undoubtedly a fine body of work, and up there with some of the best that Simone produced during her career. This description given by Ian is perhaps the finest explanation of what it takes for something to be objectively perfect, and while not everyone will agree with this choice, it’s hard to argue with her reasoning.
