The Rolling Stones pick their most underrated album: “I knew from the songs”
With each album, artists pour their efforts into the music. Months, sometimes even years, go into a record as a band focuses on and attempts to deliver the best. It’s rare to hear of a release done by halves. That’s just not the nature of artistry. When you’re in the creative zone, it’s all or nothing. But the same dedication doesn’t always translate to fans, leading to an artist’s favourite works falling into underappreciating hands. The Rolling Stones knew that feeling well.
But with 31 studio albums under their belt, the band can’t expect the same frenzied excitement for each and every one. Not every album can be held up as their greatest, ready to be swapped and changed when the next one comes out and pushes the last out of the spotlight. As each listener has different ears and tastes, and as the band evolved with the times, allowing them to have such a lengthy career, it would be impossible for each record to be unanimously agreed upon as great.
That means that sometimes releases slip through the cracks or simply don’t get the level of praise that the band might have hoped for. After pouring so much time and energy into it, anything other than total love for an album can end up feeling like a letdown.
For Mick Jagger, that feeling hit hard when it came to the 1978 record Some Girls. At the time, it was a bold new step for the band, expanding their classic rock and roll sound into new waters. “There were a lot of people that were very narrow-minded about it,” the singer said of the album and its sound. “To me, I wasn’t brought up on rock music so much as blues and soul music, and a lot of that music was dance music. It was specifically made to dance to.”
But what he thinks is truly underappreciated about the album is its craft, being one of their most cohesive and listenable albums in his eyes. “It’s one of my favourite Stones albums, I think, because it’s so listenable as an album, and it gets to the heart of the matter straight away, and there’s no mucking about, and it’s succinct,” he told Yahoo Entertainment.
However, Some Girls was still a huge success. It was still released during the band’s commercial peak when their fame was hitting major levels. It still got number one in America and soared to the tops of charts worldwide as fans still went out to buy the album, even if Jagger believes they didn’t love it as much as it deserved.
Keith Richards choice, however, is actually a more left field one. When thinking about the Stones’ heyday, everyone naturally thinks about the 1960s and ‘70s. But the guitarist demands more love for their 1990s era by picking out Bridges To Babylon as an underrated gem.
“This one is the first one since maybe the early ’80s, late ’70s where it’s taken another step. (That) is actually pushing some boundaries again, for better or worst,” he said, seeing the record as an important discography addition. “I knew from the songs that we had a good album”.
But for a lot of Stones fans, it was a step too far into innovation. Besides a few solid tracks like ‘Anybody Seen My Baby’, the record takes some misguided leaps towards modernism as the band attempted to get involved with the sounds of the ‘90s. So for a fan base born out of a love for rock and roll, it’s easy to see why their attempts at techno went underappreciated.
