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ENGLISH INFORMATION IN THE WORLD

2009年5月13日星期三

Google简介

Company Perspectives:

Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company's overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.


Key Dates:
1995: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet at Stanford University.
1997: BackRub, the precursor to the Google search engine, is founded.
1998: Google is incorporated and moves into its first office in a Menlo Park, California, garage.
1999: Google moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, and later to Mountain View, California; Red Hat becomes Google's first commercial customer.
2000: Yahoo! Internet Life magazine names Google the Best Search Engine on the Internet; Google becomes the largest search engine on the Web and launches the Google Toolbar.
2001: Google acquires Deja.com's Usenet archive and launches Google PhoneBook; Dr. Eric Schmidt joins Google as chairman of the board of directors and is later appointed CEO.
2002: Google launches the Google Search Appliance, AdWords Select, the 2001 Search Engine Awards, and Google Compute.


GOOGLE  is short for:
Meaning Category
10^100; Ten to the power of one hundred (Ten followed by hundred zeros) Academic & Science->Mathematics
Gallery Of Overstimulated GirLs Everytime Miscellaneous->Funnies
Gargantuan On-Line Operation of Government Law Enforcement Miscellaneous->Funnies
General Oblivion and Omnipotent Guide to Lots of Everything Miscellaneous->Funnies
General Organism Optimized For Gratification And Logical Exploration Miscellaneous->Funnies
Girl's Only Online Liberal Engagement Internet->Chat
Giving Opinions & Options Generously Linked Everywhere Internet
God's Only Online Gateway Linking Electronically Community->Religion
Good Offers Other Games Like Examples? Miscellaneous->Funnies
Gracios Opinions Of God's Living Entities Miscellaneous->Funnies
Gradually Overcoming Obstacles by God's Love & Eternity Community->Religion
Gradually Overcoming Our Ghastly Legal Environment Miscellaneous->Funnies
Great Oogling Options Gathered Legally Everyday Miscellaneous->Funnies
Great Opportunity to Operationalize a Gullible Luddite Exploitation Miscellaneous->Funnies

Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.[6] They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.[7] Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[8][9] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.[10]

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997,[11] and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a US$100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.[12]

Corporate affairs and culture  

Left to right, Eric E. Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Google is known for its informal corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator. In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best places to work.[4] Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."[80]

Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards.[81] For example, some system administrators earn no more than US$35,000 per year – considered to be quite low for the Bay Area job market.[82] However, Google's stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth.[83]

After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to US$1.00.[84] Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because, "their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."[84] Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making US$250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of US$150,000.[84]

They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of US$18.5 billion each.[85]

In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives. Justin Rosenstein, Google’s product manager, left in June 2007.[86] Shortly thereafter, Gideon Yu, former chief financial officer of YouTube, a Google unit, joined Facebook[87] along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer, who left in October 2007.[88] In March 2008, two senior Google leaders announced their desire to pursue other opportunities. Sheryl Sandburg, ex-VP of global online sales and operations began her position as COO of Facebook[89] while Ash ElDifrawi, former head of brand advertising, left to become CMO of Netshops Inc.[90]

Google's persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy. As of 11 December 2007, Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores "personal information for 18 months" and by comparison, Yahoo! and AOL (Time Warner) "retain search requests for 13 months."[91]

U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 ordered Google to give YouTube user data / log to Viacom to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google.[92][93] Google and Viacom, however, on July 14, 2008, agreed in compromise to protect YouTube users' personal data in the $1 billion (£ 497 million) copyright lawsuit. Google agreed it will make user information and internet protocol addresses from its YouTube subsidiary anonymous before handing over the data to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other litigants including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the Scottish Premier League.[94][95] The deal however did not extend the anonymity to employees, since Viacom would prove that Google staff are aware of uploading of illegal material to the site. The parties therefore will further meet on the matter lest the data be made available to the court.[96]



2009年5月11日星期一

滚石版最佳500专辑(1-20)

The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time(1-20)

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles 

Capitol 1967

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.

Issued in Britain on June 1st, 1967, and a day later in America,Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is also rock's ultimate declaration of change. For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and assembly-line record-making. "We were fed up with being Beatles," McCartney said decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles' McCartney biography. "We were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers."

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition. "It was a peak," Lennon confirmed in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, describing both the album and his collaborative relationship with McCartney. "Paul and I definitely were working together," Lennon said, and Sgt. Pepper is rich with proof: McCartney's burst of hot piano and school-days memoir ("Woke up, fell out of bed . . . ") in Lennon's "A Day in the Life," a reverie on mortality and infinity; Lennon's impish rejoinder to McCartney's chorus in "Getting Better" ("It can't get no worse").

"Sgt. Pepper was our grandest endeavor," Starr said, looking back, in the 2000 autobiography The Beatles Anthology. "The greatest thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea - it didn't matter who -- that was the one we'd use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, 'Well, it's mine,' and getting possessive." It was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' longtime assistant, who suggested they reprise the title track, just before the grand finale of "A Day in the Life," to complete Sgt. Pepper's theatrical conceit: an imaginary concert by a fictional band, played by the Beatles.

The first notes went to tape on December 6th, 1966: two takes of McCartney's music-hall confection "When I'm Sixty-Four." (Lennon's lysergic reflection on his Liverpool childhood, "Strawberry Fields Forever," was started two weeks earlier but issued in February 1967 as a stand-alone single.) But Sgt. Pepper's real birthday is August 29th, 1966, when the Beatles played their last live concert, in San Francisco. Until then, they had made history in the studio -- Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) -- between punishing tours. Off the road for good, the Beatles were free to be a band away from the hysteria of Beatlemania. McCartney went a step further. On a plane to London in November '66, as he returned from a vacation in Kenya, he came up with the idea of an album by the Beatles in disguise, an alter-ego group that he subsequently dubbed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "We'd pretend to be someone else," McCartney explained in Anthology. "It liberated you -- you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn't you."

Only two songs on the final LP, both McCartney's, had anything to do with the Pepper character: the title track and Starr's jaunty vocal showcase "With a Little Help From My Friends," introduced as a number by Sgt. Pepper's star crooner, Billy Shears. "Every other song could have been on any other album," Lennon insisted later. Yet it is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of McCartney's "Fixing a Hole," with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by the Beatles' producer George Martin) and modern sunshine (double-tracked lead guitar executed with ringing precision by Harrison). The Pepper premise was a license to thrill.

It also underscored the real-life cohesion of the music and the group that made it. Of the 700 hours the Beatles spent making Sgt. Pepper (engineer Geoff Emerick actually tallied them) from the end of 1966 until April 1967, the group needed only three days' worth to complete Lennon's lavish daydream "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." "A Day in the Life," the most complex song on the album, was done in just five days. (The oceanic piano chord was three pianos hit simultaneously by ten hands belonging to Lennon, McCartney, Starr, Martin and Beatles roadie Mal Evans.) No other Beatles appear with Harrison on his sitar-perfumed sermon on materialism and fidelity, "Within You Without You," but the band wisely placed the track at the halfway point of the original vinyl LP, at the beginning of Side Two: a vital meditation break in the middle of the jubilant indulgence.

The Beatles' exploitation of multitracking on Sgt. Pepper transformed the very act of studio recording (the orchestral overdubs on "A Day in the Life" marked the debut of eight-track recording in Britain: two four-track machines used in sync). And Sgt. Pepper's visual extravagance officially elevated the rock album cover to a Work of Art. Michael Cooper's photo of the Beatles in satin marching-band outfits, in front of a cardboard-cutout audience of historical figures, created by artist Peter Blake, is the most enduring image of the psychedelic era. Sgt. Pepper was also the first rock album to incorporate complete lyrics to the songs in its design.

Yet Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts -- it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place. A 1967 British print ad for the album declared, "Remember Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Is the Beatles." As McCartney put it, the album was "just us doing a good show."

The show goes on forever.

Total album sales: 11.7 million

Peak chart position: 1


2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys

Capitol 1966


"Who's gonna hear this shit?" Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band's resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. "The ears of a dog?" Confronted with his bandmate's contempt, Wilson made lemonade of lemons. "Ironically," he observed, "Mike's barb inspired the album's title."

Barking dogs -- Wilson's dog Banana among them, in fact -- are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- an acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles' masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles' Rubber Soul.

Wilson essentially made Sounds without the rest of the band, using them only to flesh out the vocal arrangements. He even considered putting the album out as a solo project, and the first single, "Caroline, No," was released under his own name. The deeply personal nature of the songs, which Wilson co-wrote primarily with lyricist Tony Asher, further distinguished the album from the Beach Boys' typical fare. Its luxurious sound convey a heartbreaking wistfulness, as songs such as "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and "I'm Waiting for the Day" bid farewell to the innocent world of the early Sixties and to the Beach Boys' fun-in-the-sun hits.

Unfortunately, Capitol Records proved no more enamored of Pet Sounds than had Love; the label actually considered not releasing the album at all. Not yet vindicated by history, Wilson withdrew further into his inner world. "At the last meeting I attended concerning Pet Sounds," Wilson wrote in his autobiography (which took the name of the album's opening track, "Wouldn't It Be Nice") about his dealings with Capitol's executive brain trust, "I showed up holding a tape player and eight prerecorded, looped responses, including 'No comment,' 'Can you repeat that?' 'No' and 'Yes.' Refusing to utter a word, I played the various tapes when appropriate."

Total album sales: 1.6 million

Peak chart position: 10

3. Revolver, The Beatles

Capitol 1966


"I don't see too much difference between Revolver and Rubber Soul," George Harrison once said. "To me, they could be Volume One and Volume Two." Revolver extends the more adventurous aspects of its predecessor -- its introspection, its nascent psychedelia, its fascination with the possibilities of the studio -- into a dramatic statement of generational purpose. The album, which was released in August 1966, made it thrillingly clear that what we now think of as "the Sixties" was fully -- and irreversibly -- under way.

Part of that revolutionary impulse was visual. Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' artist buddies from their days in Hamburg, Germany, designed a striking photo-collage cover for Revolver; it was a crucial step on the road to the even trippier, more colorful imagery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would come less than a year later.

And then there's the music. The most innovative track on the album is John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows." Attempting to distill an LSD trip into a three-minute song, Lennon borrowed lyrics from Timothy Leary's version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and recorded his vocal to sound like "the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountaintop." Tape loops, a backward guitar part (Paul McCartney's blistering solo on "Taxman," in fact) and a droning tamboura completed the experimental effect, and the song proved hugely influential. For his part, on "Eleanor Rigby" and "For No One," McCartney mastered a strikingly mature form of art song, and Harrison, with "Taxman," "I Want to Tell You" and "Love You To," challenged Lennon-McCartney's songwriting dominance.

Revolver, finally, signaled that in popular music, anything -- any theme, any musical idea -- could now be realized. And, in the case of the Beatles, would be.

Total album sales: 5 million

Peak chart position: 1


4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan

Columbia 1965


Bruce Springsteen has described the beginning of "Like a Rolling Stone," the opening song on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, as the "snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." The response of folk singer Phil Ochs to the entire album was even more rhapsodic. "It's impossibly good. . . ." he said. "How can a human mind do this?"

Recorded in a mind-boggling six days and released in August 1965, Highway 61 Revisited — named after the road that runs from Dylan's home state of Minnesota down through the Mississippi Delta — is one of those albums that, quite simply, changed everything. In and of itself, "Like a Rolling Stone," which was rumored to be about Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, forever altered the landscape of popular music — its "vomitific" lyrics (in Dylan's memorable term), literary ambition and sheer length (6:13) shattered limitations of every kind. But that was literally only the beginning. "Ballad of a Thin Man" delivered the definitive Sixties comment on the splintering hip/ straight fault line: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?" If anyone questioned whether or not Dylan had truly "gone electric," the roaring rock & roll of "From a Buick 6" and "Tombstone Blues" — both powered by legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield — left absolutely no doubt.

The album ends with "Desolation Row," a swirling eleven-minute surrealist night journey of indescribable power. Confronted with the dilemma of providing an ending to an album so bursting with ideas, Dylan evokes a Hieronymus Bosch-like season in hell that, in retrospect, seems to foretell all the Sixties cataclysms to come. "The Titanic sails at dawn," he sings wearily near the song's end. "Everybody is shouting, 'Which side are you on?' " That "Desolation Row" is an all-acoustic track — a last-minute decision on Dylan's part — is one final stroke of genius: a spellbinding new vision of folk music to close the album that, for the time being at least, destroyed folk music. The gesture was simultaneously touching and a devastating "Fuck you!"

Not that Dylan wasn't having fun all the while as well. The toy siren that opens the album's title track was keyboardist's Al Kooper's playful way of policing the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. "If anybody started using drugs anywhere," he explained, "I'd walk into the opposite corner of the room and just go whooooooooo."

Total album sales: 1.5 million

Peak chart position: 3


5. Rubber Soul, The Beatles

Capitol 1965


Released in December 1965 -- and capping a year that had been defined by groundbreaking singles such as Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" -- Rubber Soul finds the Beatles rising to meet the challenge their peers had set. Characteristically, they achieved a new musical sophistication and a greater thematic depth without sacrificing a whit of pop appeal. Producer George Martin described Rubber Soul as "the first album to present a new, growing Beatles to the world," and so it was.

The band's development expressed itself in a variety of overlapping ways. On the U.K. version (the only one available on CD), "Drive My Car" presents a comic character study of a sort that had not previously been in the Beatles' repertoire. More profoundly, however, Dylan's influence suffuses the album, accounting for the tart emotional tone of "Norwegian Wood," "I'm Looking Through You," "You Won't See Me" and "If I Needed Someone." (Dylan would return the compliment the following year, when he offered his own version of "Norwegian Wood" -- titled "4th Time Around" -- on Blonde on Blonde, and consequently made Lennon "Paranoid.") Lennon's "Nowhere Man," which he later acknowledged as a depressed self-portrait, and the beautifully reminiscent "In My Life" both reflect the more serious and personal style of songwriting that Dylan had suddenly made possible.

Musically speaking, George Harrison's sitar on "Norwegian Wood" -- the first time the instrument was used in a pop song -- and Paul McCartney's fuzz bass on "Think for Yourself" document the band's increasing awareness that the studio could be more than a pit stop between tours. From this point on, a fascination with the sonic possibilities of recording would inspire the Beatles' greatest work.

Harrison called Rubber Soul "the best one we made," because "we were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren't able to hear before." And as for why the band's hearing had grown so acute, well, that was another aspect of the times. "There was a lot of experimentation on Rubber Soul," said Ringo Starr, "influenced, I think, by the substances."

Total album sales: 6.5 million

Peak chart position: 1


6. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye

Motown 1971


"In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say," Gaye once said about the creation of What's Going On. "I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world." The last thing Motown wanted its fans to think about, however, was "what was happening in the world." So with Gaye determined to shatter the label's hugely successful pop formula and address issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights and the environment, Motown founder Berry Gordy was not pleased, to say the least. He claimed that "What's Going On" was the worst song he had ever heard.

As for "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," Gordy asserted that he didn't even know what the word ecology meant. For his part, Gaye said he would never record for Motown again unless "What's Going On" was put out as a single. After initially being rejected by Motown's quality-control committee, it was; when it became a Top Five hit, the album -- and a burst of socially conscious music from Motown -- followed soon after.

Producing the album amid a haze of marijuana smoke, Gaye made one intuitively brilliant decision after another -- from letting the tapes roll as his friends mingled and chatted to recording the rehearsal exercises of saxophonist Eli Fountain. When Fountain complained that he had just been goofing around, Gaye replied, "Well, you goof exquisitely. Thank you." And that's how the plaintive saxophone line that announces What's Going On came to be.

Total album sales: 1 million

Peak chart position: 6


7. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

Virgin 1972


A dirty whirl of blues and boogie, the Rolling Stones' 1972 double LP "was the first grunge record," guitarist Keith Richards crowed proudly last year. But inside the deliberately dense squall -- Richards' and Mick Taylor's dogfight riffing, the lusty jump of the Bill Wyman/Charlie Watts rhythm engine, Mick Jagger's caged-animal bark and burned-soul croon -- is the Stones' greatest album and Jagger and Richards' definitive songwriting statement of outlaw pride and dedication to grit. In the existential shuffle "Tumbling Dice," the exhausted country beauty "Torn and Frayed" and the whiskey-soaked church of "Shine a Light," you literally hear the Stones in exile: working at Richards' villa in the south of France, on the run from media censure, British drug police (Jagger and Richards already knew the view from behind bars) and the country's onerous tax code. The music rattles like battle but also swings with clear purpose -- unconditional survival -- in "Rocks Off" and "All Down the Line." As Richards explained, "The Stones don't have a home anymore -- hence the Exile -- but they can still keep it together. Whatever people throw at us, we can still duck, improvise, overcome." Great example: Richards recorded his jubilant romp "Happy" with just producer Jimmy Miller on drums and saxman Bobby Keys -- while waiting for the other Stones to turn up for work. Exile on Main Street is the Stones at their fighting best, armed with the blues, playing to win.

Total album sales: 1 million

Peak chart position: 1


8. London Calling, The Clash

Epic 1980


Recorded in 1979 in London, which was then wrenched by surging unemployment and drug addiction, and released in America in January 1980, the dawn of an uncertain decade, London Calling is nineteen songs of apocalypse fueled by an unbending faith in rock & roll to beat back the darkness. Produced with no-surrender energy by legendary Sixties studio madman Guy Stevens, the Clash's third album sounds like a free-form radio broadcast from the end of the world, skidding from bleak punk ("London Calling") to rampaging ska ("Wrong 'Em Boyo") and disco resignation ("Lost in the Supermarket"). The album was made in dire straits, too. The band was heavily in debt; singer-guitarists Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Clash's Lennon and McCartney, wrote together in Jones' grandmother's flat, where he was living for lack of dough. But the Clash also cranked up the hope. The album ends with "Train in Vain," a rousing song of fidelity (originally unlisted on the back cover) that became the sound of triumph: the Clash's first Top Thirty single in the U.S.

Total album sales: 2 million

Peak chart position: 27


9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan

Columbia 1966


Released on May 16th, 1966, rock's first studio double LP by a major artist was, as Dylan declared in 1978, "the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head . . . that thin, that wild-mercury sound." There is no better description of the album's manic brilliance. After several false-start sessions in New York in the fall of 1965 and January 1966 with his killer road band the Hawks — "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" was the only keeper — Dylan blazed through the rest of Blonde on Blonde's fourteen tracks in two three-day runs at Columbia's Nashville studios in February and March 1966.

The pace of recording echoed the amphetamine velocity of Dylan's songwriting and touring schedule at the time. But the combined presence of trusted hands such as organist Al Kooper and Hawks guitarist Robbie Robertson with expert local sessionmen including drummer Kenneth Buttrey and pianist Hargus "Pig" Robbins created an almost contradictory magnificence: a tightly wound tension around Dylan's quicksilver language and incisive singing in barrelhouse surrealism such as "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." Amid the frenzy, Dylan delivered some of his finest, clearest songs of comfort and desire: the sidelong beauty "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," recorded in just one take, and "I Want You," the title of which Dylan almost used for the album.

Total album sales: 2 million

Peak chart position: 9


10. The Beatles ("The White Album"), The Beatles

Capitol 1968


Beyond its stylish minimalism, the essentially blank cover of The Beatles, better known as the White Album, served a symbolic purpose. The band could find no honest way to visually represent itself as a coherent unit. Each of the three main songwriters was pursuing his own vision, with the other members, however reluctantly, serving as backup musicians. Once a whole far greater than the sum of its parts, the Beatles were now a tense alliance of daunting individual talents. The Beatles became a double album in part because John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison all insisted that their favorite songs be included. "I remember having three studios operating at the same time," Harrison said of the sessions. "Paul was doing some overdubs in one, John was in another and I was recording some horns or something in a third." Ringo Starr grew so frustrated that he quit the band for a time. The others festooned his drum set in flowers to celebrate his return. What didn't suffer in this atmosphere was the music. From the plangent yearning of Lennon's "Julia" to the exuberance of McCartney's "Back in the U.S.S.R." and the prayerfulness of Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (featuring a solo by Eric Clapton), the White Album is an exhilarating sprawl -- some of the Beatles' most daring and delicate work. "I think it was a very good album," said McCartney. "It stood up, but it wasn't a pleasant one to make."

Total album sales: 9.5 million

Peak chart position: 1

11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley

RCA 1976


Many believe Rock & Roll was born on July 5th, 1954, at Sun Studios in Memphis. Elvis Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black were horsing around with "That's All Right," a tune by bluesman Arthur Crudup, when producer Sam Phillips stopped them and asked, "What are you doing?" "We don't know," they said. Phillips told them to "back up and do it again." The A side of Presley's first single (backed with a version of Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky"), "That's All Right" was issued by Sun, on July 19th. It may or may not be the first rock & roll record. But the man who would be King was officially on wax. Bridging black and white, country and blues, his sound was playful and revolutionary. As Presley biographer Peter Guralnick observed, "This is the most improbable story of all: In a tiny Memphis studio, in 1954 and 1955, Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created rock & roll." Presley released four more singles on Sun -- including definitive reinventions of Wynonie Harris' "Good Rockin' Tonight" and Junior Parker's "Mystery Train" - before moving on to immortality at RCA. It took more than twenty years for Presley's Sun output to be properly collected on this '76 LP -- which has since been superseded by Sunrise, a double-CD chronicle of the King's beginnings at Sun, released in 1999.

Total album sales: 346,781

Peak chart position: 76


12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis

Columbia/Legacy 1959


This painterly masterpiece is one of the most important, influential and popular albums in jazz. At the time it was made, Kind of Blue was also a revolution all its own. Turning his back on standard chord progressions, trumpeter Miles Davis used modal scales as a starting point for composition and improvisation -- breaking new ground with warmth, subtlety and understatement in the thick of hard bop. Davis and his peerless band -- bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb, pianist Bill Evans and the titanic sax team of John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley -- soloed in uncluttered settings, typified by "melodic rather than harmonic variation," as Davis put it. Two numbers, "All Blues" and "Freddie Freeloader" (the latter featured Wynton Kelly at the ivories in place of Evans), were in twelve-bar form, but Davis' approach allowed his players a cool, new, collected freedom. Evans wrote in his original liner notes, "Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances." Or as the late critic Robert Palmer wrote, "Kind of Blue is, in a sense, all melody -- and atmosphere." The bass line in "So What" is now among the most familiar obbligatos in jazz, and there is no finer evocation of the late-night wonder of jazz than the muted horns in "All Blues."

Total album sales: 3 million

Peak chart position: N/A


13. Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground

MGM/Verve 1967

"We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible," John Cale, the classically trained pianist and viola player of the Velvet Underground, once said of this record. It was no idle boast. Much of what we take for granted in rock would not exist without this New York band or its seminal debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico: the androgynous sexuality of glitter; punk's raw noir; the blackened-riff howl of grunge and noise rock. It is a record of fearless breadth and lyric depth. Singer-songwriter Lou Reed documented carnal desire and drug addiction with a pop wisdom he learned as a song-factory composer for Pickwick Records. Cale introduced the power of pulse and drone (from his work in early minimalism); guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker played with tribal force; Nico, a German vocalist briefly added to the band by manager Andy Warhol, brought an icy femininity to the heated ennui in Reed's songs. Rejected as nihilistic by the love crowd in '67, the Banana Album (so named for its Warhol-designed cover), is the most prophetic rock album ever made.

Total album sales: 311,000

Peak chart position: 171


14. Abbey Road, The Beatles

Capitol 1969


"It was a very happy record," said producer George Martin, describing this album in The Beatles Anthology. "I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last." Indeed, Abbey Road -- recorded in two months during the summer of 1969 -- almost never got made at all. That January, the Beatles were on the verge of breakup, exhausted and angry with one another after the disastrous sessions for the aborted Get Back LP, later salvaged as Let It Be [see No. 86]. Yet determined to go out with the same glory with which they had first entranced the world at the start of the decade, the group reconvened at EMI's Abbey Road Studios to make their most polished album: a collection of superb songs cut with an attention to refined detail, then segued together (especially on Side Two) with conceptual force. There was no thematic link, other than the Beatles' unique genius. John Lennon veered from the stormy metal of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" to the exquisite vocal sunrise of "Because." Paul McCartney was saucy ("Oh! Darling"), silly ("Maxwell's Silver Hammer") and deliciously bitter ("You Never Give Me Your Money"). George Harrison proved his long-secret worth as a composer with "Something" (later covered by Frank Sinatra) and the folk-pop diamond "Here Comes the Sun," written in his friend Eric Clapton's garden after a grim round of business meetings. And Lennon, McCartney and Harrison reputedly sang more three-part harmony here than on any other Beatles album. Let It Be was the group's final release, but this album was their real goodbye: The completion of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" on August 20th marked the last time all four members were together in the studio they had made famous.

Total album sales: 12 million

Peak chart position: 1


15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience

MCA 1967

This is what Britain sounded like in late 1966 and early 1967: ablaze with rainbow blues, orchestral guitar feedback and the highly personal cosmic vision of black American emigre Jimi Hendrix. Rescued from dead-end gigs in New York by ex-Animal Chas Chandler, Hendrix arrived in London in September 1966, quickly formed the Experience with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell and, in a matter of weeks -- when he wasn't touring the country or jamming in clubs -- was recording the songs that comprised the original, differing U.K. and U.S. editions of his epochal debut. The incendiary poetry of Hendrix's guitar was historic in itself, the luminescent sum of his chitlin-circuit labors with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers and his melodic exploitation of amp howl. But it was the pictorial heat of his composing and the raw fire in his voice in "Manic Depression," "The Wind Cries Mary" and "I Don't Live Today" that established the transcendent promise of psychedelia. Hendrix made soul music for inner space. "It's a collection of free feeling and imagination," he said of the album. "Imagination is very important." Drugs were not. Widely assumed to be about an acid trip, "Purple Haze," the opening track on the '67 U.S. LP, had "nothing to do with drugs," Hendrix insisted. " 'Purple Haze' was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea."

Total album sales: 4 million

Peak chart position: 5


16. Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan

Columbia 1975

Bob Dylan once introduced this album's opening song, "Tangled Up in Blue," onstage as taking him ten years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis -- the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes -- that at least partly inspired this album, Dylan's best of the 1970s. In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic folk-pop songs in two months, in mid-1974. He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the album, from start to finish, for pals and peers including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby and Graham Nash before cutting them in September -- in just a week with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance. But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother David in Minneapolis, who suggested recutting some songs with local musicians. The final Blood was a mix of New York and Minneapolis tapes; Dylanologists still debate the merits of the two sessions. Yet no one disputes the album's luxuriant tangle of guitars, the gritty directness in Dylan's voice and the magnificent confessional force of his writing: in the existentialist jewel "Simple Twist of Fate," the wrung-dry goodbye of "If You See Her, Say Hello" and the sharp-tongued opprobrium of "Idiot Wind," his greatest put-down song since "Like a Rolling Stone."

Total album sales: 3 million

Peak chart position: 1


17. Nevermind, Nirvana

Geffen 1991

The overnight success story of the 1990s, Nirvana's second album and its totemic first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," shot up from the Northwest underground -- the nascent grunge scene in Seattle -- to kick Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard album chart and blow poodle-hair metal off the map. No album in recent history had such an overpowering impact on a generation -- a nation of teens suddenly turned punk -- and such a catastrophic effect on its main creator. The weight of success led already troubled singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain to take his own life in 1994. But his slashing riffs, corrosive singing and deviously oblique writing, rammed home by the Pixies-via-Zeppelin might of bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, put the warrior purity back in rock & roll. Lyrically, Cobain raged in code -- shorthand grenades of inner tumult and self-loathing. His genius, though, in songs such as "Lithium," "Breed" and "Teen Spirit" was the soft-loud tension he created between verse and chorus, restraint and assault. Cobain was a pop lover at heart -- and a Beatlemaniac: Nevermind co-producer Butch Vig remembers hearing Cobain play John Lennon's "Julia" at sessions. Cobain also fought to maintain his underground honor. Ultimately, it was a losing battle, but it is part of this album's enduring power. Vig recalls when Cobain was forced to overdub the guitar intro to "Teen Spirit" because he couldn't nail it live with the band: "That pissed him off. He wanted to play [the song] live all the way through."

Total album sales: 7,918,000

Peak chart position: 1


18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

Columbia 1975

Bruce Springsteen spent everything he had -- patience, energy, studio time, the physical endurance of his E Street Band -- to ensure that his third album was a masterpiece. Springsteen's reputation as a perfectionist on record begins here: There are a dozen guitar overdubs on the title track alone. He was also spending money he didn't have. Engineer Jimmy Iovine had to hide the mounting recording bills from the Columbia paymasters. "The album became a monster," Springsteen told his biographer, Dave Marsh. "It just ate up everyone's life." But in making Born to Run, Springsteen was living out the central drama in the album's tenement-love operas ("Backstreets," "Jungleland") and gun-the-engine rock & roll ("Thunder Road," "Born to Run"): the fight to reconcile big dreams with crushing reality. He found it so hard to get on tape the sound in his head -- the Jersey-bar dynamite of his live gigs, Phil Spector's Wagnerian grandeur, the heartbreaking melodrama of Roy Orbison's hits -- that Springsteen nearly scrapped Born to Run for a straight-up concert album. But his make-or-break attention to detail -- including the iconic cover photo of Springsteen leaning onto saxman Clarence Clemons, a perfect metaphor for Springsteen's brotherly reliance on the E Street Band -- assured the integrity of Born to Run's success. In his determination to make a great album, Springsteen produced a timeless, inspiring record about the labors and glories of aspiring to greatness.

Total album sales: 6 million

Peak chart position: 3


19. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison

Warner Bros. 1968

This is music of such enigmatic beauty that, thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description. There was no precedent for it in Van Morrison's previous vocal and songwriting success: the bright, rolling pop of his 1967 Top Ten hit, "Brown Eyed Girl"; his earlier spell as the leader of Irish R&B punks Them and writer of the garage-rock standard "Gloria." And Morrison -- a notoriously private man for whom singing and songwriting have long been a form of emotional armor as well as release -- never 0sounded as warm and ecstatic, more sensual and vulnerable, as he did on Astral Weeks. It was, in part, the sound of sweet relief. Morrison was newly signed to artist-friendly Warner Bros., after a rough ride with his previous U.S. label, Bang, when he made Astral Weeks in the summer of 1968. This was to be his first full-fledged solo album, and he used the opportunity to explore the physical and dramatic range of his voice in his extended poetic-scat singing in "Beside You" and "Ballerina." Morrison also turned his back on straight pop-song structure, setting these hallucinatory reveries on his native Belfast (the daydream memoir "Cypress Avenue," the hypnotic portrait of "Madame George") to wandering melodies connecting the earthy poetry in Celtic folk and American R&B. The crowning touch was the superior jazz quintet -- including acoustic bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet -- created by producer Lewis Merenstein to color the mists and shadows. Years later, Davis claimed that the album's basic tracks were all done in one three-hour session, and that Morrison never told the musicians what he wanted from them, or what the lyrics meant. Maybe he didn't know how. Astral Weeks is Morrison going deep inside himself, to the far corners of his life and art, without a net or fear. He was never this open, and naked, again.

Total album sales: 500,000

Peak chart position: N/A


20. Thriller, Michael Jackson

Epic 1982

Michael Jackson towered over the 1980s the way Elvis Presley dominated the 1950s, and Thriller is the reason why. Still in his early twenties when Thriller was released, the R&B child star of the 1970s had ripened into a Technicolor soulman, a singer, dancer and songwriter with incomparable crossover instincts. He and producer Quincy Jones established the something-for-everyone template of Thriller on 1979's Off the Wall, on which Jackson captures the rare mania of his life -- the applause and paranoia; the need for love and the fear of commitment -- in a crisp fusion of pop hooks and dance beats. On Thriller, the pair heighten the sheen (the jaunty gloss of "The Girl Is Mine," with a guest vocal by Paul McCartney), pump up the theater (the horror-movie spectacular "Thriller") and deepen the funk. With its locomotive cadence and acrobatic-metal guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, "Beat It" was arguably the first industrial-disco Number One. (Jackson had such an impeccable nose for the down-and-dirty that Jones called him Smelly.) But the most thrilling thing about Thriller was the autobiography busting through the gloss: the angry hiss of denial in Jackson's voice in the funk-rock noir of "Billie Jean"; the to-hell-with-haters cock strut of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." Jackson was at the peak of his art and adulthood. It is hard now to separate the wonder of Thriller from its commercial stature (Number One for thirty-seven weeks, seven Top Ten singles, eight Grammys) and Jackson's current nightmare of tabloid celebrity and self-destructive egomania. But there was a time when he was truly the King of Pop. This is it.

Total album sales: 26 million

Peak chart position: 1



90年代最好的100张专辑——Pitchfork

Top 100 Albums of the 1990s 


by Pitchfork Staff 

November 17, 2003

It's been just over four years since Pitchfork published its first-ever Top 100 feature, Pitchfork's Top 100 Favorite Albums of the 1990s , and looking back at that list a lot has changed: our perceptions of the decade are different now, our personal tastes have expanded, our knowledge of the music has deepened, and excepting myself, Mark Richardson and Brent DiCrescenzo, the staff has turned over twice. It got me to thinking about how the musical landscape, too, continually changes. Revisionism ushers in new classics which had simply been forgotten, or altogether undiscovered, and while most truly essential albums will always be represented on these types of lists, even their relevance can be dictated by current trends.

It occurred to me that, since we have the means, it might be worthwhile to revisit these lists every few years and see how they change. So, over the past few months, the current Pitchfork staff convened to tabulate their revised individual lists, with the ultimate goal of presenting an updated list of 1990s records that have remained essential into the first part of the new decade.

A big surprise for me was just how different this new list is from the old one, and how many more albums we all felt deserved inclusion that, unfortunately, a list of only 100 records could not encompass. Among the casualties were Sleater-Kinney, Cat Power, Chavez, The Wrens, Throwing Muses, Spoon, The Roots, Mos Def, Happy Mondays, Archers of Loaf, Amon Tobin, Jay-Z, XTC, Morphine, Royal Trux, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Drive Like Jehu, Orbital, Super Furry Animals, Sunny Day Real Estate, Sebadoh, Snoop Dogg, Method Man, Mobb Deep, Low, Codeine, Flying Saucer Attack, The Sea & Cake, Underworld, Polvo, Shudder to Think, Trail of Dead, Cornershop, Shellac, Gang Starr, Gastr del Sol, John Zorn, Coil, Jawbreaker, Autechre, and countless others. But something we could all agree on were that the albums that did make the list belonged there.

001: Radiohead 

OK Computer 

[Capitol; 1997]



002: My Bloody Valentine 
Loveless 
[Creation; 1991]


003: The Flaming Lips 
The Soft Bulletin 
[Warner Bros; 1999]


004: Neutral Milk Hotel 

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea 
[Merge; 1998]


005: Pavement 

Slanted & Enchanted 
[Matador; 1992]


006: Nirvana 

Nevermind 
[DGC; 1991]


007: DJ Shadow 
...Endtroducing 
[Mo'Wax; 1996]


008: Pavement 

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain 
[Matador; 1994]


009: Bonnie "Prince" Billy 

I See a Darkness 
[Palace; 1999]


010: Guided by Voices 

Bee Thousand 
[Scat; 1994]


011: Talk Talk 
Laughing Stock 
[Polydor; 1991]

012: Slint 
Spiderland 
[Touch & Go; 1991]

013: Nirvana 
In Utero 
[DGC; 1993]

014: Belle & Sebastian 
If You're Feeling Sinister 
[The Enclave; 1996]

015: Radiohead 
The Bends 
[Capitol; 1995]

016: The Dismemberment Plan 
Emergency & I 
[DeSoto; 1999]

017: Public Enemy 
Fear of a Black Planet 
[Def Jam; 1990]

018: Smashing Pumpkins 
Siamese Dream 
[Virgin; 1993]

019: Beck 
Odelay 
[DGC; 1996]

020: Björk 
Post 
[Elektra; 1995]

021: Björk 
Homogenic 
[Elektra; 1997]

022: Built to Spill 
Perfect from Now On 
[Warner Bros; 1997]

023: The Beta Band 
The Three EPs 
[Astralwerks; 1999]

024: Built to Spill 
There's Nothing Wrong with Love 
[Up; 1994]

025: Yo La Tengo 
I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One 
[Matador; 1997]

026: Weezer 
Weezer 
[DGC; 1994]

027: Guided by Voices 
Alien Lanes 
[Matador; 1995]

028: Pixies 
Bossanova 
[4AD; 1990]

029: Modest Mouse 
The Lonesome Crowded West 
[Up; 1997]

030: Liz Phair 
Exile in Guyville 
[Matador; 1993]

031: Wilco 
Summerteeth 
[Reprise; 1999]

032: The Notorious B.I.G. 
Ready to Die 
[Bad Boy; 1994]

033: Nas 
Illmatic 
[Columbia; 1994]

034: Beastie Boys 
Check Your Head 
[Grand Royal; 1992]

035: Boards of Canada 
Music Has the Right to Children 
[Warp; 1998]

036: Wu-Tang Clan 
Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) 
[Loud; 1993]

037: Magnetic Fields 
69 Love Songs 
[Merge; 1999]

038: The Jesus Lizard 
Goat 
[Touch & Go; 1991]

039: Olivia Tremor Control 
Dusk at Cubist Castle 
[Flydaddy; 1996]

040: Aphex Twin 
The Richard D. James Album 
[Warp; 1996]

041: Yo La Tengo 
Painful 
[Matador; 1993]

042: Fugazi 
Red Medicine 
[Dischord; 1995]

043: R.E.M. 
Automatic for the People 
[Warner Bros; 1992]

044: Boredoms 
Super Ae 
[Birdman; 1998]

045: Godspeed You Black Emperor! 
F# A# Infinity 
[Kranky; 1998]

046: Air 
Moon Safari 
[Astralwerks; 1998]

047: Oval 
94diskont 
[Thrill Jockey; 1995]

048: Portishead 
Dummy 
[Go! Discs; 1994]

049: Tom Waits 
Bone Machine 
[Island; 1992]

050: Outkast 
Aquemini 
[LaFace; 1998]

051: Stereolab 
Emperor Tomato Ketchup 
[Elektra; 1996]

052: PJ Harvey 
Rid of Me 
[Island; 1993]

053: Weezer 
Pinkerton 
[DGC; 1991]

054: Blur 
Parklife 
[SBK; 1994]

055: Spiritualized 
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space 
[Dedicated; 1997]

056: A Tribe Called Quest 
The Low-End Theory 
[Jive; 1991]

057: Brainiac 
Bonsai Superstar 
[Grass; 1994]

058: Jesus Lizard 
Liar 
[Touch & Go; 1992]

059: Elliott Smith 
Either/Or 
[Kill Rock Stars; 1997]

060: Palace Music 
Viva Last Blues 
[Drag City; 1995]

061: Pulp 
Different Class 
[Island; 1995]

062: Aphex Twin 
Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II 
[Warp; 1994]

063: De La Soul 
De La Soul Is Dead 
[Tommy Boy; 1991]

064: The Breeders 
Last Splash 
[4AD; 1993]

065: Daft Punk 
Homework 
[Virgin; 1997]

066: Tricky 
Maxinquaye 
[Island; 1995]

067: Mouse on Mars 
Iaora Tahiti 
[Too Pure; 1995]

068: Elliott Smith 
XO 
[Dreamworks; 1998]

069: Jeff Buckley 
Grace 
[Columbia; 1994]

070: Jawbox 
For Your Own Special Sweetheart 
[Atlantic; 1994]

071: Dr. Octagon 
Octagonecologyst 
[Dreamworks; 1996]

072: Silver Jews 
American Water 
[Drag City; 1998]

073: Brainiac 
Hissing Prigs in Static Couture 
[Touch & Go; 1996]

074: Ride 
Nowhere 
[Sire; 1990]

075: A Tribe Called Quest 
Midnight Marauders 
[Jive; 1993]

076: Mercury Rev 
Deserter's Songs 
[V2; 1998]

077: Primal Scream 
Screamadelica 
[Sire; 1991]

078: Stereolab 
Mars Audiac Quintet 
[Elektra; 1994]

079: Dr. Dre 
The Chronic 
[Death Row; 1992]

080: The Pharcyde 
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde 
[Delicious Vinyl; 1992]

081: The Breeders 
Pod 
[4AD; 1990]

082: Sonic Youth 
Goo 
[DGC; 1990]

083: Pixies 
Trompe le Monde 
[4AD; 1991]

084: Company Flow 
Funcrusher Plus 
[Rawkus; 1997]

085: Massive Attack 
Blue Lines 
[Virgin; 1991]

086: Destroyer 
City of Daughters 
[Triple Crown; 1998]

087: GZA/Genius 
Liquid Swords 
[Geffen; 1995]

088: Wilco 
Being There 
[Reprise; 1996]

089: Squarepusher 
Music Is Rotted One Note 
[Warp; 1999]

090: Cocteau Twins 
Heaven or Las Vegas 
[4AD; 1990]

091: Tortoise 
TNT 
[Thrill Jockey; 1998]

092: Scott Walker 
Tilt 
[Drag City; 1995]

093: Bob Dylan 
Time Out of Mind 
[Columbia; 1997]

094: Frank Black 
Teenager of the Year 
[4AD; 1994]

095: Massive Attack 
Mezzanine 
[Virgin; 1998]

096: Herbert 
Around the House 
[!K7; 1998]

097: Mogwai 
Young Team 
[Jetset; 1997]

098: KMD 
Mr. Hood 
[Asylum; 1991]

099: Raekwon 
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 
[Loud; 1995]

100: The Orb 
The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld 
[Big Life; 1991]


2009年5月1日星期五

摇滚巨星Trent Reznor回应中国盗版


Trent Reznor to China: download our music, don't buy it from pirates

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 13, 2007 5:28 AM | permalink

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was in Beijing last week for a rock festival. In a great, inflammatory interview with Music2dot0, Reznor excoriates the labels, promises to go independent and sell through his website -- and he exhorts Chinese fans to download his music for free rather than buying it from pirate CD sellers.

"As for the special situation in China, it does not seem to be easy to obtain Western music via legal channels, so I have the following suggestion for our fans: If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you've heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends. As I have put all my effort and heart into my music, I sincerely hope that more and more people can share the enjoyment with us."

因为中国的特殊情况,不大容易通过合法途径买到西方音乐,所以我给我的歌迷提以下建议:如果你可以找到并买我们的正版CD,我对你的支持表示感谢。如果你找不到,我想跟买盗版相比,从网上下载是更好的选择。我们的音乐很容易在网上找到,你可能不需要花很多努力就能找到我们的歌。如果你在听过我们的歌觉得喜欢的话,请自由的和你的朋友分享。因为我投入很多的努力和心血在我的音乐里,我真诚的希望越来越多的人能与我们分享那种快乐。