Mendelsohn: And we’re back to U2, this time it’s with Achtung Baby. The last time we talked about Dublin’s favorite sons, we found them on the musical warpath as foot soldiers for earnest rock, making the Grand Statement with 1987’s The Joshua Tree. Fast forward four years, and we are looking at a considerably different band. Well, musically, anyway. Bono and the Edge are still there along with the other two, whose names I never can remember. Is it Adam and Bill? Don’t tell me, I won’t commit it to memory. I don’t care enough, which also sums up the way I feel about U2. But you know that; we’ve been here before.

The thing that I find the most troubling about Achtung Baby is how dated is sounds to me. Right off the bat, in “Zoo Station”, with the Edge’s distorted guitar-riffs, swirling effects, and that nearly machine-like drum beat, it just screams early ’90s. But then, it may have been U2 that gave birth to the sound of the early ’90s, so I can’t really hold that against them, can I?

It’s roughly one month now before the first ballot for Canada’s Polaris Prize produces its Long List of the 40 best records of the year. Every round since its founding in 2006, this process has led to intense, mostly uncomfortable debate and decision-making among the pool of as many as 220 jurors, all of whom will cast ballots with their five weighted choices. Indeed, right about now, all across the country, people are taking sides, lobbying and cajoling, and dismissing and decrying.

Moreover, all over Canada, people are listening as hard as they can to as much as they can, trying to give a fair shake to all of the 120-plus records that have been variously suggested by members of the jury (on a private listserve) as albums worth paying attention to. As tasks go, it’s a daunting one, but it’s one of those “daunting tasks you’d pay to have to suffer through”, so who’s complaining? Not me. Though I will cop to a certain kind of ethical crisis every year when I fill out those five spots since, inevitably, I am leaving off another dozen or more albums that easily could have made it. It’s painful, but the kind of painful you want to share with friends over a beer. Like a real life desert island album game.

Top Ten lists, like the ragged handwritten label of an old school mixtape, should never be considered an end-all or a final declaration. They are a weight station in a single person’s life, an aural index of a person’s sense of place, time, and culture. This list of lost punk singles/7” records from the American Midwest is not about a “best of” concept, it is about the rare, sometimes seminal gems that remained tucked away from most consumers because they were made in small batches. Having growing up and attended schools and gigs in the Illinois flatland region, I consider this list like a shout-out to nearby mavericks and marginal rockers that produced fare worth revisiting.

Porcupine Tree’s 1991 debut, On the Sunday of Life . . ., is rather odd to look back on after hearing the group’s newest outings. There’s not a lick of metal to be heard, and its absurd psychedelic humor has long since faded. (example: the initials of “Linton Samuel Dawson” are . . .). The majority of the album’s 75-minute length is made up of bizarre experiments, including a brief snippet of a suicidal turnip’s final moments and an eerie monologue by a man trapped in outer space. However, as devout Porcupine Tree fans know, that first record was in many ways something of a joke; the band, after all, started out as a side project for frontman Steven Wilson, whose primary musical group at the time was No-Man, a duo featuring Wilson on instruments and singer/songwriter Tim Bowness on vocals. Over time, as Porcupine Tree’s music became less humorous and more progressive, its fame rose to a level above No-Man, who despite a rabid cult following remain largely underrated. (For my money, No-Man’s Together We’re Stranger is the closest thing to a perfect record Wilson has ever participated in). The off-kiler psychedelia of On the Sunday of Life . . . would later become more serious, particularly on the sophomore LP Up the Downstair.

Klinger: I can only imagine what a mind-messer Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” must have been when it first hit the airwaves back in 1967. Even if you had heard Otis Redding’s version a couple years before, this rendition still must have sounded like it came from another planet. That punch-in-the-face intro, the brassy first blast of vocals, those backing vocals that zig every time you think they’re going to zag—it must have been one of the most thrilling experiences pop music had offered up in quite some time.

A shame, then, that it’s been worn down to such a nub in the intervening years. Every time I hear this song I end up thinking of Murphy Brown for some reason, and I’m not even entirely sure why. Did Candace Bergen sing it a lot on the show, Mendelsohn? I don’t remember, but here we are. Anyway, the song has become such a cliché, such a lazy Hollywood way of expressing empowerment, that it’s practically lost all meaning. If you really concentrate, though, you can still hear that first spark that made “Respect” so great. And luckily, the album it came from, Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, is full of plenty more moments that haven’t been chewed into mush by the Big Chill generation. I’ll let you point out a few now.