Klinger: Well, Mendelsohn, last week you asked me if the canon was still open, what with the inclusion of slightly more recent records like Radiohead’s In Rainbows on the Acclaimed Music aggregate of the greatest albums of all time. Now this week we have Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, an actual, honest to God album that was released not just during this century, but right at the dawn of the Obama administration. Still, I have to give you the same answer I gave you last week: The inclusion of a handful of current records doesn’t indicate to me that we’re still continuing to write the history of the album as an art form. Whatever the relative merits of Merriweather Post Pavilion, I still think its placement on the Great List is more of a mathematical aberration than anything else.

I suspect Merriweather Post Pavilion is located here at No. 128 based on its high rankings on various best of the year and best of the decade lists. Once the dust settles and our resident mathemagician gets around to crunching the numbers again (which he hasn’t done for quite some time), Animal Collective’s standing will dip significantly. Even so, I think it’s fair to discuss this album as a snapshot of a certain genre (indie rock) at a certain time (the late ‘00s). That’s a time when I was a little checked out, though. Perhaps you, Mendelsohn—with your finger on the pulse and whatnot—can shed some light here?

In an otherwise lively, judicious, and conversant article that ranked Built to Spill’s albums from worst to best, Stereogum critic Chris DeVille took a departure from sound judgment with this puzzling perspective: he referred to “The Weather” as a “dud”. At the risk of being dramatic, let me state that prior to this I’d never heard or read anyone venture a slighting word about “The Weather”. I may have stood quiet had tamer language been used, but “dud” represents a bridge too far.

For those unaware, “The Weather” is the dreamy and evocative final track on Ancient Melodies of the Future, the Idahoan indie-rock act’s 2001 full-length. As a whole, the album doesn’t amount to much more than solid and enjoyable—especially coming on the heels of heady, near-flawless heavyweights like Perfect from Now On and Keep It Like a Secret—but it does boast some stand-out moments, including “Strange”, “You Are”, and – yes – “The Weather”.

At this point Billy Bragg is more than just a musician; he’s an institution. The past 15 years have seen him become an author, political commentator, and de facto curator/proselytizer of the Woody Guthrie legacy, in addition to his own musical output. Given his current status as a beloved, NPR-friendly raconteur in America and “national treasure” back in England, it’s hard to remember a time when Bragg was a divisive figure who invented his own brand of scrappy folk-punk that was equal parts love songs and socialism. Bragg’s latest album, March’s Tooth & Nail continues in the mold of his recent albums featuring lots of the upbeat, soulful roots music that has increasingly dominated his records since 1996’s William Bloke. His early career however, sounded much different.

Following the dissolution of his first band, Riff Raff, and a brief stint in the British Army, Bragg burst onto the scene as a solo musician with little more than his heavily accented voice and a slightly-distorted guitar on 1983’s mini-album, Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy, which set the template for his early work. The following year he released a proper full-length, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, which added only occasional production touches to his stark guitar songs. He expanded his sound further on his “difficult third album”, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry in 1986 which was his first top ten album in the UK. Workers Playtime (1988) was his breakup album, which saw also Bragg finally cave in and actually bring drums into the mix. Finally, in 1991 he released his pop masterpiece, Don’t Try This at Home. Recorded with an all-star cast including members of the Smiths, R.E.M., and Kirsty MacColl, the record gave him his highest-charting single, got him on Later Night with David Letterman, and allowed him to tour the world with a full band in tow. It also marked the end of his early work, as he would take five years off from recording after Don’t Try This at Home and would return to the studio a husband and father with new responsibilities and concerns.

Liz Phair’s seminal Exile in Guyville opens with “6’1”,” arguably the record’s hardest, grungiest early ‘90s rock moment. It is an act of sheer bravada on Phair’s part—the musical equivalent of a freshly incarcerated inmate slugging the largest, meanest mother in the shower stalls—as she encounters a former flame (“All the bridges blown away / Keep floating up”) and spends three fabulously caustic minutes assuring him that while she’s only gotten better with time (“I kept standing 6’1” / Instead of 5’2”), he’s visibly shrunken in stature (“I loved my life / And I hated you”). It’s an ultimate act of sizing up—and cutting down—set to music, one of many subtly humorous moments constructed by Phair’s perverse intellect (though, compared to the album’s subsequent tracks, it is by far one of the tamest).

“Your record collection don’t exist / You don’t even know who Liz Phair is”. This playful admonishing of a much younger lover is, in many ways, the most telling moment on Liz Phair’s controversial eponymous 2003 album. The once reigning (blowjob) queen of the indie rock scene, Phair celebrated the 10th anniversary of her near-universally praised debut album Exile in Guyville by highlighting her hair and shortening her skirts; enlisting the services of production team The Matrix (responsible for the likes of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” and Hillary Duff’s “So Yesterday”); and, on the album’s cover art, wielding her guitar to strategically obscure her topless torso in lieu of actually playing it on the record. That Phair had made such an abrupt, transparent grab for mainstream success left diehard fans confused and heart-hurt, while the very music critics who had canonized Guyville as an inimitable masterpiece scratched their heads; that Phair was so unapologetic about her infectious but inconsequential “Why Can’t I?” becoming a summer radio hit (and later anthologized on Now That’s What I Call Music! 14, respectively) and relished the derisive debate it sparked surprised no one.

Phair’s songs and persona have always been brimming with rebellion, sometimes subtly, sometimes screamingly so. The more critics and fans tried to pick apart and figure out if Liz Phair was all some colossal joke orchestrated by a cunning feminist artist, or simply a frustrated, recent divorcee who had spent the previous decade in dowdy clothes on the Lilith Fair realizing she’d best do something drastic to keep herself relevant, the more Phair fired back. She most notably penned a retelling of the fable Chicken Little in response to Meghan O’Rourke’s assertion in the New York Times that Phair had committed “career suicide”. Phair was once again eliciting shock and awe among listeners, but for seemingly all the wrong reasons.