Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I've got four so far. Unsurprisingly, Pink Floyd is three of them, as they leaned hard into the concept album idea. That's Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon, and The Wall. And the fourth is Pearl Jam's Ten.

There's a two-year period where I intensely listened to Pink Floyd albums all the way through, most often Dark Side of the Moon, and I managed to turn it into a specifically memorable experience. For several college semesters, I tutored math, from remedial Algebra through Calculus. In the library study rooms where students would meet me for tutoring appointments, I would play Pink Floyd at a courteous volume. One day, with Dark Side of the Moon playing, a Calculus student asked if I knew about the album's 'synchronicity' with Wizard of Oz. He told me to look it up, promising how "unreal" the album aligns with scenes from the film. This was back when YouTube videos were limited to 10 minutes. I found a playlist stringing together videos of the first 40 minutes of Wizard of Oz cut over with Dark Side of the Moon. The music slowing to a piano interlude during the tornado dream sequence. The tonal shift once Dorothy crash lands in the land of Oz. I was more than impressed.

Dark Side of the Moon is definitely an album I've many times listened through, and to this day my memories of Calculus, Wizard of Oz, and Dark Side of the Moon are interconnected, reinforcing each other - one doesn't come to mind without the other.

Radiohead's OK Computer and Kid A also come to mind as Albums I listened to to hear them all the way through. As an older Millennial born in the mid-80s, I'm among the last ages to appreciate listening to albums all the way through. From what I remember, it was my friend's older siblings (younger Gen-Xers, high schoolers while I was in middle school) who took seriously to keeping an after-school habit of laying on the carpet of their bedroom floors and letting their minds drift to full albums by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Bush's Sixteen Stone, and REM's Out Of Time.

By the time I was getting into high school, the new music was already getting truncated into more digestible bite-sizes through MTV's Total Request Live, Napster downloads, iPods, and Apple's iTunes Store selling singles for 99 cents. Although an older Gen Xer might argue that "bite-sizing" was already in the works once Mix Taping was popularized in the 1980s.

By then it wasn't only consumer demand preferring the single, but the music industry quietly moved on from emphasizing the larger structure of albums. I remember back around 2000 reading several Rolling Stones reviews bemoaning the loss of "unity" in new albums. Commentary that would emerge when the reviewer would be surprised by an album that achieved an internal "balance." For example, the Wallflowers 2000 album (Breach) was praised by Rolling Stone for its "interconnectedness."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=627aciBA2E8

Oh and a comment about mixtapes-- we definitely started re-shuffling our music, but for most of us mixtapes were created with a specific goal or purpose.  They were party mixes, or lovesong mixes for making out with your girlfriend, or driving/cruising mixes, or road-tripping mixes.  But they still never replaced the whole-album experience.

I will say that record labels sort of shot themselves in the foot starting sometime in the 80s, too, when they started urging their bands not to put all their good songs on one album, and instead create a lot of lame filler.  I have more than a couple albums that I was really disappointed in, with how much filler crap they actually put on there.  Ultimately consumers were trained not to buy whole albums and that ushered in the late 90s jukebox era in the first place, and it was of course aided by technology like faster broadband, file sharing, mp3 players, the ipod, and eventually itunes and then streaming services.  But the decline in the album era was already underway, IMO.  And it's the greedy record labels that killed it.

Oh can't believe I haven't listed Van Halen I.  That's a full album for sure.

Oh snap.....a lot of Van Halen probably belongs on here for me.  Overlooked because, again, it's not necessarily my most favorite stuff. 

But......1984 and 5150 are both winners.  When I'm in the mood for VH, I generally listen to those all the way through.  

Yeah 1984 is probably my favorite VH album, and my favorite VH song is "I'll Wait" which I think is extremely underrated.  

Most VH is easy to listen all the way through for me because, even if there are 1 or 2 songs that aren't compelling, Eddie's guitar work is still so intricate and amazing, that I'll focus in on just that.

Well, that comes from the Use Your Illusion albums, not Appetite For Destruction.

I can't actually remember the Use Your Illusion albums anymore.  I have a compilation UYI that was released which had the best songs from each, and that's all I've listened to for years.  I would actually include that, but I reckon it technically counts as a compilation.  The originals may be on my list.....I just don't remember them as well. 

Yeah I have all three of those, but the only one I ever go back and listen to all the way through, is Appetite for Destruction.  So at some point I guess I decided that UYI 1 and 2 just weren't all that great, all the way through.

Maybe I'll give them another listen soon, to see if my opinion has changed.

GnR just doesn't do it for me