Why is Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Shmaltzy, glammy, proto-punk? Yeah, this is one unique album.
What does Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
From the opening track, “Do the Strand,” which entails wild piano chords and Bryan Ferry’s weirdly Germanic-Euro accented glam rock vocals (I think?), you know you’re in for a different kind of party with For Your Pleasure. It’s glam, it’s rock, it’s art house… it’s kind of shmaltzy, really, but in a good way.
Also, “Do the Strand” is just a great name for a rock song.
“Editions of You” is my favorite song on the album. It begins with a funky, bouncy organ line before propelling into a New York Dolls-y, rollicking proto-punk, art rock number. “Propulsion” is a word I think about a lot when listening to Roxy Music, which is almost always a good thing when coupled with a good hook and overall execution, and that’s certainly the case here.
“The Bogus Man,” at over nine minutes of running time, just gets flat out weird, if you can dig. I’m more of a fan of songs like “Grey Lagoons,” which again utilizes old time piano boogie music as a base and then layers glam, art rock, and proto-punk elements on top of it.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure
There’s a lot about For Your Pleasure that represents what was so exciting about music at its best in the early 1970s, with elements of hard rock, blues rock, and singer-songwriter stuff colliding with newer forms of music in proto-punk and glam rock and the early strands of sounds that would soon crossover to the mainstream such as disco, club music, punk rock, and hip hop.
I mention all of this because a sadly short lived HBO TV show called Vinyl was poised to capture this moment and time in a specific location, New York City.
Vinyl ran for one season and I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t perfect. There were storylines that could have been cut, and did they really have to show Bobby Cannavale’s character, Ritchie Finestra, aggressively taking out a Scarface-level amount of cocaine that many times?
But there was a lot about Vinyl to be excited about, particularly the great music (of course) and Ray Romano’s performance as Zak Yankovich. And I’ll stand by the fact that the pilot episode, directed by a guy you may have heard of named Martin Scorsese, is absolutely fantastic.
Some stats & info about Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Glam Rock, Album Rock, Proto-Punk, Pop Music, British Bands, Art Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #351
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was For Your Pleasure released? 1973
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #836 out of 1,000
Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.