So why is Stone Temple Pilots’ Core on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
As I’ve discussed before, one of the many pleasures of embarking on an admittedly zany venture as compiling the best 1,000 albums ever is that I’ve learned so much about what I love about music in the process.
And then there are the many surprises along the way – the music and albums I wound up loving and ultimately “ranking” higher versus other stuff that I might have “expected” to enjoy as much or more along route.
While I wasn’t at all surprised that three total Stone Temple Pilots albums also made the best 1,000 (also see: Tiny Music… Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, #595, and Purple, #371), I wound up being slightly shocked that Core bubbled all the way up into the Top 200 to land at #198 overall.
There are a few reasons for this. To take a step back and rewind to 1992, a wide swath of STP’s debut album was omnipresent during that wild year of musical/cultural (Nevermind was released in the fall of 1991, launching the era of “grunge” and a completely new musical landscape) and political (Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush to take the presidency back for the Democratic Party for the first time since the Carter administration) transitions.
I was mostly oblivious to these larger goings on at the time, but I do recall rock radio and MTV pushing Stone Temple Pilots with all of their collective might. And I also recall kids in my class attempting to bust out their best and/or most “stylized” Scott Weiland voices while singing “Sex Type Thing”:
I am, I am, I am
I said, I wanna get next to you
I said, I gonna get close to you
You wouldn’t want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too
The more I think about it, it’s those memories of my friends imitating Stone Temple Pilots and the recollection of being overexposed to the band and Core around that time – and then throw in the inevitable comparisons to Nevermind-era Nirvana, unfair to any rock musicians on the planet – that caused me to expect not to enjoy revisiting early STP as much as I did.*
* Just ask Billy Corgan.
But I did. I really did. Maybe “Sex Type Thing” isn’t the chief example – it’s a fine rock song – but the melancholy acoustic vibes on “Creep” really did blow me away, and allowed me to easily consider Stone Temple Pilots as one of the best “grunge bands” of the era (more on this below).
“Wicked Garden” and “Dead & Bloated” represent a really effective “big” hard rock-meets-grunge sound with huge, meaty guitar hooks that hit the zeitgeist sweet spot in a way that reached a massive audience. I can see how that last statement can be seen as a criticism but I don’t mean it that way at all – they’re great songs.
Which brings us to “Plush,” a song that feels to me as ubiquitously 1990s as any that was ever produced during that decade. For me, it’s also forever tied to quite a character of a guy named Michah, who was the original lead singer (and frontman extraordinaire) of a college band, Soul Patch, that included several close friends of mine.
I particularly recall hanging out with some friends, and Michah picked up a guitar and began messing around, as people would often do in those days. And over the course of a few hours, it seemed like he played the main chord progression of “Plush” a few dozen times. “I just can’t get enough of this song,” he said, or words to that effect.
And some songs and some bands – from pockets and places and times in our lives – are just like that.
Pop culture stuff that has something to do with Stone Temple Pilots’ Core
I’ll have to pore over the best 1,000 albums ever and think about this some more to be sure, but I’m pretty sure I’d place Stone Temple Pilots within my “Top 5 grunge bands of all time,” probably around the number four slot. Nirvana easily holds the numero uno position, with Alice in Chains – another band for whom my respect grew enormously over the course of this project – coming in at number two.
From there, things get a little more open: Hole, L7, and STP are in the mix here. If you have any passion or interest in anything I’m discussing here, I’m sure some of you are thinking things like, “What about Pearl Jam, what about Soundgarden, what about Foo Fighters, are you NUTZZ?” Or some such.
I like and respect all of those bands, but they’re not Top 5 range for me, really. And of those three bands, the one album that truly melts my brain is the Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut. But we’ll get to that as the best 1,000 albums ever continues its march toward the top of the top.
Some stats & info about Stone Temple Pilots – Core
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Hard Rock, Alternative Rock, Grunge, SoCal Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 3.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Core released? 1992
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #198 out of 1,000
Stone Temple Pilots’ Core on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Stone Temple Pilots’ Core that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I’m half the man I used to be.
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 review of 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.