The Greatest 50(ish) Albums of All Time
A 411 Formation
Album #17 : Mary J Blige — What’s The 411?
I really didn’t want to write about football this week. Especially after I have written about my relationship with the beautiful game previously. But, to be honest, I haven’t been able to summon much interest to write about anything else, and this album didn’t exactly help to inspire me.
Although it is widely recognised as a seminal album, What’s the 411? is not exactly enthralling. It is one of those records that suffers because it was the first to do what it did. Nobody had really fused hip hop beats with R&B melodies before. Today, it sounds tired, like it has been done before — but it hadn’t. And that is the crux of it. Therefore, the respect for this record seems to come more the principle behind it than the actual content.
And that was what led me to football. This week there has been an announcement that several European clubs (including the one that three generations of my family have supported) have signed up to a so-called Super League. You can find more detail around it elsewhere but basically it is a greedy cash grab and an attempt to take football further away from its fans.
A super league, without the threat of relegation or the thrill of promotion, stands in the face of the very nature of football and its meritocracy. That is the principle behind football — jeopardy, risk, drama. Taking away those things and all you have is a game.
For those for aren’t football fans, it can be difficult to understand. So as another example, say you don’t like football, say you like soap operas. Imagine if several of the main characters from one of the shows you watched decided to go off and start a new show, which you had to pay more to watch, in which none of those specific characters could face any drama, be killed off or jailed or anything like that. They might have minor arguments, sure, but nothing would ever come of it. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That is what is proposed for football.
What’s The 411? represents change and evolution in R&B, soul and hip hop. That is undoubtedly a good thing, and I am not against change in football. But this is like Blige announced her next album was going to be nothing but the sound of her screaming into a microphone for 90 minutes and insisting it is the next step in musical evolution.
There is an argument going around that fans are to blame for this super league idea. That they should have ‘spoken with their feet’ earlier when owners pushed for higher ticket prices, bigger TV rights packages and more shirt sales. That argument fundamentally, and wilfully, misunderstands the nature of fandom. You cannot just switch off from supporting a football club because it gets expensive — that’s like stopping believing in god because the church inflicts a minimum contribution when asking for collections — the owners of football clubs know that and they have pushed their luck over and over again. This time, they have gone too far.
I wrote the above on Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday evening, the backlash from the proposed super league was so virulent that the whole thing collapsed on itself. Almost all the clubs involve have withdrawn. Some clubs apologised, some chairmen left their roles, and the proposed tournament seems to be dead in the water. It seems though that the damage has been done — the owners of the clubs involved have shown their true colours and they aren’t pretty.
Thanks for reading — over the course of 2021, I’ll be reviewing 50(ish) of the greatest albums ever recorded. You can see the list here:
There is also a playlist featuring the best song from each album here.
