Sly and the Family Stone offered the title of their 1971 masterpiece, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, as an answer to a question posed by Marvin Gaye just five months earlier. What’s Going On, wondered Gaye with his seminal, nine-song concept album about the state of the country in the midst of the Vietnam War. He made note of generational and racial divides; he shed light on the growing opioid epidemic; he prayed for the environment. Wanting to keep that important conversation going, Stone changed the title of his own album, which he had planned to call Africa Talks to You.
Four decades later, Yo La Tengo have adopted There’s a Riot Goin’ On as the name of their fifteenth studio record, to be released March 16. It’s a sprawling, self-produced collection that glides between blissful record-nerd indie rock and stretches of meditative drone. Unsurprisingly, its gentle psychedelia reflects little of Sly Stone’s urgent funk and passionate messages of black power. Still, YLT’s Ira Kaplan insists There’s a Riot Goin’ On is an earnest name: “I know the title in our minds is a direct reflection of the record, it’s not meant ironically or humorously in any way unlike some of the other ones,” he recently told Stereogum.
And Yo La Tengo aren’t the only veteran indie rockers pulling a “call me by your name” at the moment. Superchunk recently announced that their forthcoming album will be titled What a Time to Be Alive, after the 2015 Drake/Future collaboration. While the hip-hop giants’ hashtag-ready name seemed to signal a sense of opulent disbelief, for Superchunk, they’re words of protest, aimed at “the scum, the shame, the fucking lies.” Just as titles can keep a conversation going, they can take on entirely new meanings when transplanted into different times, by different kinds of artists.
Below, we revisit six of the best albums that made new statements under familiar names.
The Replacements: Let It Be (1984)
The Replacements were at their wits’ end deciding on a title for their third album, one that infused their high-energy prankster punk with a newfound wistfulness. The ’Mats were headed to a show in Madison, Wisconsin, when they decided on an arbitrary method for finally putting this thing to bed. The next song to play on the radio, they decided, would be their album title. Then, from the depths of some midwest classic rock station, arose a familiar series of piano chords. “We peed our pants laughing,” recalled Paul Westerberg in Bob Mehr’s bio, Trouble Boys.
What could be more perfect for that moment and for that collection of songs—equally passive and confrontational, it was both a tribute and a fuck you. The band even had photographer Greg Helgeson shoot an album cover that riffed on Abbey Road before they settled on something more original (thank god). For the Beatles, those three simple words signaled a labored farewell. For the Replacements, it was their new guiding philosophy: Let It Be cemented their legacy as one of rock’s most influential acts.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube
Galaxie 500: This Is Our Music (1990)
This Is Our Music was Galaxie 500’s final album. So in retrospect, its title reads more like an epitaph than the mission statement it was for the Ornette Coleman Quartet, showcasing the composer’s singularity even when performing an uncharacteristically old-school standard (Gershwin’s “Embraceable You”). “Does it sound self-important?” Dean Wareham pondered in his 2008 memoir Black Postcards. “I guess it was our way of saying, ‘Fuck you, we play slow and quiet and we’re not gonna change.”
Despite the stubborn attitude, the songs on This Is Our Music suggest a loosening grip on the snowy slowcore of the Massachusetts trio’s previous two albums. There are more moments of levity (its opening lyrics go, “I wrote a poem on a dog biscuit/And your dog refused to look at it”), and there’s generally more light in the frame. Throughout its dreamy 50 minutes, This Is Our Music is a distinctly subtle record that, even during a Yoko Ono cover, sounds like the work of no other band. This was their music, indeed.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube
Lambchop: Thriller (1997)
One of Lambchop’s greatest skills is delivering punchlines with a straight face. The Nashville outfit’s understated alt-country could easily slip into a dinner party playlist without any guests realizing they’re listening to a song called “My Face Your Ass.” That dry sense of humor extends to their album titles, which have taken the form of red herrings suggesting historical nonfiction (2000’s Nixon, an album that makes no direct reference to the 37th president), political commentary (2016’s FLOTUS, which actually stood for “For Love Often Turns Us Still”), and self-help manual (1996’s How I Quit Smoking, which offered no such tips).
Thriller, the title of their 1997 album, is clearly another one of these jokes, aligning the Merge Records band with one of the best-selling albums of all time. But there’s some truth to the title: Though Thriller is neither the best nor the most well-known Lambchop album, it is their most, well, thrilling. While future records would find the group slowing down and stretching out, Thriller features some of their most energetic moments, like the guitar chimes and bobbing horns that propel “Your Fucking Sunny Day” to sound positively beaming. It’s the big bang they’ve spent the last two-plus decades cooling down from.
Listen on Spotify and Apple Music
Refused: The Shape of Punk to Come (1998)
In 1933, H.G. Wells published a speculative novel titled The Shape of Things to Come. Written in the past tense, it offered a history of mankind through the year 2106, detailing, among other things, the abolition of religion and the advancement of weapons of mass destruction. Ornette Coleman was channeling the mad ambition (and occasional clairvoyance) of Wells’ book when he titled his 1959 Atlantic Records debut The Shape of Jazz to Come. Coleman’s new work rid the genre of its assumed instruments—piano and guitar—to make it feel as bold and boundless as he had imagined it.
Attempting to connect with that lineage (or at least its trendsetting possibilities) in the late ’90s was Swedish hardcore band Refused. Their gripping, ominous sophomore album became an instant classic, with a vision of punk wide enough to incorporate elements of jazz, metal, and electronic music. Two decades later, the title itself has not quite proven to be accurate, mostly because it’s hard to imagine a sound so precarious and technical being successfully replicated. But Refused’s philosophy, on a grander scale, was prescient. They proposed the shape of rock music’s genre-busting to come, with artists as disparate as Fucked Up and Paramore later acknowledging its influence.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube
Caroline Says: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong (2014)
Elvis Presley never actually released an album called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Like the Beatles’ White Album, Elvis’ Gold Records Volume 2 assumed this nickname due to its iconic album cover, which displayed the hard-to-argue-with slogan in bold letters right up top. Regardless, it later inspired the name of an easier-to-argue-with Bon Jovi box set and, on the other end of the spectrum, a lo-fi folk-rock cassette originally released in an edition of just 100 copies.
50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong is the debut from Austin singer-songwriter Caroline Sallee, whose habit of nodding to the past is clear from her Lou Reed-inspired moniker alone. The album spans the gamut from sunny indie rock to near-ambient balladry, with songs that riff on everything from Tiffany to the Beach Boys. After receiving a wider reissue last year, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong is beginning to develop a life of its own—The King excepted.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp
Lana Del Rey: Lust for Life (2017)
By now, you have to imagine that Iggy Pop is used to it. He’s inspired a couple of Bowie’s best records and some of iPod rock’s worst songs. His beach-punk look has become so omnipresent, Billabong figured they might as well just give him his own line of board shorts. And of course, his blunt titles have been repurposed by everyone from Slayer to Jens Lekman.
So when one of pop’s most culturally literate stars, Lana Del Rey, named her fourth album after Iggy’s classic 1977 LP Lust for Life, she was bringing along all those associations (OK, maybe not the board shorts). The albums do share some common ground, though. For both acts, Lust for Life marked shifts in thinking: for Iggy, away from the drug-fueled darkness of the Stooges, and for Lana, toward “a feeling of freedom and lightness being in the present moment.” Both album covers also showcase un-self-conscious grins from artists more recognizable for their moody pouts.
Even if Lana hasn’t cited Iggy Pop as a direct musical influence, a mutual fandom seems to exist. “I think she’s quite good,” Iggy Pop said in a 2014 interview. “I noticed that she communicates to a lot of people through the music and videos but you don’t see her around chattering much, so that’s pretty good. That’s smart.” It’s no surprise, then, that she nodded back through her music.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube
