Anyhoo, I was asked at one point for my version of the Five Best Albums of All Fucking Time: here's my answer (snicker-snicker):

5:Memphis by Telegraph - The Stuttering Hand.

Very few albums in the history of rock feature really good, effective trombone playing. Even fewer also feature really good, effective tap-dancing. This, praises be, is one of the few.

4:Perplexed, Drowning, Shaven, Incandescent - Icephone.

When vocalist Murray LoBuie of the late lamented Scrunchhof announced that he was leaving not only that band, but music, to retire to a lamasery in remotest Bhutan, fans of his patented apoplectic, earth-shakingly deep squawk no doubt rent their clothing, tore out their hair, took vows of sobriety, and renounced all but the most downmarket forms of sexual expression. Such fans can break out the horns and hooters; Murray's back in town. After an unfortunate incident involving a ritual yak and an out-of-print K-Tel compilation 8-track, LoBuie sacked his Buddhist ways, and reclaimed the flesh from the pawnshop. He's added the oboe to his instrumental expertise, and on this album he plays sham-weary shamen to the shameful pain-shamming champagne-guzzlers of the urban trackless wilderness. Or something like that.

3:BENTON! (original cast recording).

Look, call me tasteless--but I love a good showtune as much as the next guy (or gal). And there's no finer wellspring of roof-raisin', toe-tappin', g-droppin' showtunes than the unfortunately overlooked Sander Fundt's BENTON!, about a dejected veterinarian who finds true love in the person of a charming and talented telemarketer named Cyndi. The heartwarming, epic finale will melt the heart of even the coldest curmudgeon, as Benton, Cyndi, and the full children's chorus sing the joys of animal medicine as an entire squadron of paratroopers descends from the catwalks into a real, onstage Olympic swimming pool.

2:Shit - Fuck.

Not to be confused with Britain's The Fuck, this is the L.A. band, Fuck, overlooked hardcore heroes of '77, who pummel 35,792 songs in this 15-minute LP - originally available only in a box set of 33 7-inch singles pressed in raw sewage. Recently remastered on CD (and reissued at the bargain price of $34,875.99), it sounds like crap - buy the original, even though only three copies were ever made. (I own two--the last one's behind bullet-proof glass in a small record store in Oregon; the owner's asking $36.75 billion or two Stealth bombers for it, but it's worth every penny, believe me!)

1:Whatever - As If You Care

Raw adrenalin, fierce political anger, unflinching integrity, searching meditations on one's deepest personal traumas, aggressive and innovative arrangements...? Forget it - this band is so ironic and slack-cool that this CD - an unmarked disc shipped in antique letterpressed cardboard packaging, each one individually cut out with children's scissors from the backs of various snack food products - is completely blank. Yes, they're hip enough to know that it's been done before - but you're not. Buy it to prove that you get the joke. You do, don't you?

Grand Prize (that's higher than #1, if you've lost count):

Hog-Carcass of Doom - International Harvester of Sorrow

In the mad rush of postmodern cultural genetics, it seems likely that every possible crossbreeding of musical DNA would already have been belly-flopped into the gene pool of...oh hell, I can't carry this metaphor any further. At any rate, few musicians have been as visionary and just plain pig-headed as this band's lead guitarist, songwriter, and screamer/gargler/hog-caller Big Earl Von Haeptmannschtuller-Arsnoxionus. While most metal is ox-stunningly obvious in its derivative attempts to be EVIL (pronounce the second syllable with a short "i" for the proper effect), and most country music seems consist mostly of maudlin dribbling-in-your-beer hackwork performed by clumsy, mustachio'd galoofs wearing cowboy hats to cover their impossibly bad blow-dried perms, IHS combines these traits from both musical genres in a goat-roping, shit-kicking, devil-worshipping, feedback-inducing, lit-Bic-raising display of...something or other.