Is 90125 the most underrated Yes album?

It's hard to underrate an album that gets trampled on enough anyways. 
Apart from that it's a great album in its own right and only loses out when compared to previous albums. Quite unfair, really.
I always have the feeling that later Yes albums are all treated as the inferior b-sides of CttE.


Edited by npjnpj - May 27 2011 at 05:58

freyacat wrote:   The real mistake came later on, when Yes attempted to repeat this formula in the 90's.  When the electric dreams of the 80's proved just as ephemeral as the hippie utopia of the 70's, the culture was adrift, and musicians still trying to prop up the discredited beast called popular music brought well-deserved scorn upon themselves.   In short, the 80's were a time to pretend to be something other than yourself.  Yes and Genesis and King Crimson did so, quite artfully.  But when the 90's came, anything that smelled even faintly of inauthenticity was brutally dismissed.

This is not strictly pertinent to the topic but at what point does being authentic also begin to make for boring and somewhat lifeless music?  There's an element of playing a part and of suspension of logic in a lot of art.  It is necessary sometimes if you want the music to grab you and shake you up because the reality you inhabit is quite evidently not so stirring as to constantly shock you and excite you. Carefully studied approximations of reality are not going to interest a lot of people at the end of day because art is not a left brained pursuit for all constituents of its audience.

To that end, I always felt the 70s were much, much livelier than the 90s and I am now beginning to question the 'conventional wisdom' that the 90s were better than the 80s. I am trying to think of a blockbuster pop equivalent of Purple Rain from the 90s and have so far drawn a blank.  If anything, the 90s reinforced the wholly artificial distinction between high art and low art and worse still made this divide well entrenched in popular music forms like rock.  And as I referred to earlier, the pursuit of authenticity only led to a cynical dismissal of eminently apt modes of expression and robbed a good deal of life out of music.  Of course, there were still plenty, plenty great albums from the 90s and I too count many 90s albums amongst my favourites.     


Edited by rogerthat - May 26 2011 at 12:04

It was my first YES album and I worked my way back to their 70s material from there. Great albums in the 70s bury 90125 but it still holds up as a radio friendly gem.

harpagroom wrote: I don't really dig why people tend to hail 90125 a pop(ular) stuff. It does contain some wonderful hooks as Rogerthat puts it. A real youthful, freshy, exciting listening almost all through. The meaning of "progressive" has been changing through time: in  the late 60s / 70s it was long, complex, philosophical tracks mingling with jazz, like Formentera Lady, Supper's Ready and Close To The Edge; in the 80s it was shorter gags and songs with more discipline (!) and abstract power (Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson) mingling with the new wave, now it is also Mars Volta and DJ Krush in a way. And by the way, some pre-90125 Yes pieces like Turn of the Century are not popular and twee..? Dear 70s-fans, just listen to the brilliant, crazy, provocative Mr. Rabin guitar solo on Owner of a Lonely Heart!!! P.S. Can anybody tell me what the hell is AOR influence? I love abbreviations!

influence from adults which are oriented towards rock, and rock that most obvous atract only adult listeners, vry few kids will wnjoy lisning to it becouse it is to adulted,and mature.

 no funn games just serious and sofisticated


Edited by aginor - May 24 2011 at 07:34

The debut is obviously the most underrated Yes album.

Like it or not, 90125 is the main influence on the new Yes album, along with CTTE (apparently it's like a cross between the two).

And as if that aint enough 80's pop for ya'............ Rabin + Anderson + Wakeman is obviously gonna sound a bit like it!

RoyFairbank wrote: 90125 is one of the truly great albums of the 80s, though in a Yes-y vein (you sure as hell ain't gettin' any great philosophical insight or even coherent themes). Owner Of A Lonely is just perfect, and there is not a song on the album which does not work out. Some of the lesser-known songs I've always liked a lot too, like City Of Love Err-ERRRR, err-ERRR, City of Love, City of Love, City Of Love!

Slartibartfast wrote: Yes I like referring to it as 90210...

Me too.

Yes 
I like referring to it as 90210...

esky wrote: I don't know about underrated, but I can chance a guess that it is perhaps their worst.