Maybe you can continue this thread to put there some great albums that are not mainstream. Or start another thread, if you feel ashamed to put your albums here. I think that Midnight Oli album is just great and I think the critics also said that in that time. Maybe you´re right, maybe I have been just wasting my time and there is no use of my lists specially SYG.

One addition: I just wondered have someone here in SYG except me listened most of those mainstream albums I´ve listed? I know many here have bad attitude about mainstream, but I think if you really want to understand popular music, you should have listened most of these albums at least once. I think it is one of the main problem of the today´s world that people don´t know important things from the past. I think quite rare today´s people for example know their family´s history, I mean back in the 19th-century.

This is a baffling opinion is you don't like Abba. You don't have a choice. You should go out and buy Abba Gold.

It's not about wasting your's or anyone else's time. All I meant was that a list of albums that're of importance to you (as with the Midnight Oil ones) will always be far more interesting than one consisting of already quite well established 'classics' supposedly liked by other people.

Whenever you mention George Michael, I think of you wearing a massive knitted jumper and dancing to Wham as a slightly geeky teenager. I hope there's pictures of such a thing.

And yeah, Elvis over everything else, for any reason.

Can somebody give this man a knighthood, or is it too much to ask?

There's talk about Finnish music, but no mention of Hanoi Rocks?

Glice is right to mention Abba Gold, not just because it's Abba but because vast swathes of significant pop music doesn't really lend itself to conventional albums: Abba, The Carpenters, Motown, Spector, the Bee Gees, the Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, Blondie all being far better represented by 'best of' compilations.

Emphasising 'great' standard albums will always obscure the achievments of those artists who never managed to produce one, despite many of them making some of the most important singles in pop. When a method of evaluating pop music has no means of validating Hall and Oates, something's obviously wrong.

MAARS is a great example and emphasises the problem a lot of dance acts have had in gaining any real recognition as a result of never really excelling in the album stakes and elevating those that have (The Prodigy, Orbital, Fatboy Slim) way beyond their actual merits. There are countless dance music producers that've been quietly churning out great things for years now and can sell out most mega clubs just with their name but who are likely to end up as little more than a footnote in pop's 'official' history simply because they never made a great album. I mean this is surely as important a piece of 90s mainstream music as anything else.

MARRS was a one off side project for members of AR Kane and Colourbox. The b side of Pump Up the Volume is great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u6jKV9TPLc

In my lists were already Doors, David Bowie and Elvis. Roxy Music and Johnny Cash are one I´m going to listen more somedays, Carpenters was the one I just forgot. I have only that Singles collection, but it´s just great and definitely something everybody´s must listen! Duran Duran, Boney-M and Culture Club are ok, but I think popular culture would be doing fine without them.

I have Abba Love Stories collection and it´s ok. I haven´t say I don´t like Abba at all, but I think it´s very possible I never become Abba-fan. I am going to listen some Abba-original-album someday (maybe Warerloo or the second album) but there has been so much interesting listening that I haven´t had time to it in these days.

Yeah, sorry. That's it.

My point in the earlier message was that people here SYG seem to judge many mainstream music without even hearing that ever. I´ve also wondering what´s the line of mainstream and non-mainstream? Selling over 10 000 records or just 5000? Are Dead Kennedys, Nomeansno, Joy Division, Beefheart and Misfits for example mainstream? (Demonrail said earlier that in my list everything else was mainstream as Finnish ones). If someone bothered to listen some albums from my list, I don´t ecxept he/she likes them automatically. To me it´s quite same do people like Jimi Hendrix, but if someone is seriously interesting about pop music, he should have heard at least one album from him.

I just have understood, why I feel myself a little bit uncomfortable here in SYG. If most people in SYG thinks that the most important thing in the popular culture are M. Jackson, Abba and Prince, then I might be in the wrong company. Someone said in the sixties, that Beatles is something that fits in the youth and the adults. I think Jackson, Prince and ABBA is much more of that. Some kind of feeling of the danger or the creativity of your inner child has been the most important things I´ve been interested about popular culture and those three just don´t have them, altough I don´t mean they´re not great in their way. These three could never make album like the Stooges Raw Power. Their music sounds too much a kind of perfect product to me. And I don´t mean that "forever young"-bullshit, I have liked to grown old. But I´m not going to ever grow adult. I have done some things I didn´t mean to (getting married, have children), but I don´t still have a fancy car, yacht, fancy clothes, lots of money. Altough popular culture has become more and more commercial, there are still artists whose music are against this moneymaking world. I know Rolling Stones are more bisnesmen than some others, but still their music sounds like their situation in their very early career.

I think it´s quite a fun in the context of this thread that many in this SYG seem to think Sonic Youth isn´t good anymore. I have thought that fans think SY-members has grown too old and can´t make fresh music anymore. I think SY is one of those artists that refuse to grow adults. So maybe Sonic audience has grown adults and doesn´t like them for that reason?

One album I forgot from my list is New York Dolls Too Much Too Soon. In my opinion Hanoi Rocks didn´t have much of addition to that album.

That's an ongoing problem for me. Do sales determine whether something is mainstream or not? Does Metallica's Master of Puppets become more 'mainstream' than a JoJo album simply by selling more copies? Will Nicola Roberts' next album be 'underground' as result of only Glice buying it?

I checked today's honours list. Nothing, again.

Phil Spector's back to mono is well worth working through. 4 discs of pop classics.