The Jam "All Mod Cons" [1978]

I'm sure you don't care -- unless you're an Anglophile with way too much time on your hands -- but the difference between "punk" and "mod" in the late 70s equates to: if you're "punk," your folks kick you out of the suburban house you grew up in; if you're "mod," your folks begrudgingly let you live in the basement. "All Mod Cons" is self-important Brit-rock (a redundancy?) ripping off Beatles lines, covering the most cloying songs from The Kinks and continuing to imitate Pete Townshend's ineptitude. The Jam are actually an impressive guidebook for anyone who inexplicably hates English music to suddenly become explicable. It's no wonder these guys never took off on the other side of the pond. Self-consciously trying to balance out their various ghastly pretensions, lead dickhead Paul Weller attempts to put himself amongst the crowd of his fans, like the commoner he actually is but mostly tries not to be; why anyone would buy this I have no clue -- maybe people in the UK are a lot more naive than they let on. How else can one explain a serious discussion about this album being one of the all-time greats of the era while allowing this chorus: "No matter where I roam/I will return to my English Rose/For no bonds can ever keep me from she." This line is so bad it doesn't even register on my suckometer.