Cool beats and timely accents

In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, 'The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies'. Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller's self-titled album or Rick Dees' The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history's silliest, it stands to reason 'that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies', that abominations should be the best of our time. This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida's definition of the 'post condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving. Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs' greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all.