There is a phenomenon that I'm sure has been remarked on before but that I have dubbed the "Psycho Problem" after Alfred Hitchcock's seminal 1960 film of the same name. It refers to my personal experience when watching Psycho--I did not find it particularly scary. This is because it pioneered a lot of the horror tropes that have become commonplace today, which have since been expanded on, and so the original source materials is now perceived as less effective. Tropes such as the 'killing a woman in a shower' or 'split personality killer' are tropes that Psycho created! But they're so commonplace now that the subversions of these tropes were big like 20 years ago. And we'll never not live in a pre-Psycho world again, so we can never really go back to perceiving Psycho as it was meant to be perceived in 1960--as shocking, and horrifying, and scary.
All this is to say that as we are going through the 1001 Greatest Albums of All Time, these are supposed to be the Most Influential albums of the 20th/21st century and so many fall victim to the Psycho Problem. And I don't know enough about the history of popular music to discern whether a certain album is the First Of Its Kind to do a specific thing. I've been generally rating based on my personal enjoyment of the music (should have ranked coldplay lower. and the german industrial music.) but I don't know! Is that fair of me?
To tie it in to the actual review of this album--I thought Bug was just alright. But apparently, according to their Spotify blurb, the band was "largely responsible for returning lead guitar to indie rock", which sounds really impressive. Maybe if I was listening to this in 1988 I would have been blown away by the use of guitar in such a manner. But, sadly, I've heard it before. And I just don't know, man.
