Old School Week has been incredibly fun for us. We discovered influences that weren’t apparent. We struggled over how to articulate the impact that classic art still has today. And most of all we got a chance to share these things with you.

To close the week, we’ve decided to each pick one album and one film that we believe will prove itself to be a classic 30 years from now. Enjoy and feel free to leave your picks in the comments.

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The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is my favorite album of all-time. Yes, ranking even higher than Ready To Die. I love my Hip Hop and I love Biggie. But a work of this magnitude definitely deserves the top spot.

It is a massive, epic album. 28 songs, stretching over two hours, it was released as a triple-LP broken into six sections: Dawn, Tea Time, Dusk, Twilight, Midnight and Starlight. The title alone, Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, points to its ambition. Debuting at number-two on the Billboard charts, it spawned five vastly different singles: the Grammy-winning Bullet with Butterfly Wings, 1979, Zero, Tonight, Tonight and Thirty-Three. Yet any one of the tracks can stand alone in its greatness.

This release captured The Smashing Pumpkins at their finest. In retrospect, 1995 was an auspicious time in their careers—after the faux grunge of Gish, the flashes of promise on Siamese Dream; before their failed foray into electronica with Adore and devolution into post-rock, existentialism with Machina/The Machines of God and Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music. It was the height of the mid-90s post-grunge movement. Kurt Cobain had passed the year before and we were searching for someone to fill the void. Something about that moment in time sparked the flames of creativity and allowed The Pumpkins to make the most passionate music in their 20 years of existence.

Guitarist James Iha was at his virtuous best. D’arcy Wretzky’s bass shined like on no record before or after. Jimmy Chamberlain’s heroin-fueled drums were focused and fierce. And they were all led by the enigmatic brilliance of Billy Corgan. Every part of The Pumpkins had coalesced into this preternatural sound that became Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

The album is relentless, pushing forward with purpose and vision. It flows effortlessly from the ethereal, piano balladry of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to the industrial tinged, noise-rock lamentations of Zero in the span of 768 glorious seconds. The variety doesn’t stop with the sonic qualities of the record. Lyrically, Corgan touches on topics as diverse as love, God, family, apathy, hate and the abstract.

Like Michael’s Thriller, King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King or Marvin’s What’s Going On?, it is a perfect album.

—BIG

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Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

It’s been almost exactly ten years since Eminem released his sophomore album, The Marshall Mathers LP (May 23, 2000), and listening to it right now I can honestly say it’s lost virtually none of it’s effect.

His first album, The Slim Shady LP, was a novelty. Sure, he had some great lines, and the beats were good, but he was a white guy breaking onto the rap scene with a mentally imbalanced persona. For Marshall Mathers, Eminem dropped the cutesy schtick that stopped us from taking him seriously, and got right up in our fucking grills. His lyrics matured, and his childhood anger and limelight annoyance converged over Dr. Dre’s solid, minimalist beats. From the first dead body of the opening “Kill You” to the last gunshot of “Criminal”, the album is so intense you feel like Eminem really is leaving air in your lungs just to hear you scream for him to seep it. I still can’t listen to “Kim” without becoming completely silent and letting the lyrics absorb like a pissed off, homicidal sheet of acid. His energy is constant, unapologetic, and still insanely talented.

Granted, there was a certain level of novelty with this album as well, but only at first. I don’t remember ever hearing violent, fucked up lyrics like that on a mainstream album prior to 2000. Sure, Brotha Lynch Hung said shit that made me want to cry and run into the nearest church for some Jesus, but that’s all he was: shock value. You can probably use words like “novelty” and “shock value” to describe every other Eminem album to date. Just not this one.

Ten years later, and I still love nearly every track on this album. It still gets my blood pumping. Will it still hold up twenty years from now? I guaran-fucking-tee it.

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—GWG

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

This film came out in 2004, but for some reason I always think it came out years earlier. It’s been one of my favorite films for so long, I already consider it a classic. It’s like Michel Gondry took Dreamscape and turned it into a real movie. It is Jim Carrey’s best dramatic role. It put Kate Winslet back on the map. It solidified Charlie Kaufman as a unique and talented writer. Gondry didn’t use a lot of crazy visual effects and CGI to tell the story. Set design, art direction, and lighting accomplished more in this film than James Cameron could ever hope to.

But again, it is more than the sum of its parts. Who among us hasn’t wished at some point that the memories haunting us could be extricated from our mind? This entire film is a lucid dream, full of surreal imagery and non-linear, snapshot memories. And yet it is completely relatable. Watching Carrey and Winslet meet, and the immediately jumping to post-breakup gets you on the hook. The whole time his memories are being erased, the story jumps back and forth in their relationship, forcing you to reserve judgement until farther into the film than your mind would like. Side stories that seem to have no relevance end up creating a a complete portrait of destiny and emotional connectedness. I won’t spoil anything, just know that even if it doesn’t seem important, it is. Nothing is trivial. The scene at the end with the house falling apart around the characters is one of the most effective and appropriate metaphors ever to close a film.

I will never get tired of this film, and there is something spectacularly fulfilling about showing it to someone else for the first time. I can’t wait to sit down with my kids someday, show them this movie, and say, “In my day, this was cinema at it’s finest.”

—GWG

Fight Club (1999)

By the time 1999 rolled around, David Fincher already had an impressive resume—Alien 3, Se7en and The Game. But he had never attempted a task as daunting as adapting a Chuck Palahniuk novel. In adapting Fight Club—a work dense with aggression, self-destruction, satire and madness—Fincher set out to do the impossible.

And he pulled it off. More to the point, he fucking killed it. From a technical standpoint, the film excelled in all areas. Casting, acting, direction, photography, writing—all extraordinary. It introduced Edward Norton as a legitimate force, gave Brad Pitt his defining role and included the best use of The Pixie’s Where Is My Mind in cinema history.

But this film was more than that. It was more than just a great movie. It was a commentary on the excess of the 90s:

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

“The things you own end up owning you.”

It was a nihilistic response to that excess:

“You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, and in all probability, he HATES you.”

“Fuck damnation, man! Fuck redemption! We are God’s unwanted children!”

It was a wake up call to the scores of angry men afflicted by the general pussification of society:

“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

“Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think every thing you’re supposed to think? Buy what you’re told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.”

“I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke.”

It was an eerie, prophetic look at what was to come:

“It’s getting exciting now, two and one-half. Think of everything we’ve accomplished, man. Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.”

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected.”

Word. And looking back on the ten years since Fight Club and seeing what we’ve become, I can truly say,

“I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.”

Classic.

—BIG

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