The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jamesbbeard for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, and the second for Julian Cope's PEGGY SUICIDE. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Also, there's a trivia question at the bottom. Thanks for reading!

Up until Peggy Suicide, Julian Cope was a quirky psychedelic throwback, wearing his Krautrock and Syd Barrett influences on his musical sleeve. There were hints at deeper themes in albums before--lots of space stuff on Saint Julian, for example, and a few barbed comments about mainstream religion (which was almost the norm in alternative music during the 80s, to be sure).

Peggy Suicide was different, though. Here was a concept album, steeped in environmentalist themes with a neo-pagan perspective that would continue to be the focus of Cope albums thereafter. Typing it out, it sounds a little dreary, but because Cope is a floored genius*, lyrically he gets the point across, and musically--this album fucking rocks! Yes, it’s depressing as hell when you aren’t listening--lyrics like “Winter's getting warmer, the ice-caps are melting, I've got the whole Blues of Creation, snapping at my heels…” are Cope as Cassandra, shouting cursed prophecies at us 30 years ago, knowing that we won’t listen. But this is over a wailing and growling propulsive guitar rave that sounds like nothing so much as the opening of “Interstellar Overdrive,” before it gets noodley-spacey, when the blues are as important as the hallucinogens in getting the story right. And maybe, in this case, some speed as well--all together, “Hanging Out and Hung Up on the Line” gives you the sense of urgency we should have had in 1991, if not before. Rushing towards a cliff, brakes gone in a flash of light and heat...

I always listened to side one more than side two (tracks 1-8 were side A, the rest side B--I think the LP was actually a double album). I couldn’t connect to the optimism and day glo flower-power of “Beautiful Love” or “The American Lite” as well as I did to the grimy indictments of “East Easy Rider” or “Double Vegetation”. But, I am (at least by training) an anthropologist--and most practicing anthropologists spend a significant bit of their careers “problematizing”, but rarely offering solutions. Side two has big ideas that don’t gel as well with my cynicism--paeans to collective action and embracing the Earth in Goddess form. There are tracks on that second side that I love, too, like “Soldier Blue,” which shouldn’t work as well as it does, or “Hung Up and Hanging Out to Dry,” when Cope indulges in his freakier tendencies. But in the end, no matter how much side two asks--I suppose I’m just not ready to get skyclad and crawl under a turtle shell, Julian.

Don’t rush to vote, is all I ask. Give Peggy Suicide a couple play-throughs, let it ferment a bit, see if you might could love it. That’s all I can ask of you!

Appendix: I was going to put some “6 degrees of Julian Cope” trivia here, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Liverpool and Manchester scenes just kind of overlapped everywhere in the 80s. I’m not sure you can find a band from that region and era that isn't connected to all the rest. But, let’s have fun! Who can give me two Cope connections to bands or artists, that have competed this week? (In one case, I’m thinking of a song from this week’s albums that Cope covered…)

-- @jamesbbeard