[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

Originally Posted by Dead-Air

I actually thought I'd explained that in my post, albeit through implication rather than direct statement.

It has to do with why I find this topic impossible to actually completely answer. One album can't embody everything I love about music, because music means many different things and sometimes they are flat out contradictory.

One thing I love about music is perfect melody, another is dissonant noise, another is rhythm, another is minimalism, but then sometimes complexity can be very interesting too...

What makes Curtis Mayfield sound amazing to me is nothing like what makes Iannis Xenakis equally so. The music of John Fahey is not of the same language as the music of Public Enemy. I'm not even sure that the music of John Fahey's later work is of the same language as his acoustic folk albums.

When you use mathematics to convey meaning, there is really only one language you can use, though it is infinitely far reaching. Despite what John Williams and the director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind may have tried to say about music as a universal language, even if you keep the aliens out of the picture and just stay on Earth, there are often more musical languages in even one culture than spoken dialects.

In an effort to come as close to answering the topic question as possible I decided on The Velvet Underground & Nico because it somehow cohesively runs much of the gamut of what I love about music. Closer than anything else I could think of anyway. There are still languages it doesn't speak, however.

You pretty summed up why I feel this question completely unanswerable