Chris Bell

Posthumously released in 1992, I Am the Cosmos is without a doubt one of the most nakedly disconsolate records ever released. Not for listening too soon after a breakup, it's a collection of songs recorded by the former Big Star in the years before he was killed in a car crash in 1978.

It's safe to say there would have been no modern pop movement without Big Star.
Everyone from the Replacements, the dB's, the Bangles and R.E.M. to Teenage Fanclub and
Ride is beholden to Big Star for the post-Beatles, post-Velvets trails the band blazed in the
early Seventies. Big Star dared to be poppishly offbeat when both pop music and
nonconformity were being beaten back by the industry-driven push toward cor... More >

Protopomo chameleon Alex Chilton had so much Anglophile in him he didn't need this full-fledged Beatle obsessive to create Big Star's world-historic Radio City and suicidal Third. And where Chilton evolved toward bent cabaret-rock, Bell's secret vice was folkiedom. But it's clear from Bell's very posthumous solo album--recorded mostly in 1975, three years before he slammed his TR-6 into a telephone pole--that Big Star was his idea. Stuck inside of Memphis with the Liverpool blues again, so pop-against-them he never fully grasped the function of the rhythm section, he was every bedroom bohemian who ever drove 300 miles to see the Kinks. Yet at the same time his spiritual yearnings are hippie on "I Am the Cosmos" (adolescent self-absorption at its most sex-starved), Southern on "Better Save Yourself" (in Jesus's name, amen), and both on "There Was a Light" (God meets gurl as if Bell's truly secret vice was Al Green). (Grade - A-)