Thoughts as I listen to Rolling Stone's Top 500 albums, from 500 to 1
345. Bruce Springsteen, "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle"
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In my mind I keep two different "Best of" lists: the objective list and the subjective list. In other words, there are the songs that I think are maybe the Greatest Songs in Rock, and then there are My Favorite Songs, and those are two very different lists. Same with albums, I guess. I think Sgt Pepper is one of the best and most important albums in rock history, but it's not in my personal top 20.
This album is a dead lock for Top 500 because of one song and that song is "Rosalita," objectively one of the best songs in the history of rock music. I was borderline obsessed with "Rosalita" when I was aboooouuuuut 13 or 14 years old maybe, and while I still love it, our ardor has cooled. It is no longer one of my favorite songs, but I still firmly believe it is one of the best songs.
(This is a live version, but it's similar to the version on this record and it's probably even better of a song live.) So for "Rosalita" alone, this album is a gift.
What about the rest of the album? It's almost a concept album about the characters that used to inhabit blue collar New Jersey and New York. For example, "Incident on 57th Street" is about a would-be male hustler and the girl he falls for:
Well, like a cool Romeo he made his moves, oh, she looked so fine
Like a late Juliet, she knew she'd never be true but then, she really didn't mind
Upstairs a band was playin' and the singer was singin' something about going home
She whispered, Spanish Johnny, you can leave me tonight, but just don't leave me alone
Like so many Springsteen compositions, it's operatic in scope and delivery, with multiple movements and tempos and musical ideas. In a lot of ways, this album - Springsteen's second - is where you hear him stretching his wings as a songwriter and composer. There are going to be much more famous albums in his future, but this one is foundational.
Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.
Sorry for the service interruption! Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry. (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989. De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Do you want the good news or the meh news first? The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me. I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be. The meh news? I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently. Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey. (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
500 albums later and we're out of albums. This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot). I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs. I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth. But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
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