317. Billie Holiday, "Lady in Satin"

 

There are going to be albums on this list - already have been albums on this list - that I am going to listen to and appreciate and respect the importance of but just not like.  This is one of those albums.  I certainly respect Billie Holiday and the influence she had on everyone from Frank Sinatra to Amy Winehouse (Frank: "It is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the 1930s, who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence.") but this album just didn't do a thing for me.  Yes, I am a cretin, a lowlife who knows nothing of the finer things, this is true.

I'm kidding (about the lowlife part, not the not liking this album part), of course, but it does make me feel some kind of way when an album this revered by a great many people just leaves me absolutely blank.  Speaking of which, I went back and checked the methodology used to create The List and was reminded that Rolling Stone asked "more than 300 artists, journalists, and industry figures" to list their Top 50 albums then compiled those into The List.  You can see the voters here, which is fine, but c'mon, Rolling Stone, publish everyone's list!  I want to see what albums John Wurster and Roger McGuinn and Katie Crutchfield listed!  I even want to see Gene Simmons' list, even though I suspect it's all Kiss albums, just listed over and over and over.

So a bunch of people must have put this album down and that means it's Important and so I feel kind of bad or something that it wasn't for me.  Oh well.  Sorry, Billie Holiday.  First heroin addiction and now this!

(One wild note: Billie Holiday was local SF politician/former supervisor Bevan Dufty's godmother!)

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? If Carly Rae Jepsen thinks so, that's good enough for me.

Comments

  1. StephenAugust 2, 2021 at 9:59 PM

    My puzzlement is "what is this list supposed to cover?" Regardless of quality, aren't there *some* genre limitations? Is Cecil Taylor next? Tom Lehrer? Some Deutsche Grammaphone recording of Debussy? Why are Billie Holiday and DJ Shadow on the same list?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TKAugust 3, 2021 at 10:02 AM

      I think that's a great question and it's obviously heavily influenced by who they chose to submit lists. As you may have noticed, there has been almost zero country albums, which has been my biggest surprise. But it's not a surprise when you look at the list of contributors - almost no country artists or critics or industry folks. I didn't expect classical, just because I doubt they asked for the lists of any classical performers or critics. But stuff like this I can see - Holiday was obviously hugely influential on jazz singing (and other genres too) and I could see, say, Beyonce and Christgau both putting this album on their lists.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  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"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  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
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  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
Read more