291. Destiny's Child, "The Writing’s on the Wall"

 


I put this on last night while we were making dinner and I guess I was mildly surprised to find my wife dancing around the kitchen and singing along.  She was absolutely astonished that I had never heard this album before.  "Seriously?" she said.  "You don't know 'Bills, Bills, Bills?'" she asked.  I did not.  I gather this was a popular song!  "Where do you know it from?" I asked her.  The club, of course!  Specifically, she guessed, WPLJ's in Walnut Creek, which now appears to be closed.  (Not entirely surprising, based on the Yelp reviews.)  We were all young once.

So no, I didn't know "Bills, Bills, Bills," but that's what you get when you silo yourself musically like I did in the late 90's/early 00's.  It's an interesting song, with a harpsichord-sounding backing track and a complicated, swooping melody, along with the exquisite harmonies that wrote Destiny's Child's checks.

She also knew "Jumpin' Jumpin'," another new one on me, which I also liked quite a bit.  The voices are carefully intertwined, coming together and then separating, a really cool effect.  Like a lot of the other songs, it just sounds complicated.  The melody is all over the place, but that's a good thing.  But not all was lost!  I did recognize one song, "Say My Name," which I guess was so ubiquitous that even a hermit like me knew it.  I think my favorite was probably "Bug a Boo," which is laid over a syncopated sample from "Child's Anthem," an extremely 70's instrumental that opened Toto's first album, to excellent effect.  

As I have documented repeatedly here, R&B is one of the genres I'm least familiar and comfortable with, maybe the most, so I hesitate to expound at length.  I will say that I appreciated the incredible vocals and the studio artistry it takes to make recordings sound like this.  There are definitely echoes of earlier "girl groups" like the Supremes.  Destiny's Child, of course, launched Beyonce - whom we shall surely see again - into the stratosphere where she remains, smiling serenely down on all of us.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I would have to say yes.

Comments

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...
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