Funeral to Finish

  Partial list of references in the lyrics of this album: Rin Tin Tin Fernando Valenzuela Vinny Testaverde Midnight Run Marion Barry, drug use of Liz Claiborne (same song as Marion Barry, even) Home Depot En Vogue, TLC, and Toni Braxton Denzel Washington Laverne and Shirley I bring this up just to note that the depth and breadth of the lyrics on this album is amazing.  Both Q-Tip and Phife are at the top of their game, maybe even more so than on Low End Theory, although there will certainly be people who disagree with that.  Just a small sample from "Award Tour," maybe my favorite song on the album: People give your ears so I be sublime It's enjoyable to know you and your concubines Niggas, take off your coats, ladies act like gems Sit down, Indian style, as we recite these hymns See, lyrically I'm Mario Andretti on the MOMO Ludicrously speedy, or infectious with the slow-mo Heard me in the eighties, J.B.'s on "The Promo" In my never-ending quest to get...

  I really disliked this record!  I mean, out of 500 albums, there are going to be a few that I really don't like, but I've been generally surprised at how few that turned out that way.  This, however, is one of them. I'm not even sure why!  In its perfect 10 review , Pitchfork called it "a strange, captivating mix of impulses, with seesawing drones exploding into lush, neo-classical passages."  I guess that's true!  It's definitely strange. Let's take an example.  The 8th song, "Alarm Call," starts out sounding vaguely trip-hoppy (in fact, the whole album nods at trip-hop), and then Bjork's powerful voice comes in, singing a detached, flowy melody.  It's not really a coherent melody in the way I think of as a melody; if pressed, I would never be able to recreate it.  Maybe that's why this album was so hard for me - she ignores all the conventions of song structure and melody and coherence that I'm comfortable with.  That'...

  Thought experiment: Where would this album be today if the title track hadn't famously been used in a Volkswagen Cabriolet ad in 1999? (Sample YouTube comment: "This introduced my young self to Nick Drake. I'm eternally grateful.")  We can say that U.S. sales of this album went from 6,000 a year to about 74,000 in 2000.  I'm surprised it sold 6,000 copies a year before this!  Every day, 16 people in the US were buying this album even before the ad.  I imagine they were all boring their friends by going on and on about how great it is. It is great!  It's just... a mood, as the kids say today.  Prior to this, Drake had recorded two more conventionally orchestrated records, neither one of which did particularly well.  Recorded over two nights in 1971, this album is just Drake and his exquisite guitar playing, except for a single piano overdub in the title track.  It sounds like loneliness and introspection and also a coming to terms.  Yes...

  Since Kanye West is now a full-time provocateur/professional hypebeast/full-time public figure, it's almost quaint to think that the big hoopla when this album came out was whether this or 50 Cent's album was going to sell more.  Kanye won, and rightly so.  Let's try to put KANYE the industry aside momentarily and take a minute to recognize that this is a very, very good album. Never afraid to take his samples from anywhere, this album has a whole song ("Champion") based on a sample of Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne."  The next song, "Stronger," is based on Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."  Through the whole thing, there's an undeniable nod to indie rock, in that the melodies are as important as the raps themselves.  But some of those raps are great.  From "Flashing Lights": Feelin' like Katrina with no FEMA Like Martin with no Gina Like a flight with no visa First class with the seat back, I ...

  You may think of Cat Stevens as a lovable little garden gnome, playing his ballads of love and frolic with a vole playing a lute made from half a walnut shell, but this shit is kinda dark .  Did everybody already know how bleak some of this album is?  I mean, surely you know "Wild World," a breakup song ("And it's breakin' my heart you're leavin'/Baby, I'm grievin'") in which he basically tells the chick who dumped him how much she's gonna get fucked over without him, but it gets way worse.  Check out this verse from "Sad Lisa," as if the title didn't give you a heads up: She sits in a corner by the door There must be more I can tell her If she really wants me to help her I'll do what I can to show her the way And maybe one day I will free her Though I know no one can see her Lisa Lisa, sad Lisa Lisa Sounds like what Lisa needs is an SSRI, Cat Stevens, not your bummer tunes. I don't know what to say about this reco...

  If you're having a problem with cocaine (and it's the mid-70's and you live in LA and you're famous) and you need to clean up, David Bowie has the plan for you: move to France with Iggy Pop and record an album.  Sounds counterintuitive, but hey, worked for him!  Although this album is known as the first in the "Berlin trilogy," it was mostly recorded at the Château d'Hérouville in France, which is coincidentally where I like to record my albums too.  Bowie was such a fucking monster that he wrote all the music for Iggy's The Idiot and recorded that first, then went ahead and pumped this out.  This was his 11th album!  And it came out in 1977! Bowie was of course one of the most eccentric and sui generis musicians of modern music, but this is weird even by his standards.  The first song, "Speed of Life," is an instrumental which is kind of a shame, really, because I can just imagine an awesome Bowie vocal on it.  A lot of the songs seem lik...

  I knew this day would come and I would have to do it.  I have tried to prepare myself emotionally, spiritually, and physically.  I tried picturing myself as a 72-year-old man who hasn't listened to anything released after 1979 and who calls P.F. Changs "ethnic food."  I tried watching only reruns of Mannix and Hart to Hart for a month.  Nothing worked. I still had to choke down an entire Eagles album.  There was no getting around it. Here's the good news: I can't really say I hated it because it's too bland and inoffensive to hate.  It's like hating soda water.  OK, fine, but what's the point.  The bad news?  What isn't boring is mostly terrible, more on which below. (One thing I found really odd, as a sidenote - typically albums by white legacy rock bands have fallen on the Rolling Stone list as it's grown more inclusive and circumspect, but, against all odds, this album climbed from number 368 in the 2012 edition to 207 now.  D...

  By the time this album came out in 2008, Lil Wayne was already famous; he had been signed to Cash Money when he was TWELVE YEARS OLD and this was his sixth album.  It was an instant hit, sold a million copies the first week it was out, and with good reason: this album is a fucking BLAST, a ton of fun, and an incredible showcase for Weezy's weird and wonderful flow. The second single, "A Milli," is a great example of what's going on here.  There's a sampled voice repeating the song title, serving as the de facto backbeat, and then Wayne's crazy, syrupy, twisty voice, slinging verses one on top of the other: They say I'm rapping like B.I.G, Jay, and 2Pac André 3000, where is Erykah Badu at? Who that? Who that said they gon' beat Lil' Wayne? My name ain't Bic, but I keep that flame, man Who that one that do that boy, you knew that, true that, swallow And I be the shit, now you got loose bowels I don't O U like two vowels But I would like for...

  Released in 1986, this album was so foundational and important it even penetrated my dumb white boy R.E.M.-Elvis Costello-The Jam listening bubble.  I knew virtually nothing about rap in 1986, but I still know multiple tracks from this album.  Like I said about the last Run-DMC album on here , for many people, this was their understanding of how rap was supposed to sound for a long time. Listening to it again, besides being an absolute pleasure, you're also struck by how open and spacious the sound is compared to a lot of modern hip hop, which is absolutely crammed with sound sometimes.  A lot of these songs are just Run and DMC and a drum track and maybe a couple of samples.  Compared to more recent stuff - as we'll see in our next entry - it makes for an immediate and urgent sound. This album is also the one that first introduced white America to rap through the cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," one of the first rap videos to get heavy airplay on MTV, a ...

  Everybody loves Ray Charles, it's true, how could you not, but this is an absolutely punishing 53-song, 2 1/2 hour collection.  I did my best but did I listen to every bit of every song?  No.  No, I did not. There are some highlights.  "Mess Around," a New Orleans boogie with its piano part almost certainly lifted from a bunch of earlier songs.  It was written, believe it or not, by Ahmet Ertegun, the legenday co-founder of Atlantic Records.  I didn't know "I've Got a Woman" but I immediately recognized it as the source of a sample on Kanye's "Gold Digger" (the "She gives me money/When I'm in need" part).  It's a pretty good song on its own. The iconic "What'd I Say" is on here too, which I didn't know had two parts and which I didn't know was formative in the history of rock and roll.  When Paul McCartney heard it, it made him want to start making music!  It was the first song Mick Jagger sang with...

  Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: Were you a mall teen in the 90's or early 00's?  You probably owned this shirt .  It is not, as some people believe, a topographic map of some kind, but rather a stacked plot of the radio emissions of a pulsar, a lonely, dead star sending out sonically interpretable transmissions through the void, much like Joy Division itself. Was this the first goth album?  The surviving members of Joy Division (i.e., the band New Order, whom we will certainly see) hate the term but probably.  The music is cold and sparse and it sounds like it was recorded in an abandoned castle or a cave of the undead.  And then there is Ian Curtis' voice.  "Weird" doesn't really capture the nuance; it's a baritone-bass, which already sounds Boris Karloff creepy, and he's barely singing, it's more like intoning.  The songs are all funeral chants, but for Ian Curtis' own funeral. As you might expect, the songs are not exa...

  I try not to put too much stock into positioning on this list, i.e., what records are next to each other, but putting this right before Fiona Apple's Idler Wheel is just a bit too on the nose, you know?  Simone was a huge and acknowledged influence on Apple, and listening to this, it's easy to see why.  I loved Apple's swooping and kinetic melodies and the way she can modulate her voice for effect and while Simone's performance here is much more sedate - much, much, MUCH more sedate - the way Simone uses her voice is no less interesting. This is a fairly quiet and restrained album, and it's all about the vocal.  "What More Can I Say?," to take an example, starts out very quiet, and then builds in intensity and volume and boldness, with her voice driving it.  "Why Keep On Breaking My Heart" has this wild change about 35 seconds in; it starts out very quiet, and then breaks into this Latin-ish kind of marimba beat just out of nowhere.  Bold choi...

  A while back, one of my Loyal Readers asked what albums on the list were new to me but I have since revisited.  Great question, and from now on my answer is THIS ALBUM.  Here's a weird thing: I don't really like avant-garde music, weird song structures, jazz, or show-tuney feeling stuff. But I kinda LOVED this album, which has some of all of that stuff.  What gives?  It is unlike almost anything I generally "like" and listen to over and over but as soon as it was over I started it again and I've been dipping back into it regularly.  But it's so weird .  A lot of it is just Apple and piano, with some weird percussiony stuff in the background which, as it turns out, is often her using found objects like a pillow or (it sounds like to me) a paperback book - one big exception being the tympani she plays to thunderous effect on "Hot Knife," more on which later.  I was sometimes reminded of Carly Simon and Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, of course, but ...

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I've figured out the Tom Petty Problem, which is actually probably two problems.  Problem (1) is that his songs are so tightly engrained into post-60's American culture that it's hard to determine whether they are actually good  songs, or just songs that you know so well they're like a warm blanket, and the related Problem (2) is that Tom Petty wrote so many above average songs that it's hard to determine whether they are actually good  songs, or just very competent.  The man got so good at writing songs that he could probably toss off a few in the morning just for fun then have breakfast.  Great story : producer Rick Rubin "recalled Petty playing him a tape of demos, interrupting to pick up his guitar and write an entirely new song on the spot, inspired by hearing his own words played back at him." So this album is a great test case for these problems, because I have never heard it before - not a s...

  Not really a studio band, the Dead are far better known for their sometimes incendiary live shows, tapes of which circulated (and may still circulate, idk) among the faithful underground for decades like ciagrettes in prison.  In the pre-Internet days, knowing someone who had a Cornell 5/8/77 was like knowing someone who had an unreleased Beatles album.  Now you can just buy the show or even just listen to it on Spotify.  It's great if you're a fan but something's lost when you lose the cachet and the mystery of the hard-to-get. Although they were never known for the studio albums, this one is the exception to the rule, a lovely set of stoner-country songs, obviously informed by the Flying Burrito Brothers and the burgeoning country-rock scene of the late 60s.  Recorded in San Francisco at Wally Heider Studios (which eventually became Hyde Street Studios, still rocking along today), the album is a fusion of the bluegrass and early country sounds Jerry Garcia ...