Funeral to Finish

  I can see how great this album is but it just didn't do much for me, how's that for a boring take?  Frank Ocean's debut studio album, this has been hailed as " a masterful, dynamic and evocative collection of conversations between his inner-self and the listener " and was the best-reviewed album of 2012 .  I wanted to like this album so, so much, but it left me cold. It is cold, for one thing; the production is often chilly and stark, and the themes tend towards the dark.  Ocean (he legally changed his name in 2015) was originally from New Orleans, but moved to LA in 2006.  Rich kids obviously made a big impression on him!  From "Sweet Life:" You've had a landscaper and a house keeper since you were born The starshine always kept you warm So why see the world, when you got the beach? Don't know why see the world, when you got the beach The sweet life In fact, there's a whole song about this!  One of the best songs on the album, "Super...

  Totally true small world story about John Prine: in the late 60's he was a mailman in Chicago and one of the people on his route back when you knew your mailman and talked to them was my wife's uncle and they used to hang out and chat.  Wild, huh?   John Prine went on to become not only one of the world's greatest songwriters but also a mentor and father figure and general lifter upper to a whole generation of younger songwriters like Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson.  He was one of the first people I recognized who died of Covid (along with Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, another monster songwriting talent of a different era).  Prine wasn't just the aw-shucks singer-songwriter type, he was an absolute legend, but maybe only in the songwriting community.  (Speaking of aw shucks, he said the cover photo for this album was the first time he'd ever sat on a hay bale - the man was from Chicago!) You can hear it all on this album, his first....

  "Stark" doesn't begin to describe this bleak and beautiful album, which starts off with a song about Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, who killed 11 people over an eight-day spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in late 1957 and early 1958.  The song, told from Starkweather's perspective, ends with him strapped into the electric chair, wishing Fugate could be with him as he died.  (Starkweather was, as the song relates, executed in 1959; Fugate, who was 14 years old at the time of the crimes, was later paroled and is still alive.)  And it pretty much goes downhill from there. Springsteen recorded this as demos, using a four-track, in his house, mostly in one day in 1982.  And it sounds like it; most of the songs feature nothing more than guitar, some harmonica, and Springsteen's voice.  It's as simple and unforgiving as the cover image, suited to the subject matter, mostly about lowlifes and people in trouble and facing a crossroads.  In "Johnny 99,...

  My experience with this album being limited, I turned to my wife (well, not literally, I texted her) to see what she thought about it and she replied "It's amazing!  Iconic!  How many of those songs do you know from osmosis?  And a true reinvention and setting out on his own terms in a time when there was huge label pressure not to.  It was HUGE!  That video with all the supermodels?  Gay icon!" Sadly, the video with the supermodels turned out to be " Freedom! '90 ," which isn't on this album but I watched it anyway just to be safe.  But there were plenty of videos for this album too, like the title track! I think what impresses me most about this song - indeed, about most of this album - is that George Michael wrote and arranged all the songs pretty much by himself, which would be unheard of for a major pop star today.  Take a song like "Levitating" by Dua Lipa , a perfectly catchy pop song that came out in 2020 and required three writers ...

  Just an absolute blast of an album.  This mashup of new wave and punk and sheer attitude was released in 1979 and debuted at number 1 on the UK albums chart, due largely to the Pretenders' cover of the Kinks' "Stop Your Sobbing," which had already been released and gone to number 1 in the UK.   This quintessentially British band was fronted by American Chrissy Hynde, and has there ever been a frontwoman with more swagger (except possibly Debbie Harry)?  She wrote almost all the songs and delivers them with so much confidence and attitude that you would swear she'd been doing it for years.  A song like "Precious," the album opener, is so fully formed and well-thought-out as a song that it's hard to believe it's on a band's debut.  It also sets the table perfectly for the rest of the album, landing somewhere between punk, new wave, and pop, an absolutely magnetic blend that Hynde more or less invented.  It also has the provocative lyrics that...

  Oh dear, I'm afraid we have another Sonic Youth situation on our hands by which I mean I'm absolutely sure this is a great album but I just do not like it that much.  I have been trying to like both sushi and PJ Harvey since the 90s and have finally just resigned myself to the fact that it's never going to happen for either one. Believe it or not, this is the second record we've had that was produced by Steve Albini at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota (the other one being In Utero ).  Albini was, and is, famous for a few things, one of them being wide shifts in sound dynamics - or, if I wasn't a pretentious twat, going quiet LOUD quiet - and his resolute opposition to compressing records to sound louder, both of which are on display here.  The album starts with a quiet strumming, and then you can kind of tell there's a song building, and then there's some very quiet vocals, and then around 2:10 it comes BLASTING at you and then gets quiet again...

  Aretha Franklin is a towering figure in American music, one of the greatest singers who has ever lived and whose influence can be felt far and wide to this day.  She's at the top of her game on this album, wielding  her incredible voice like a sword, totally in command of every note.  So why did I have decidedly mixed feelings about it? This album was recorded in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, under the watchful eye of Aretha's father, Rev. C.L. Franklin.  By this point, Aretha was already a world-famous talent; she had already released "Chain of Fools" and "Think" and won a couple of Grammys, so this was more of a homecoming than a coming out.  She, of course, had grown up in the church and had begun her legendary career by singing gospel music. The importance of Christianity in African-American culture cannot, of course, be overstated.  The Bible's stories of enslaved people getting their freedom must ...

  "99 Problems" isn't just a great song, a justifiably famous track that lifted its chorus hook from an Ice-T song of the same name (from 1993's Home Invasion), it also is one of the few rap songs to inspire a law review article about the Fourth Amendment implications of the second verse .  In "Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps," Southwestern Law Scool Professor Caleb Mason writes , "In one compact, teachable verse (Verse 2), the song forces us to think about traffic stops, vehicle searches, drug smuggling, probable cause, and racial profiling, and it beautifully tees up my favorite pedagogical heuristic: life lessons for cops and robbers."  Here's some of the verse: "License and registration and step out of the car" "Are you carrying a weapon on you, I know a lot of you are" I ain't stepping out of shit, all my papers legit "Well do you mind if I look ar...

  I had 4 big albums my senior year of high school:  R.E.M.'s Reckoning , The Smiths' Meat Is Murder , the Velvet Underground's VU , and this album.  Me and my friends probably looked like the dirtbags on the cover.  I was 17 and wearing ripped jeans and smoking cloves and going to underground shows and doing sound for local bands and drinking Schaefer (God bless it) and smoking the shittiest weed you can possibly imagine.  It was pretty much fucking heaven, and the Replacements and this album were a huge part of it. Released in 1984, it's a perfect snapshot of a band transitioning from punk fuckups to post-punk fuckups.  By that I mean there are actually well-crafted songs with ideas and heart; this transition had been hinted at in their prior record, Hootenanny , but that one was still not as developed as the songs here.  The album starts with "I Will Dare," still one of the finest songs of the 80's, with its loping bassline and Paul Westerberg'...

  In America, anyway, 1995 was a year dominated by hip hop and R&B.  The number one song of the year was "Gangsta's Paradise" and the next two were TLC songs.  The highest-selling single of the year that could credibly be called "rock" was Blues Traveler's "Run-Around," at number 14. So when this album dropped, it didn't just represent pure rock making a stand, it was also a definitive win in the Britpop wars for Oasis.  They didn't just beat Blur in America; they annihilated them.  This album went to number 4 and sold 4 million plus copies. And why not?  It is - and I do not say this mildly - a fucking blast, an incredible collection of sing-along choruses and huge guitar sounds and the snarling laddism that was Oasis' calling card.  I mean it utterly sincerely when I say this is a great fucking album .  Once again, I never owned this album, but I know every single track on it.  Some of the songs I know every word, every inflection...

  By the time Erykah Badu started working on this album, her relationship with Andre Benjamin - who we will most certainly see here again - had started to break down.  The song "Green Eyes," the last track on the album, which starts out sounding like an old 78 and progresses through a series of jazz inflections as it slowly modernizes, reflects that breakup: Never knew that love could hurt like this Never thought I would but I got this Makes me feel so sad and hurt inside Feel embarrassed so I want to hide Silly me I thought your love was true Change my name to silly e badu Before I heal it's gonna be a while I know it's gonna be a while chile Ouch.  A lot of this album is painfully confessional like that, but it's hard to tell because the music is so beautiful and rapturous that it's hard to fixate on the lyrics.  This record, which I don't think I'd heard before, reminded me so strongly of D'Angelo that I was not surprised to learn that it was re...

  Man, I hope there are some other Police albums on here, because this is the worst Police album.  What made the Police so exciting and innovative early on was their urgent, immediate sound, a blending of reggae and new wave on albums that crackled with life.  This album sounds like it was assembled by robots and radio programmers.  Unsurprisingly, it was their best-selling record. The one high point on the album is "Synchronicity II," a frenetic burst of sound centered on the contrast between the constricting life of a worker forced into stifling conformity and, "many miles away," something emerging from a "dark Scottish lake."  It's got real energy and verve and heart.  Sting said about it, "There's a domestic situation where there's a man who's on the edge of paranoia, and as his paranoia increases a monster takes shape in a Scottish lake, the monster being a symbol of the man's anxiety.  That's a synchronistic situation....

  Straight-up Gen X touchstone, I wore this album fucking OUT in '92-'93, and for good reason - there are so many great songs on here.  Of course it suffered by comparison to Nirvana's Nevermind , which came out a month later, because both albums were thrown in the same Pacific Northwest Grunge bin even though they are very, very different albums doing very different things.   Listening back to it now for the first time in a long time, it slowly dawned on me that this isn't a gunge album at all; it owes more to classic rock and heavy metal than most "grunge," however you want to define it.  In fact, I was reminded specifically, believe it or not, of Iron Maiden, who married strong vocal melodies to crunching, attacking guitars - and, of course, Led Zeppelin, whose influence is obvious. There are very few albums that open as strongly.  The first four songs are "Once," "Even Flow," "Alive," and "Why Go," then followed by ...

  Weirdest thing: I really love this album (well, I used to really love this album, back when, now I guess I just really like it) but after the operatic over-the-topness of Pulp's Different Class  yesterday, it seemed a little wan and delicate.  And this is a great album!  That Pulp album just kinda blew me away I think.  Anyway, enough about that. Look at those dudes on the cover.  Left to right, Graham Nash is 27, Stephen Stills is 24, and lovable fuckup David Crosby is 28.  And these guys had already been in other wildly successful groups!  Great story about the cover: they found an abandoned house in West Hollywood (just sit with that  idea for a minute), shot the picture, then came up with the name for the band and went back a few days later to shoot it again with the guys in the correct order and the house had already been demolished .  There's some kind of metaphor there but I can't figure it out.  ( The house is now a parkin...

  On "Sorted for E's and Wizz," the eighth track on this remarkable and beautiful album, Jarvis Cocker sings: Oh, is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or just twenty thousand people standing in a field? And I don't quite understand just what this feeling is But that's okay 'cause we're all sorted out for E's and wizz And tell me when the spaceship lands 'cause all this has just got to mean something Somehow, the press jumped on this as some kind of drug-positive song, probably because it has drug names in the title ("wizz" is Brit slang for speed; you know what "E" is), but if you just listen to it, it's obviously not.  Cocker explained, "You're searching for that illusory thing, where you're always trying to get back to that state, but you know you never will.  And you start to see through it, notice how it's a bit frayed at the edges.  And that's what that song's about.  Drugs a...

  The propulsive strut of "Stayin' Alive," the first song on this absolutely legendary soundtrack, is in the title sequence of the 1977 film.  Just watch Travolta swing the paint can in time with the music: Even if you profess to hate disco, you were bopping your head, admit it.   This is officially a "Various Artists" album, but we all know it's a Bee Gees joint.  Speaking of the Bee Gees, did you see the fantastic documentary that came out in 2020 ?  It's absolutely worth a watch.  The story of the group is a lot more complicated and interesting than I ever knew. The producers of Saturday Night Fever  originally went to Boz Scaggs, but he turned it down and so the Bee Gees got called.  "Stayin' Alive" was originally called "Saturday Night," but they sagely observed there were too many songs already called "Saturday Night."  They already had "Jive Talkin'," a slinky bop with a rhythm based on the the click...

  This isn't the only Johnny Cash live album.  For that matter, it's not the only Johnny Cash live album recorded in a prison, or even the only Johnny Cash live album recorded in a prison in California.  Johnny Cash has to be the undisputed master of live albums recorded in prisons.  But this is the one that put Cash back on the map at a time when he was struggling for relevancy.  And it worked; the album went gold not long after its release and revitalized Johnny Cash as a viable artist (although kicking his addiction to uppers probably helped just as much). If I had to describe the album in one word I might say "rollicking" or just "fun."  Cash is clearly at ease, joking around with the audience, who rewards him with enthusiastic cheering.  His voice isn't in top form; it sounds like he needs to clear his throat basically the whole time, but he delivers the songs with so much heart and verve that you can overlook it. We start out, as we must, with ...