Funeral to Finish

 As you'll notice below, I have irritatingly refused to rank the Top 10, which all together exist in a nebulous cloud of Top 10ness. 20. Beulah, Yoko 19. Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary 18. Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music 17. Dandy Warhols,  Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia 16. Game Theory, The Big Shot Chronicles 15. The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album) 14. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 13. Elliott Smith, XO 12. The Clash, London Calling 11. R.E.M., Murmur The Top 10 The Libertines, Up the Bracket Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea The Wrens, Meadowlands The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street Weakerthans, Reconstruction Site The Trash Can Sinatras, Cake The Loud Family, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain The Beatles, Abbey Road R.E.M., Reckoning This was fun!  Let's do it again never. The single question I was asked most often was "Did you discover any new music that you really like b...

Sorry, this is not three Warped Tour bands, it's a description of the artists who were somehow NOT included on the Rolling Stone list. First off, let me say what a wild and weird feeling it is to get up in the morning knowing I don't have to listen to anything in particular.  I have more than two years of new music to catch up on and my Spotify algorithm thinks all I want is music from the 70's.  It's going to take me years to get it back to normal. 1. The Jam The Jam isn't just  a great band, although they were that too, they're a totally influential, important band.  You can hear them in everyone from Blur to Bloc Party to Arctic Monkeys to my beloved Libertines.  The fact that they broke up in 1982 and lead singer Paul Weller has resolutely refused to do the now-perfunctory reunion probably hasn't helped, but they should be on this list. Album that should be on the list: All Mod Cons 2. Van Halen I know why they aren't on the list; they have a reputat...

  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...

Just another short break before we get to the top spot, which I have been listening to/digesting/trying to think about.  My own Top 20 will follow the number 1.  Thanks for sticking with me through this over the last 2+ years. 80. Husker Du, New Day Rising 79. Belle & Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister 78. Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols 77. Little Feat, Waiting for Columbus 76. TV on the Radio, Dear Science 75. Smiths, Meat Is Murder 74. Todd Snider, East Nashville Skyline 73. Wings, Wings Over America 72. Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison 71. De La Soul, Three Feet High and Rising   70. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver 69. Weakerthans, Reunion Tour 68. Pearl Jam, Ten 67. Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here 66. Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home 65. Pogues, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash 64. Rolling Stones, Tattoo You The last really great album the Stones ever made, despite "Start Me Up."  "Hang Fire," ...

  I have a few theories about why this often-boring, massively overrated album is so beloved by old white music critics.  First, it famously took thousands of hours of super-intensive studio tinkering to make, and old white guys love tinkering with things.  Second, after the album went out of print in the mid-70s, it became a cult classic, and old white guys love something that's very hard to get and so is available only to hardcore collectors and guys who get to estate sales at 8 am on a Saturday to see if there are any old records.  Third, it's become a Third Rail album that is now so accepted as brilliant that you look like a dope in front of your other old white guy friends if you say it mostly sucks.   The first single on this record - which was actually released under Brian Wilson's name, and was intended to launch his solo career - was "Caroline, No," an absolutely inert dud of a song that sounds like something Andy Williams would have recorded on a ...

  Like many music dorks my age, I've always been captivated by lists.  I mean, obviously, I'm doing this project , which is just my takes on someone else's lists.  From time to time, I've compiled my own lists of my favorite music in some form or another, but I have never undetaken the daunting task of figuring out my favorite 100 albums and then putting them into order from 1 to 100.  It's an inherently transitory task, as it represents my feelings about these albums at this particular date in history.  Nevertheless, the top 20 at least is very, very similar to a top 20 list I made about 15 years ago, so it's not all out of left field. Brief comments on some of the albums, as warranted. 100. New Order, Low-Life Kind of a forgotten New Order album, but the first one I bought, way back as a youth.  I still remember the tracing paper sleeve that let you slide band members photos in and out so you could have whoever you wanted on the cover.  Best known pr...

  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...

  I was somewhere with my friend Doug - I'm not sure when or where, but it was probably in North Beach in the early 90s - when this song was playing.  I was marveling at its gorgeous melody and listening to the lyrics: Until the day is night and night becomes the day (Always) Until the trees and seas just up and fly away (Always) Until the day that eight times eight times eight is four (Always) Until the day that is the day that are no more (Did you know you're loved by somebody?) Until the day the earth starts turning right to left (Always) Until the earth just for the sun denies itself (I'll be loving you forever) Until dear Mother Nature says her work is through (Always) Until the day that you are me and I am you (Always) Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky (Always) Until the ocean covers every mountain high (Always) And I jokingly remarked something about how this song must be called "Always" because, reader, I was not familiar with this album as ...

  Did you see the other day that Paul almost got flattened while crossing Abbey Road ?  Like, this just happened a couple of day ago!  I mean, I'm glad the guy's OK, but wouldn't that be like the most poetic ending possible, especially since the album's cover was integral to the whole " Paul is dead " theory that was a thing in the late 60s because people didn't have the bandwidth for "The CIA is overthrowing Central American countries for the United Fruit Company" or the horrible real conspiracies that were happening. I've thought about it a lot and this might be the album I've listened to more than any other.  That is due, in no small measure, to my studio art teacher in high school, who used to regularly play this album while I was in the studio working on my terrible paintings and whatever.  I had it cassette and CD.  So yeah, I've heard it a ton, but not a lot recently. I used to think of this as One of My Favorite Albums and I g...

  There are very few songs where I can remember exactly where I was the first time I heard it and one of those songs is "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the opening track of this album, and I was driving on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge approaching San Francisco when it came on Live 105, which used to be the "alternative rock" radio station in SF .  I distinctly remember being immediately floored .  Then I remember wanting to hear it again, immediately.  I didn't buy the album right away because I had no way to play albums at the time. It's hard to conceptualize now how much this album changed popular music at the time it was released, but one of my favorite facts is that it displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the number 1 spot on Billboard, and if that isn't symbolic enough I don't know.  In an instant, the hair-metal bands that had strode the landscape like dinosaurs met their asteroid in the form of a kid with a shitty attitude from Aberd...

  When I hear the songs on Rumours , the sun is always shining; the memories are washed-out and shaky, like they were shot on an 8 mm home movie camera; and there is infinite promise stretched out in front of me.  Recorded in turmoil, it's paradoxically one of the brightest-sounding records ever made. The story behind the record's production - largely in the windowless rooms of the Record Plant in Sausalito - are now legendary.  The band would convene around 7 pm, and then after a feast of food and wine and endless supplies of cocaine, they would begin recording and go all night.  The last song, "Gold Dust Woman," directly references the damaging power of the drug ("Rock on, gold dust woman/Take your silver spoon, dig your grave"), but no one was complaining at the time. The resulting record - at over 40 million copies, one of the best-selling albums of all time - somewhow combines existential turmoil with some of the most beautiful and beautifully-construct...

  Not to disrespect Prince in any way, since he was clearly one of the greatest musical talents of our time and deserves any possible accolade you can give him, but I'm puzzled overall by the rankings of his albums on this list.  This is certainly a fine album but, to my mind, pales in comparison to 1999 .  And it's not just me; lists of Prince albums ranked usually have Sign O' the Times at the top, and even though my personal preference is with 1999 , I certainly can't argue with that.  But this being the highest ranked Prince album?  I'm mystified. Let us first take account of the absolute audaciousness of a 26-year-old deciding that what he really needs is a biopic.  That's right, at the time this album was released, along with the film of the same name, Prince was a mere 26 years old and was already a rising star, largely due to Controversy and  1999 , the albums that preceded it.  (I should note at this juncture that I've never seen the mov...

  There are two things that will make Boomers extremely mad.  One of them is taking away the Early Bird special at Applebees and the other is saying that this album is overrated.  Guess what motherfuckers, there are only nine albums left and if I go down I'm taking Bob with me. We've already established that my favorite Bob Dylan album, and in fact the best Bob Dylan album, is Highway 61 Revisited .  But I know that this album is a lot of people's favorite, including commenter Stephen.  As best as I can tell, that unvarnished love is mostly about the lyrics, which is good because apart from a few exceptions we'll get to, the music isn't that great. So let's start with the music.  Originally recorded in New York City with the bluegrass band Deliverance as backup, Dylan scrapped that plan pretty quickly and then recruited new musicians for the sessions.  When his brother heard the test pressing and complained that it sounded too much like old Dylan, Bob ...

  I like, but don't love, this album, which has peaks that can rival any album on this list but some patches that can drag.  I certainly understand why it's up here, but I think it's a top 20, not top 10, album.  God I'm such a fucking downer! Let's talk about it. The peaks are really, really high.  Before we get to the hits, I want to spend some time with "To Zion," a song about motherhood and the kind of love you feel for a child that's unlike any other love.  Sorry for the naked sincerity but it's true!  God, it is such a beautiful song.  Hill's voice dances through the melody, and Carlos Santana's guitar provides just the right counterpoint.  The lyrics are a frank look at the tension between career and parenthood that so many feel: Unsure of what the balance held I touched my belly overwhelmed By what I had been chosen to perform But then an angel came one day Told me to kneel down and pray For unto me a man-child would be born Woe thi...

  It's 1966 and the biggest band in the world is in flux.  Three-quarters of the band have tried LSD and embraced it; only Paul McCartney has held out.  They go into EMI Studios in London in April 1966 and over the course of a few weeks essentually rewrite pop music.  For the first time, you don't have to be constrained by what you can reliably play live; now you are free to use the studio to create your sound and not worry about how it could sound on stage.  Indeed, the first track recorded for this album was the last song on the record, "Tomorrow Never Knows," a feast of backwards-tracking, sitar drone, tape loops, and John Lennon's vocal recorded partly through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet.  It doesn't have any chord progression or rhyming vocals and it sounds like the dawn of something new and wild and slightly scary.  There's a reason why Mad Men paid $250,000 to license this single song, for a scene in which Don Draper realizes the world is ...

  It is a well-known fact that this is the biggest-selling album of all time; although the bulk of its sales were in the pre-SoundScan era and thus are a matter of some conjecture, it's reliably thought that this record has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 million copies, making it the best-selling album worldwide and second in the US, behind Eagles' Greatest Hits  (ugh).   When I was researching this I went down a delightful rabbit hole concerning the history of the best-selling album of all time.  The first biggest album ever was the 78 rpm soundtrack to Oklahoma! , which held the title up until 1946.  It was briefly interrupted by Al Jolson's The Jolson Story , which I'm sure is an absolute banger, and then regained the crown in 1956.  Then it's mostly soundtracks - Boomers fucking loved  soundtracks - until 1973, when Carole King's Tapestry became the best-sellling album of all time.  For a while it was the Saturday Night Fever ...