Funeral to Finish

  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 ...

  This is wild, but no one really knows who wrote the original version of "Respect," a song each and every one of you know, the first song on this record.  Originally presented to Otis Redding by Speedo Sims, Redding took the slow ballad, sped it up, and recorded it for his third album, Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul.   But there's a reason you don't know that version and do know this one.  Franklin rearranged the song, flipped the genders, and turned it into an anthem of female empowerment and one of the best-known songs in soul.  In 2021, it came in first in Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs list, and that's hard to argue with. This compact, 32-minute album, Franklin's first for Atlantic, was her first top 10 album in the US and her first truly successful breakthrough album.  Recorded partly in Muscle Shoals (a tiny Alabama town that is one of the truly most important spots in American music) and partly in New York, it arrived at a propitious time in earl...

  "What's your favorite album?," my sister asked me once.   " Exile on Main Street , I guess," I said. "No, I mean, what's your actual favorite album, not the album you say when people ask you what your favorite album is," she replied. I don't know, I've probably toyed around with this being my favorite album from time to time.  It's at least in my top 10.  And why not?  It's practically a greatest hits collection all in one place.  "Tumbling Dice," "Rip this Joint," "Rocks Off," "Shine a Light," "Sweet Virginia," I mean, come the fuck on.  It's more or less the creative apex of the Glimmer Twins', Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, rock songwriting.  Later albums in the 70s saw the band experimenting with other genres, largely at Jagger's direction, as Richards' heroin habit made him a difficult collaborator. Although it sounds like this album was recorded at least part...

  I am properly embarrassed to say that this album slipped right by me when I was younger and although I had certainly heard tracks from it, like "Bring the Noise," I ahd never heard the album all the way through until yesterday.  So I am here to say, as a totally unbiased listener: this album is fucking great . I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this just seems way ahead of its time for 1988.  The Bomb Squad's production on these songs is a thing of beauty, whisking together some expertly chosen funk, soul, and rock samples with booming percussion, all serving as a backdrop for Chuck D's muscular voice.  Take the aforementioned "Bring the Noise," for example; it has samples from "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" by Funkadelic, "The Assembly Line" by Commodores, "Give it Up or Turnit a Loose (Remix)" by James Brown, and a speech by Malcolm X.   That last sample is absolutely representative of the themes of this album, which is ...

  After yesterday's, um, unpleasantness , it is so nice to get an album like this, an album I love completely that also happens to be one of the Greatest Albums Ever Recorded, Slam-Dunk edition.   The opening chords to the first track, the title song, sound like an alarm, a staccato siren, and the song is  an alarm, a warning about the myriad fears of the Cold War era, when disaster always seemed a day or so away: The ice age is coming, the sun's zoomin' in Engines stop running, the wheat is growin' thin A nuclear error, but I have no fear Cause London is drowning, I, I live by the river The alarmlike quality of the song is accented by Topper Headon's martial drums, pounding out a march that matches Joe Strummer's guitar.  Strummer's voice is typically hoarse and strained, and that quality lends itself to the time-is-running out anxiousness of the song.  Strummer's wolf howls and yelps only add to the feeling of doom. I guess this was called "punk,...

  Ah fuck, here were are again at the Kanye West Problem, which is how to talk about a work of art when the artist has recently revealed himself to be a loathsome antisemite and is also probably seriously mentally ill and whether mental illness should offer mitigation for genuinely awful behavior  and on what terms.  It's complicated! Lots and lots of artists on this list have done and said vile and inexcusable things.  It was an open secret that Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, liked underage girls, and in fact had a relationship with Lori Mattix when he was 29 and she was 14 .  Aerosmith's Steven Tyler is accused of an ongoing relationship with a 16-year-old girl in the 70's.  Eric Clapton is more or less openly racist .  Chris Brown, of course, has a long history of abusing women, and beat Rihana so bad she had to go to the hospital.  And on and on.  So why is Kanye such a hard case? Two things, I think, and please excuse me if I k...

  What if you decided to stop playing only acoustic music and suddenly started playing with a full, electric band, when that was widely regarded as an Earth-shaking, life-altering  decision?  And then recorded an entire album backed by that full band?  And then made the first song "Like a Rolling Stone," a song that would later be named the Best Song of All Time?  (At least in Rolling Stone's 2004 and 2010 lists; it was bumped to number 4 in the 2021 list.  Hey, Bob, number 4 is still very good!) That would be cool. This album, Dylan's sixth, was released in 1965, and recorded in blocks before and after the famous electric set at the Newport Folk Festival .  It's hard to conceptualize now what Dylan going electric meant at the time, but imagine that Billie Eilish suddenly started performing speed metal or Adele announced she was a rapper now.  It was very shocking to our Boomer predecessors, who were not used to this sort of thing!  To our mo...

  Upon relistening to this brilliant, utterly captovating album, I thought "One day this will be rightfully placed among the Sgt. Peppers es and the Pet Sounds es and the like" and then I realized you know what?  Today is that day.  Or two years ago was, I guess, whenever this list came out.  I realize that I'm still in the thrall of this amazing document after listening to it maybe three or four times over the course of a weekend, but it more than lives up to the hype and I firmly believe it will remain in upper echelon of recorded American music for years and decades to come. It's a hip hop album, sure, but it's not just a hip hop album, not by a long shot.  Lamar is clearly conversant with the long, rich history of African-American music and it all shows up, in some form or another, on this album.  There's a heavy jazz influence; "For Free?," for example, sounds like a Black beatnik spitting rapidfire rhymes at the Village Vanguard at the end of t...

  Do I like this album, a mostly somnabmbulant collection of whooshing sounds and ominous synth tones over which Thom Yorke keens repeated phrases that seem deeply meaningful but are actually nonsense?  No.  Is it nevertheless one of the greatest albums of all time, a work of visionary genius, well ahead of its time, a document of a band at the zenith of its creative powers?  Also no. Let's face it, after OK Computer and all of its (deserved, for the most part) praise and honors, Radiohead could have recorded almost anything and it would have been hailed as a Towering Work of Genius.  Except for, probably, cool songs that people like and can sing along to with hooks and catchy choruses, yuck .  So they all got very Radioheady and introspective.  Thom " moved down to Cornwall , went out to the cliffs and drew in a sketchbook, day in, day out.  I was allowed to play the piano and that was it, because that was all we had in the house."  Of cour...