Funeral to Finish

  Drake is one of the biggest artists of the 2010s (and will be for the 2020s, if he so wishes, I'm sure).  And yet - personal confession time here - I could not name a single Drake song.  He has just never been on my radar.  I mean, I know what he looks like, and we all know the meme , but I could not name a song.  Even after listening to this whole album, I still couldn't. [LENGTHY PARENTHETICAL: I don't know any songs because, of course, I was listening to it on my device while walking around or whatever, the same way I, and probably most everybody, consumes music these days.  As a Gen Xer, I used to listen to music as a youth by putting on albums and then carefully studying the sleeve and liner notes as it played.  This way, I grew to know what each song was named.  Now, I barely look at my phone while music is playing so I almost never associate songs with names.  I barely know the names of any songs any more.] So.  This album....

  Poor George.  He spends years in the Beatles and they only let him contribute a couple of songs an album!  So the Beatles break up and George has SO MANY SONGS saved up and he apparent puts them all out AT ONCE.  I guess this was the first triple album?  (Later, Paul and Wings would release a live album, Wings Over America , also a triple album.  I wonder if that was done specifically as a rejoinder to this.)  This did not need to be a triple album, but let's get to that later. First, the good: "What Is Life," which you all know, has one of the greatest and most memorable guitar riffs in history.  "If Not For You" sounds like a Dylan song because it's a Dylan song.  Our old buddy Phil Spector shows up again here, bringing the instantly recognizable Wall of Sound to songs like "Wah-Wah" and "Let It Down" and, of course, "My Sweet Lord," Harrison's possibly subconscious update of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine....

  There's a definite 90's hip hop sound, and this album definitely has it.  I've been trying to figure out what exacrtly makes that sound so distinctive - like, if you'd never heard this and someone put it on and asked you to guess, roughly, what era it came from, you'd instinctively say 90's - and I think it's a few things: (1) sort of trip-hoppy drums, with lots of reverb, a snap snare, really high in the mix, (2) minimal, repeating instrumentation; (3) dense, rapid-fire raps, with very little vocal affectation.  Here's a perfect example, "Cradle to the Grave," from this album: This album has all of that stuff, but it's like the dark side of it, where something like Tribe Called Quest is similar, but definitely not dark  like this.  (Not coincidentally, I assume, Tribe's Q-Tip was deeply involved in making the album.)  Even the beats are kind of menacing, and lyrics, about violence, poverty, and death in the projects of Queens, are st...

  You can't help but like Lil Wayne.  Of course, he talks a tough game (album opening lyrics: "Cash Money, Young Money, motherfuck the other side / They can fuck with us if they want, I bring 'em homicide / Word to my mama, I'm gon' continue bombin'") but he just seems like a genuinely likable guy.  He does hits on sports TV shows, and has interests in all kinds of stuff, and just seems like a good dude.  I mean, it's tough to stay hard when you're on The Masked Singer . This album, which came out in 2005, was Weezy's fifth, and is generally considered his best work.  It's really, really good!  There's a lot of bravado, not unusual for albums of this type and artists in this genre, but it's backed up with some truly excellent flow and some musically interesting tracks.  Wayne's voice is a real instrument here, cracking with emotion and booming with power.  I really dig the intricate rhymes, but like when it's transcribed her...

  Another one of those albums you know a ton of songs on, from the early Smokey Robinson-written songs like "The Way You Do The Things You Do" (and boy, those songs sound so Smokey I had to check to make sure it wasn't him singing) through the hits like "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" to the more obscure stuff like "Psychedelic Shack."  Just an incredible barrage of songs you know by heart.  The Temptations didn't just crank out hit after hit, they left an indelible mark on American culture. (Speaking of, once when I was extremely young I saw one of those duos with two guys with acoustic guitars in a bar playing covers and they played "My Girl" except they substituted "cocaine" for "my girl" in the lyrics so it was like "I guess you'd say/What can make me feel this way?/Cocaine.....Cocaine...."  The crowd ate it up.  The 80's, man.) Since I've now fucked everything up by mentioning the 80's pleas...

  When people say "acid rock," this is what they're talking about, that combination of blues and pointless, too-long guitar solos.  The music itself is fine ("It was hard to get the band to play in tune and in time. They just weren't very good musicians," the engineer later said), but the obvious star here is Janis Joplin.  It's fascinating listening to her right after yesterday's Hot Buttered Soul , since the centerpiece of both records is an unforgettable, magnetic voice, and those voices could not be more different.  Where Hayes rumbles with powerful, oaky sureness, Janis shrieks and wails and somehow stays on key the whole time.  It's really an amazing performance. The songs the band wrote themselves are really nothing interesting.  "Turtle Blues," which Janis wrote, is just straight-ahead blues.  "Combination of the Two," which kicks off with a Bill Graham intro to make it sound live (although it wasn't), kind of mean...

  What a wild album.  There were only four songs on the original version, one of them 12 minutes long and one of them 18 minutes long, and Hayes only helped write one of them.  So this weird collection, released into the teeth of the 2-minute single era, sold a million fucking copies.   First we've got to talk about "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," that sappy lump that a million shitty lounge singers have tried to emote into.  Well, Hayes said fuck that and took that song and gave it an eight-minute spoken word intro, backed with only a one-note bass thump and cymbal tap, in which he spins out a story about a woman who did him wrong - seven times!!!! - before he decided to leave her in a '65 Ford and head from LA towards, yes, Phoenix.  In a completely different vein, there's the lyrically loony "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," which finds him singing lyrics like I wanna come back Cause I like it like that Your modus operandi Is really all right, o...