Funeral to Finish

  Every once in a while on Twitter the question "what celebrity's death hit you the hardest" and you always get the usual responses - lots of Cobains and Whitney Houstons and River Phoenixes and so forth.  But for sensitive, wounded Gen Xers like myself, Elliott Smith is a not uncommon answer.  It's my answer.  I remember the instant I heard, looking out my office window and feeling shaken and empty and deprived.  I literally could not believe it.  And I wasn't an Elliott Smith superfan!  He just had that kind of impact on me, I guess. This was his last album before jumping to a major label (selling out, I guess, but I don't remember a lot of selling out discourse at the time; it's possible I missed it), it sounds rough and grainy and homemade, which fits because a lot of it was recorded in people's houses - Smith's own, Joanna Bolme's, the house shared by his former bandmembers in Heatmiser.  A lot of it is just Smith and acoustic guitar - usu...

  You are Noel Gallagher and you have arrived back in Manchester after being a roadie for Inspiral Carpets on their 1991 American tour to find that your stupid brother Liam is singing with his dumb little band the Rain.  Now, you have been writing absolutely cracking songs for years while on the clock for British Gas and you immediately sense an opportunity.  Join up with Liam's crew of knockabouts and punters and make a real go of it.  And so you tell your idiot brother that you'll join his band if you get to write all the songs.  Liam readily says yes and Oasis is born.  Finally your genius will be brought forth to the world. Your first single was "Supersonic," track 6 on this album, written in a day in the studio in Liverpool.  It's the prototypical early Oasis song; slightly Beatlesesque chords but run through a Manchester filter and pumped up with just a touch of glam, with Liam's snotty oi voice over the distortion.  The song is a hit, going...

  Oh my god, if this doesn't scream NINETIES baby, you can practically see 90210 playing in the background.  This monster-selling album practically defined the sound of the decade, and it's got just one banger after another on it.  I think I even owned this on CD at one point?  Or maybe my ex-wife did, it's really a sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves thing.  Sure, Left Eye shouldn't have burned down Andre Rison's Atlanta mansion , but I bet he didn't fuck with her any more after that!   The songs!  "Creep" was the first single, a story of revenge cheating set to a complex R&B beat.  Written by Dallas Austin, it was somewhat controversial!  Wow, that seems so quaint now.  Imagine, post-"WAP," a song being controversial because it's about stepping out on your man .  (Dallas Austin, btw, had a kid with Chilli - the "C" in TLC - and has had a rich production career.)  Both Radiohead and Stone Temple Pilots had a song call...

  I really liked this album, which was heretofore unknown to me.  Once again, I betray my breathtaking ignorance of modern hip hop music.  Modern-ish, I guess; this came out in 1995.   There's the undeniable swagger you expect from any Wu Tang album, but what got me were the densely packed rhymes.  Check this out, from "Knowledge God": Fake niggaz throw shit in they drinks Club nights we snatch linx politic, Africans and chinks While World of Sport niggaz snort coke by the seconds Niggaz projects filled with fiends injectin Morphine, the God seen more CREAM, and upstate Cousin Reek, almost got hit with fourteen Chill Pah, the God'll be a Star when you come home Light bones and let you rock my 3G stone So, see cousin, yo I was workin, cats I'm jerkin And uptown these niggaz actin like they hurtin Keys twenty-four a brick Columbians be on some bullshit, that's why Poppy got hit There's a lot going on here, but you get the idea.  This album is fascinated ...

  Here's another weird time/nostalgia thing: I was into this album as a much younger person in the mid-late 80's, probably peaking around let's say 1988.  At the time, this album seemed like a relic from a different age; although it was released in 1970, it was unmistakably from THE SIXTIES and it sounded like hippies and long hair and patchouli and all that shit.  There is a song specifically about Woodstock!  Called "Woodstock"!  (Killer song, btw.)  OK so at the time I was super into it, this album was 18 years old.  Only 18 years old!  That's like listening to Arcade Fire's Funeral or Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days  today and thinking of them not just as older albums but albums from an entirely different age, which is not how I think of those albums!  I continue to be puzzled by this phenomenon, where what was "classic rock" in my youth would merely be "stuff I listened to when I was younger" today.  I guess it...

  This album came out in 1992.  Sadly, 30 years later, Zack De La Rocha's lyrics are still, if not even more, relevant.  Here quoted by guitarist Tom Morello: That's from the second track, "Killing in the Name Of" (actual quote: "Some of those that work forces/Are the same that burn crosses").  Every single one of the 10 tracks on this album are just as explicitly political and defiant and, well, enraged.  It's hard to do openly political music well, unless you're Rage Against the Machine, a social justice organization that also made kickass rap-metal before that became a joke genre. Of course De La Rocha's lyrics take center stage in this operation, because of their stridency and urgency and call to arms.  Like in "Wake Up": Movements come and movements go Leaders speak, movements cease When their heads are flown 'Cause all these punks Got bullets in their heads Departments of police, the judges, the feds Networks at work, keepin...

  I don't care if you don't like techno or EDM or electronica or Madonna herself, the title track of this album, the third cut, is an absolute banger, a gem of a pop song dressed up in electronic clothes but with a melody you'd kill for and an absolutely outstanding vocal performance by Madonna. As it turns out, Mads got a vocal coach after she got cast in Evita  and found out that stage singing is a completely different animal than pop singing.  "I studied with a vocal coach for Evita and I realized there was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using," she said in this fantastic interview in Spin . "Before, I just believe I had a really limited range and was going to make the most of it. Then I started studying with a coach. God bless her."  Together with British electronica icon William Orbit (more on whom later), who co-produced the album with her, she put together maybe the best vocal performance on any of her albums with some serious songwriting.  Yo...