Funeral to Finish

  Before we get started on today's album, I have to let you know that this blog will be on hiatus next week and part of the week after that.  There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to come right out and say it: I'm going to Peru. I've never been a huge traveler.  My mother was obsessed with travel and was always off to Thailand or France or Guatemala.  Growing up with a chaotic and unpredictable mother I think left me wanting a sense of order and stability in my life, so I was never the backpack-through-Europe type.  My wife is from Ireland so I've gone to Europe a number of times since I've met her and I've greatly enjoyed those trips, but it never would have occurred to me to go to Peru, which seems like a fine country but is just one I never really think about, except that one of my relatives who is a university Spanish professor has been in Lima since January doing some kind of research or something, I'm not 100% sure, with his whole ...

  I feel like such an idiot for disliking most of Joni Mitchell's stuff as much as I do, but this, her most commercial and probably most accessible album, I even enjoyed in parts.  Look, Joni Mitchell is widely beloved and revered and she doesn't need me or anybody else to like her and I have some glaring musical blind spots and this is just one of them.  Wow I sound defensive but it's just so weird to totally not get something that so many people love so completely.   There is one song on here I liked unconditionally: "Raised on Robbery," a 50s-tinged boogie about a prostitute trying to pick up a guy at the Empire Hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan (Mitchell, you know, being Canadian and all): He was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel He was drinking for diversion He was thinking for himself A little money riding on the Maple Leafs Along comes a lady in lacy sleeves She says let me sit down You know, drinkin' alone's a shame (It's a shame it's a...

  First of all, just feast your eyes on that cover.  It's so 80s it looks like leg warmers married a Rubik's Cube.  The squiggly lines, bright colors, it's got it all.  The cover for the single version of the title track goes even harder: It's like the Berlin Wall is falling all over again.  Anyway, graphic design is not even close to the most interesting thing about this album, a tight 41 minutes of electro-dance-pop mixed with R&B and funk and disco and God knows what else.  The cultural reach of this album is hard to overestimate; I knew like half the songs, and to my knowledge I have never listened to this album before. Thjis album, which came out in 1986, was Jackson's third, following two mostly forgettable and routine pop efforts overseen by her legendarily domineering father, Joe.  With this album, she stepped away from his overbearing presence and worked with superstar producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.  It seems to have worked...

  OK I guess.  I don't really have any strong feelings for or against this abum.  It's like the VW Jetta or the Rocky Road of albums to me - fine, but I'd never pick it first.   Also part of the problem is that all the hits are mostly frontloaded onto the first disc of this double album, making the second half kind of a drag, at least to me.  So the album starts off like this: "Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding" "Candle in the Wind" "Bennie and the Jets" All big hits!  "Funeral/Love" is like 11 minutes long and operatic in scope.  It's a wild choice to start an album, since it takes a long fucking time to warm up and get going, but, incredibly, radio stations would play the whole thing.  "Candle" I did not know at all until it got repurposed as a Princess Diana tribute song in the late 90s.  It's treacly as hell but I actually don't mind it.  "Bennie and the Jets" is about a fictional band, and ...

  Remember a couple of days ago when I was like "oh god where's the Smiths" because we had gotten this far without a Smiths album?  Here's the Smiths. Not my favorite Smiths album (that would be Meat Is Murder , which it would be for Johnny Marr's guitar tone on "How Soon Is Now" alone, never mind the other fantastic songs on that album), but it's usually and widely regarded as the "best" Smiths album.  Not to take anything away from it; it's a fantastic album. Right now we're watching the very trashy/highly enjoyable series "Pistol" on Hulu , a docudrama about the Sex Pistols, and I would love to see the Smiths get the same treatment because Morrissey is such a messy bitch who loves drama.  By the time the band recorded this, their third album, they were already a trainwreck.  Marr was deep in his cups, and Andy Rourke would soon be fired by Morrissey for drug use via a Post-It note left on his car windshield that said ...

  It truly warms one's heart to think that the son of the founder of Elite Model Management and the son of a million-selling songwriter could meet at boarding school in Switzerland and reconnect back in New York City and somehow be able to get started in the music business.  I kid, but this is all true.  What really pisses me off about the Strokes is that the band was born of privilege and opportunity and there is no excuse for them making a record as good as this. The Strokes are largely credited with the garage rock revival of the early aughts.  Kings of Leon, when they first started, were known as the "Southern Strokes" and the Strokes were an obvious influence on the Arctic Monkeys and the Libertines.  I was giving them shit at the beginning, but they came by their acclaim honestly.  They practiced every night and played a ton of gigs around NYC and honed their sound into something recognizable but also brand new in some way.   And, I mean, ha...

  This album, Kendrick's major label debut, is such a fascinating contrast with Kanye's Late Registration that we saw a couple of days ago.  Kanye's is all bombast and big, sprawling sounds, while this album is moody and introspective.  The beats here are subdued and downbeat, completely unlike the lush, orchestral sweep of Registration .  Kendrick's all Nick Drake to Kanye's Queen. This record is loosely structured as a concept album about a day in the life of a kid in Compton, trying to make it as an artist in one of the roughest places in the country.  It is dark and personal and introspective to a degree that starts to feel uncomfortable.  This album is all about Kendrick's voice and his rhymes and his life and it is an intense record. "good kid," track seven, is a good example.  Built on a sample from "We Live in Brooklyn, Baby" by Roy Ayres Ubiquity and with a hook sung by Pharrell Williams, Kendrick raps about how hard it is to stay s...