Funeral to Finish

  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...