Funeral to Finish

  Long before No Depression magazine or an "Americana" category at the Grammys, there was this album, arguably the first Americana album of them all.  In 1967, Roger McGuinn, who was by then one of only two remaining original members of the Byrds, planned what was essentially a tribute album to American music, with country, jazz, R&B, and other genres showing the development of music in America.  Short on members, he invited doomed angel Gram Parsons to join the band and, happily for the rest of us, Parsons derailed McGuinn's original idea and convinced them to decamp to Nashville to record this album, a groundbreaking work that fused pure country with rock, probably the first well-known country-rock, or Americana, album of all time. But enough about the concept.  Are the songs any good?  Reader, they are.  As with most Byrds albums, it's heavy on covers, but the covers are so well-played and realized that they're now identified as Byrds songs more than the o

  When the first song on your album is called "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go" and starts with Curtis Mayfield yelling "Sisters! N-----s! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don't worry, If there's a Hell below, we're all gonna go!" you know Mayfield has more on his mind than just having fun.  Nevertheless, this album alternately goes so hard and then so smooth that you can't help but absorb that message, whether or not you want to.  (Watchers of mediocre HBO dramas will recognize this song as the theme from "The Deuce.") So that opening song is a rocking funk jam, but the album then moves into the psychedelic soul it's known for, with "The Other Side of Town."  Later we get "Move on Up," an absolute banger that you almost certainly have heard.  The constants throughout are the social message and Mayfield's beautiful voice.  The vocal is higher in the mix than it is on most records,

  It may be hard to remember now, what with Radiohead being the premiere avant-rock band in the world and Thom Yorke doing whatever the fuck it is he does, but they used to be an indie rock band, albeit a very good one, and this album was their last in that incarnation.  Which is to say, it's a very good indie rock album, the last one Radiohead would ever make. I say it's a very good album because of all the good songs.  "Bones" is one of my faves, an absolute jam where Jonny Greenwood's fuzzed out guitar rides a pumped up bassline and Phil Selway's pounding drums while Yorke absolutely belts an instantly memorable chorus.  It sounds like they spent months on it, and they probably did.  "Black Star" is borderline magical, soft verses that launch into a majestic, anthemic chorus rife with astronomical references ("Blame it on the black star/Blame it on the falling sky/Blame it on the satellite/That beams me home"), a song that seems to be ab

  If you've been reading this project for a while, you will know by now that the one genre I'm not really comfortable with my knowledge about - and in fact, don't really like all that much - is R&B.  I was never really exposed to much R&B, so I've never gotten totally familiar with it.  I mean, I can appreciate it, but it's really just not my thing. So this album really was not my thing.  But that doesn't mean it's not great or doesn't deserve to be here!  Maybe it's just my lack of understanding.  Except contemporary reviews are also decidedly lukewarm.  From the Guardian :  "Her album seems similarly straitened: there are a handful of great moments, where risks are taken and ground is broken, but too often it opts for the familiar and the bland. Listening to The Diary of Alicia Keys, you can't help but wish she threw caution to the wind a little more often."  Even slavishly artist-friendly Entertainment Weekly piled on : &quo

I tend to think of this as Zeppelin's hippie album, even though there's only one track that's really a hippie song ("Over the Hills and Far Away").  It's just kind of looser and less ponderous than the first four Zeppelin albums, which were either crunchy blues-rock or weirdo mushroom mysticism.   This one sounds like they just all got together and said "fuck it, let's do a little bit of everything."  So we've got "The Crunge," an obvious James Brown tribute, with a drum part John Bonham wrote to intentionally be impossible to dance to.  (More on Bonham later).  Zep's stab at reggae, "D'yer Mak'er."  "No Quarter," a long jam of a song with John Paul Jones' mellotron and synth work throughout.  That song is kinda boring, actually, but I bet it's awesome if you're stoned on shitty ditch weed in your best friend's older brother's basement room and looking at a black light poster of a

  Sometimes the context of a piece of art endows it with a meaning unknown to the artist at the time.  When Nirvana gathered at Sony Music Studios in Hell's Kitchen on November 18, 1993, to tape this set for MTV, Kurt Cobain was less than six months away from killing himself, and this stark, chilling performance feels funereal. Perched on a stage decorated with black candles and stargazer lillies (at Kurt's request, it was designed to look "like a funeral"), the band made their way through a set of deep album cuts, covers, and a mini-set of Meat Puppets songs, accompanied by members of that band.  It's not actually acoustic; Kurt's plugged into an amp, and using effects, but mostly so.  (Ironic side note - Kurt mentions during the show that Leadbelly's estate was trying to sell him Leadbelly's guitar for $500,000, and he jokes that he asked David Geffen to buy it for him.  Later, the guitar Kurt played for this show - a Martin D-18E - sold at auction f

  This is a solid rap album.  It was the biggest-selling album of 2003, sold over 9 million copies, and probably still sells today.  It's not hard to see why; 50 has a drawling, syrupy flow that's immediately appealing and the lyrics have a lot of prototypical gangsta shit.  Maybe  - maybe - it's a Top 500 album.  It is not a number 280 album, though. Like I said, there's a lot to like about this album.  The first song, "What Up Gangsta" has this great lyrical callback to Patti LaBelle and the Temptations: The rap critics say I can rhyme, the fiends say my dope is a nine Every chick I fuck with is a dime I'm like Patty LaBelle, homie, I'm on my own Where I lay my hat is my home, I'm a rolling stone I also liked the steel drums and the overall Caribbean feel of "P.I.M.P."  And Eminem, one of the co-producers of this album, drops a very Eminem-sounding verse on "Patiently Waiting."  There are not one but two 9/11 references on th