Funeral to Finish

  By the time this album came out in 2008, Lil Wayne was already famous; he had been signed to Cash Money when he was TWELVE YEARS OLD and this was his sixth album.  It was an instant hit, sold a million copies the first week it was out, and with good reason: this album is a fucking BLAST, a ton of fun, and an incredible showcase for Weezy's weird and wonderful flow. The second single, "A Milli," is a great example of what's going on here.  There's a sampled voice repeating the song title, serving as the de facto backbeat, and then Wayne's crazy, syrupy, twisty voice, slinging verses one on top of the other: They say I'm rapping like B.I.G, Jay, and 2Pac André 3000, where is Erykah Badu at? Who that? Who that said they gon' beat Lil' Wayne? My name ain't Bic, but I keep that flame, man Who that one that do that boy, you knew that, true that, swallow And I be the shit, now you got loose bowels I don't O U like two vowels But I would like for

  Released in 1986, this album was so foundational and important it even penetrated my dumb white boy R.E.M.-Elvis Costello-The Jam listening bubble.  I knew virtually nothing about rap in 1986, but I still know multiple tracks from this album.  Like I said about the last Run-DMC album on here , for many people, this was their understanding of how rap was supposed to sound for a long time. Listening to it again, besides being an absolute pleasure, you're also struck by how open and spacious the sound is compared to a lot of modern hip hop, which is absolutely crammed with sound sometimes.  A lot of these songs are just Run and DMC and a drum track and maybe a couple of samples.  Compared to more recent stuff - as we'll see in our next entry - it makes for an immediate and urgent sound. This album is also the one that first introduced white America to rap through the cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," one of the first rap videos to get heavy airplay on MTV, a lo

  Everybody loves Ray Charles, it's true, how could you not, but this is an absolutely punishing 53-song, 2 1/2 hour collection.  I did my best but did I listen to every bit of every song?  No.  No, I did not. There are some highlights.  "Mess Around," a New Orleans boogie with its piano part almost certainly lifted from a bunch of earlier songs.  It was written, believe it or not, by Ahmet Ertegun, the legenday co-founder of Atlantic Records.  I didn't know "I've Got a Woman" but I immediately recognized it as the source of a sample on Kanye's "Gold Digger" (the "She gives me money/When I'm in need" part).  It's a pretty good song on its own. The iconic "What'd I Say" is on here too, which I didn't know had two parts and which I didn't know was formative in the history of rock and roll.  When Paul McCartney heard it, it made him want to start making music!  It was the first song Mick Jagger sang with

  Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: Were you a mall teen in the 90's or early 00's?  You probably owned this shirt .  It is not, as some people believe, a topographic map of some kind, but rather a stacked plot of the radio emissions of a pulsar, a lonely, dead star sending out sonically interpretable transmissions through the void, much like Joy Division itself. Was this the first goth album?  The surviving members of Joy Division (i.e., the band New Order, whom we will certainly see) hate the term but probably.  The music is cold and sparse and it sounds like it was recorded in an abandoned castle or a cave of the undead.  And then there is Ian Curtis' voice.  "Weird" doesn't really capture the nuance; it's a baritone-bass, which already sounds Boris Karloff creepy, and he's barely singing, it's more like intoning.  The songs are all funeral chants, but for Ian Curtis' own funeral. As you might expect, the songs are not exa

  I try not to put too much stock into positioning on this list, i.e., what records are next to each other, but putting this right before Fiona Apple's Idler Wheel is just a bit too on the nose, you know?  Simone was a huge and acknowledged influence on Apple, and listening to this, it's easy to see why.  I loved Apple's swooping and kinetic melodies and the way she can modulate her voice for effect and while Simone's performance here is much more sedate - much, much, MUCH more sedate - the way Simone uses her voice is no less interesting. This is a fairly quiet and restrained album, and it's all about the vocal.  "What More Can I Say?," to take an example, starts out very quiet, and then builds in intensity and volume and boldness, with her voice driving it.  "Why Keep On Breaking My Heart" has this wild change about 35 seconds in; it starts out very quiet, and then breaks into this Latin-ish kind of marimba beat just out of nowhere.  Bold choi

  A while back, one of my Loyal Readers asked what albums on the list were new to me but I have since revisited.  Great question, and from now on my answer is THIS ALBUM.  Here's a weird thing: I don't really like avant-garde music, weird song structures, jazz, or show-tuney feeling stuff. But I kinda LOVED this album, which has some of all of that stuff.  What gives?  It is unlike almost anything I generally "like" and listen to over and over but as soon as it was over I started it again and I've been dipping back into it regularly.  But it's so weird .  A lot of it is just Apple and piano, with some weird percussiony stuff in the background which, as it turns out, is often her using found objects like a pillow or (it sounds like to me) a paperback book - one big exception being the tympani she plays to thunderous effect on "Hot Knife," more on which later.  I was sometimes reminded of Carly Simon and Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, of course, but thi

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I've figured out the Tom Petty Problem, which is actually probably two problems.  Problem (1) is that his songs are so tightly engrained into post-60's American culture that it's hard to determine whether they are actually good  songs, or just songs that you know so well they're like a warm blanket, and the related Problem (2) is that Tom Petty wrote so many above average songs that it's hard to determine whether they are actually good  songs, or just very competent.  The man got so good at writing songs that he could probably toss off a few in the morning just for fun then have breakfast.  Great story : producer Rick Rubin "recalled Petty playing him a tape of demos, interrupting to pick up his guitar and write an entirely new song on the spot, inspired by hearing his own words played back at him." So this album is a great test case for these problems, because I have never heard it before - not a s