Funeral to Finish

  "99 Problems" isn't just a great song, a justifiably famous track that lifted its chorus hook from an Ice-T song of the same name (from 1993's Home Invasion), it also is one of the few rap songs to inspire a law review article about the Fourth Amendment implications of the second verse .  In "Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps," Southwestern Law Scool Professor Caleb Mason writes , "In one compact, teachable verse (Verse 2), the song forces us to think about traffic stops, vehicle searches, drug smuggling, probable cause, and racial profiling, and it beautifully tees up my favorite pedagogical heuristic: life lessons for cops and robbers."  Here's some of the verse: "License and registration and step out of the car" "Are you carrying a weapon on you, I know a lot of you are" I ain't stepping out of shit, all my papers legit "Well do you mind if I look ar

  I had 4 big albums my senior year of high school:  R.E.M.'s Reckoning , The Smiths' Meat Is Murder , the Velvet Underground's VU , and this album.  Me and my friends probably looked like the dirtbags on the cover.  I was 17 and wearing ripped jeans and smoking cloves and going to underground shows and doing sound for local bands and drinking Schaefer (God bless it) and smoking the shittiest weed you can possibly imagine.  It was pretty much fucking heaven, and the Replacements and this album were a huge part of it. Released in 1984, it's a perfect snapshot of a band transitioning from punk fuckups to post-punk fuckups.  By that I mean there are actually well-crafted songs with ideas and heart; this transition had been hinted at in their prior record, Hootenanny , but that one was still not as developed as the songs here.  The album starts with "I Will Dare," still one of the finest songs of the 80's, with its loping bassline and Paul Westerberg's cla

  In America, anyway, 1995 was a year dominated by hip hop and R&B.  The number one song of the year was "Gangsta's Paradise" and the next two were TLC songs.  The highest-selling single of the year that could credibly be called "rock" was Blues Traveler's "Run-Around," at number 14. So when this album dropped, it didn't just represent pure rock making a stand, it was also a definitive win in the Britpop wars for Oasis.  They didn't just beat Blur in America; they annihilated them.  This album went to number 4 and sold 4 million plus copies. And why not?  It is - and I do not say this mildly - a fucking blast, an incredible collection of sing-along choruses and huge guitar sounds and the snarling laddism that was Oasis' calling card.  I mean it utterly sincerely when I say this is a great fucking album .  Once again, I never owned this album, but I know every single track on it.  Some of the songs I know every word, every inflection

  By the time Erykah Badu started working on this album, her relationship with Andre Benjamin - who we will most certainly see here again - had started to break down.  The song "Green Eyes," the last track on the album, which starts out sounding like an old 78 and progresses through a series of jazz inflections as it slowly modernizes, reflects that breakup: Never knew that love could hurt like this Never thought I would but I got this Makes me feel so sad and hurt inside Feel embarrassed so I want to hide Silly me I thought your love was true Change my name to silly e badu Before I heal it's gonna be a while I know it's gonna be a while chile Ouch.  A lot of this album is painfully confessional like that, but it's hard to tell because the music is so beautiful and rapturous that it's hard to fixate on the lyrics.  This record, which I don't think I'd heard before, reminded me so strongly of D'Angelo that I was not surprised to learn that it was re

  Man, I hope there are some other Police albums on here, because this is the worst Police album.  What made the Police so exciting and innovative early on was their urgent, immediate sound, a blending of reggae and new wave on albums that crackled with life.  This album sounds like it was assembled by robots and radio programmers.  Unsurprisingly, it was their best-selling record. The one high point on the album is "Synchronicity II," a frenetic burst of sound centered on the contrast between the constricting life of a worker forced into stifling conformity and, "many miles away," something emerging from a "dark Scottish lake."  It's got real energy and verve and heart.  Sting said about it, "There's a domestic situation where there's a man who's on the edge of paranoia, and as his paranoia increases a monster takes shape in a Scottish lake, the monster being a symbol of the man's anxiety.  That's a synchronistic situation.&qu

  Straight-up Gen X touchstone, I wore this album fucking OUT in '92-'93, and for good reason - there are so many great songs on here.  Of course it suffered by comparison to Nirvana's Nevermind , which came out a month later, because both albums were thrown in the same Pacific Northwest Grunge bin even though they are very, very different albums doing very different things.   Listening back to it now for the first time in a long time, it slowly dawned on me that this isn't a gunge album at all; it owes more to classic rock and heavy metal than most "grunge," however you want to define it.  In fact, I was reminded specifically, believe it or not, of Iron Maiden, who married strong vocal melodies to crunching, attacking guitars - and, of course, Led Zeppelin, whose influence is obvious. There are very few albums that open as strongly.  The first four songs are "Once," "Even Flow," "Alive," and "Why Go," then followed by &

  Weirdest thing: I really love this album (well, I used to really love this album, back when, now I guess I just really like it) but after the operatic over-the-topness of Pulp's Different Class  yesterday, it seemed a little wan and delicate.  And this is a great album!  That Pulp album just kinda blew me away I think.  Anyway, enough about that. Look at those dudes on the cover.  Left to right, Graham Nash is 27, Stephen Stills is 24, and lovable fuckup David Crosby is 28.  And these guys had already been in other wildly successful groups!  Great story about the cover: they found an abandoned house in West Hollywood (just sit with that  idea for a minute), shot the picture, then came up with the name for the band and went back a few days later to shoot it again with the guys in the correct order and the house had already been demolished .  There's some kind of metaphor there but I can't figure it out.  ( The house is now a parking lot, btw .) Side one, song one: "Su