Funeral to Finish

  Do you ever think about the confluence of events that had to transpire exactly right to produce a specific moment?  The fact that you are wherever you are right now reading this is the product of a series of increasingly improbable consequences, piled up on top of one another.  If I hadn't finally reached a breaking point and broken up with my ex the exact time I did... years later, no 9-year-old sitting in the room next to me playing Pokemon on a Nintendo Switch.  No Nintendo Switch, probably. And so in January 1964, the Afro-Shirazi Party overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and established a new government in the former British protectorate.  The Bulsara family, like many other ethnic Arabs who lived in Zanzibar, fled the resulting violence and emigrated to England, where they lived in Middlesex and then London.  Farrokh, the oldest Bulsara child, who had been going by Freddie, graduated from Ealing Art College in 1969 and joined a succession of bands before landing in a band call

  First off: love the subway tile!   This album is as stark an example as I've seen here of the difference between how an album hit me when I was 14 and how it hits now.  When I was a sullen teen, I thought this record was so fucking deep  - you know, man, we really do build a Wall between ourselves and the world, this is so amazing, how do they know exactly what I'm feeling?  I had the whole cliche down - lying on my back in my room with The Wall  blasting in headphones and just reveling in my suffering and aloneness.  Typical privileged suburban kid.   So yesterday I listen to this album again all the way through for the first time in like 30 years and now it doesn't sound like a monumental work of art that also happens to just get me.  Now it sounds like an incredibly self-indulgent, overwrought work of art with some definite high points but also some serious flaws. To back up, this album is, of course, one of the best-selling records of all time, and, incredibly, is onl

  Every once in a while on Twitter or a music forum somewhere, someone will ask "Hey, what's the best three song sequence to open an album ever?"  And people will give reasonable answers (Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -> With A Little Help From My Friends -> Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds or Who Loves the Sun -> Sweet Jane -> Rock and Roll) and some people give ridiculous answers (The Changeling -> Love Her Madly -> Been Down So Long [from the Doors' LA Woman , God help us]), but the correct answer just might be the first three songs on this album.  Feast your eyes: 1999 Little Red Corvette Delirious I mean, are you kidding me?  Any one of those would be a career-making song for any other artist, and Prince just casually stacks them one after another on this, one of the best albums of all time, somehow here at 130 and not in, say, the top 50.  This album, released in 1982, paved the way for black artists to appear on MTV, a huge deal at the

  Sorry about Friday, but I just didn't feel like it was right to do my dumb album review on one of the saddest, most profound days in American history, the day when 6 judges, 3 of whom were picked by a President who lost the popular vote twice, decided to take away the right of a woman to control her bodily autonomy.  Since then, I've been awed by the voices of women and men who are determined to fight instead of just bummed out and kind of lost feeling like me. Which brings us to Dummy, Portishead's debut album, an album NME called "a sublime debut album.  But so very, very sad."  NME is not wrong.  This album is so suffused with melancholy and longing that it practically makes you want to weep.  It has probably made many people weep. Although this wasn't by any means the first trip-hop album, or even the first big trip-hop album, I think it represented such a leap forward in the genre that they became intimately associated with it to the point that even the

  I just can't.

  As regular readers are aware, there has been a serious lack of country and country-adjacent music on this list, so I am cheered to see any country representation, even if it is a compilation/greatest hits album.  So this album - really a double album, released in 1978, the 25th anniversary of Williams' death - was a joy to listen to, a pleasant trip through (mostly) familiar songs.  When I was a kid, we had a record player and I had access to my Mom and Dad's records, which means I listened to a lot of Broadway cast recordings and old country.  Were my musical tastes shaped by Jesus Christ Superstar and 1968's Hank Williams' Greatest Hits ?  Maybe! This collection progresses in roughly chronological order, and it is stunning to realize that these songs were almost entirely recorded in a five-year stretch between 1947 and 1952, and almost all written entirely by Williams himself.  The first track, "Move It On Over," recorded on April 21, 1947, may well have

  I maintain two Best Of lists in my head that sometimes overlap.  Like I have a mental list of the Best Albums of All Time, and it sometimes, but not always intersects with My Favorite Albums.  (We'll see how much it intersects with this list.)  To take a recent example, I'm sure Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is a brilliant album, but it just didn't speak to me .  (I was gonna make a snarky comment about the Grammys' Best Album of the Year always being dreck but looking back on it now, they got it right a surprising amount of times!  Last year was Taylor Swift's folklore , an album I absolutely adore, and they gave it to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Speakerboxx/The Love Below .  There are a lot of really bad misses, but they occasionally hit!) This is all a really really long and boring way of saying that I guess this album is critically revered and people love it or whatever but I fucking hated it so much that every second listening to it felt like an