Funeral to Finish

  Man, the journey I've had with this record.  I picked it up used in the early 90s from Reckless Records on Haight Street and had a very brief but very intense relationship with it for a few months and then promptly forgot about it.  Then I didn't listen to it at all for about 30 years until I put it on again on Friday and have barely listened to anything else since. This weird, wonderful album is a meditation or a tone poem or a portal to another state of consciousness, as the title suggests.  The songs on it aren't really songs in the conventional sense of the term - they're wild and meandering things, almost free-form jams, which makes sense, because, according to bassist Richard Davis, that's exactly what they were.  There were no lead sheets or even basic song outlines, just Van Morrison and the musicians going at it.  This sounds like a recipe for a fucking disaster, but instead it's one of the most famous and influential albums of the 20th century. What

  This is gonna be really embarrassing, but not only did I not know much about this album, I had never heard it before yesterday.  That's how disconnected from most hip-hop I was in the 80s and 90s.  This was released in 1987, two weeks before yesterday's abum, Appetite for Destruction .  I don't know if that means anything. So first: I was reading up on this album, as I do, and learned that it was incredibly influential and groundbreaking for its time.  Which is great, because it sounds hella dated to me.  Now, this is like someone who only knows modern fiction reading Moby Dick or Jane Eyre and going "lol why do they talk like that, so dumb," I understand that, but I AM THAT PERSON.  My personal enjoyment of rap began roughly with De La Soul, who were on a completely different wavelength than these guys.  Now, of course, you can't have Jonathan Franzen or Ottessa Moshfegh without Herman Melville or Charlotte Brontë so it means if you want to know about Eng

  You could be anywhere in the world when the opening riff of "Sweet Child O' Mine" comes over the speakers and somebody will go "WHOOOOOO."  I don't care if it's a VFW post in Des Moines or a sushi restaurant in Soho or an abandoned ship on an island in the South Pacific.  Put on that song and someone will WHOOOOO.  That riff - which came in second behind "Whole Lotta Love" in a BBC poll of the greatest guitar riffs in history - is one of the greatest things in rock 'n roll and everyone knows it. This album, the best-selling debut album in US history (in the world, it's Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell , which I fear we will see), initially landed with a thud upon release in 1987, believe it or not.  It wasn't until the following year that Geffen general manager Al Coury convinced MTV to play the video for "Welcome to the Jungle" for three consecutive days.  It became the most-requested video in MTV's history and you k

  I was never really a Stereo Guy.  I'm not even sure if Stereo Guys exist any more, but they used to hang around hi-fi shops and compare tuners and speakers and use words like "harmonics" and "Blaupunkt" and "Harmon-Kardon."  They had their turntable arms balanced by professionals and their stereo was in a room that was especially tuned for it.  Anyway, if you went over to a Stereo Guy's house (and I can imagine Stereo Girls existing, although I've never seen any evidence of it), he would put on an album to show you how great his stereo was and that album would be Aja  by Steely Dan. The reason is because the production on this album is so crystallinely clear that it sounds like the musicians are actually in your head.  It's so crisp and sharp you could cut diamonds with it.  I guess it's jazz-rock or jazz-pop but it has been rightfully celebrated as one of the foundational albums of Yacht Rock , a genre that did not exist when the alb

  This big, fun as hell record gave rise to OutKast's first #1 single, "Ms. Jackson," a rap-funk hybrid about Andre 3000's relationship with Erykah Badu; the titular Ms. Jackson is Badu's mother.  Did she take it the wrong way?  No, she did not, according to Badu ; "How did my mama feel? Baby, she bought herself a Ms. Jackson license plate . . .  She had the mug, she had the ink pen, she had the headband, everything.  That’s who loved it.”  The song's absolutely iconic chorus ("I'm sorry Ms. Jackson/I am for real/Never meant to make your daughter cry/I apologize a trillion times") also gave rise to one of the best tweets of all time: But this album is so much more.  The group had recently purchased a studio in Atlanta, and freed from the constraints of studio time, were free to let their imaginations roam.  So you get an incredible pastiche of styles and beats.  "Gasoline Dream," one of the album's best songs, draws from early

  What's the Best Live Album of all time?  Some people say it's the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East , but that album's a bore and they're wrong.  Some people say it's Cheap Trick's at Budokan and they might be right.  I know at least one person who thinks it's Live Rust by Neil Young.  But a lot of people say it's this album (which came in at #1 on Rolling Stone's " 50 Greatest Live Albums of All Time ") but I have to disagree.  I think this album is fine, but it's not the best live album of all time and it's not even close to the best James Brown album. For one thing, it's oddly subdued.  When you think "James Brown live" you're expecting a fucking ferocious barn-burner, dripping sweat from every groove and setting you aflame.  This album has its moments like that - "Think" is full of verve and life - but there's a lot of mellow.  You could put on "I Don't Mind" to put a child t

  Oh, I don't know, whatever.  This is so far outside my musical area that you might as well put on a recording of someone reciting poetry in Czech and ask me what I think about it.  It's nice? I put it on yesterday while I was working and I guess it was fine to work to.  It's way better than that Miles Davis album we had a while back because it's not actively annoying.  It didn't make me angry and uncomfortable like that one did, so that's a plus!  Here's a good slogan: " A Love Supreme : Jazz that Doesn't Make You Feel Angry or Sick!"  Run with it, marketing! Honestly, what I read about the album makes me feel like I'm a musical idiot or something.  Pitchfork says, "It's the sound of a man laying his soul bare.  Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones' opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner's piano clusters t