Funeral to Finish

  What I found most amazing about listening to this album was how often I went "Hey! [Some other artist] stole this exact line/riff/entire song!"  I mean, everyone knows "Maybellene" and "Johnny B. Goode" and "Reelin' and Rockin';" they're not just part of rock DNA, they're part of the American cultural lexicon.  But then you listen to "Sweet Little Sixteen," a song on this compilation that I don't think I've ever heard before, and immediately you're like "This is Surfin' USA!" And guess what?  You're right, the Beach Boys copied it exactly for their song, and now Chuck Berry's publisher owns the rights to "Surfin' USA." When you listen to "You Can't Catch Me" and hear the lyric "Here come old flat-top," you may think, hmmm that line sounds familiar.  Indeed, the Beatles copped it verbatim for a little ditty called "Come Together."  And Dyl

  So little of a Bowie-head am I that until yesterday I had never heard this album, except for, of course, "Golden Years," a Bowie staple that, it's rumored, he originally wrote for Elvis Presley, who turned it down.  It's a brilliant song, really, a funk/doo-wop/disco mashup with Bowie's indelible croon floating above the whole thing. The rest of the album?  It's fine.  On the 2012 version of this list, it was number 324, which seems way more appropriate placement than 52.  It is not the 52nd best album of all time.  I doubt David Bowie would even say it's the 52nd best album of all time.  What happened between 2012 and 2021?  David Bowie died, returning him to the public consciousness in a big way and, I anticipate, giving all his classic albums a big boost. There's only six songs on this album, ranging from the just under 4-minute "Golden Years" to the 10-plus minute title track, the first song on the album, wherein Bowie introduces the Th

  After yesterday's seemingly endless parade of nearly-perfect two and a half minute bops, this weird, sprawling album seems like wading through molasses.  That is not a great simile but it will have to do. Let's hit the good part first.  There isn one absolute masterpiece on this album, and it's Hendrix's cover of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower."  You hear those first strums and immediately recognize it and it completely overpowers you and sweeps you up.  This is one of the winners in the "cover that's better than the original" game, because honestly, it makes Dylan's original sound like the cover version.  I can't hear this without picturing Huey helicopters over the jungle and burning police cars because it's been the soundtrack for a million documentaries and shows about the 60s.  (This album came out in October 1968, which is about as close to the climax of The Sixties as you can get.)   "Crosstown Traffic" is a

  Four CDs!! Nearly five hours of music!! This collection, released by Polydor in 1991, has basically every song you could possible think of when you think "James Brown."  It's not just a greatest hits collection, it's an every hits collection, and this is a man who put something like 120 singles on the R&B charts.  It goes from his first hit, "Please, Please, Please," a doo-wop-adjacent number released as "James Brown & the Famous Flames" in 1956 to his 1984 collab with Afrika Bambaataa, "Unity, Pt. 1." In between are some of the best-known songs in R&B, soul, funk, and just whatever it is James Brown does.  It's arranged in chronological order, so the first disc ("Mr. Dynamite") covers roughly '56 to '65, then the second ("The Hardest Working Man in Show Business") runs from '65 to early '69.  Disc one has "Night Train," which I didn't realize I already knew, and the ofte

  One thing I've learned doing this project is that some albums I thought were revelatory masterpieces in early high school now sound dated and boring, and this is one of them.  Man, I was so into this album, because I was 15 and had just started smoking weed and this album is the perfect vehicle for a 15-year-old beginning stoner.  I would go over to my friend James' house and we would put this on and get to the very quiet end of "On the Run" and then the cacophony of loud, blaring alarm clocks at the beginning of "Time" and it sounded like the world ending and man that was such a trip. Now it sounds like extremely - extremely  - well-produced prog-jazz-rock, but is it ever cold.  The only real warmth on this record is Clare Torry's wailing, impassioned vocal on "The Great Gig in the Sky," for which she was paid 30 pounds (she later settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and got a co-writing credit).  After the wordless opener, "Spea

  I am beyond shocked that this beautiful, angry, funny, almost perfect album, which I love with the fire of ten thousand suns, was somehow ranked highly enough by enough people to land it here, in the Top 60 albums of all time, which is entirely deserved but which, if you told me or any other 20-something who loved this album when it came out, would cause us to laugh and laugh in our bitter Gen-X way. And this is a Gen-X album, through and through, written by Ms. Phair in her 20s, after an unsuccessful year spent in San Francisco trying to get noticed for her music.  As a fellow Gen-Xer, Phair is my Joni Mitchell, and this album is my Blue , the voice of a worried and distracted generation, told we were gonna die from nuclear war NO I MEAN AIDS NO I MEAN air pollution NO I MEAN the ozone layer.  No wonder we just gave it all up for drugs and booze and semi-meaningless sex and sarcasm and Winona Ryder and John Cusack. The songs themselves are mostly stripped-down and spare.  Some of th

  I have a theory that for some of their votes, the people who voted on this list told their assistant "Find out what album song so-and-so was on and put that on my list," figuring that whatever album that is, it must be good.  For this album, it's either "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" or "Up On Cripple Creek" because those are both foundationally great songs and the rest of this album is pretty boring. Look, I'm not dumb, I know this album is revered and whatever, which is fine, I'm not saying it wasn't an important album.  I know enough about music to know that it was!  I'm just saying that it's a shaggy, half-baked affair, a country-folk-rock mashup that just isn't all that interesting.  (TO ME, ok.) But yes, there are two stone-cold classics on here.  "Up On Cripple Creek" is a magnificent song, written by Robbie Robertson but sung by Levon Helm in his wry tenor, punctuated by a clavinet that is clearly a p