Funeral to Finish

  It's 1966 and the biggest band in the world is in flux.  Three-quarters of the band have tried LSD and embraced it; only Paul McCartney has held out.  They go into EMI Studios in London in April 1966 and over the course of a few weeks essentually rewrite pop music.  For the first time, you don't have to be constrained by what you can reliably play live; now you are free to use the studio to create your sound and not worry about how it could sound on stage.  Indeed, the first track recorded for this album was the last song on the record, "Tomorrow Never Knows," a feast of backwards-tracking, sitar drone, tape loops, and John Lennon's vocal recorded partly through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet.  It doesn't have any chord progression or rhyming vocals and it sounds like the dawn of something new and wild and slightly scary.  There's a reason why Mad Men paid $250,000 to license this single song, for a scene in which Don Draper realizes the world is chan

  It is a well-known fact that this is the biggest-selling album of all time; although the bulk of its sales were in the pre-SoundScan era and thus are a matter of some conjecture, it's reliably thought that this record has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 million copies, making it the best-selling album worldwide and second in the US, behind Eagles' Greatest Hits  (ugh).   When I was researching this I went down a delightful rabbit hole concerning the history of the best-selling album of all time.  The first biggest album ever was the 78 rpm soundtrack to Oklahoma! , which held the title up until 1946.  It was briefly interrupted by Al Jolson's The Jolson Story , which I'm sure is an absolute banger, and then regained the crown in 1956.  Then it's mostly soundtracks - Boomers fucking loved  soundtracks - until 1973, when Carole King's Tapestry became the best-sellling album of all time.  For a while it was the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and then

  This is wild, but no one really knows who wrote the original version of "Respect," a song each and every one of you know, the first song on this record.  Originally presented to Otis Redding by Speedo Sims, Redding took the slow ballad, sped it up, and recorded it for his third album, Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul.   But there's a reason you don't know that version and do know this one.  Franklin rearranged the song, flipped the genders, and turned it into an anthem of female empowerment and one of the best-known songs in soul.  In 2021, it came in first in Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs list, and that's hard to argue with. This compact, 32-minute album, Franklin's first for Atlantic, was her first top 10 album in the US and her first truly successful breakthrough album.  Recorded partly in Muscle Shoals (a tiny Alabama town that is one of the truly most important spots in American music) and partly in New York, it arrived at a propitious time in earl

  "What's your favorite album?," my sister asked me once.   " Exile on Main Street , I guess," I said. "No, I mean, what's your actual favorite album, not the album you say when people ask you what your favorite album is," she replied. I don't know, I've probably toyed around with this being my favorite album from time to time.  It's at least in my top 10.  And why not?  It's practically a greatest hits collection all in one place.  "Tumbling Dice," "Rip this Joint," "Rocks Off," "Shine a Light," "Sweet Virginia," I mean, come the fuck on.  It's more or less the creative apex of the Glimmer Twins', Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, rock songwriting.  Later albums in the 70s saw the band experimenting with other genres, largely at Jagger's direction, as Richards' heroin habit made him a difficult collaborator. Although it sounds like this album was recorded at least part

  I am properly embarrassed to say that this album slipped right by me when I was younger and although I had certainly heard tracks from it, like "Bring the Noise," I ahd never heard the album all the way through until yesterday.  So I am here to say, as a totally unbiased listener: this album is fucking great . I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this just seems way ahead of its time for 1988.  The Bomb Squad's production on these songs is a thing of beauty, whisking together some expertly chosen funk, soul, and rock samples with booming percussion, all serving as a backdrop for Chuck D's muscular voice.  Take the aforementioned "Bring the Noise," for example; it has samples from "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" by Funkadelic, "The Assembly Line" by Commodores, "Give it Up or Turnit a Loose (Remix)" by James Brown, and a speech by Malcolm X.   That last sample is absolutely representative of the themes of this album, which is

  After yesterday's, um, unpleasantness , it is so nice to get an album like this, an album I love completely that also happens to be one of the Greatest Albums Ever Recorded, Slam-Dunk edition.   The opening chords to the first track, the title song, sound like an alarm, a staccato siren, and the song is  an alarm, a warning about the myriad fears of the Cold War era, when disaster always seemed a day or so away: The ice age is coming, the sun's zoomin' in Engines stop running, the wheat is growin' thin A nuclear error, but I have no fear Cause London is drowning, I, I live by the river The alarmlike quality of the song is accented by Topper Headon's martial drums, pounding out a march that matches Joe Strummer's guitar.  Strummer's voice is typically hoarse and strained, and that quality lends itself to the time-is-running out anxiousness of the song.  Strummer's wolf howls and yelps only add to the feeling of doom. I guess this was called "punk,&

  Ah fuck, here were are again at the Kanye West Problem, which is how to talk about a work of art when the artist has recently revealed himself to be a loathsome antisemite and is also probably seriously mentally ill and whether mental illness should offer mitigation for genuinely awful behavior  and on what terms.  It's complicated! Lots and lots of artists on this list have done and said vile and inexcusable things.  It was an open secret that Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, liked underage girls, and in fact had a relationship with Lori Mattix when he was 29 and she was 14 .  Aerosmith's Steven Tyler is accused of an ongoing relationship with a 16-year-old girl in the 70's.  Eric Clapton is more or less openly racist .  Chris Brown, of course, has a long history of abusing women, and beat Rihana so bad she had to go to the hospital.  And on and on.  So why is Kanye such a hard case? Two things, I think, and please excuse me if I keep talking about this every tim