500
Albums Rated
2.83
Average Rating
46%
Complete
589 albums remaining
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1970s
Favorite Decade
Singer-songwriter
Favorite Genre
other
Top Origin
Critic
Rater Style ?
31
5-Star Albums
43
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo
The Byrds
|
5 | 2.83 | +2.17 |
|
69 Love Songs
The Magnetic Fields
|
5 | 2.85 | +2.15 |
|
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
Lucinda Williams
|
5 | 3 | +2 |
|
Armed Forces
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
|
5 | 3.09 | +1.91 |
|
Mermaid Avenue
Billy Bragg
|
5 | 3.18 | +1.82 |
|
My Aim Is True
Elvis Costello
|
5 | 3.35 | +1.65 |
|
Endtroducing.....
DJ Shadow
|
5 | 3.36 | +1.64 |
|
Aja
Steely Dan
|
5 | 3.46 | +1.54 |
|
Dusty In Memphis
Dusty Springfield
|
5 | 3.47 | +1.53 |
|
Blue
Joni Mitchell
|
5 | 3.49 | +1.51 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
In Rainbows
Radiohead
|
1 | 3.84 | -2.84 |
|
Master Of Puppets
Metallica
|
1 | 3.73 | -2.73 |
|
Kid A
Radiohead
|
1 | 3.71 | -2.71 |
|
Californication
Red Hot Chili Peppers
|
1 | 3.7 | -2.7 |
|
The Marshall Mathers LP
Eminem
|
1 | 3.49 | -2.49 |
|
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
|
1 | 3.47 | -2.47 |
|
Bat Out Of Hell
Meat Loaf
|
1 | 3.45 | -2.45 |
|
Hail To the Thief
Radiohead
|
1 | 3.44 | -2.44 |
|
...And Justice For All
Metallica
|
1 | 3.43 | -2.43 |
|
Amnesiac
Radiohead
|
1 | 3.41 | -2.41 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Beatles | 4 | 4.25 |
| Stevie Wonder | 3 | 4.33 |
| Pink Floyd | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Radiohead | 4 | 1 |
| Metallica | 3 | 1.33 |
| Barry Adamson | 2 | 1.5 |
| Joy Division | 2 | 1.5 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Miles Davis | 1, 5, 2 |
| Arcade Fire | 2, 5, 3 |
| The Byrds | 2, 3, 2, 2, 5 |
5-Star Albums (31)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Girls Against Boys
1/5
I tried to convince myself this wasn’t that bad by thinking, “It’s kind of like The Jesus Lizard, I guess” but really this reminded me of nothing so much as Bush. So fuck this. I didn’t like this kind of shit when I was an angry young man, so I’m certainly not going to like it now that I’m a bitter, grouchy tired old man.
22 likes
Kanye West
3/5
“I’m not going to support this Nazi by listening to his music. I mean, I’ll listen to all the other Nazis, pedophiles, rapists, abusers, and general pieces of shit on this list, but not this particular one. Aren’t I enlightened?” - y'all stupid motherfuckers.
Fuck y'all. Kanye West has gone insane as many geniuses do but this is a great album. The beats are solid, the subject matter goes beyond the stupid gangsta cliches rappers constantly spout, and it’s actually funny pretty much throughout. But enjoy being morally pure by not listening to this and maybe spin some RHCP instead.
20 likes
Elvis Presley
2/5
I know this is an important record and I know it has to be on this list. But I am going to give it two stars for the same reason that if it were 1500 B.C. I would be amazed by staring at a fire, but in 2024 I'm not. The world has moved past this sound and I personally find it pretty basic and if I hear that generic rockabilly riff that has been used in 8 billion songs one more time I'm going to kill myself. That being said, if I was a teeny-bopper in 1956 I'd be losing my fucking shit over this album.
Also, Elvis is one lucky motherfucker. Race is a social construct but culture is real. And while cultural appropriation - in the sense of just adopting signifiers of other cultures as a fashion accessory - is wrong; cultural exchange is admirable and is how you get basically every genre of music. Different cultures are constantly mixing and blending and stealing from one another's musical traditions and creating new types of music from the weird Frankenstein babies that they make, and its great.
Cut to the 1950's and there is a giant blockage in the mixed streams that lead to new music being created and shared because colonizers and slave traders invented the concept of race in the 1660's to justify their rape and pillaging of other peoples in the name of profit. And almost 300 years later, there was still this artificial separation between musical traditions in America. That left millions of white teenagers with no idea that black Americans had invented a new sound called Rock & Roll.
So who comes along but a talented boy singer from Memphis who had charisma and a unique vocal style and a pretty face and could dance. But more importantly, he could do pretty decent versions of all this great music that those millions of teenagers hadn't heard yet and that allowed him to become the best selling artist of all time based on a decent amount of talent, but no more than thousands of other artists who were nowhere near as successful.
Congratulations Elvis, the Atlantic slave trade allowed you to become famous enough to spend twenty years popping pills, having pillow fights with 14-year old girls, making shitty low-budget movies, posing with Nixon and then dying on a toilet in your huge tacky mansion.
17 likes
Crosby, Stills & Nash
3/5
Here are some fun facts. In 1982, David Crosby crashed his car into a fence after having a cocaine seizure. Responding police found his coke and a loaded .45. When they asked Crosby why he felt the need to travel with a loaded weapon, he supposedly replied, "John Lennon." At one point, Stephen Stills started to believe he had been on missions with the US Marines in Vietnam and began wearing fatigues on stage during concerts and signing autographs “Stephen Stills, US Marine Corps”. In 2016, Graham Nash, who was in his 70's at the time, divorced his wife of 38 years to marry a 40-year old. His adult children stopped talking to him, which he said was probably for the best.
These were three talented individuals and this is a pretty decent album and Deja Vu is even better. It is a shame that after making some pretty decent albums these guys spent the next 50 years ruining their lives and the lives of the people around them.
Don't do drugs kids.
12 likes
Paul Weller
2/5
Dear Mr. Dimery,
I wanted to tell you about something with which you appear unfamiliar: https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/countries_of_the_world.htm. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “hey wait, I know one of those!” And I wholeheartedly agree and concede that you are clearly very aware of the United Kingdom and its constituent … states? provinces? kingdoms? Also a few of its colonies that have regrettably and temporarily distanced themselves from their rightful owner. I do not dispute that. But what I wanted to point out is that there are at least 175 other names on that list with which you appear to be wholly ignorant. Maybe, instead of putting EVERY SINGLE 2.2-star and above album that was released between 1980 and 2010 from one of those countries on your list, you could put a 5-star album from each of those other countries? Just a thought.
This book really needs to be done by a committee of individuals of different ages, races, sexes and nationalities. People are too affected by music they were exposed to from ages 16 to 26 to be unbiased when choosing albums everyone should hear. Or at least this dumbass was. What the fuck would make someone consider this an album everyone needs to hear before they die? I mean, it’s fine. If it were playing quietly in a Starbucks, it would be completely apropos. But to think people NEED to hear it? Good God. I don’t even know how to relate to a mind that would think that way. It’s too alien a concept for me to be able to even imagine holding.
Anyway, Robert Dimery, you are a real honest to God dyed in the wool dumbfuck and this album is perfectly fine. It’s like if Jack Johnson came out 15 years earlier and was slightly less poppy and more British. Nothing bad about this album at all. Completely inoffensive. And I could have lived a thousand years without hearing it and been perfectly fine.
7 likes
1-Star Albums (43)
All Ratings
The Smashing Pumpkins
3/5
Generic grunge droning. Lame lyrics. Mostly forgettable outside the hits.
Television
3/5
Discordant. Harsh. The kind of music that pretentious nerds think they SHOULD listen to, but nobody actually enjoys. Title track is okay.
The Cars
4/5
Great record. Utterly cool. Amazing sound. Perfect late 70’s rock and roll record.
Peter Gabriel
3/5
I read that Phil Collins didn’t understand why critics hated him and loved Peter Gabriel. They were both in Genesis, they both put out monster albums in the 80’s with tons of hits. What made the critics love Peter Gabriel and hate Phil Collins? I think it’s cause Peter Gabriel is wearing a toupee on this album cover and Phil Collins just openly went bald. But who knows?
This is a fine album. It’s hard to really hear the hits because of how often I’ve heard them before. I like Peter Gabriel’s Genesis stuff, and this is kind of three minute pop versions of that. It’s a good album. But “No Jacket Required” better be on this list too.
King Crimson
2/5
This album has: (1) an iconic cover image; (2) an absolute banger of an opening track; and (3) a really cool title track that has sub parts, one of which involves a “fire witch.” That isn’t nothing, but I’m not sure it makes up for the rest of the album being generic prog noodling.
The Who
1/5
Ugh. I don’t know shit about operas, but isn’t this a rock musical rather than a rock opera? I mean, it sounds like The Who doing a lame ass musical. So, The Who are pretty good, but lame ass musicals aren’t. This is like Micheal Jordan playing baseball. Or I guess if the Beatles did a rock musical, that would be like Michael Jordan playing baseball. This is more like Shaq playing a genie in “Shazam.” Blech.
Michael Jackson
3/5
When you reach the heights that MJ did, even an album made after you’ve begun your downward slide is pretty great. This has some hits and some filler and some garbage, but it’s just past peak Michael Jackson.
Pere Ubu
1/5
I don’t like post-punk. This is awful even for post-punk. Why would you listen to this? Terrible.
Ray Charles
2/5
I prefer rollicking and fun Ray Charles to ballad singing Ray Charles. The first song on the album is amazing but then it goes to snoozetown and never returns.
Bob Dylan
1/5
The stranglehold that the Boomers had on music criticism in the 90’s album-sonified. Dylan hadn’t done anything good in more than a decade when this mess came out but because the critics all liked him when they were 16 we had to appreciate this important new work. Terrible. This is like Jethro Tull beating Metallica and Jane’s Addiction for Best Metal Album at the 1989 Grammys. This late career middling piece of garbage has no place on an albums you must listen to list and I'm embarrassed for everyone involved that it’s on here.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Near peak Stevie Wonder, which make it near-peak music in general. Great album. Superstition is too played out to really hit properly anymore, but other than that it’s close to perfection from start to finish.
The Notorious B.I.G.
3/5
For the ten minutes or so the subject matter is not limited to robbery, murder, being good at sex and being rich, its pretty good. He was obviously a talented rapper, but I wish he had expanded what he was writing songs about somewhat. "Suicidal Thoughts" is good.
DJ Shadow
5/5
My first five star rating since starting this project. Close to a perfect album. A cohesive whole from start to finish. So great.
Ella Fitzgerald
2/5
“The Very Best of” on Amazon Music is only 12 songs and 44 minutes long. I’m not sure why so many of the reviews on here are talking about 3 hours of music. This is fine. I prefer jazzier versions of these songs from other releases, but these are nice. Not really my thing though.
Aphex Twin
1/5
uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha one star.
Louis Prima
3/5
Fun. A little corny and hard not to hear King Louie, but definitely worth a listen. I’m glad this project introduced me to this artist and album.
Derek & The Dominos
3/5
Great album. Duane Allman was unstoppable at this time. The combination of him and Clapton really shouldn’t work but it does.
The Human League
2/5
It was okay. There were a couple of decent songs outside the single, but the single became such a giant hit for a reason. Nothing else on the album even approaches it in terms of quality. I doubt I will ever listen to this album again.
Gang Of Four
1/5
I don’t like post-punk. I’ve tried to listen to this album multiple times over the years and never got what people like about it. Tried again and still don’t. So harsh and discordant. Not my kind of thing I guess.
Ozomatli
1/5
Lyrics are shallow and dumb. Music is derivative and uninteresting. Total waste of time.
Beatles
5/5
You don’t even have to rank it based on it being almost 60 years old, it still sounds perfect. All pop and rock music owes a debt to this album.
Willie Nelson
3/5
I have read critics try to explain why this album where a reedy-voiced country singer known mostly for his songwriting covering old standards is so great and I think they all miss the mark. The reason it’s great is because maybe once in a generation an artist hits a patch where they could read the phone book and it would be amazing, and Willie was in exactly such a patch in the late 70’s. It’s not hard work or practice or dedication. It’s magic. Willie was fully connected to forces beyond human comprehension in this time period and so this album is great because he made it at this time, despite its content. This album is great because magic.
But I don’t like old-timey songs, so three stars.
Britney Spears
1/5
For her first music video, whichever record executive was behind this travesty dressed this 16 year old child in pig tails and a Catholic school girl outfit and blatantly sexualized her. This “album” was obviously marketed in part toward pedophiles. The people who made this pile of garbage should be in jail.
Substantively, this isn’t an album. It’s two singles and a bunch of filler. I am dumber for having listened to this. Absolutely terrible.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
I am a huge Elvis Costello fan but this album just doesn’t hit like his earlier work. It has some good songs but this album doesn’t reach the heights of his 1970’s albums. Still, mid-grade Elvis Costello is better than top shelf most other artists.
Country Joe & The Fish
2/5
All I knew about this band was that they performed at Woodstock and had a dumb name. This album isn’t bad, but seems to really only be worthwhile in the context of its time. I’m glad to have been exposed to it for the first time through this list, but can hear nothing essential about it.
The Black Keys
2/5
This is fine. If you want to listen to pretty good blues rock made in 2010, you could do worse than this album. However, there are lots of better blues rock albums to listen to, so I'm not sure why you would go out of your way to listen to this one.
The Who
3/5
Enjoyable garage rock album. I had heard some of these songs before but not the whole album. Pretty fun and definitely worth listening to.
Nanci Griffith
3/5
Pretty decent 80’s style country. Nanci Griffith has a nice voice. I’m glad to have been exposed to it.
The Dictators
1/5
I developed a theory when a really smart English professor I had once introduced me to the band Fear. I think two types of people like dumb shit: 1. Dumb people, and 2. Smart people that are constantly surrounded by smart shit and so they think dumb shit is transgressive and rebellious. Well, I grew up steeped in dumbness and I don’t view dumb shit as anything other than dumb. So fuck this album.
It’s only made worse by being made before punk rockers realized their shitty songs wore out their welcome after 2 minutes and so these songs are as bad as the worst punk rock but three times as long.
I wish I could rate this worse than one star.
Peter Tosh
3/5
Peter Tosh is one of my favorite reggae artists, but I don’t think this album best represents all he is capable of. I think it’s a good album but not a great one.
Guns N' Roses
3/5
The singles are great. There’s definitely a reason that this is one of the biggest selling albums of all time. The other songs are pretty unimpressive. I am probably biased because I don’t really like glam/heavy/hair metal. I get that people like it and I can kind of understand why, but it really doesn’t speak to me.
Santana
4/5
Great album. Love everything about it. What an incredible sound.
2/5
When I heard “rising” repeated on Universal Corner I thought “oh gross, this sounds like The Doors.” Then I check Wikipedia and see this album was produced by Ray Mancerek and also learn that The Red Hot Chili Peppers sampled a song from this album, so two strikes against Wild Gift. But it’s not bad. Adult Books is a pretty good song. I don’t like punk, but this was more melodic and musically varied than what I think of as punk. Not an album I’m likely to spin again, but not entirely unenjoyable.
The Specials
2/5
I like ska. It’s upbeat. It’s fun. It’s got horns. What’s not to like? When this album sticks to ska, it’s pretty good. But when it goes off on weird tangents in genres I can’t really identify, it really drags. Consequently, this album is a bit of a mess.
Frank Sinatra
2/5
I’m a Goldilocks when it comes to music. If it’s harder than Monster-era REM, I’m like “Chill out and stop screaming, you’re hurting my poor sensitive ears!” but if it’s softer than Neil Diamond, I’m like “zzzzzz, wake me up when you want to rock grandpa.”
I suppose if I was lounging in a big city apartment in a suit and tie sipping a cocktail at midnight with a cigarette in my hand surrounded by hep daddy-o’s and classy dames and calling the get together a clam bake ironically then this would be the perfect album but I’m wearing a tracksuit at 7am getting my kids ready for school in South Carolina and eating a pop tart so this is just not doing it for me.
Sam Cooke
3/5
I’m not a big fan of live albums. In the studio, artists have all the time in the world and every piece of equipment under the sun that they can use to record and re-record every piece of their songs and then stitch the best take of each instrument and vocal together so the end result is a song that is absolutely as good as they can make it. Live versions are just one take of whatever they can throw together on a stage on one particular night. All that being said, this is a good live album.
I love Sam Cooke, but he can sound a bit too polished, so it was fun to hear his songs done in a rougher style. “Bring it on Home to Me” was particularly enjoyable.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
Great songs on this album:
1. Cecilia
2. Keep the Customer Satisfied
3. The entire first half of the second side.
Five great songs on one album is pretty strong, but I’d be fine never hearing the title track ever again. “Sail on silver girl” 🙄. Definitely an album everyone should hear.
Count Basie & His Orchestra
2/5
It’s funny that one of these songs is called “The Late Late Show” because all I can hear when I listen to big band music is The Tonight Show Band blaring out overly enthusiastic bombastic blaring noise to convince people that they are about to have fun.
Hey big band musicians, why is your band so big? Why do you have like 20 horn players? How is having a band this big economical? You pay each horn player $10 and you’re out $400 bucks. That’s the whole fee you’re getting for the gig. How are you going to pay the other 87 musicians? Are you going to tell Satchmo Jenkins and Tootely Toot Jones that they aren’t getting paid tonight?
I’m deducting one star for each musician involved in making this ruckus above 50. That takes us to negative 8 billion stars.
BWHA BWHAH BAAA WAAA WAHH!!!!!!
fIREHOSE
2/5
Slightly proggy, slightly grungy, but struck me as more proto-jam band than anything else. Not my thing.
Rahul Dev Burman
3/5
This is really cool, except the songs that have that high-pitched voiced singer. I loved the first song and “Baby Let’s Dance Together.” Such a crazy mix of different styles. Fun to listen to.
Paul Simon
5/5
Seems to be a huge divide between those that love this album and those that find it to be “sanitised world music for middle class drones with no imagination and less soul.” Maybe I’m a middle class drone with no imagination or soul, but I love this album like few others. Listening to it never fails to make me happy. Whether that is because of its innate musical qualities or because of nostalgia and my own history with it, I can’t say. All I know is that, to me, this album is as close to perfect as music gets.
Motörhead
3/5
I was fully prepared for this to be nothing more than loud angry music for pimply boys in the 80’s to be mad at their parents to, but I was pleasantly surprised when I found myself tapping my steering wheel along to several songs. Yes it’s loud and angry but it’s also catchy and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Good job scary metal cowboys!
The Style Council
3/5
Pretty fun album. All over the place stylistically but had some enjoyable moments. Other than “Gospel” there weren’t any truly bad songs. I’m glad to have heard it.
Goldfrapp
2/5
I like Trip Hop. At its best, this album sounds like okay Trip Hop. But it’s mostly random synth tones and pleasant vocals with no real song structure. Very forgettable.
Barry Adamson
1/5
Some of this was kind of okay but most of it was terrible. I don’t need to listen to music to make me feel anxious, I’m plenty anxious on my own.
Dire Straits
4/5
This is a great jazz influenced pop record. The second side drags a bit, but it is still amazing.
Now here is a play I wrote.
All the band members except Mark Knopler: “Fine Mark, you can play your weird 1920’s metal guitar on all the songs. Now it’s time to come up with the cover art. What do we want to put on it?”
Mark Knopler: 👉👈
Various Artists
4/5
Some of these songs have been covered tens of thousands of times and the versions of them on this album are some of the best ever done, if not the best. This is an absolute monster of an album. The only downsides are 1) they’re Christmas songs and so you can only listen to them a few weeks a year and 2) Phil Spector being a murderer. Other than that, a perfect album.
Pet Shop Boys
2/5
Did Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys get together and decide to go from disco-y dance pop to sedate snoozefests as soon as 1/1/1990 hit? Whether it was a conspiracy to go from 80’s ravers to 90’s droners or not, I think both versions of both bands suck. “Ordinary World” is pretty good but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is, if I didn’t like Pet Shop Boys before they decided to spend forever being boring - and I very much didn’t - then there was no way I was going to like this drab 1990’s version of them. Yawn and pass.
Pavement
4/5
I love Pavement. Listening to them never fails to take me back to a time and place when they were probably my favorite band. I prefer Slanted and Enchanted to this one, but they are both incredible albums.
I wish grunge had never happened and Pavement/Sebadoh/Dinosaur Jr. had been the sound of the 90’s. Then maybe the Goo Goo Dolls and Limp Bizkit and Korn and the boy bands and Brittney’s and Christina’s wouldn’t have taken over and there would have been no Woodstock ‘99 or 9/11 or War on Terror and Gore would have won in 2000 and there wouldn’t have been a writer’s strike and The Apprentice would have never made it to air and Trump would have died in semi-obscurity and COVID-19 would have been stopped early by an efficient presidential administration. But it was not to be. Thanks Kurt.
k.d. lang
2/5
The aural equivalent of watching paint dry. Very Canadian: boring, soulless, inoffensive and bland. It doesn't warrant a 1-star review because it fades into the background so completely that I hardly noticed it. I would almost rather be annoyed by an album than bored into a coma by one, but not quite.
Radiohead
1/5
I imagine that anyone doing a 1001 album listening to and reviewing project considers him or her (probably him)self a "music nerd" but obviously there is a giant degree of variation as to what that term means to different people. Some people think that if they have been to five Dave Matthews Band concerts that they are a music nerd and some people think that if you haven't got a top ten list of favorite 1920's-era Zimbabwean throat-singing noise disco artists then you aren't really a music fan at all. I am somewhere in that spectrum, probably on the more basic end, and even in full recognition of that basicness I have some serious apostasies from what I consider to be music nerd orthodoxy. For example, I unironically love Neil Diamond; I cannot for the life of me get what people like about Gang of Four, or post-punk in general; I think Gin Blossoms and Toad the Wet Sprocket were better 90's bands than Nirvana and Peal Jam; I wouldn't kick Air Supply out of bed for eating crackers; and damnit do I hate Radiohead.
I think that if Radiohead were just a one hit wonder grunge era band that kept on making some kind of weird music in their subsequent career that a few people really liked then I would probably say, "The singer's voice is not for me, but its okay" and move on, but Radiohead is held up as the end all be all of music nerd music and I just don't get it. OK Computer is okay. Creep is a pretty good song. But everything else they have ever done can be tossed to the bottom of the ocean for all I care. If they come on the radio I turn the channel. I fucking hate them. I think it is mostly Thom Yorke (had to be "Thom" didn't it? Couldn't possibly be "Tom")'s voice, but its probably just everything. Fuck you, Radiohead. Fuck you, music nerds who think everyone has to like Radiohead.
I wish I was an amnesiac and could forget that this band ever existed. And I think what makes listening to this garbage even more upsetting is knowing full well that there are probably at least three other shitty Radiohead albums on this list. Let's see . . . yep, four albums total. God help me, I'm going to have to endure In Rainbows again. Kill me now.
The Zombies
4/5
I wonder if this album gets assigned on 1/1 like the Phil Spector Christmas album gets assigned on 12/25 because “This Will Be Our Year” is the perfect song to start a new year with.
I think this would be a five star record if it weren’t for “Butcher’s Tale”. Even with that dud this is a 4-star record for me. I think the baroque pop sound is so unique and enjoyable to listen to. A great album.
Roxy Music
2/5
I like a couple of Brian Eno songs. I like “More Than This.” But this album is garbage. Nothing about this makes me want to listen to it.
Moby Grape
3/5
This is pretty good. I feel like this was a sound that was popular at the time and I am sure that hundreds of bands did it worse than these guys, but quite a few did it better too. If you get tired of listening to all the bands that did this sound better than Moby Grape did - or if want to get the classic rock version of indie cred for listening to a forgotten band with a tragic story - by all means, put on Moby Grape. I am glad that I have now heard Moby Grape and I could totally see listening to this album again. Not life-changing but decent.
However, the joke that resulted in their band name: “What is purple and swims in the ocean? Moby Grape!” I don’t get it. “What is purple and conquered the world? Alexander the Grape!” makes sense because “Grape” rhymes with “Great.” But Moby Dick and Moby Grape don’t rhyme. I don’t get that joke and I suspect either it’s stupid or I’m stupid or a little of both but either way I’m angry.
Japan
2/5
Oh look, more generic British synth pop. Too bland to hate but nothing to recommend it either.
Beatles
5/5
This is a tough album to rate. Part of me thinks I should give all Beatles albums on this list five stars because they invented modern pop music (or stole it from American R&B and country and brought it to white middle class teenagers like Prometheus bringing fire to mankind). But I think Abbey Road has some problems. I hate “Come Together” and don’t like “Something.” “Oh! Darling” is good but a bit much on the Little Richard impersonation. “Octopus’s Garden” is a Ringo song 😒.
But starting with “I Want You (She’s so heavy)” it’s essentially perfect. Ridiculously, insanely perfect. “Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go” wrecks me every time I hear it. Even “Golden Slumbers” isn’t too treacly when it comes after the long suite of songs blending together that precedes it. Then capped off by the weird and wonderful 23 seconds of “Her Majesty.”
Fuck it, five stars.
Marvin Gaye
5/5
This album has some great songs on it, but it’s real accomplishment is to knit every song on the record together into a song cycle where the entire album sounds like one song rather than a collection of songs. Then what takes that to an entire other level is that these were incredibly talented musicians and composers at the tops of their games and so the song cycle is both an amazing technical achievement and sounds beautiful at basically every second of its 35 and a half minute length. This album is deservedly frequently ranked as the greatest album of all time. Popular music doesn’t get much better than this.
Alice Cooper
2/5
I don’t like Gwar or Rob Zombie or Alice Cooper. I don’t want any horror in my rock & roll. The only thing scary about those bands is how shitty their music is. Grand Finale was decent because it was an instrumental and they couldn’t make it all stupid with their stupid lyrics. Other than that this is total garbage.
Astrud Gilberto
2/5
“The Girl From Ipanema” sold five million copies and Stan Getz made sure that Astrud Gilberto only got $120 for her contribution to it (Getz was a monster who swindled and sexually assaulted his way across America in the 60’s). Gilberto’s husband cheated on her and she was so desperate for money because of their break-up that she toured with Getz and reportedly slept with him. Astrud Gilberto was one of the countless talented women who the music industry used, abused and discarded. And now that I have listened to “Beach Samba”, I feel the karmic scales are somewhat balanced.
I guess the idea is that if she sounded good backed by some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time that she’d sound just as good with the most generic Muzak they could find in the background? This album is a waste of Astrud Gilberto’s beautiful voice. I had to go home and listen to “Getz Gilberto” just to get the taste of this album out of my mouth.
The xx
2/5
Jamie xx's "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" is one of my favorite songs so I always think I am going to like The xx, and they are always . . . fine. I will find one of their songs completely tolerable, but I'll think, "dang, is this like a ten minute long song?" and then see that it's been two and a half minutes. Nothing is wrong with The xx's music, but it’s just kind of there. It's like the quinoa of music.
Elvis Costello
5/5
It’s hard to think of anything to say about this album. I love it. I love every song on it. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times and it never gets old. I’m the guy from the Walking Dead in Love Actually and this album is Kiera Knightly. I’m just standing outside this album’s door holding up a sign that says “To me you’re perfect.”
Cream
3/5
First off, I have to admit that I have been too hard on this album in the past because I misheard a few important lyrics. I thought they were saying "Strange Brew, girl what's inside of you?" Now I see it's "kill what's inside of you." That is much cooler. Also, in SWLABR I thought it was "the vicar has a mustache" but its "the picture has a mustache," which is not great but at least it isn't so off-puttingly British as using the word "vicar" in a rock song.
I think I also like this album a little less than I otherwise might because "Sunshine of Your Love", like Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", has been overused in film and television to let the viewer know that the scene is set in the 1960's and possibly hippies and drugs are involved. That has made it harder for me to appreciate that song, and that song is definitely one of the tentpoles of the album, along with Strange Brew and Tales of Brave Ulysses.
All in all, this is a pretty good album, but I think it is overhyped. There are some really great songs, but there are also some duds. I have no issue with it being included on a list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, but I would not rank it as the 87th-greatest album of all time as VH1 did in 2001. Some other lists put it in the high 100's of greatest albums, which I think is getting closer to where I would put it, but still might be overrating it as far as I’m concerned.
The Thrills
3/5
Everyone knows that an American who appropriates Japanese culture is called a weeaboo. Most people are also familiar with the term for Americans that ridiculously mimic a stereotype of Irish culture: Bostonians. But do you know what you call Irish people who cosplay as 1960’s Californians? The Thrills.
I like this album. I heard “Big Sur” on The OC soundtrack, read the review on Pitchfork, torrented the album and then burned it onto a CD to listen to in my Saturn with an “F: The President” sticker on the back. Could that sentence BE more early 2000’s?
Despite my fondness for this album, I’m not sure it is one of the 1001 albums to hear before you die. It seems a little too slight and unimportant to warrant that. But, I liked it in 2003 and enjoyed listening to it again today, so who’s to say?
Jane's Addiction
2/5
“Jane Says” is a great song. The rest of the album is just okay. Perry Farrell seems like kind of a jerk and I don’t like his screechy singing. I hear less Zeppelin than Van Halen and RHCP and shitty hair metal. It’s not the worst album but it really doesn’t do it for me.
Haircut 100
3/5
The band Chicago is pretty lame, but I absolutely love their self-titled first album when they were called Chicago Transit Authority. At its best, this album sounds like Chicago Transit Authority mixed with sophistapop and it’s awesome.
This is probably my favorite album I have heard doing this project that I wasn’t familiar with before (I had heard “Love Plus One” on Sirius XM’s First Wave channel but nothing else). The lyrics left a lot to be desired and it was a bit too cheesy in parts, but overall I really dug it. I am a sucker for a horn section.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
Take country, R&B, rockabilly, straight ahead 50’s rock and psychedelia and have a band that takes their craft seriously and has a strong pop sensibility mix them all together and you get one of the great American albums. I love the extended “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” jam and "Long as I Can See the Light".
If this album has any downside it’s that it is a de facto CCR greatest hits album and several of the songs have been worn out by classic rock radio. However, even fifty years of over-playing five of these songs can’t overcome how incredible an album this is.
Arcade Fire
2/5
I really like Funeral but have liked this band less with every subsequent album, stolen basketball, Disney collab and sex pest allegation. Trying to listen to The Suburbs today with unbiased ears, it’s okay. A bit too bombastic and pompous. Sprawl II is a good song. All in all, if it isn’t Funeral then I’d rather just skip it.
Mariah Carey
1/5
*Mariah*: This SUUUHUHUHACKKSS UHUHUAAHHHSSSHooooAAHHSS”
*Puff Daddy “rap” break*: “This sucks. She is saying “this sucks” but stretching the words out way longer than is necessary because that’s what good singing is? Also I’m a rapist.”
*”Rap” break over, back to Mariah*: “This really SUUHAACCCKS ooooo UHUHUAHHSSSSAHHooooAAHHSS!”
This “album” is just that for almost an hour. No amount of yass-slaying this queen is going to make this anything other than disposable 90’s pop garbage.
No one should ever listen to this, much less have to listen to it before they die. 60% of the “lyrics” are “AAAAAAHHHHHH” Ooooooo” “EEEEEEE” and a high-pitched squeaking sound. This is a paper plate of an album. Meant to appeal to what was popular at that exact moment, sell a bunch of copies and then be discarded and forgotten. Its existence is a net negative for humanity. My day, and my very life, are worse for having had to endure this “music.”
Metallica
1/5
I’d like to say that I hate Metallica because they were millionaires who sued to stop normal people from getting around having to pay them even more money to add to their hoards while pretending that their greed was really about artistic integrity, but honestly I just really really hate this shit.
Oooooh puppet masters controlling people. How profound! So anti-authoritarian and anti-war. Oh wait, what’s that James Hetfield? You are "honored" the U.S. military used Metallica's music to psychologically torture prisoners of war because it "help[ed] us stay safe."? Wow, what an absolute piece of shit you are.
I guess stupid angry people need something to listen to in their jean jackets while driving their Geo Metros to go see the latest Fast and the Furious movie, but for everyone who didn’t stop growing as a person at 15, this is unbearable.
And before you start talking to me about 21/32 time signatures and chromatic scales, don’t bother because I don’t know what any of that means. But prog rock bands do all that band geek autism stuff too, but their music is actually enjoyable. In fact, the only way I got through listening to this album was to pretend it was just heavier prog rock, which helped, but not much.
Paul Simon
4/5
Paul Simon is SO BAD at choosing album cover art, that I feel it important to celebrate this album for him doing a good job in that realm for a change (possibly the only other time being Graceland). All the Simon and Garfunkel album covers are embarrassingly lame. Well, Sounds of Silence is okay, but that Greatest Hits cover, woof. And then There Goes Rhymin Simon is giving Steely Dan a run for the worst album cover by a great recording artist of all time. When Paul Simon was picking his stats he put everything into song writing and musical ability and attributed no points to graphic design, the min-maxing motherfucker.
I just watched The Wrecking Crew documentary and was surprised to recognize several of the session musicians from that movie as playing on this album. Makes sense I suppose. Paul Simon is the type to bring in whoever will make his album as good as it can be. It’s really no different than going to Kingston to record with members of Toots and the Maytals in order to make “Mother and Child Reunion” sound like actual Reggae and not a pale imitation. Paul Simon was going to make the best music he could make and didn’t care if he had to beg, borrow or steal to do it.
The first song on each side is the hit and up there amongst the best pop music of all time. But the rest of the album isn’t filler. It never reaches the heights of the two singles, but they are almost all compelling songs in their own way. This is a great artist making an album when he was in his prime. The world is a better place for this album being in it.
Bob Dylan
3/5
I think this album is mythologized to such a degree that it is hard to tell if I’m reacting to what I’m hearing or to the hype. There was a time in my life when I thought I really liked this album. Now I’m not so sure.
I think it’s shitty that Dylan never gave the Minneapolis session players that re-recorded several of the songs credit. I think it’s shitty that he showed up to the New York sessions drunk and acted like he didn’t care about what he was doing. I have rarely been as horrified as when I heard Bette Midler singing “Buckets of Rain”. I far prefer the New York versions of “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “Idiot Wind” but think some of the Minneapolis versions are better, like “Rosemary, Lily and the Jack of Hearts”.
At this point in my life, I am in neither the “Bob Dylan is rock’s greatest poet” camp nor the “This guy’s voice is terrible, turn it off” camp. I like most of Desire and most of Blonde on Blonde. I like Rolling Thunder Revue era Dylan with his eye liner and his silly feathered cap. I like some of Highway 61, and Bringing It All Back Home and John Wesley Harding. But only some of those albums. If I never heard folk or born again era Dylan again I’d be fine with that.
As for Blood on the Tracks, I think I like some of it okay. “Meet me in the Morning” and “Buckets of Rain” are pretty cool songs. But I think that I’ve listened to this album too many times at too many ages to really hear it when I put it on. I think it’s probably pretty good. I think people should listen to it before they die, but it’s not an album I am likely to put on. And isn’t that what makes an album good? Something you enjoy listening to and want to play? Cause for me, this isn’t that.
Duran Duran
3/5
Pop music is always evolving but this is exactly what it sounded like in 1982. Duran Duran should be commended for flawlessly capturing the sound of the moment and making it memorable and catchy enough to still resonate 40 years later.
This is way better than a lot of the generic 80’s British synth-pop on this list that is a chore to slog through (I’m looking at you Human Leaugue’s Dare and Japan). The cover is iconic, the hits are absolute monsters (with “Save a Prayer” and “The Chauffeur” being standouts for me) and “Last Chance on the Stairway” is a song I had never heard before that kicks ass.
All that being said, having lived through this era, although being too young to really participate in it, pictures of this band and seeing the videos bum me out for reasons I can’t fully articulate. Maybe because Duran Duran, and people who owned Duran Duran albums, were the cool kids living a glamorous life that I could only glimpse from the outside. Duran Duran always feels like really good music made for people who aren’t me, rather than feeling like music made for me.
Still, they were the absolute best at what they were doing, even if they were doing it for people who had way spikier hair and shinier shirts than I did. So, credit where credit is due.
Girls Against Boys
1/5
I tried to convince myself this wasn’t that bad by thinking, “It’s kind of like The Jesus Lizard, I guess” but really this reminded me of nothing so much as Bush. So fuck this. I didn’t like this kind of shit when I was an angry young man, so I’m certainly not going to like it now that I’m a bitter, grouchy tired old man.
Death In Vegas
2/5
Okay techno/triphop/shoegaze. Not something I’d ever feel a desire to listen to again, but it being the assigned album didn’t ruin my day. I wish a genie had offered the band the ability to take itself a little less seriously in exchange for having to make every song on the album two minutes shorter. But other than those issues, this was fine.
The Beau Brummels
2/5
At times this sounds a little bit like the soundtrack to the Rankin/Bass animated Hobbit movie (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL545948224B999E8A&si=PC6Lk90OH7Wwg8JP) which isn't a bad thing, but also is not necessarily a great thing either. This struck me as very 1960's San Francisco. While I think it is an interesting artifact of its time, I would not consider it an album everyone needs to hear.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
I think Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest pop musicians of all time and this is his masterpiece. His mid-70’s run of amazing albums, culminating in this one, may be unmatched in music history. The breadth and depth of songs on this album is unbelievable. Fun, soulful, socially conscious, personal, danceable; this album is everything you could possibly want in a record. I don’t think it would be hyperbolic to say, as many people have said before, that this is the best album ever made.
David Bowie
2/5
David Bowie was born in 1947. Raquel Welch was born in 1940. David Bowie released Ziggy Stardust in 1972 when he was 25 years old. Raquel Welch was in the film where her famed doe-skinned bikini shot was taken in 1966 when she was 26 years old. Raquel Welch Was 69 years old in 2009. David Bowie was 69 years old in 2016 when Blackstar was released. If you want to listen to a David Bowie album made in 2016, do you want to look at a poster of Raquel Welch in a bikini from 2009? I’m sure Raquel Welch was interesting and charming and insightful at 69 years of age, and I may have loved reading an article she wrote or watching an interview with her at that age, but I wouldn’t want to see Raquel Welch bikini-modeling in 2009, and I don’t want to listen to Blackstar.
Obviously, bikini-modeling and making music are not the same thing, but I would argue that, while older people can still enjoy it, rock and roll music is primarily made by and for young people, just as posters of women in bikinis are. And even if this album can’t be classified as rock and roll, that’s what Bowie was famous for doing (I know, I know, Low etc., still) and so what makes his ambient, jazz noise album any more desirable to listen to than any other 69-year old’s?
I am a firm believer in Sick Boy’s Unifying Theory of Life: “at one point, you’ve got it, then you lose it. Then it’s gone forever, all walks of life. . . ‘The Name of the Rose’ is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory.” We all get old if we live long enough. Some of us, like Bowie, achieve greatness for a brief period if we are exceedingly talented and brave and lucky. Bowie was brilliant when he was brilliant, but in 2016 he was decades past his prime. Blackstar is an interesting artifact and I suppose a nice “parting gift to his fans” (they still had to buy it though didn’t they) but it’s not for me, and I suspect that it’s not really for most people, if they’re being honest with themselves.
The White Stripes
4/5
I was blown away by this album when it came out. When “Seven Nation Army” became such a big hit, The White Stripes felt like a breath of fresh air and so, not necessarily original, but so different than anything else that was happening at the time in mainstream music. I found them to be very exciting then, and still enjoy this album now.
Musicians are great, but rock stars are really fun, and The White Stripes were rock stars. The mythology, the motifs, the brashness and confidence; all classic rock star stuff. And the songs are worthy of all the trappings that accompanied them. This is definitely an album everyone should hear.
Missy Elliott
2/5
Missy’s and Timbaland’s beats and creativity are impressive as always. She merges a very old school style of rapping with production that was way ahead of its time. She was a shot in the arm for hip-hop and is an amazing talent.
All that being said, this album has some real duds on it. This is more “Work It”-and-Friends than an actual album. But “Work It” is such a great song that it’s hard to be too mad about that. I think Missy, like many rappers, is a single-oriented artist rather than someone focused on making a cohesive album.
I think someone dying having never heard “Work It” would have really missed out, but this album? You’d be alright giving it a pass.
Grizzly Bear
2/5
Good lord, when I see the words “chamber pop” I shudder in horror. I kind of get what these guys are going for, but most of the record I just wonder why they would ever want to go for this. When it’s at its best it’s kind of hypnotic and jammy and a pleasant wall of sound kind of thing. But you have to fight through a lot of “goddamit will you fucking hipster nerds shut the fuck up?!” to get to that point. All things being equal, I’d rather listen to an actual album with actual songs than this harpsichord woodwind tonal stew.
Gorillaz
3/5
An English virtual band exploring a variety of musical styles including hip hop, electronic and world music made up of NFT-looking anime human/ape hybrids?
https://wifflegif.com/gifs/552151-mr-pink-fuck-all-that-reservoir-dogs-gif
Some of this music was perfectly fine. I like Damon Albarn’s work. But knowing that I’m supposed to listen to this while watching cartoon monkeys really tanks the whole experience for me. I’ll stick to listening to Blur.
The Beach Boys
4/5
I’ve owned this album for decades and listened to it a hundred times or more. It’s almost too big to rate. It’s been lauded as one of the top two or three albums of all time for longer than I’ve been alive, but how often does someone decide to spin Pet Sounds just for the hell of it?
Maybe the baby boomers’ lead-exposure-damaged brains cause them to think an anxious and depressed twenty-something boy band member who had until that point only made songs about surfing, cars and girls but decided to hire a bunch of studio musicians with the deliberate intention of making the greatest rock album of all time and then started playing glockenspiels and coca-cola bottles is good. Maybe it’s just three hits, a bunch of filler, and one full on Exotica song for some reason.
I don’t know. But when an album kicks off with “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” and then goes on to contain “Sloop John B” and “God Only Knows”, it’s hard not to give it full marks. “Here Today” and “I’m Waiting for the Day” aren’t too bad either.
Ultimately, I am trying to rate albums based on how I feel about them as an individual and not based on their place in rock history or whatever. For me, Pet Sounds is a cool sounding and pretty album that I can appreciate for not being afraid to get real weird. But I don’t consider it one of my all-time favorites.
Jean-Michel Jarre
2/5
It was weird reading the Wikipedia page about Oxygene and learning that it was an international sensation that sold 10 to 15 million copies, and that Jean Michel Jarre was the first Westerner to ever play China and put on the biggest concert of all time, because I had never heard of this album or this artist before today. It felt like that Berenstein Bears thing where you feel like you’ve shifted to a slightly different dimension.
I thought Oxygene sounded a little like Tangerine Dream and a little like Tubular Bells but did not appeal to me as much as either of those. I appreciate that this album was ahead of its time when it was made but I think this type of music has been taken to a lot more interesting places in subsequent years.
I found listening to this comparable to someone liking Renaissance art and then being told to check out crappy medieval art from before they figured out perspective. Like yeah, this guy’s flat face in this circa 1135 painting is cool and all, and was the best they could do at the time, but I’d rather go back to Raphael and Michelangelo and the other ninja turtles.
Wild Beasts
2/5
Stupid, banal, totally unexceptional in every way. Sounds like a shitty Roxy Music, and Roxy Music is already shitty enough on its own. It also reminded me of all those recent bad Arctic Monkeys albums where they are trying to be space lounge singers. Just a waste of an album pick.
Supertramp
3/5
I like Supertramp. The blending of pop and prog that they pull off when they are firing on all cylinders is really fun. I had heard "Bloody Well Right" before, but while I have spun Breakfast in America a bunch of times and really like it, I do not believe that I had heard anything else from this album before. Honestly, other than "Bloody Well Right", I don't hear anything on this album that I would necessarily want to hear again.
Crime of the Century seems to take itself a little more seriously than the band does on Breakfast in America. I am giving the album three stars because it is Supertramp, but not peak Supertramp.
Beatles
4/5
If I had a time machine, I would go back to any time when a band or artist was contemplating making a double album and force them at ray gun point (because I assume if I have a time machine I also have a ray gun) to just make a really good single album instead. The only exceptions being Songs in the Key of Life, Exile on Mainstreet, The Basement Tapes and maybe Blonde on Blonde.
The White Album is great, but you know what would have been better?
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Dear Prudence
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Happiness Is A Warm Gun
I'm So Tired
Blackbird
I Will
Julia
Birthday
Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
Helter Skelter
Long, Long, Long
That album would be up there with Abbey Road as a near perfect Beatles album. Instead you've got this giant sprawling mess of a double album that includes a bunch of songs that nobody needs or wants.
I get it, they were super famous and nobody could tell them no, they had fried their brains on acid, they had all just had a bad three-month-long weird cult vacation and they weren't getting along. Still, if you watch that Apple TV special where they recorded them for forty-something hours while they made Let it Be, Paul says something about how the band had been off its game since "Mr. Epstein" died because Brian Epstein kept them in line. I have to agree. These chuckleheads needed a grown up.
The White Album isn't bad (I know, hot take) but it suffers from the classic double-album curse. It could have been an amazing single album.
Steely Dan
5/5
I’m smiling as I’m reading the bad reviews of this album that all the sweet summer children are leaving. There is some time travel movie or book I saw or read once and forgot where the main character is a passionate believer in one thing at one point in his life and a zealot for the other side captures and tortures him and then later it’s revealed that the zealot is him from the future who has been converted to the other side and goes back and tortures his younger self. You then learn that it’s half hatred inspiring the torture of his younger self, but it’s half love. That is how I feel about people who don’t yet love this album.
And I say “love” not “like” because one day you will love this album. It is inevitable. The day your goatee becomes predominantly white, this album will arrive in the mail on vinyl, no postmark or return address. You will look at it disdainfully but put it on - because why not? - and it will sound to you like the best thing you have ever heard. You will goggle at the way its seven songs burst with sophisticated changes, exquisitely played by such jazz luminaries as saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboardist-vibraphonist Victor Feldman (both graduates of Miles Davis’ ‘60s bands) and session pros like bassist Chuck Rainey, drummers Steve Gadd, Jim Keltner and Bernard Purdie, saxophonists Jim Horn and Plas Johnson, pianist Paul Griffin and guitarists Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour.
The hypnotic suavity of the musical concepts and Fagen and Becker’s propensity for writing brainy, elliptical lyrics will thrill a part of your soul that has always been there waiting to emerge. You will fall down on your knees like Saul on the road to Damascus and when you rise you will be Paul. And you will love this album with the type of fervor that only the convert can have.
I smile as I read your one-and-two-star reviews calling this album boring elevator music because I was you once, and it seems like it wasn’t that long ago. But two things are undefeated in this life: Father Time and The Dan. And both of them are coming for you.
One day soon we may sit together and discuss how “Black Cow”’s silken, soul-derived groove (propelled by Rainey’s fat bass lines), Feldman’s pristine electric piano solo and Tom Scott’s tenor sax outburst all cloak the tale of a man at odds with his drug-addicted, promiscuous girlfriend, whom he may or may not be clandestinely stalking. We will hear that unmistakable gravelly voice singing “Peg” in the background, and I’ll say, “Steely Dan sought out the absolute master of every single instrument that was played on this album to contribute, and the voice is an instrument, which is why they hired Michael McDonald as their back-up singer” and you’ll smile and nod.
Steely Dan’s unique blend of smooth sophisticated music and complex and dark lyricism will unite us as brothers and we will commune together enjoying this album with no hint of cynicism or irony because we will have moved past those concepts and be far too enlightened to engage in such trivialities in what we will know is the entirely too short amount of time remaining to us in this life.
And on that day, both of our backs will hurt.
The Byrds
2/5
The Byrds are a very influential band. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is a great album. I like jangly folk/country rock. Plus, I'm sure 60’s teeny-boppers appreciated being able to hear Pat Boone versions of Dylan songs so they could feel like they were super groovy without having to listen to the voice of the voice of their generation. But Younger than Yesterday is not doing it for me.
A fair amount of this album is straight up lame (looking at you "Mind Gardens"), and when it isn't lame it just isn't substantial enough to warrant being on a list of 1001 albums you must hear before you die. I'm not discounting that the Byrds are an important band that made some great songs and inspired some of my favorite bands of all time (REM, Big Star, The Jayhawks), but this album is not very good.
Lorde
2/5
***WARNING: Early-mid-40's-year-old-man rant incoming***
Here is something I don't understand about Lorde, and while we're at it, Lana Del Rey/Billie Eilish/Olivia Rodrigo/etc.: are they pop or not? In the "I think this might be pop" category, they win Grammys and sell out stadiums and are played on pop radio and have hits. On the other hand, they don't make songs that are fun to listen to. And isn't that what pop is, at its core? Fun songs that make you want to dance and sing along? Because I would not describe any songs by any of the artists I have named that way, except maybe "Royals".
And - I totally get it - I am lumping Lorde in with other female artists around her age and dissing all of them for not making pop music. Which smacks of some kind of backwards attitude that men can make art but women have to make pop. But before I am totally canceled, back in my day we had Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, and before that there was, I don't know, Kate Bush? Those artists were making music that, for the most part, wasn't poppy, but had something else going for it, whether that was unique instrumentation or engaging lyrics or . . . something. And for me, most of Lorde/Lana Del Rey/Billie Eilish/Olivia Rodrigo's songs aren't pop and also don't have anything else going for them. They are just tinkling pianos and boring synths and I'm-14-and-this-is-deep lyrics.
I like Tori Amos and Kate Bush and Bjork and PJ Harvey and Regina Spektor, so I think my I-enjoy-female-artists-even-when-they-aren't-all-that-poppy bona fides are firmly established. Therefore, I think that there may be some validity to this rant . . . possibly mixed with an unhealthy dose of misogyny and I need to really examine some of my assumptions and possibly do better. But, speaking from my current unenlightened state, I don't like this album. Also, fuck Lana Del Rey.
The Smiths
4/5
For men, the most important period for forming musical taste is between the ages of 13 to 16 according to the first article that came up on my Google search. Well, I had The Smiths Best Vol.’s 1 and 2 when I was in high school and wore those discs out I played them so much and so it’s hard for me to be unbiased when it comes to The Smiths. They are such a perfect band for a lonely, introverted, pretentious teenage boy. I’m so glad that The Smiths exist and that I had them to mope to during those prime time moping years.
The Queen is Dead has an embarrassment of riches of great songs on it. “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side", "Bigmouth Strikes Again", "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out", “Cemetry Gates”. It’s insane. Morrissey was such an incredible lyricist (at this time at least) and Johnny Marr has a sound that is so unique and so fun to listen to. The two of them together are sublime. I love this band and I love this album.
Elvis Presley
2/5
I know this is an important record and I know it has to be on this list. But I am going to give it two stars for the same reason that if it were 1500 B.C. I would be amazed by staring at a fire, but in 2024 I'm not. The world has moved past this sound and I personally find it pretty basic and if I hear that generic rockabilly riff that has been used in 8 billion songs one more time I'm going to kill myself. That being said, if I was a teeny-bopper in 1956 I'd be losing my fucking shit over this album.
Also, Elvis is one lucky motherfucker. Race is a social construct but culture is real. And while cultural appropriation - in the sense of just adopting signifiers of other cultures as a fashion accessory - is wrong; cultural exchange is admirable and is how you get basically every genre of music. Different cultures are constantly mixing and blending and stealing from one another's musical traditions and creating new types of music from the weird Frankenstein babies that they make, and its great.
Cut to the 1950's and there is a giant blockage in the mixed streams that lead to new music being created and shared because colonizers and slave traders invented the concept of race in the 1660's to justify their rape and pillaging of other peoples in the name of profit. And almost 300 years later, there was still this artificial separation between musical traditions in America. That left millions of white teenagers with no idea that black Americans had invented a new sound called Rock & Roll.
So who comes along but a talented boy singer from Memphis who had charisma and a unique vocal style and a pretty face and could dance. But more importantly, he could do pretty decent versions of all this great music that those millions of teenagers hadn't heard yet and that allowed him to become the best selling artist of all time based on a decent amount of talent, but no more than thousands of other artists who were nowhere near as successful.
Congratulations Elvis, the Atlantic slave trade allowed you to become famous enough to spend twenty years popping pills, having pillow fights with 14-year old girls, making shitty low-budget movies, posing with Nixon and then dying on a toilet in your huge tacky mansion.
David Bowie
1/5
I think we all know someone who is a completist about a particular artist. They think that if there is a recording of Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Phish or whomever singing in the shower at age 68 that everyone must hear it. It is clear that Robert Dimery is a completist when it comes to David Bowie. Now, there are worse artists to be obsessed with, but I am done with humoring this clear delusion. [Insert Meme of Robert Deniro saying, "Are you saying that David Bowie made some albums not worth listening to?" and the Joker replying, "I am. And I'm tired of pretending that there aren't" here].
There is a scene in the television show "Sports Night" where a character is trying to edit a baseball game down to its highlights and he gets too in the weeds and just can't cut anything. His version has five minutes of a pitcher pitching to a batter with no hits, and a coworker comes in and asks why he hasn't cut that and he replies that you have to see it because it allows you to appreciate the battle. Then the producer pops her head in and says, "Just give me the double off the wall, the homer in the fifth, and the error at third" and that is the end of it.
In the spirit of that scene, the David Bowie albums that make the cut of 1001 albums you should hear before you die are Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Low, He has a lot of great songs, but they are spread out over too many albums filled with too many not great songs to warrant any further inclusion on a list of this kind. And I am tired of pretending otherwise.
Faith No More
2/5
I only knew “Epic” and would have been fine living my whole life that way. Veered between lame late-80’s metal, RHCP imitations and just stupid California bro- music, with cringy lyrics running throughout. Some of the bass and drums were well done, which is not surprising for a metal band. I also appreciated the willingness to experiment with various genres. But all in all, this is a hard pass for me.
Manic Street Preachers
2/5
Good God. I know that in the U.K. they eat mushy green peas and beans on toast for every meal and watch "comedians" being droll and witty while pretending to play a game show for entertainment, but do they really not have any concept of "bland"? This music is bland. It is as bland as the album cover and the pictures of the people who made this shitty album. This is the aural equivalent of mushy green peas.
Joy Division
1/5
Man, fuck this spooky-ass, haunted house, Count Chocula, doom and gloom, oggedy boogedy, creepy crawly, monster mash bullshit and the wolfman it rode in on. Fucking laser beam solos on “Insight”. This sucks. Go smoke cigarettes in a graveyard you techno-goth nerds. 🧛+🤖=💩
Nine Inch Nails
1/5
Oh boy, an album by the esteemed artist who scored "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem"! Look, I suppose if you can't make music that sounds good for normal people to enjoy then you can make loud, discordant noise for stupid, angry people to enjoy, and can make a lot of money that way because there are plenty of stupid angry people in the world who can often manage to scrounge together $15. But this is stupid noise and it sucks.
The Pogues
3/5
The Pogues are fun to listen to and this is a very good album. It’s not something I am super into or spin very often, but I am glad this band and this album exist. And “Fairytale of New York” makes me cry every time I hear it.
Afrika Bambaataa
3/5
When this started, I thought “oh great, a historically important album that is going to feel like homework to listen to” but by “Renegades of Funk” it had won me over. Yes, it is foundational to modern rap and hip hop, but it’s also just fun to listen to. I’ve heard it said that music is supposed to be fun, that’s why creating songs is called “playing music”. This felt like people “playing music” in every sense: creating something new with joy and excitement and flair. I really liked it.
Digital Underground
3/5
Incredibly dated but honestly still catchy and fun. “The Humpty Dance” was played ad nauseam in 1990 with good reason because it rocks. I’m glad to have heard this album. There needs to be more nautical and sci-fi themed rap.
Quick movie pitch: Hannibal Burress did a bit on a podcast lovingly making fun of old school rappers and how simple their rhymes were, and I think that two minute bit could be made into a whole movie.
Open on our heroes, old school rappers on top of the world selling out clubs just by going, “My name is [rapper] and I’m here to say . . .” and telling people to wear condoms and not to smoke crack. Then a Rakim-like rapper comes along and starts doing internal and multisyllabic rhymes and the old school rappers get made irrelevant overnight.
And then other stuff happens. I guess a love interest maybe. Then the old school and new school rappers unite to defeat a common enemy or something. I don’t know. I don’t know how to write screen plays, but you get the idea.
Call it “Rhyme of the Century”, cast Hannibal Buress, Chris Rock and Will Ferrell as LL Cool J. Make a million dollars. You’re welcome.
Joan Baez
2/5
Reading Ms. Baez’s Wikipedia page, she seems like a very good and genuine person. She was obviously a skilled guitarist even at 19 when this album was recorded. “Silver Dagger” “House of the Rusing Sun” and “Wildwood Flower” are pretty good songs.
Now that all the positive stuff is out of the way, this sucks and I hate it. I hate her voice. I don’t like hearing Colonial Williamsburg music. If I hear about the “salt sea” one more time I’m going to scream. Fuck all of this.
Harry Nilsson
4/5
“Nilsson became big when The Beatles named dropped him”. Wake up sheeple. The Beatles had stupid money and power at that time and had the juice to hire a bunch of scientists to mix all four of their essences up together into one person and then age him up to their age so they could hang out and jam with him.
The scientists did it in some weird all-chrome 1960’s lab while smoking cigarettes so it came out a bit off, but they pretty much accomplished it. Harry Nilsson had Paul’s old-timey pop sensibilities, John’s acerbic wit, George’s naive vulnerability and Ringo’s goofiness. He’s a one man The Beatles, but just kind of a fucked up one.
All of Harry Nilsson’s albums are worth listening to, but this really is the one you need to hear before you die. I think “all the songs sound the same” is lazy criticism because it means you aren’t paying enough attention to pick up on nuances, but there honestly are some albums that really feel like that. This album is the exact opposite. Every single song is wildly different from the others but they all sound like Nilsson.
This is a great album by a weird lab-grown Frankenstein monster man who never felt at home in this world because he was brought to life by mad scientists and pop stars arrogantly playing God. Also it has a great beat and you can dance to it.
The Doors
2/5
“MR MOJO RISIN” is an anagram for “Jim Morrison”. Poetic genius Jim
Morrison came up with that in the days before the internet made it possible for narcissistic nerds to view every possible anagram of their names in seconds. This dork had to sit down with a pen and paper to work that shit out.
There is some inoffensive blues rock on this album, but nothing that makes wading through the ocean of pretension that is The Doors worthwhile. Oliver Stone should have to pay reparations to anyone who sat through that awful movie, and anyone who thinks Jim Morrison wouldn’t be a Trump supporting Q-Anon podcaster if he was still alive is kidding themselves.
- RIFLE WAILS, MD
Rufus Wainwright
2/5
58 minutes is too long for an album, especially one this boring. If there were any interesting moments in any of these songs, I would say he should have just included those and made the album a good 34 minutes long rather than an interminable 58 minutes long. But there are no interesting moments. This is just softer, more orchestral Radiohead, and Radiohead sucks. Sorry, I have to stop writing because this album is playing in the background and I have gotten very sleepy. . . zzzzzzz.
Marilyn Manson
1/5
For someone who played Paul on “The Wonder Years” and had a rib removed to be able to suck his own dick, this guy sure seems cranky. You’d think between hanging out with Fred Savage and all the autofellation, he’d be in a better mood and write happier songs.
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
I like Curtis Mayfield a lot but had never listened to this album and I’m really glad I did. His sound is so incredible and fits his voice so well. I really enjoyed this album.
Sarah Vaughan
3/5
Out of 48 studio albums and ten live albums, I’m not sure how this was the Sarah Vaughan album chosen for this book. It’s fine, but I don’t believe this album captures her at her best. Sarah Vaughan was incredibly talented and deserves inclusion, but if it were up to me, I’d have gone with a different album.
The Doors
2/5
You know what, I am going to say something nice about this Doors album. Many of the songs are less than three minutes long. So, as a listener your suffering is pretty minimal. Good job you overrated pretentious mediocre hacks. At least this collection of awful songs you foisted upon the world has several awful songs that are pretty short. Good job.
Richard Hawley
3/5
I had no idea what to expect from this album and was very pleasantly surprised. It is obviously explicitly referencing a variety of influences, but never sounds like a nostalgia act. “Born Under a Bad Sign” reminded me a lot of “Maple Leaves”-era Jens Lekman, which I love. I am really glad to have heard this for the first time.
CHIC
2/5
I guess I had only heard the radio edit of “Good Times” before but I enjoyed the album version more than I do the song I’ve heard in grocery stores and dentist offices a million times. The lyrics are still utterly moronic and the hook is repetitive, but the extended instrumental section almost redeems the song. That is about the only good thing I have to say about this album.
I know the whole “Disco Sucks” movement was grounded in racism and homophobia from middle-aged white construction workers who throw batteries at Santa Claus that thought everyone should just be happy to listen to Bachman Turner Overdrive for the rest of time, but disco sucks. Disco music is music made for people to dance to. Is “The Electric Slide” or “The Cupid Shuffle” on this list because of their importance in giving boring people something to do at weddings? This music does not need to be heard unless you are wearing bell bottoms, being felt up by Andy Warhol and doing the hustle.
Every review of this album talks about how people have sampled the beats to make other songs. Okay. That just means these are bad songs with some good beats in them. Let’s listen to those better songs that reuse these beats instead of these songs that are really only good for disco dancing and the few ballads they threw in for when the coke wore off I guess.
Most of this is pretty lame, and even worse, it’s lame and way too long. If you’re going to be cheesy, at least get it over with quickly. On the plus side, the overall album length isn’t too bad, even if the songs are way too long.
In conclusion, disco sucks. *throws battery at Santa Claus*
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
2/5
Sometimes your lone voice crying out in the wilderness is right while all the rest of the world is wrong. And sometimes you’re David Rubinson. According to Wikipedia, the record label said “these are just demos, we’re not releasing them” and the artist himself said, “those are just demos, don’t put those out” but David Rubinson insisted that they be released and now here I am almost 50 years later having to listen to this garbage.
Music reviewers sometimes hear a really cool (probably untrue, because artists are liars) story about the making of a record and then tell people they have to listen to the record because it gives the reviewer an excuse to tell the cool story. Yes, yes, fire axes and mental institutions and a motorcycle, it’s all very compelling. But just tell me the story and don’t make me listen to this unfinished, rambling dreck.
There is nothing about this album that warrants listening to it. This is out of tune talk-singing over semi-formed quasi-songs for 45 minutes or so. This album is without any merit whatsoever.
Led Zeppelin
3/5
I like Led Zeppelin as a band (not as people, what with their blatant musical thievery and statutory rape, but if that were a deal breaker I’d have to discount 75% of this list) but I think this album has the same problem that so many other double albums do, it is bloated and over filled with just okay music instead of being cut down to just the strongest material.
If they cut three sides worth of music, then instead of filling side four with stuff not good enough for their earlier albums, they should have saved a side’s worth of tracks for their next album. There are a lot of great songs on this album, but also some real duds.
Portishead
5/5
Man I love this album. I bought this on CD in 1994 and have loved it ever since. I am giving this a five star rating knowing full well that I gave The White Album and Pet Sounds four stars and I don't care in the slightest. I am ranking these albums based on my personal feelings about them, not on some imaginary ultimate scale of quality that I am somehow able to tap into because I am so uniquely discerning.
This is one of my favorite albums and I love it. It is hard to even pick a favorite song off this album because there are no tracks that I don't think are great. Five stars.
The Verve
3/5
Hey Robert Dimery, which kinda mediocre, completely unexceptional, generic brit pop album should we include on the list of 1001 albums you must here before you die?
Robert Dimery: YES!!!!
76 minutes of shoegaze-lite monotony. Ugh. These songs are too long and too boring and the lead singer sounds like the guy from Coldplay. This album isn't bad, but it sure as hell isn't good.
Dwight Yoakam
3/5
I prefer Hillbilly Deluxe and think it is a stronger album but I really like late-80’s Dwight Yoakam and am glad he is on this list. He may have harkened back to the sound of an earlier time but he sounded like nothing else that was coming out at that time and I have always enjoyed his early albums.
The Magnetic Fields
5/5
All of your reviews saying that you’re not going to bother to listen to an album this long sound like Philistines whining about about how the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is too big. I got so mad reading your half-literate tossed off dismissals of an album that is foundational to the vast majority of indie music made in the last 25 years and I started to say that anyone who doesn’t bother to listen to this masterpiece and recognize its greatness should just quit this project now. I was big mad for a minute there.
But then an intense feeling of peace came over me. I realized I don’t have to tell you to quit this project. You will do that on your own. You don’t have the passion to finish doing something like this, or to finish anything really. You will continue to live in your sad boring apartment by yourself, or with a series of partners who you don’t care that much for and who don’t care much for you, for the next few decades, playing video games and looking at the internet, and then you will die and the world will move on without much of a fuss. You will have never had the courage to love or be loved, you will never have felt deeply enough to affect the world or anyone in it. You will be utterly forgotten before your body is cold. You are not worthy of being upset with because you don’t really exist.
I wish I could give this album a million stars. Yes, it’s a giant sprawling mess that veers from sublime and too perfect for this world to absurd and maudlin and unbearable. Because that’s love. But you wouldn’t know anything about that.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
3/5
Here are some fun facts. In 1982, David Crosby crashed his car into a fence after having a cocaine seizure. Responding police found his coke and a loaded .45. When they asked Crosby why he felt the need to travel with a loaded weapon, he supposedly replied, "John Lennon." At one point, Stephen Stills started to believe he had been on missions with the US Marines in Vietnam and began wearing fatigues on stage during concerts and signing autographs “Stephen Stills, US Marine Corps”. In 2016, Graham Nash, who was in his 70's at the time, divorced his wife of 38 years to marry a 40-year old. His adult children stopped talking to him, which he said was probably for the best.
These were three talented individuals and this is a pretty decent album and Deja Vu is even better. It is a shame that after making some pretty decent albums these guys spent the next 50 years ruining their lives and the lives of the people around them.
Don't do drugs kids.
Boston
4/5
Idk, man. If you don’t like this album, I think you are going to have to start asking yourself some really hard questions about who you are as a person. Do you like to rock? Do you like to party? Do you like Camaros? Do you like crushing cold beers? Do you like smoking Marlboro Reds? Do you even own a sleeveless T-shirt and jean shorts? Do you like making out with hot chicks? Do you like riding around in a Camaro on a hot summer night dressed in jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, blasting rock music, drinking a cold beer and smoking a Marlboro Red on your way to make out with a hot chick, AKA partying? Because if you do, then you know this album fucking rocks.
Also, those are upside down guitars with blue flames coming off the strings on the cover, not cities attached to UFOs escaping a dying world, or whatever your nerd ass thought they were. The blue flames are coming off the strings because of how hard the band is rocking. Just, FYI.
Blur
3/5
After so much mediocre Britpop, it’s nice to get to listen to arguably the best album of the genre. I like the mix of pop songs with weird experiments. A great album.
Stereo MC's
3/5
*British people hear a type of music* https://giphy.com/gifs/hero0fwar-tim-and-eric-5wWf7GMbT1ZUGTDdTqM The blues, R&B, reggae, sure, but rap?! The audacity of these people. You almost have to admire it.
And the worst thing is that this album is pretty good. A bit insignificant for inclusion on a list like this, but I figure the author wanted to be sure every single British person who was alive in the 90’s was on here somewhere. But when the guy starts rapping it is almost as ridiculous as that album cover.
Is that the top of a set of headphones or some type of cerebro-like mind power amplifying helmet? “Oi bruv, we gotta snake and the earth and mushrooms and a volcano but it’s missing summit, innit?” “How about a lightning bolt?” “Brilliant mate!”
This album wasn’t bad. I knew the single and liked it alright and the rest of the album is pretty similar to it. Kinda silly but not bad. Better than a lot of other stuff on this list but not essential in my opinion. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour.
The Killers
4/5
Good lord, this album will be twenty years old in two months and I still think of it as new music. Time makes fools of us all.
I am not prepared to weigh in on whether this was the last great rock record or just Imagine Dragons 1.0. This albums is ambitious and incredibly well-produced and has hooks for days. It also doesn’t hurt that it came out at a time when I was ready to fall in love with an album like this. Listening to it now, twenty years later, it still sounds great to me.
Dr. Dre
4/5
I think what was so incredible about this album was the world-building. Like the little girl from “Pan’s Labyrinth”, Dre and the other originators of the gangsta rap genre grew up in unpleasant circumstances and chose to escape those circumstances by building a fantasy world where all the men were tough gangstas and all the women were sexual objects. It wasn’t an original world, but borrowed from Blaxploitation films and funk music, just like Tolkien borrowed from various mythological traditions when he created middle earth.
In the 90’s, white suburbanites pretended to be gangstas the way kids from the 50’s pretended to be cowboys or film noir detectives. And those tropes were not that different. The characters lived in worlds of violence and frequent gunplay, they survived based on their toughness and street smarts, and their worlds were populated by over-sexualized stock female characters. Fantasies like these appeal to adolescent boys, for better or for worse, probably for worse.
I don’t think that the inventors of the gangsta rap fantasy world can be criticized any more than the inventors of other fantasies that captured the imagination of young men looking for a pretend world to inhabit. Plus this iteration of that teen-boy-friendly world-building had style and flair and sounded incredible.
Dr. Dre is nothing if not an expert in identifying and incorporating talent. Ice Cube was a better lyricist, Eazy and then Snoop had more charisma, and his later protege (or young white avatar, according to Atlanta) Eminem was a vastly better rapper, but Dre recognized talent and gave talented artists greater exposure. He also used samples from great music and did so in a way that made them sound fresh to young ears. There is no denying that this album sounds amazing, even if most of the credit for that belongs to George Clinton, Isaac Hayes, James Brown and Donny Hathaway.
I can’t defend the lyrical content of this album but I think it is reductive not to appreciate its strengths.
OutKast
3/5
I get that it has "Hey Ya" on it, but a single does not an album make. This is the worst Outkast album other than Idlewild. But the worst Outkast album is better than most other groups' best albums. Speakerboxxx is a better than average straight ahead rap album. The Love Below is a bit of a mess. You can never go wrong listening to Outkast but this album is as close to being wrong as listening to Outkast gets.
I would be remiss not to mention that “Tomb of Boom” has two of my all time favorite rap lyrics: “I prefer my liquor dark and a mean white slut.” I hear ya, Supa Nate. Also, “Y'all driving Subarus, stuck in your cubicles; I'm stuck in the air with weed crumbs under my cuticles.” Oh Luda, I don’t care how many cheesy action and Christmas movies you do, you will always be cool to me.
David Gray
2/5
Bland. Boring. Soulless. John Mayer without the edge. It’s bad enough that I had to have “Babylon” played at me constantly for six months in a row in 2001, but now I had to listen to it twice on this Nilla Wafer of an album. Boo.
Pixies
3/5
Surfer Rosa and Doolittle are great albums. Bossanova is a good album. Come on Pilgrim and Trompe le Monde are okay. I don’t acknowledge the existence of anything else by this band.
I love the Pixies but don’t think this is them at their best. There are still some great songs on here, but nothing that approaches the best songs on their first two albums. And the just-okay songs on Bossanova are way worse than the less good songs on Surfer Rose and Doolittle. Is Bossanova worth listening to? Yes. Is it a top tier Pixies album? For me, no.
P.S. My cat’s favorite thing in the world is to roll around in my closet under shirts where she can bat at them and be partially hidden and rub against things while I pet her. When we are doing that I like to sing “Stormy Weather” to her, but I change the words to “It is time . . . it is time (whoah, oh) . . . it is time, for closet cuddles.”
Miriam Makeba
3/5
Being exposed to albums and artists like this is why I’m doing this project. I had never heard of Miriam Makeba before but I am so glad that I have now. This is a really fun album and “Pata Pata” is an incredible song that I found after listening to this album and reading the artist’s Wikipedia page.
The Smiths
3/5
Good album by a great band. As with all Smiths albums, Morrissey is insanely clever and Marr is angularly jamming away in the manner that only he can. And “Barbarism Begins at Home” is a fantastic showcase for Andy Rourke’s mind-blowing bass skills.
For all of you who can’t hear The Smiths mentioned without harping on the fact that Morrissey is a piece of shit, boy do I have bad news for you about every single pop star and any member of any band ever. Yes, Morrissey is garbage, but so is pretty much everyone else on this list. I’m not sure if it’s a consequence of having too much money, or the psychological effect of fame and adulation, or maybe just human nature, but basically everyone who becomes even moderately successful making music sucks. Morrissey included, but not exclusively, and not to any significant degree beyond the norm.
So please, if you don’t have the requisite intelligence and savior faire to appreciate The Smiths, just admit that you aren’t that great at listening to music and having taste and stop trying to pin it on Morrissey being a monster. They’re all monsters. Always have been.
Arctic Monkeys
3/5
I love it when future soft boys make an album when they’re really young and haven’t embraced their softness yet. Future soft boys make albums that are energetic and fun and loud and fast and lusty because the band is the hardest they’ll ever be because they’re 19 or whatever, but the albums are also melodic and poppy and catchy because the band are soft boys at heart. An album like that really hits the sweet spot for me and this is a perfect example of one.
I don’t know what the fuck the Arctic Monkeys have been doing for the last decade or so, lounge singers on Mars or some shit, but their first two albums were great and very deserving of being on this list. And to all you future soft boys who know you are soft at heart but are super angry and cynical and wild right now and for the next year and a half or so, pick up electric guitars for God’s sake! We need more albums like this.
Finley Quaye
2/5
Oi bruv, dis reggae music is brilliant innit?! Do we know any Jamaican geezers that can make some for us? Finley Quaye? Isn’t he Ghanaian or summit? Ah, toss it. Sign ‘im to a record deal and put the kettle on!
It is so stupid that this album is on this list that it makes it feel like doing this project is a waste of time and energy. I get it that "Sunday Shining" was big in the UK in 1997 but "Banditos" by The Refreshments was big in the US in 1996 and I in no way shape or form expect Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy to be on this list. For God's sake, there are no Toots and the Maytals albums on this list. A real reggae artist who made actual ground-breaking and influential albums that really do deserve to be heard. Instead we get this weird bland reggae imposter. This is insanity.
Ultimately, this album is not bad. It is a completely nothing melding of reggae and trip hop that managed to strike a chord with a small group of people almost thirty years ago. That is fine. I am glad that Mr. Quaye had his moment in the sun. Or in the cold drizzle I suppose, since he was only big in the UK. There is nothing particularly offensive about this album, except for maybe the lyric "cause I'm a hero like Robert De Niro" and the fact that it is a Scottish person of Ghanaian descent doing a Jamaican accent. But why in the name of all that is holy would anyone need to hear this album before they die?! The answer is, they don't. Terrible pick.
Alanis Morissette
3/5
Alanis Morissette was to grunge what The Partridge Family was to hippies. She was a cheesy pop singer glomming onto the youth counterculture of the moment and helping to commercialize it. And it worked. She sold a billion records and played a not insignificant part in taking grunge from Nirvana to Nickelback. You don’t do that without making some decent songs and there are obviously some decent songs on this album. But nostalgia and a few okay songs should not cause this to be seen as anything other than what it was: a pop singer aping the style of a genre that was in vogue at the time but that she had no connection to whatsoever in order to sell records.
Oh, and my friend Gabe thought it was “the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me”. lol.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
Driving through the parts of our country where it’s flat and empty and feels washed out somehow, with nothing but abandoned towns that used to be vibrant communities breaking up the landscape, feels like listening to this record. This is an album about the forgotten places. The places that have been dying a slow death for 100 years and the people who still choose to live in them for whatever reason. This album is about hopelessness and the beauty that can be barely felt on the edges of stark, ugly despair.
Metallica
1/5
I just don’t understand why I hate this so much and so many others love it. Maybe you either have to be a dumb adult or a middle-schooler (and so automatically dumb) so that your affection for it carries over to when you are a non-dumb adult. Or maybe it’s like cilantro and you are either born with the gene that makes this sound good to you and if you don’t have that gene then it tastes like soap. I don’t know what makes me hate this, but boy do I. It’s dumb and loud and angry and just the worst. I don’t care if it’s thrash or prog metal or heavy metal or hard rock cause all that shit sounds the same to me anyway. Hairy assholes making unpleasant sounding music for dumb people to hit each other or further sustain brain damage to. There is nothing redeeming about this to me whatsoever. Just ugly noise that makes my day worse.
The xx
3/5
Another perfectly acceptable xx album that is totally fine and also too bland to get even the slightest bit excited about. I just don’t see what about these milquetoast records is supposed to be so vital you have to hear it before you die. They are in no way shape or form bad, they are pleasant enough, but I can’t hear anything in them that takes them beyond generic inoffensive indie pop.
Madonna
2/5
Like an Oscar going to an actor who was just okay in a role but everyone now agrees was really good in something a few years ago, music critics love nothing better than pretending a late period album by a once great artist is something other than garbage. Sorry critics, I’m not falling for it. Madonna was a force of nature from ‘83 to ‘89 but this sucks.
Sonic Youth
3/5
https://youtu.be/bWQYwqHWiyQ?si=QsbYaZO-z236ViU5
I hate to contradict Juno, but Sonic Youth is pretty cool and this is a pretty good album. I don’t like noise rock but Sonic Youth has always kept their noise poppy enough for my tastes. I wouldn’t want to listen to this all the time but I’d take a kinda noisy rock and roll record over another bland snoozefest most of the time.
The Isley Brothers
3/5
This is alright. At times a little too disco-y, at times a little too quiet stormy, at times a little too 70’s soft rocky, but overall not bad. The band sounds great but I wish they had stronger material to work with. Still not a bad album.
Marty Robbins
3/5
This album is like those Men’s Adventure magazines (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_adventure), but with someone singing you the stupid cliched stories with generic Western music playing in the background instead of you reading them. Despite that, sometimes the dumbest things in the world can catch lightning in a bottle. This album should have been one of a million other bits of late 50’s early 60’s pop culture detritus that was forgotten almost as soon as it got home from the record store. But something about this album really works. Maybe the generic Western music is played perfectly, maybe it’s the singing. Who knows. Life is funny sometimes cowboy. 🤠
Black Sabbath
2/5
This is fine I guess. Kinda Zeppliny, kinda Creamy, but mostly this just strikes me as silly. Adolescent boys playing their instruments loudly and trying to be scary and dark. I like rocking out as much as the next guy, but do you have to be so edgelordy about it? Once your band goes spooky I just feel silly listening to you. It’s not Halloween. Ghosts and wizards and devils and witches aren’t real. They’re just something children are scared of. Or very dumb people.
I think that is ultimately my problem with heavy metal and thrash metal and black metal and all the rest of it. It all just seems like music for dumb people. More so than mindless pop, more so than bro country, more than any other genre I can think of. Just music for pimply, pretentious, angry, emotionally stunted dumb people. Boo! 👻
Lightning Bolt
1/5
Lot of reviews saying, “wow you can kind of hear some elements of songs in here” and I agree. “Crown of Storms” is playing now and it sounds like the band knows what songs are and are kind of making a song-esque thing out of static and noise. But what I’m wondering is, why are we grading this band on a curve? Is this band some kind of human interest story about two people with a mental disability that prevents them from understanding what sounds good? Is it a triumph of the human spirit that these two goofy bastards (https://youtu.be/OkzaOwAmDmA?si=5i18tm3SvrobZWkF) made ten “songs” that almost sound like music? Is GMA going to do a feel good story about how the members of this band bravely overcame adversity to make something so close to real music? Because if not, I’m wondering why - if these guys know what music is - why they don’t just make that and not this?
Flamin' Groovies
2/5
Nothing wrong with doing old music as long as you bring something new to the table which this album doesn’t do. This is just “here is a cool blues riff” and “here is a neat rockabilly song” for thirty minutes. The title track gets close to something new, but other than that, it’s basically a cover record. I’m glad that you discovered a bunch of cool old songs that you like, but if that’s all you have to say then just make a mix tape.
Merle Haggard
2/5
Five wives, six children, 66 studio albums, born in a boxcar, multiple escapes from prison, a plethora of convictions for crimes he both did and didn’t commit that were ultimately pardoned by Ronald Reagan, and lived to be 79 years old. Merle Haggard’s life sounds too crazy to be true.
Merle Haggard recorded dozens of amazing songs during his career but sitting down for an entire album of his is rarely something I want to do. This one is no exception. I can’t deny his talent or that he touches greatness at times, but he was a working musician who was putting out songs like a factory puts out widgets. Creating art wasn’t really his goal and so it’s no surprise that he only did so rarely.
His albums are the sound of a talented craftsman making solid music, and so worth hearing, but out of his decades-long music career you can listen to the times he really made something that surpassed that in a couple of hours.
Judas Priest
1/5
You can really hear the super-lame hair metal like Poison or Motley Crue lurking just around the corner from this super-lame whatever-the-fuck-kind-of-shitty-metal-this-is.
I know some idiots think they are discerning music fans who just hate, for example, country music, but really they are just prejudiced and haven’t heard good country music and hopefully a list like this could broaden their horizons and educate them a bit. But the thing about metal is that there is no good metal. It is all shit.
There are no metal albums that anyone needs to hear because the genre as a whole is completely without value unless you are a 15 year old boy or a moron. I am neither of those, so I have no interest in ever hearing any metal albums of whatever type. They are all absolute garbage.
The Clash
4/5
Couldn’t have this list without this album on it, no question. This is one of those albums that has never been important to me - despite knowing a lot of the songs, I don’t recall ever sitting down and listening to the whole thing - but that I get why it is an important album.
This is the best kind of punk rock album. One that takes a bunch of genres that don’t suck and mixes them in with the punk rock so the music isn’t terrible punk rock anymore. I love the horns and the reggae influence. This album is so good that it isn’t really a punk rock album any more. And that’s the highest praise one can give to punk rock.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
3/5
Albums like this are why I’m doing this project. I had never heard, or heard of, this album before doing this, but I am really glad I’ve now been exposed to it. You can obviously hear Eno’s influence on it, but I also hear some Tubular Bells-type sections, which is always nice. This is just avant garde enough to make you feel like you are cool but poppy enough to be listenable. Good stuff.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
I’ve been listening to this album for years and had no idea that it is called “Time Out” because the songs are all in odd time signatures. I’m not even totally sure I know what a time signature is. Like the beat of the song? All I know is that this album sounds great and blows me away no matter how many times I I’ve heard it. Easy, no brainer five star album.
Madness
2/5
Hey Madness, you are a ska band. People like your ska music. Why are you making whatever this is? "Our House" is a great song, but it feels like they just put it on the album to trick people into listening to all this other garbage. This is not a good album.
Johnny Cash
2/5
That image from this concert of Cash flipping off the camera (https://www.nme.com/news/music/johnny-cash-19-1292708) is so appropriate for who he was. Flipping off a photographer who you are paying to take pictures of your concert because you're pretending you are doing it to an authority figure perfectly sums up Johnny Cash.
Everything about him was a put-on, which could likely be said about all artists, but the crudeness of the act is particularly galling about Cash. It’s like pretentious music nerds are given a choice of two artists who are deep-voiced and vastly over-hyped to stan and they have to choose between Johnny Cash or Tom Waits.
I’m not saying he wasn’t good. I’m definitely not saying he didn’t surround himself with talented artists, especially The Carter Family. But the distance between the quality of his output and the esteem in which he’s held is absurd.
This album is fine. I can’t think of another live album where the setting of the performance is such an integral part of the album itself other than his other live prison albums. There are some good songs on here, this album is important and everyone should hear it. But I just find Johnny Cash annoying.
Nas
2/5
This sounds really dated. The beats are original at times but the lyrics are the exact same shit as every other rap song from this time period. How do you have an entire of genre of music that just says the exact same thing over and over again? “I deal drugs and have lots of sex and am rich and commit frequent acts of violence” said in slightly different ways over ten million different albums. Pass.
Rod Stewart
4/5
Rod Stewart gets a bad rap because of going disco and then going Sinatra, but he was putting out some solid records around this time, both as a solo artist and with The Faces, and this was his masterpiece. There is hardly a bad song on the record and “Maggie May” deserves its place as one of the greatest classic rock songs of all time.
I love how raucous and loose the playing sounds, especially on “That’s All Right.” This album feels like a bar band having a good time. And Rod Stewart as a vocalist is hard to beat. Thank God there was a time when he put his talents to good use by singing decent material.
Roni Size
1/5
The version of this album that comes up on Amazon Music is the 20th Anniversary Edition and it’s 53 songs and five hours and 14 minutes long. And so I thought to myself, “wow it must have taken them forever to make that much music” but then on listening to it, I realized they could have knocked this out in an afternoon.
“Uncha uncha uncha uncha”. Track one done. “Bloop bloop uncha uncha bloop bloop”. There’s track two. Have we got someone who has no understanding of what rapping is supposed to sound like to “rap”? Great, add that to track two and the sound of a dial-up internet connection and there’s track three. Rinse and repeat until you’ve got a super long and super shitty album.
I’m embarrassed this album (1) made this list, (2) won a mercury prize, (3) is remembered by anyone almost thirty years later, (3) is something to which I have now listened, (4) exists. There is no more value to this collection of drum machine beats and electronic noises than there is to ones generated at random.
The worst part was thinking, “man, that has got to be the 50th time they repeated that bit” and then seeing that I’m only three something minutes into a six something-minute-long song. And I can look and see how long the song has been playing and how long it has left because I’m listening to this shit in my car on my way to work, and not in a warehouse at 3am in late-90’s London while high on ecstasy, which I imagine is the only time this music would sound good.
The fact that whether music sounds good to you is so dependent on context - including place and time and activity you’re engaging in and substances you’ve consumed - really makes me feel like doing this project of listening to the albums on this list is pointless. Or maybe it’s just that listening to this album makes me feel life itself is pointless.
The Sabres Of Paradise
3/5
If you are reading the one-star reviews that say that this album is just the sound of pots and pans being banged together and has no actual songs on it, please note that those reviews should come with a disclaimer reading, "I listened to the first 30 seconds of the first song and said 'hey this isn't like everything else I listen to! It hurts my wittle ears" and turned it off. Please disregard my opinion."
The first couple of songs are a little discordant but then it really picks up. I liked this album despite it not being my normal cup of tea. "Theme" sounds like a blaxploitation film soundtrack done by the Chemical Brothers.
I should not be surprised that I enjoyed this since one of the guys from Portishead contributed to it and I love that group. This is a pretty solid album for me, although it admittedly has its flaws.
Muddy Waters
4/5
I completely understand when people say, "I am not into the blues". In some ways, listening to the blues is like reading the alphabet. You like novels and poems and everything else made using letters, but you don't want to just sit and look at the alphabet. But it goes without saying that you don't get novels and poems, etc. without the alphabet. But you are not just going to stare at your ABC's and think, "man, so great". Couple that with every asshole in the world hearing great blues albums like this and thinking they can do this and going out and making the absolute shittiest sound ever heard by human ears (https://youtu.be/BiSTW3NSp6o?si=fRkOCXxu0G1vlSC1), and you have a recipe for turning people off the genre completely.
But I think albums like this are the antidote to the belief that you aren't into the blues. This sounds so much more alive than most other music of any genre, not just blues albums. "Hard Again" crackles with electricity that positively jumps out and grabs you. This album makes you feel like you are in a Chicago club listening to a live performance by a band at the absolute top of its game.
It’s really hard to sound fresh and original when 75% of popular music has been biting your shit for 20 years, but Muddy Waters managed to do it on this album.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
I don’t understand people who (1) don’t like Elvis Costello; and, to a lesser extent, (2) think this is Elvis Costello’s best album. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great album. But I think “My Aim is True” is significantly better. Still, Elvis Costello was unstoppable during this Aim/Model/Armed period, which is up there with the best three albums runs in popular music. This is an amazing album and well-deserving of being on this list.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
It’s funny how great albums made by artists at their peaks tend to have these quotidian origin stories. The Wailers were broke and stuck in the UK, so they took a $6,000 advance to get home and gave Island one of the greatest reggae albums of all time in return.
These artists, either together or on their own, would go on to make better albums, but this was an incredible record to introduce millions of people to this genre. Everything that makes reggae music great is present here.
Stan Getz
4/5
I’ve got a theory. Northerners make fast, loud, oftentimes angry music because they are cold and need something to jump around to and get their temperature up. Southerners make quiet, soft, laid back music because they are fucking hot and just want to lounge in the shade and sip a cold drink and chill.
Northerners: metal, rock & roll, the more aggressive strains of hip hop, etc. Southerners: country, reggae, bossa nova, etc. It’s not a perfect theory, but I think I’m on to something, and this album is a solid piece of evidence. This music is as chilled out as music gets.
It is easy to hold the thousands of Muzak versions of “The Girl From Ipanema” against this record, but if you can try to hear this with fresh ears then it is really cool and really subtle and beautiful.
John Lennon
3/5
Grown up nerds hate John Lennon because they loved him when they were pretentious little nerdlets and now they’re embarrassed and taking their anger at themselves over how cringy they were out on him. So any mention of John Lennon on the internet is accompanied by a never-ending stream of “wife-beater”, “remember when Gal Gadot at the beginning of Covid…”, and “a rich person saying ‘imagine no possessions’…” ad infinitum.
I will spare everyone yet another repetition of those old saws because I think they say nothing relevant about the quality of this album. But please don’t doubt that I am sufficiently mortified that I wore round gold-colored wire-framed glasses when I was 16. Also, I think this story from Yoko is better John Lennon rage-bait than all of those other ones anyway:
[Begin quote] In 1972 ,the night McGovern lost the election, John and I were invited to a party at Jerry Rubin's apartment in the Village. It was a gathering of New York liberal intellectuals, some artists, musicians and many journalists. John became totally drunk and pulled a woman into the next room and started to make love. Nobody could leave the party because all the coats were in that room. We were all sitting there trying to ignore what was happening. The wall was paper thin and you could hear the noise, which was incredibly loud. A considerate musician put a Dylan record on to offset the sound. But that did not drown out the sound coming from "the room." In the middle of all this, a New York celeb woman chose to make conversation with me. "I don't know how you feel about him... but we love him. He and his friends... what they did... but especially John... we all respect him tremendously. He's a great man... he is a wonderful man..." [end quote].
LOL. What an asshole. Anyway, this album is just okay. You could likely have not heard it before you died and been fine. “Oh Yoko!” is pretty good and makes for a great needle drop in “Rushmore”.
In conclusion, this album is fine, John Lennon is no more a monster than every other rock star, and you need to forgive yourself for being a pretentious nerd when you were a kid.
Bob Dylan
4/5
There are lots of different Bob Dylans, and I think this album is the best album by this version of Bob Dylan. But this Bob Dylan is not my favorite Bob Dylan and this album is not my favorite of his albums. It has some amazing songs on it and I like how loose and freewheeling the Nashville session musicians sound but if I’m going to put on a Dylan album it probably isn’t going to be this one. Still unquestionably a great record though.
The Band
4/5
“The Basement Tapes” is one of my favorite albums of all time. It is my favorite Dylan album by far. So, I should love this album. And I do like it. But I feel like Robert Christgau, who said he admired this album from a distance.
I’ve listened to enough shitty psychedelic drivel through this project that I can imagine what a breath of fresh air this was when it came out in ‘68. But I think that outside of that context, this album is just decent folksy Americana roots rock. It gets extra points for having essentially invented folksy Americana roots rock, but you know, what have you done for me lately?
Michael Jackson
4/5
I think one of the worst things about the world is that abuse perpetuates itself. Michael Jackson was abused as a child and then he grew up to abuse children. Sometimes I think that the best thing we as humans can hope to do is to be a dam in the giant river of shit running downhill and refuse to visit the cruelty we experienced onto other people when we have the power to do so. There are probably better things to aspire to than "I won't abuse vulnerable people the way I was abused when I was vulnerable" but if you manage to do that then you are pretty okay in my book. According to an overwhelming body of evidence, Michael Jackson did not manage to do that. However, I am rating this album as a work of art and not Michael Jackson as a person.
The problem with trying to rate this album as a work of art is that it’s the best-selling album of all time. I’ve heard “Beat It” and "Billie Jean" and
"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and "Human Nature" and "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" and "Thriller" somewhere approaching an infinite number of times and so it’s impossible to hear them with fresh ears. Not only that, but every song I’ve heard since this album came out was recorded by someone who has heard most of these songs approaching an infinite number of times. So every song I’ve heard that has come out in the last 42 years has been influenced to some degree by these songs. How do you rank an album like that?
In terms of sales, influence, probably innovativeness at the time it was released, “Thriller” unquestionably deserves full marks. But there is never a time when I am flipping through my record collection and see “Thriller” and think, “oh cool, I’ll put this on.” So because my rankings are based on my subjective enjoyment of an album and not some attempted universal scale of quality, I will give this four stars. To the extent I can hear this album, I think that I like it. But I can’t really hear it, so it is just a guess.
This is neither here nor there but I think the fact that this broken, demented pedophile is either the greatest selling artist of all time, or one of the top two or three (along with Elvis and Drake, both of whom could also be described with those same words), speaks to how sad and weird humanity is. God help us.
Anita Baker
2/5
This isn’t music for music’s sake. This is just 33 minutes and 37 seconds of vaguely pleasant background noise for old people to fuck to. I feel like Robert Dimery just walked up to me and handed me a condom and lube and a scented candle and I said, “No thank you Robert Dimery. I do not need these items at this time as I am not about to engage in the physical act of love, rather, I am driving to Lowes to buy a shower arm” and Robert Dimery said, “That’s okay. Just hold this condom and lube and scented candle and - you know - appreciate their beauty as objects” and I said, “No, that’s weird. I don’t want to do that”, but here I am anyway, sitting in the Lowes parking lot listening to an aural geriatric erotic aid.
The Saints
3/5
This reminded me more of early rock & roll than punk rock. As always, the highest compliment you can pay to punk rock music is that it sounds like something else. This punk rock sounds like something else, so it’s not too bad.
Kendrick Lamar
2/5
This is twice now that I have given this album a shot. The first time was in 2015 when everyone was saying how great it was. I couldn’t do it then and didn’t do any better this time. I love old school funk and typically am up for an artist trying to be experimental, so it seems like this would be right up my alley, but it just doesn’t work for me.
While the lyrics, thankfully, seem to try to say more than hip hop’s usual themes of “I have money and deal drugs and am good at sex and prone to acts of violence”, they didn’t do so in a nuanced or intelligent way. The only thing worse than stupid people are stupid people who think they’re smart. “Ooh the homeless person was really God 😱 So deep!”
Don’t get me wrong, every genre’s lyrics are stupid on the whole but have the rare exception with intelligent lyrics. But grading hip hop on a curve and acting like a rapper is a “street poet” because his lyrics aren’t quite as dumb as “she blow my dick like a cello” strikes me as racist pandering.
In addition to the lyrical content being r/I’m14andthisisdeep-worthy, Lamar’s whiny voice is insufferable. The song where he calls everything “boo boo” twenty times is like nails on a chalkboard to me. A combination of a grating voice and too much experimentation and dissonance just doesn’t work for me. See Radiohead.
I appreciate the fact that this album tries to be different, but it falls flat for me.
Elliott Smith
3/5
Man, what a tragedy. Elliot Smith could have killed himself BEFORE he made all this shitty music.
Paul Weller
2/5
Dear Mr. Dimery,
I wanted to tell you about something with which you appear unfamiliar: https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/countries_of_the_world.htm. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “hey wait, I know one of those!” And I wholeheartedly agree and concede that you are clearly very aware of the United Kingdom and its constituent … states? provinces? kingdoms? Also a few of its colonies that have regrettably and temporarily distanced themselves from their rightful owner. I do not dispute that. But what I wanted to point out is that there are at least 175 other names on that list with which you appear to be wholly ignorant. Maybe, instead of putting EVERY SINGLE 2.2-star and above album that was released between 1980 and 2010 from one of those countries on your list, you could put a 5-star album from each of those other countries? Just a thought.
This book really needs to be done by a committee of individuals of different ages, races, sexes and nationalities. People are too affected by music they were exposed to from ages 16 to 26 to be unbiased when choosing albums everyone should hear. Or at least this dumbass was. What the fuck would make someone consider this an album everyone needs to hear before they die? I mean, it’s fine. If it were playing quietly in a Starbucks, it would be completely apropos. But to think people NEED to hear it? Good God. I don’t even know how to relate to a mind that would think that way. It’s too alien a concept for me to be able to even imagine holding.
Anyway, Robert Dimery, you are a real honest to God dyed in the wool dumbfuck and this album is perfectly fine. It’s like if Jack Johnson came out 15 years earlier and was slightly less poppy and more British. Nothing bad about this album at all. Completely inoffensive. And I could have lived a thousand years without hearing it and been perfectly fine.
Screaming Trees
2/5
Maybe you are walking around a ghost town that used to be your city because everyone moved away because your band sucks so bad. Like, the entire population of a major metropolitan area thought, “Ehhh, I’ve got a good job here, and friends, and I bought my house right at the beginning of the pandemic, so I’ve got a great interest rate that I will never be able to get again until there is some kind of major economic downturn, and my kids are right in the middle of the school year and so it would be really hard on them to move right now, but fuck it, I can’t live in the same city as Screaming Trees with their rustic hard rock, equally informed by heavy metal and folk. I mean, I don’t go to their concerts or interact with them or their music in any way, but just knowing that I live in the same city as they do is intolerable to me on a visceral level so I’m going to have to move away from here.” And now during all these dying days you walk through the ghost town that used to be your city. I mean, maybe you enjoy walking, and it is good for you, but you could use other means of transportation. I assume that all the city busses were abandoned, heavy machinery, ATV’s and dirt bikes and what not. You could just hop on any of them and drive around the ghost town that used to be your city. I bet that would be fun. Plus there’s no traffic! Because it’s a ghost town. Because everyone moved away. Because of how bad you suck.
Bob Dylan
3/5
There are too many Bob Dylan albums on this list, but Bob Dylan - without question - belongs on this list. Dylan had something about him that was pretty incredible that shines through even though this style of music is not my cup of tea. If you don’t want to engage with his music enough to hear the thing that so many people have found compelling for so many decades because he doesn’t make your style of music, that’s fine, but it’s also pretty lazy. Because it’s there if you are willing to listen for it.
I am not crazy about folk-era Dylan but I can still hear that thing he had. I don’t really ever put this album on, but I think it’s worth hearing.
Pink Floyd
4/5
I was firmly anti-prog rock for most of my life. I remember being bothered by Pavement mentioning Geddy Lee in “Stereo” and wondering why musicians all seemed to like that stupid hair metal band. But after reading “Ready Player One” I decided to give Rush a chance and they were my gateway drug into all things prog. And now I am a huge fan of the genre. Yes, ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson. I have fully embraced prog and am happier for having done so. My wife and daughters having to be around me when I listen to it, not so much.
Is Pink Floyd the best prog rock band of all time? Can they even be properly labeled as prog? I think so, but if someone differed I would respect that opinion. But I think “Wish You Were Here” and “Dark Side of the Moon” were two of the greatest prog rock albums ever made. If you are in the mood for this type of music, this would be one of your go-to albums to put on.
If a pop or rock song goes on over four minutes, I start to get antsy, but a 13 minute prog song never wears out its welcome. I kind of wish that they hadn’t split up “Shine On” and just left it as one song. I love it when a whole side of an album is just one song. But that is just a quibble. This album is proggy enough for the weirdos but poppy enough for the normies. It is a masterpiece.
Bob Dylan
3/5
I was assigned "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" for my 165th album. This is my 167th album. "Blonde on Blonde" was my 156th. "Blood on the Tracks" was my 71st. "Time Out of Mind" was my 10th. Of those albums, I would cut "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" and "Time Out of Mind" from this list.
This list has too many Bob Dylan albums. That being said, this is a good album and it belongs on this list. Dylan sounds like he is figuring things out; like who he wants to be and what kind of music he wants to make. He sounds like he was really coming into his own on this record. This is definitely worth hearing before you die.
Radiohead
1/5
*Enter a slender dark-haired man with a neat goatee, wearing a suit and carrying a box with a large red button on the top*
Him: "Good day, sir. I hear you consider yourself a bit of a 'music nerd'. Well, I have a proposition for you. If you hit this button, you will have to pay a dire price. Every music nerd's favorite band, Radiohead, will be erased from the very fabric of existence. Radiohead's music, with its diverse influences from electronic music, ambient music, krautrock, jazz and 20th-century classical music, will be gone! You will never again hear their songs featuring modular synthesisers, the ondes Martenot, brass and strings, processed guitar sounds, samples and loops, and impersonal and abstract lyrics sung by Thom Yorke. All music they ever created will be gone from the world and from everyone's memories. It will be as if Radiohead never existed, forever! Ha, ha ha. However, if you can live with this terrible cost, you will receive-"
Me: *hits button*
Him: ". . . dude, what the hell? You didn't even wait to hear what you would get?! Jesus, 'OK Computer' is gone now! That is like a top ten album for me. Why did you do that!? You were supposed to be eaten up by the terrible cost you would have to pay to receive my boon. That is messed up. A lot of very sad people really loved that band."
Me: ". . ."
Him: "I mean, I get being willing to pay the price, but you didn't even weigh it against the benefit. I was going to offer you something incredible, but think about what you just did. 'Kid A' is gone. Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and the Times ranked it the greatest album of the 2000s, and in 2020 Rolling Stone ranked it number 20 on its updated list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 'Amneisiac', 'Hail to the Thief', 'In Rainbows', 'The King of Limbs', 'A Moon Shaped Pool', all gone! This is so-"
Me: *hits button again*
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
2/5
So it’s two hits, a bunch of electronic dance music and then some weird synth pop covers that make no sense? It seems as if Frankie Goes to Hollywood was more of a fad to sell T-shirts than an actual band. “Two Tribes” is pretty decent but this album is a mess.
Donovan
1/5
Hippy dippy acoustic folk music can puff my magic dragon.
Jethro Tull
4/5
My top ten favorite flautists:
1. Ron Burgundy https://youtu.be/_c_ufaxeSTs?si=vlPesSHEmdGrBo3N
2. This flutin ass mother fucker from Jethro Tull
3.-10. I couldn’t name another flautist if my life depended on it and am honestly proud I even knew the term “flautist”.
You can’t tell me that when that tootelly tootin starts going “tootelly toot toot toodely toot” that you aren’t feeling it! If you’re not down with “Aqualung” and “Thick as a Brick” you either take yourself too seriously, do not rock to an appropriate degree, or have some other major character flaw.
Medieval folk prog featuring prominent fluting should in no way shape or form work but dammit to hell does it totally and completely work. This album rocks.
Lynyrd Skynyrd
4/5
I just read this on the band’s Wikipedia page:
[Begin Quote] In return for avoiding prison following his guilty plea to DUI manslaughter, Collins would be wheeled out onstage each night to explain to the audience why he could no longer perform [End Quote]
So to avoid going to prison for manslaughter for killing his girlfriend in a drunk driving accident, his paralyzed-from-the-neck-down ass had to be wheeled out on stage and tell 20,000 drunk rednecks not to drink and drive while they shouted “woo!” and “Free Bird!” and their sister/girlfriends sitting on their shoulders flashed their tits?! Goddam I love the South!
Look, I don’t know about whether this band was racist or whether Neil Young put down his maple syrup-infused cocaine long enough to decide if he wanted to be friends with them or not. I only know when something rocks, and this album rocks.
I had the majority of these songs played at me on repeat by Rock 101 WROQ - where it’s always a Southern county fairgrounds in 1978, forever! - for most of my teenage years, and I can still appreciate that this music is solid and fun and brings together a bunch of influences in a compelling and fresh way.
I’m sure that Skynyrd were deeply flawed in any number of different ways - just like every other rock band - but in the early to mid-70’s, they had it. This album is all the proof you could ever need of that.
Kraftwerk
2/5
Pro: only six songs
Con: with one exception, all the songs are over 5 minutes long
Pro: being robots is cool (https://youtu.be/2IPAOxrH7Ro?si=Ac80pCdLK4rwtkoI)
Con: these aren't really robots but just weird German dudes making boring bleep boop music in the 70's
Congrats on being historically important or whatever, but this isn't music for people to listen to. At least, not this person.
Sonic Youth
3/5
I hate arty discordant music so much. It’s pretty much all I do. I can barely function in life because of how much time I spend hating Radiohead. It’s a real problem. But for some reason, Sonic Youth works for me. It’s probably because I got into them at the right age to be willing to look past the arty-ness and the discordance and my willingness to give them a chance at that age has allowed me to enjoy them even now when I’m a cranky old man who hates everything. Maybe the stupidity of youth isn’t so stupid after all.
All that being said, this album goes completely off the rails in the second half.
Ute Lemper
1/5
Boy oh boy did I totally hate this.
Joan Armatrading
3/5
I really enjoyed her singing voice and found it very expressive. The songs were poppy without being cheesy and folky without being boring ass folk bullshit. I could hear how influential this album obviously was on 80’s pop music and new wave. This was good and I’m glad to have heard it.
MGMT
3/5
It seems like MGMT wanted to be droning electro artists but then decided to turn their 45-minute instrumental versions of the Ghostbusters theme song into 3-minute pop songs so they could get famous. And they did so very effectively. The three hits are solidly hits. The filler is pretty bland but not offensively so.
This is very 2007 “indie” pop but there are worse things.
PJ Harvey
3/5
I like PJ Harvey okay. I had heard a few of these songs but never listened to the whole album. I had the three albums she put out after this one on CD and was always lukewarm about them. PJ Harvey rocks a little too hard for my soft little heart. But only slightly. She’s close to my Goldilocks zone; but just a bit too harsh and discordant to fall into it. I’m glad she’s on this list though. She’s certainly worth hearing.
The Go-Go's
3/5
I had only heard the two hits and didn’t know much about this band at all but I think this album is pretty solid. I didn't know they were punk rockers who slowed their songs down to record them or that one of them played Joan of Arc in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
I think they are a little derivative of Blondie but a ton of things obviously copied them so it’s hard to fault them for that. Good album.
Saint Etienne
2/5
A bland boring collection of background music. “Oh what a perfect album to halfway pay attention to while you do other things” is about the best you can say for this.
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
The samples, the beats, the lyrics, the mountains of charisma coming from each group member; everything about this album kills. Wu-Tang Clan truly is nothing to fuck with.
AC/DC
3/5
Spinal Tap quality lyrics; basic as hell guitar riffs and song structure; glorifying alcohol abuse after your last lead singer just drank himself to death; being Australian. Nothing about this should work, but it unquestionably does.
I hate hair metal and glam rock and all the shit that either owes its whole existence to this record or all the shit that came before it that AC/DC perfected on Back in Black, but this album cannot be denied. It has the depth of a Petri dish, but what it does it does exactly right. If you don’t like Back in Black, then you don’t like to rock.
Quicksilver Messenger Service
1/5
Whenever anyone says about an album, “this is so timeless, it could have been released today” I always think that’s bullshit. Music almost always sounds of its time. But I think I’ve found the exception. Jam bands have not advanced one iota in 55 years. The very few times I have heard Phish or Goose or moe or Umphreys McGee by accident or morbid curiosity, they have sounded exactly like this. And I don’t mean, quite similar to this. I mean, I think jam bands might get on stage and pretend to play instruments but are actually just playing records from other jam bands over the sound system and their tapioca-brained fans don’t realize it.
I’ve heard the theory that lawyers and accountants and middle managers aren’t really necessary to an economy and are really just make-work to ensure that mediocre children of rich people have jobs. I’m starting to think that jam bands are that for 20 to 50-year old bandnerd potheads. Nobody needs these bands to make new records because it’s just the exact same shit that every other jam band has made for the last 60 years, but who’s going to let an unemployed smelly nerd who won’t stop talking about polyrhythms crash on their couch for a decade? Nobody. So those dudes have got to have some kind of job and so we keep needing jam bands to scoop up 6 of them and put them on a bus to travel around taking drugs and sleeping with a parade of hairy foul-smelling whippet-addicted women and playing the exact same songs that every other jam band has played for the past fifty years.
This garbage may have sounded good in the Fillmore East to people tripping on acid, but I’m in my kitchen eating Frosted Mini-Wheats, so it sucks.
Nitin Sawhney
2/5
How to describe the cultural and musical impact that Nitin Sawhney’s “Beyond Skin” has had in the 25 years since it was released? *checks notes* None. Oh, okay. None.
In 2001-02 I was home from school studying for exams on my parents’ computer, which had a program like Windows media player or something similar that had around five sample songs that came with the program. I didn’t have any CDs or other music readily accessible and I think I was probably depressed, so I didn’t go to the effort of finding any other way to listen to music and just listened to the five sample songs that came with that program over and over, 5-6 hours a day for around two weeks straight. They were fine songs. Generic, bland trip-hoppy and forgettable. Good to study to because they had almost nothing about them that stood out. This album sounds exactly like those Windows media player (or similar program) sample songs 90% of the time. The other 10% was Indian music.
Eurythmics
3/5
Warning, hot take incoming, but lord have mercy “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” - the song - is straight fire. A song that has been played at you eight billion times is hard to really appreciate, but that song still hits even after all that repetition.
The rest of the album has some good moments but mostly fades into the background next to the title track. I think this is an album worth hearing though. But also, I like to imagine this scene playing out during the recording of basically every 80’s synth pop album:
Producer: “Hey [every 80’s synth pop artist], Terry is here”
Every 80’s synth pop artist: “Oh, cool, I love Terry”
Producer: “. . . and he brought his horn”
Every 80’s synth pop artist: “Oh no”
Producer: “Yeah, he keeps listening to the demos and mentioning that a horn would go great during a bunch of parts”
Every 80’s synth pop artist: “He can’t think . . .”
Producer: “He says he’s got to get some work soon or he’ll lose his union healthcare and he needs to have that surgery . . .”
Every 80’s synth pop artist: “Look, I like Terry, but there is just no place for horns on this record. This is straight synth pop. We just can’t have a random horn section on these songs. It would sound totally out of place and cheesy. Can we just let Terry hit a key on a synth or play a tambourine on a song and give him a credit?”
Producer: “He’s wearing sunglasses and keeps slicking back his hair and smiling and asking if anyone is ‘feeling horn-y’ while fingering the little buttons on his trumpet, but it looks like he is crying a little too”
Every 80’s synth pop artist: “. . . okay, geez. Find a song to have him play on”
Terry, popping his head around the corner, hair super-slicked back with a mixture of gel and tears: “BWHAAAAAHH BABABAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3/5
Albums that absolutely should be on this list: “Damn the Torpedos”; “Full Moon Fever”; “Wildflowers”. Albums that should not be on this list: this one. Not only is this album way worse than most of Tom Petty’s catalog, but the album cover alone should disqualify it.
“American Girl” is one of the greatest rock songs of all time and “Breakdown” is a great song as well, but those two songs are all this album has going for it. Tom Petty is such an amazing artist with so many great albums that the decision for this to be his only album included on this list is absurd.
Funkadelic
3/5
Five Sly-and-the-Family-Stone-style pop funk songs bookended by a ten minute guitar solo and a ten minute psychedelic freak out. Now, the five pop funk songs are solid and the guitar solo had its moments, but I think this album may be a bit overrated.
I have always liked Parliament Funkadelic, but I have never loved them. This album does nothing to change that opinion.
Christina Aguilera
1/5
There’s art, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, made by someone with incredible technical skill, but also inspired by a vision they are compelled to bring into reality with little thought to its commercial appeal. And then there’s craft, like a dude putting up wallpaper. The dude putting up wallpaper doesn’t care what’s on the wallpaper. Could be rocket ships, could be pineapples, could be anything. He doesn’t care. He just has to put it up so he can get paid.
And everything is somewhere along that spectrum. The skilled artist that makes something utterly uncommercial because it is an uncompromising reflection of her artistic vision and only 5 people enjoy it because it’s so weird. The artist who is inspired but lacks the skills to bring his ideas to life and so few are willing to engage with his ham-handed works no matter how great his ideas are. The craftsperson who is just working for a paycheck but who is so skilled at their craft that what they make is worth appreciating as a piece of art even though it was intended to be a purely commercial object. And the stoned teenager heating a frozen patty and putting it between two buns to make 1,000 McDonald’s hamburgers in an afternoon without any skill or inspiration.
This album, like 90% of pop music, is a McDonald’s hamburger. The only inspiration for this album was “I want to make more money and become more famous”. That is enough inspiration to achieve greatness in the hands of someone with exceptional skill or talent, but this is a Christina Aguilera album. This was disposable pop that was meant to sell a bunch of records and then be utterly forgotten for all time. To listen to this record 22 years later as if it were something other than that is a perversion of intent and taste and good sense. This album has no place on this list and I’m embarrassed for everyone involved to be listening to it.
Randy Newman
2/5
I don’t understand Randy Newman. Is it actually music or is it a parody of music? A satire of music? It’s not Weird Al. It’s not Mark Russell. But it’s also not, not those things. Is Randy Newman a comedian? Is he a singer? What am I supposed to do with these “songs”? Am I supposed to go, “oh, what a clever turn of phrase” and chortle. Is listening to this “music” supposed to make me feel smart? Are these like MadTV sketches set to music? Is this a music review or a clever parody of a music review? Is this cynical social commentary on the absurdity of music reviews? Maybe it’s a loving homage to music reviews that satirizes their cliches but also exemplifies what they do best? Do you feel smart reading this? Call me Pixar, I hope I’ve passed the audition.
Van Halen
2/5
I loved when Ritchie from “The Bear” misquoted David Lee Roth, saying: “I’m not like this cause I’m in Van Halen, I’m in Van Halen cause I’m like this.” It’s a great quote, it was a great quote for that character and it’s such a rock star thing to say. That led me to read several websites compiling memorable quotes from David Lee Roth, which was well worth the time and effort. Two of my favorites were, “When you can spell subpoena without thinking about it, that’s when you know you’ve made it.” and “I'm a family man. I personally started 3 or 4 families last year.”
Another one of his quotes was “The reason more rock critics like Elvis Costello than us is that more rock critics look like Elvis Costello than us.” Well, Mr. Lee Roth, your wisdom continues to impress, because I look a lot more like Elvis Costello than you, and I do not like your band. I get it; I can appreciate the shtick, but it’s not for me. Probably because I’m not twelve years old and it’s not 1983. I’m glad Van Halen was a thing for a while. I like the mythos of rock and roll excess and big hair and leather pants and shredding on guitar and … bandanas?, but it’s not for me.
Aretha Franklin
4/5
After all the psychedelic hippie bullshit and completely unremarkable Brit pop on this list, it is so refreshing to hear pros that are masters of their instruments (watch the Muscle Shoals documentary if you haven’t yet) backing an amazingly talented singer and making perfect pop/soul/R&B songs. There should be way more albums like this on this list and way less of the garbage that’s actually on here.
The title track and “Do Right Woman” are incredible and “Respect” deserves its reputation as one of the best songs ever recorded. The rest of the albums is less impressive, but is still worth hearing. This album captures one of the greats of American music in her prime.
The White Stripes
3/5
The White Stripes would go on to make great records, but did not do so this time out. A lot of the parts that they would later put together to great effect are here and the album has its moments, but overall I think this is skippable. That being said, even not-that-great White Stripes is pretty darn good.
The Cardigans
3/5
This is fine. Poppy. Swedish. Pleasant vocals. There is way worse music than this and so I’m inclined to give it a pass for being pretty insubstantial. Doesn’t do much for me, but it ain’t hurting nothing.
Meat Puppets
3/5
I enjoyed this album when it was weird and countryish. Less so when they got thrashy. This didn’t grab me but I didn’t really mind it. I think it was worth hearing.
The Damned
1/5
Maybe punk rockers are so angry because they spend all their time listening to shitty music. I know I’d be a bit of a grump if I listened to shit like this all the time. I only had it on for 36 minutes or so and I’m already in a bad mood. Hey punk rockers, try listening to an actual album of actual music some time. You might find out that you aren’t so angry after all. 😘
The Velvet Underground
4/5
The fact that this came out in 1969 blows my mind. I love John Cale and think this album suffers some from his absence but it’s still great. Lou Reed was undeniably a flawed person but also, the world is more interesting for what he brought to it. This is - without a doubt - an album everyone should hear.
Frank Sinatra
2/5
Ahh, the songs my grandparents fell in love to. Maybe all art is made specifically for its time and going back to experience old art is pointless. Maybe we shouldn’t go to museums to look at the Mona Lisa and should instead just watch TikTok videos. Maybe the whole idea of art having timeless qualities is a delusion. Maybe all art is equally good, it’s just that some appeals to more people at the time it’s made than others, but no matter what, all of it should be tossed as soon as a new generation comes along so they can make their own art for themselves.
I don’t know. I guess people read “The Odyssey” for a long time and seemed to be okay with it. All I know is that this is just old people music to me. I guess it’s okay for what it is. But I don’t want to listen to old people music. I’m only in my early-late 40’s. I still want to rock! When are we going to get a Billy Joel album?!
Miles Davis
1/5
I have tried appreciating this album a dozen or more times. I have owned it on vinyl for five years or so and probably put it on at least twice per year. Every time, I think I might finally hear what people like about this album. I mean, it’s Miles Davis; it’s got a cuss word in the title; the album art is rad; the other players on it are a who’s who of jazz fusion greats; it’s got super long songs, which I typically am all about. But every time I put this on I’m like Charlie Brown getting the football pulled out from under him before he can kick it. I never cease to hate this album no matter how many times I put it on thinking “this time is different. This time I’m going to get ‘Bitches Brew’!”.
Whatever it is that makes people like this album, I just can’t hear it. I think it’s because I like songs and music and this is just noise and sounds. Noise albums feel really lazy to me. Like, it is hard work to put letters together to make words, and words together to make sentences. But words and sentences make sense. What if instead there were “noise authors” who put out a book that read:
assajnxoendkcbebdjdgggggggwmenfi!:&;)3!fdgkn$&537!?dvkkknfjebb gg did egxjsbxhchsnshcusnskxjJBgeibej$/$&;8,)2’wuxhnsjejHh&3&:@,$jdndjcksksbdhskebxyzhjGgVnwksodhzhjJ$f7j(4hh64:?$fgytyikbgujjn,&,@/&;$.!€>\€\£$?/73838
for 300 pages? And pretentious nerds were like, “yeah man, I totally get it.” No. Take the time to make your letters form words and your words form sentences. Yes, it’s hard work and there is less time for shooting heroin, but it’s worth it because then you’ve written something people can read and not just a bunch of random characters.
“Bitches Brew” is the aural equivalent of a bunch of random characters and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
4/5
A messianic, egotistical, androgynous alien as a metaphor for a rock star is so on the nose that it’s almost a cliche at this point, but Bowie made the connection perfectly with this album and the songs are just as strong as the ideas behind them. I think people get a little too hyped about David Bowie. Like, he’s good, but calm down. But this is an undeniably great album.
Weather Report
2/5
First song sounds like a knock off “Night Court” theme song but not in a good way. Second song sounds like Kenny G-tier quiet storm bullshit. Third song is background music for Axl Foley to chase bad guys to. Fourth song feels like I should be offering a woman with very large hair and shoulder pads a line of cocaine off my glass coffee table lit by neon light to try to get her “in the sack.” Fifth songs has drums and yelling. Sixth song I’m at a limbo contest on a cruise ship and everyone there is white except the staff. Seventh song sounds like a Renaissance fair needed background music but only had a Casio keyboard. Last song is just standard issue jazz fusion made by and for people wearing brightly colored polo shirts.
This music is so lame they had to put a fedora on the cover to warn everyone. Sorry, it’s obviously a jazz hat. https://youtu.be/Ry1xNNgbkYw?si=BS9OlKJt2mJPCS2X
Fatboy Slim
3/5
When will the palest and whitest of white guys stop taking samples of music made by black people, putting them into a computer, and turning them into “their” songs and making millions of dollars off of them? Never. You can’t make them. I can’t make them. They will never stop. The last number one song before humanity dies out will be created from a snippet of the chorus from 1920’s Mississippi blues man “Blind Willie” Tyrone “Blackity Black” Johnson’s song “Oh Lawd I’m Glad You Took My Eyes (So I Can’t See What Dem Crackers Done Done)” mixed with a horn section from Isaac Hayes, a beat from Kurtis Blow and an anime porn video game voice sample mixed in garage band by Greg Mayonaisington under his stage name DJ Lil Coochee Stank. And it will be a bop.
That’s the thing. Fatboy Slim, Moby, Daft Punk, DJ Shadow, The Chemical Brothers, I like them all. It’s a winning formula. The original artists made great music and the DJs who sample them make great music out of that other great music. Now, could the DJs make great music without relying on the earlier artists? Probably not. So I’m glad they did what they did. Cause this shit is bangin’.
Ramones
2/5
The ultimate punk rock band. Completely lacking in substance and existing solely as a stylistic endeavor. These songs are garbage but at least they short.
R.E.M.
5/5
This is one of my all-time favorite albums and may be the album I’ve listened to from start to finish more than any other. Songs about death and aging and loss and anger and whatever “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” is about. There are artists who do things different than what REM was doing better than this, but REM is the best there is at what they do. I love this album like an old friend.
Burning Spear
4/5
I am a bit embarrassed to say that my only familiarity with Burning Spear prior to listening to this was from Sinéad O'Connor‘s “Throw Down Your Arms” (but not that embarrassed because it’s actually a pretty awesome album). But I am really glad to have heard this. Totally solid roots reggae. Very cool.
Klaxons
2/5
From being offered a trip to space as incentive to sign with a label and marrying Kiera Knighly in 2007-10 to only one of the former band members having a Wikipedia page in 2024 perfectly encapsulates how the British music press overhypes anything even remotely popular with a glimmer of next-big-thing potential. Look, British music press, you guys had the Beatles. You’re not going to get another one of those. You need to stop acting like the next one is just around the corner. It’s been 65 years. Surely people are going to stop falling for it eventually.
I guess for a Brit, living in London is like being a celebrity, and so if a band has 40 people in the audience - but they’re 40 Londoners, I.e., the coolest, most influential people on the planet - then it must seem like the event of the century. But it’s not. You just live in a dumb country.
As for this band, they’re fine. A little Bloc Party, a little Franz Ferdinand, a few decent songs. Nothing special whatsoever and no reason to hear before you die. Throw them on the pile of this-is-the-most-important-band-ever-I-swear-I-mean-it-this-times put forth by the British music press every eight weeks and forgotten six months later.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Dammit, I'm going to give this pretentious, derivative, plagiaristic, screechy-vocaled nerdrock made by pedophiles five stars aren't I? *guitar starts jumping between channels on "What Is and What Should Never Be"* Yep. I am indeed going to give this five stars. Because I have two ears and they're connected in some way that I do not in any way understand to a set of balls. It can be as dumb or wankish as it wants to be, but this is rock & roll. If someone had never heard rock & roll music and wanted to know what that term meant, you could play them Led Zeppelin II and say "this is what rock & roll is" and they would say "did they just mention Gollum and Mordor and then have a several minute-long drum solo?" and you would just smile and do that thing with your hands that looks like devil horns and start nodding your head. And they would either get it or they wouldn't it, but you would have done all you could to bring them into the dark, dank, wood-paneled basement/wizard's laboratory wherein dwells rock & roll. Motherfucking five stars and fuck you for even considering anything else. Dammit.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
I really liked ”Maps” when it came out and went to Best Buy to buy a CD to try and figure out what this whole post-Y2K indie scene was all about but ended up getting the “Garden State” soundtrack instead, which I think was the right choice. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a little more discordant than where my Goldilocks zone lies, but not too far outside of it. This is a pretty cool album and worth hearing.
Hüsker Dü
2/5
Hüsker Dü has always been one of those you’re-supposed-to-like-this-band bands, like Gang of Four or Radiohead, that I just never saw the appeal of. I appreciate that the book picked their last album where they’d apparently softened up quite a bit, and I suppose I liked this more than “Zen Arcade”, although I don’t remember much about it other than it being noisy and abrasive and sucking, but even at their poppiest, Hüsker Dü aren’t poppy enough for me. “It’s Not Peculiar” was pretty decent.
Look, I’d be angry if I lived in Minnesota too, but you don’t have to put that evil on me Ricky Bobby. Just go back to your igloo and drink your Molsen with the Gundersons and the Olaffsens and say “you betcha” a bunch. Don’t make a bunch of cranky aggro albums that I have to listen to in order to be considered a true music fan.
Michael Kiwanuka
2/5
The first 15 seconds of the first song sound like Curtis Mayfield and then the album falls directly off a cliff and never recovers. The comments on YouTube are all “I found this song through a Gap commercial!!1” and that sums this album up perfectly. This has no edge or rawness. This is rounded off, safe, soul Muzak. This is music for a Gap commercial or Sirius XM The Spectrum or NPR. Or British people. I guess the British could listen to this on their wireless while the kettle is on and feel super soulful. Good job, Brits. You guys sure are funky.
Chicago
4/5
I absolutely love this album. I only knew Chicago from their cheesy 80’s soft rock and when I heard this album for the first time it absolutely blew me away. If it weren’t for “Free Form Guitar” this would be a five star album for me. That being said, I have some issues with “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”
First, a man comes up to the speaker and asks him what the time is on his watch. Awkward phrasing, but fine. But then the speaker answers, “does anybody really know what time it is? does anybody really care? (About time)”. Yes, someone does know what time it is. You do. Based on the question you were asked, we all know you are wearing a watch. Also, the guy who asked you the question cares about what time it is, that’s why he asked. Maybe he has a job interview at 2:30pm and needs to know if he should start heading over there you stupid hippie! Stop blathering about time as a concept and tell the poor guy what the numbers on your fucking watch say!
Then, in a separate incident, the speaker was walking down the street and a pretty lady looked at him and “said her diamond watch had stopped cold dead.” Okay, bullshit. Nobody has ever said that. So now you’re annoying people who are just trying to live their lives with your pseudo-philosophical garbage and you’re a liar.
Also, why do you even wear a watch? If you are so enlightened about the pointlessness of knowing what time it is, why are you wearing a device on your wrist whose sole purpose is providing you with the information that you seem to think no one should ever need to know? Just so people will ask you the time and you can deny them that simple and practical bit of information and instead pontificate at them? Fuck you, sir.
Oasis
3/5
Oh man, if you were a 3.8 on the preference-for-less-poppy-music scale in 1994 - with a 1 being Ace of Bass and a 10 being (I don’t know) Colossamite - this album lived in your CD player for most of late 94-early 95. But I was a 5.2 on that scale (Tori Amos, Portishead, REM) and so I never owned this CD and just know the hits as being played on the radio constantly around that time. And the hits are good, but I have very little affection or nostalgia for this album. It’s pretty cool, I guess. British pop rock. A little bit of attitude but also sophistication. We’re Duran Duran meets The Sex Pistols. We’re wearing suits, but we also have stubble and say “arse” and “wanker”, so watch out! Kind of a neat mixture. But not really my thing.
CHIC
2/5
Since this album is basically exactly the same as the other Chic album on this list, I’ll just repurpose my review of “Risqué” for “C’est Chic”:
I know the whole “Disco Sucks” movement was grounded in racism and homophobia from middle-aged white construction workers who throw batteries at Santa Claus and thought everyone should just be happy to listen to Bachman Turner Overdrive for the rest of time, but disco sucks. Disco music is music made for people to dance to. Is “The Electric Slide” or “The Cupid Shuffle” on this list because of their importance in giving boring people something to do at weddings? This music does not need to be heard unless you are wearing bell bottoms, being felt up by Andy Warhol and doing the hustle.
I am aware that Chic was influential and people have sampled them millions of times to make other songs. But that just means these are bad songs with some good parts in them (mostly the bass which is, admittedly, bangin). So let’s listen to those better songs that reuse the good parts of these songs instead of this cheese-fest. Most of this is pretty lame, and even worse, it’s lame and way too long. If you’re going to be cheesy, at least get it over with quickly.
In conclusion, disco sucks. *throws battery at Santa Claus*
Fats Domino
2/5
The television show “Happy Days” was filmed in the 1970’s but set in the 1950’s. It was a running gag on the show that whenever Richie Cunningham would “make it” with a girl (offscreen, of course), he’d appear in the next scene, bold as brass, singing Fats Domino’s version of “Blueberry Hill”. It was his way of celebrating what had just happened. His way of giving thanks for being happy, for having indulged in a rite of passage, and for simply being alive.
https://youtu.be/o20YZ9B5BaQ?si=V5ceaCHJ4Rl1T7Tq
That carrot-topped freak would stroll right past his mom and dad and little sister, walking bowlegged, reeking of sex, sticky love juices quickly drying on his be-freckled face, incubating a virulent case of the clap he’d just picked up in the backseat of his jalopy from Pinkie Tuscadero, with a shit-eating grin on his face and singing “Blueberry Hill.”
That nasty little ginger sex fiend had no shame. Walking right up to his cornfed midwestern momma with her bouffant and her apron, doing a “I just blew a bitch’s back out and since this is the 1950’s she’s probably going to get pregnant and have to drop out of school and have the baby in secret in a dingy charity hospital in Chicago and give it up for adoption and slink back into town ten months later and say she was recovering from polio but everyone will know what really happened and she’ll never be employed in anything other than a service job and no one decent will marry her while I marry the bank president’s daughter and start working in his bank as a vice-president right out of Wisconsin University and turn her down for a loan to open a beauty shop fifteen years later because she doesn’t have an upstanding reputation even after all that time and she has this emptiness inside and never stops wondering if her baby is okay” touchdown celebration dance, singing “🎶I found my thrill, on Blueberry Hill🎶.”
Pretenders
3/5
“The Cars” came out about a year before this and I think the two albums are very similar. Both debuts; both straddling punk, new wave and pop; and most importantly, both so incredibly cool. The difference being that “The Cars” had like six all-time classic new wave songs on it and this “only” has three.
I prefer “Learning to Crawl” to this album, but I prefer “Learning to Crawl” to most albums, so that’s hardly a knock on this one. The Pretenders had just enough punk in their pop to make it interesting, but they always seemed to know they were making pop music. For Chrissie Hynde’s voice to be as distinctive as it is, it always surprises me how different the Pretenders sound from song to song, and I think that’s because they were so eclectic in their sound. They were unafraid to incorporate any genre that brought something positive to their songs.
This is a great debut album by a great band.
Mudhoney
2/5
more like dud honey
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
I was at a bar one Friday night and a guy came in and played ten Neil Young songs on the jukebox and then did a magic trick for me. I love Neil Young and thought he was charming and so we got to talking. He asked me out and I agreed. We dated for close to a year, and then one evening he took me to that same bar and proposed by pulling a ring out of his sleeve with “Pocahontas” playing in the background. I said “See the losers in the best bars; Meet the winners in the dives” which he of course knew meant “yes.”
We were married for thirty years and had four beautiful children. He passed away in 2022. We held his wake at the same bar where we met. Neil Young played on the jukebox all night. Our eldest son waited until the evening was winding down and went up to his father’s silk-draped coffin. Every eye in the place was on him. You could’ve heard a pin drop (he’s a natural showman just like his father). With tears in his eyes, he looked up and said, “It's better to burn out than fade away” and pulled the silk cloth from the coffin with a flourish. There was a burst of flame and the coffin was gone. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. Except the bartender. That guy was a dick.
Dire Straits
3/5
The classic rock station I listened to growing up would play "Sultans of Swing" every fifth song, like clockwork. A typical afternoon in my young adulthood would sound like this: the Georgia Satellites; the Marshall Tucker Band; Blackfoot; ZZ Top; "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits; the Charlie Daniels Band; the Doobie Brothers; Creedence; Atlanta Rhythm Section; "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits; 38 Special; the Allman Brothers Band; Molly Hatchet; Lynyrd Skynyrd; "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits, etc. Maybe a "Money for Nothing" thrown in once a day for variety. Because of this, I fucking hate that song. I don't know if it is good or bad, I only know I hate it.
But I kind of like Dire Straits. They have a laidback jazzy blues sound that is pretty cool. None of the songs on this record really stand out, but they are all pretty good. It isn't Dire Straits's fault that Rock 101 played "Sultans of Swing" to death and so I try not to hold it against them. But they are never going to be one of my favorite bands, despite them being totally decent.
Badly Drawn Boy
2/5
On the one hand, “like the partridge family, but indie” is basically my favorite genre. On the other hand, this is like if Elliott Smith was British, knew how to play the cello and was 12% more interesting. Elliott Smith probably knew how to play the cello and needed to be way more than 12% more interesting for me to like him. This album is completely inoffensive but just doesn’t do it for me.
David Bowie
3/5
This album is certainly interesting and worth hearing, but it’s not my jam. I’m sorry that the pretty pop/rock star got hooked on cocaine and had to go to Berlin and listen to ambient music and krautrock while getting clean, but that doesn’t make him an ambient musician or a krautrocker. It just makes him a strung-out tourist. He does well when he is making his pretty pop/rock (“Sound and Vision”) but the rest of this is Bowie doing something other than what Bowie does best. So it’s just not that great, despite the music nerds overhyping it for the last decade.
Also, hey late-70’s David Bowie: https://youtu.be/-E3dwBabYBY?si=meE0-IpG0H4__NT3
Turbonegro
1/5
Is all popular music just a way to trick dumb kids out of their pocket money?
Snoop Dogg
3/5
Joyce Brothers didn’t care about boxing, but memorized every fact in existence about boxing because that was what she needed to do to become famous by appearing on “The $64,000 Question”. She wasn’t a boxing expert. She was a celebrity that needed to do something to become famous. I think Snoop is much the same. He’s not really a rapper, but rap was the best way to become what he is: a celebrity. It’s not that he isn’t a talented rapper, but that’s not his real calling. He was born to be famous and he achieved that, and this album- and his star turn on The Chronic before it - is how he did it.
This album wouldn’t have allowed him to achieve the fame he was destined for if it wasn’t good, and it is, but I don’t think it’s great. It was on-trend and captured a growing movement at the time it was released, and so deserves all the credit it gets for those things. But as a work of art, I think it’s just okay. But how do you separate its artistic merit from its cultural impact? I will always be affected by having been a teenage boy in 1993 and being at ground zero of its cultural impact. I think it’s a good and important album but I’m not sure how much of that is nostalgia.
As many people have pointed out, much of the lyrical content is abhorrent. A lot of the “we don’t love these hoes”-style lyrics sound like whistling past the graveyard to me. Girls and sex play such an outsized role in the psyche of adolescent boys that repeatedly describing how much they don’t care about women might have been overcompensating for what they perceived to be a weakness. It’s not dissimilar to the anti-simping rhetoric you see online today. That doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it a little more understandable.
Snoop was a good rapper who had a nearly unlimited supply of charisma and charm. He leveraged those things to make him a celebrity and has played that role for the last three decades. Doggystyle captured everything he was at this time and I think it is an album that everyone should hear. That being said, it is not an album that I ever put on to listen to.
The Clash
2/5
The Clash might be my favorite punk rock band. But I hate punk rock, so that makes them my 10,000th or so favorite band overall, behind basically all bands in all genres I don’t hate, except Radiohead. Even a punk rock band can be better than Radiohead. But most punk rock bands aren’t even good enough to be better than Radiohead, and that is really saying something, cause Radiohead sucks.
Punk rockers are the ultimate posers. It’s all an act. Punk rock is the least authentic genre of music ever. It was invented by a clothing store owner to sell T-shirts to scene kids (https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/music/1420480/Sex-Pistols-manager-Malcolm-McLaren-punk-rock-johnny-rotten-evg/amp). Even the cheesiest musicians generally care about music. But not punk rockers. They only care about looking cool and drinking or shooting heroin and being angry at whatever they are angry at. And most of them are too dumb to even articulate what it is they are angry at.
Pop garbage is made by people who only care about making money and being famous instead of music and punk rock is made by people who only care about looking cool and drinking or shooting heroin and being angry instead of music. The entire genre is a put-on that only the truly, deeply stupid fall for.
All that being said, the Clash are okay.
John Martyn
3/5
I had never heard of this artist before and when I saw the words “British folk singer-songwriter” in the Wikipedia excerpt, I was seriously dreading listening to this. I figured I was in for another Donovan-type album, but this was surprisingly enjoyable. Reminded me a lot of Nick Drake but - and I am loathe to say this about a British folk singer-songwriter - kind of funky. I guess it is more jazzy than funky, but I swear I heard echos of Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly soundtrack in “Dreams by the Sea”. I am glad to have heard this for the first time and I am planning to check out more music by this artist.
Dirty Projectors
2/5
“Stillness is the Move” is a good song. Unfortunately this album has eight other songs on it.
You just know that everyone in this band owns grooming products that cost more than my car and also smells bad all the time.
From Wikipedia: “Longstreth notes that the music contained within the album "felt very [much] about colors, and their interaction,"”. Isn’t that just indie music in a nutshell? Other genres have songs about sex and drugs and dancing and frustration and divorce and violence and poverty and things real people deal with, and indie music has songs about things twenty-five year old sadboy trustafarians think about while they are high on mushrooms and meditating in their Brooklyn apartment next to their vegan kumbacha.
They call it indie music because it belongs indie trash.
On May 8, 2009, members of Dirty Projectors collaborated with Bjork to perform an orchestral composition for five voices and acoustic guitar composed by Longstreth as part of a charity concert to benefit Housing Works, a nonprofit dedicated to finding housing for homeless men, women and children with AIDS. Halfway through the concert the homeless people stood up and said "if it’s all the same to you, we'll stick with the AIDS!"
1/5
Hey, wait a minute! This is more mentally stimulating than 60s pop rock:
🤮😡😭🤬
The Avalanches
4/5
I love this album and have since I first heard it. It’s a little bit ridiculous, but it’s undeniably catchy and fun to listen to. Definitely worth hearing.
Otis Redding
5/5
When Otis Redding was asked to record a duets album with Carla Thomas, he said “Well, hey, you from Memphis, you from Tennessee, you can hang". The man knew what was up.
If you haven’t watched the documentary “Stax: Soulsville USA”, I would highly recommend it. The talent gathered in that particular place at that particular time is mind-boggling. From Wikipedia:
Except for one track, Otis Blue was recorded in the span of 24 hours from July 9 to 10, 1965, at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. As with Redding's previous records, he was backed by the Stax house band Booker T. & the M.G.'s, a horn section featuring members of the Mar-Keys and the Memphis Horns, and pianist Isaac Hayes
Insane. Not only the personnel, but also to have knocked almost all of these songs out in 24 hours.
I think the covers of “My Girl” and “Wonderful World” suffer by comparison to the originals, but if that is the worst thing you can say about an album then you are clearly discussing one of the greatest collections of songs in the history of pop/soul/R&B. This album is a masterpiece.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I think “Beatles or Stones?” as a personality test-type question is silly. The Rolling Stones are a great band but the Beatles are so far beyond the Stones that it’s not even a contest. I don’t agree with Paul McCartney saying the Stones were just a blues cover band, but I don’t think that’s completely wrong either. Not only am I not a big Stones fan, but I also have an intrinsic suspicion - bordering on full on dislike - for double albums. They are almost always just missed opportunities to make a really great single album. They are typically boring and self-indulgent and way too long. All that being said, this double album by The Rolling Stones is my favorite album of all time.
This album is what spinning out of control and coming apart at the seams sounds like. Fast and hard and joyous and raucous; and then decadent and lascivious and louche; and then exhausted and cynical and a paranoid bundle of nerves and depression; and finally transcendent. If you can’t get into this album then you have to ask yourself if you’ve ever even run a slight temperature in the funkhouse, much less had a full on fever up in that mother.
I also love albums with completely mundane origin stories. Started in London, then recorded over months In the basement of Keith’s villa in the south of France with a revolving door of contributors, then Mick leads overdubs in LA with a bunch of session musicians inspired by Aretha Franklin’s gospel singing. There is no overarching theme or plan. They were mostly just drunk or high or broke or running from the law or trying to cheat the taxman or their previous manager or the French police and these songs happened to be recorded at some point in that years long fiasco. This album should not be good. And it isn’t good and it certainly isn’t perfect, it’s just - to me - the greatest album of all time.
The Divine Comedy
2/5
One of the most memorably hateable albums on this list so far has been by Ute Lemper, and this guy is in league with her to do . . . something. And that is part of what frustrates me about this and Ute Lemper. I don’t understand what they are doing. Do they want to write songs for musicals? Is this crooning? Are they lounge acts? What the fuck is this? And more importantly, who is this for? I’ve been on this earth for 46 years and have met all kinds of people in that time and can’t think of anyone I have ever encountered that would be into this. Who listens to this?! https://youtu.be/ilcRS5eUpwk?si=TJiOw4Kr3usTorbO
Songhoy Blues
3/5
I went through a pretty big Afrobeat phase awhile back but was not familiar with desert blues. It’s not bad. Nothing on this album particularly grabbed me but it was a nice change of pace as something to listen to. I’m glad to have spent some time with this album.
Thin Lizzy
3/5
A live version of their greatest hits is kind of cheating isn’t it? They should have just put Jailbreak on the list. Also I like the comic book art on that one. And I like it when bands are really blatant about the fact that it is 13-18 year old boys who buy their records and so that is clearly who they are catering to.
It’s always crazy to me that people describe Thin Lizzy as hard rock. I know the band isn’t hard rock because I kind of like them. Plus I have ears. Thin Lizzy is like Boston if Boston was 10% less poppy.
Thin Lizzy is pretty good but has never been one of my favorites. Hearing this live album did not change that.
Miles Davis
5/5
Sometimes things are really popular and critically acclaimed for a reason. This is one of those. A great album that everyone should hear.
John Prine
4/5
“Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios”. “Sam Stone” is about Sam Stone; but the song keeps returning to those kids running around in other people’s clothes. Sam Stone is dead center of the picture, but the artist has painted it in such a way that the viewer’s eye keeps being drawn to those kids, almost without the viewer knowing why. If they really look, they will walk away thinking thoughts they may have never thought before. They will be a different person walking away from it than they were when they first looked at it.
John Prine accomplished more in a few lines than most artists do in their entire careers, all so a bunch of Philistines could bless the internet with insights like “I don’t like country music hur hur.”
Little Richard
2/5
You cannot overstate his influence. You read his Wikipedia page and basically every artist you’ve ever heard of says that he inspired them. I like how short the songs are. I like the insane frenetic energy. I think this is more a collection of singles and b-sides than a proper album, but given that he was basically inventing rock&roll, I’m willing to give him a pass for that. However, this is not an album - to the extent it even is an album - that I would ever put on to listen to for pleasure.
Kate Bush
2/5
I like Kate Bush. But I like cool synth pop Kate Bush. Not lame, world music, Peter Gabriel-wannabe, songs about dancing with Hitler Kate Bush.
Also, how bad was the lighting in this dancing establishment? Hitler is a pretty distinctive looking dude, and given that he was on the front page of the paper the next day, was pretty well known when this story takes place. So some little weirdo comes up to you yelling in German about flipping a coin and dancing and you look at him and he’s got a stupid Hitler mustache and you’re in Berlin or wherever in ‘39 and don’t think to yourself “wait a minute this guy might be Hitler”? I think this is on you lady.
Beck
3/5
I was a sophomore in high school when Mellow Gold came out, and that was a pretty important album for me. I’ve seen Beck in concert a couple of times. I liked Odelay, Midnight Vultures and Sea Change. I’ve owned all of those and Mutations and Stereopathic Soul Manure on CD or vinyl. I’d say I’m a moderate Beck fan. I listened to this album for a few weeks when it came out and tried to get into it, but it just didn’t do it for me. It’s fine, but it kind of felt like a rehash of old ideas by someone who didn’t have it any more. Relistening to it today did nothing to change that opinion. It has a few nice moments, but not enough to make it anything like an album you must hear before you die.
Eminem
1/5
I don’t need a rap album to hear the thoughts of dirtbags whose brains have never fully developed because of fetal alcohol syndrome or whatever is wrong with them. They will tell you their thoughts. Loudly. UFOs are making chem trails turn everyone on the flat earth gay and their ex’s boyfriend been talking shit and is about to get fucked up, not to mention their bitch-ass parole officer and their whore mom. Cool. They’ll gladly pour their half-thought out nonsense into your ears any chance you give them. Or you can listen to the Joe Rogan podcast. There are plenty of sources of dirtbag ramblings. You don’t need to listen to an album to hear them.
There are so many things worth rebelling against, but when you start to lump into that category the fact that you’re not allowed to drive drunk or hit women or kill people that piss you off, then I assume you’re not a serious person and I’m not going to listen to you. I think that is something that bothers me about a lot of music geared towards angry young men. Youth rebellion is such a powerful force, but life beats you down so fast that it only really lasts from ages 15 to 25. If we could concentrate that force at something, we could change the world. But not the whole world. Just maybe one big thing. But pop/rap/punk music is the thumb over the nozzle of the hose that makes that anger come out fast and hard in a bunch of pointless directions. If an entire generation was like “we’re really angry at the way the world is!” and all of their pop/rap/punk stars were to say “Yes. The world has a lot of problems. Let’s fix one.” then they could end employer-sponsored healthcare in a generation. Then the next generation could end fossil fuel usage. Then the next could reform policing from the ground up. They could use their anger to make real change instead of having it spray out uselessly in the stupidest possible directions.
All of these “rebellious” musicians are just tools of the man taking the power of youthful frustration and diverting it away from anything that could create real change.
Simple Minds
3/5
It’s . . . not bad? It’s not unpleasant to listen to. Occasionally it has some enjoyable parts. One of the worst album covers I’ve ever seen, but that’s neither here nor there. This is fine 80’s synth pop. It didn’t really do much for me, but it did not make my day worse. So that’s something I guess.
Actually, after a couple of listens, I’d say this is better than average 80’s synth pop. A bit murky and dirge-like for my taste at times, but overall kinda cool. Had a little Tangerine Dreamy kind of instrumental in the middle, which was fun. I’d say this is an album worth hearing.
50 Cent
2/5
I always thought of 50 Cent as a novelty. I knew the hits but had never listened to this album all the way through. This was okay. It’s dumb catchy rap music. There are worse things.
Mike Oldfield
4/5
Found this in the used bin at a record store years ago and decided to check it out since I was getting into prog rock and absolutely loved it. I know it’s nerdy. I know it’s pretentious. I know it’s absurd. I don’t care. There is something about this album that just clicks for me. He does a great job of building tension and then paying it off.
Elton John
4/5
What an insanely great album. Even the cheesy songs that have been played to death on the radio sound better in the context of this record because it’s so well put together. But you have the classic double album problem of there being stuff that could have been cut to leave you with a much stronger single album.
Honestly though, Elton John might have been the best in the world at this time. What was Stevie Wonder doing? Innervisions. Well, he was up there. If he wasn’t the absolute best, most interesting, recording artist in the world in 1973, he was without question in the conversation. Also, holy shit, Google “albums 1973”. Shit is crazy. We haven’t had as many truly great albums in the last 24 years as came out just in 1973.
This album is big, weird, overstuffed, silly, bombastic and insane. Everyone should hear this.
Arcade Fire
5/5
I can’t separate how I feel about this album now from how I felt about it 20 years ago when it was released. It seemed like a culmination of so much that had been bubbling up in indie music for years but that never caught on outside of that scene. At the same time, it felt like something completely new. I will likely always love this album because of how much it blew me away when it came out.
It’s just dramatic enough. It’s just arty enough. It’s just complex enough. It is as much one cohesive piece of art - rather than just a collection of unrelated songs lumped together for no real reason - as any other album I can think of. I consider this easily one of the best albums of the last twenty years.
Joy Division
2/5
Two of these dorks met at a Sex Pistols concert and one of them thought the Sex Pistols "destroyed the myth of being a pop star, of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship" and borrowed £35 from his mother to buy a bass guitar the next day. That is exactly the type of origin story I would expect for this droning, tuneless, boring, sad teenage dracula music.
Going to see a fake manufactured sham of an alt boy band and thinking they were changing music forever and borrowing money from your mom to copy them. It couldn’t have been that hard, the Sex Pistols couldn’t play their instruments either, because manufactured boy bands never can.
Also, I've got a question for this Ian Curtis fellow: https://youtu.be/v9wKiA4sigc?si=jqH-U83I8NOb_7MQ&t=33
Aerosmith
3/5
Riding around the country, playing guitars loud, rocking out every night, young girls in my bed, fifth of vodka in my hand, scarf tied to my microphone stand, oops the Sheriff’s 16-year old daughter might be pregnant, gotta roll, guitar solo, boogie woogie, two girls at a time, one might have been a man and the other too young even for me, drum solo, scarves hanging in the bus now, makes for more quiet spots to take the girls, the Sheriff lost his election because of the scandal related to his daughter’s pregnancy but somehow his very pregnant 16-year old daughter was elected Sheriff is that legal, too tired and drunk to understand, that girl was definitely a man but also wearing a Sheriff’s badge, these guitars are so loud, I can’t see anything through all these scarves, I’m surrounded by 16-year old pregnant law enforcement officers and scarves and guitars, I can’t get sober but every bottle I try to drink from is just full of scarves, I’ve been on the road for years rocking out every night but these pregnant Sheriffs never seem to give birth, they’re just always pregnant, I would skip town but they’re on the bus and also the entire audience at the next concert venue, I think, but it’s hard to see them clearly because I’m so drunk and the guitars are so loud and there are too many scarves in the way, my entire closet is just scarves and I’m scared to change out of my clothes because I’m worried they’ll have turned to scarves when I try to put them back on and the 16-year old Sheriffs are too pregnant to want to fool around but we do stuff anyway and it’s getting odd with all my clothes on and I was just dry-humping scarves last night and there wasn’t even a 16-year old Sheriff around I don’t think, why am I so drunk, I can’t hear anything but boogie woogie rock and roll and maybe it’s the bus fumes that are making me high all the time but I can’t think straight and I can’t see anyone because of all the fucking scarves and I can’t hear anything over the guitars and I just want to talk to someone and ask how long this tour is supposed to go on or where we’re going or realistically how many Sheriffs - especially 16-year old pregnant Sheriffs - there could be serving in office at the same time in one country or whether this is an international tour but we are only ever on buses and in clubs I think but I can’t really tell because scarves and the 16-year old Sheriffs just want to have sex but also don’t and it’s hard to tell if that is actually really happening because I can’t see them or hear them but I know they’re there. Rock & Roll!
Michael Jackson
4/5
Take disco, speed it up, add really watered down funk horns and top it off with Motown polish. It makes for a really great sound and this is a great album. Stronger on the first side than the second, but when it’s strong it is really strong.
It’s hard not to dance when this album is playing. But I’ve criticized disco for being just music to dance to in the past, so why is this better? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not that the lyrics are any deeper on this album than on a random Chic song. Maybe it’s Jackson as a performer. He wasn’t just the singer in a disco band. He was honestly a once in a generation talent.
A lot of the material on this album was great but Michael Jackson was going to elevate any material he performed at this time. In addition to his natural talent, he had been training his entire life to be great at this one thing. Michael Jackson was like a terrible science experiment designed to produce the ultimate pop star. It made for an awful human being, but hey ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, a hit is a hit.
Steely Dan
4/5
The band called their cover for The Royal Scam the ugliest album cover of the 70's except for this one. And this truly is an abomination. I think a lot of Steely Dan fans are not crazy about this album because it is the least Steely Dan-esque Steely Dan album, but I think it is pretty good. I love "Dirty Work" and the other hits are also strong. I think the band was still discovering what it was when this was recorded, but a lot of the elements that would make up peak Steely Dan were here. This is a good record.
Elliott Smith
2/5
If I wanted to hear a scuzzy pillhead whine about how sad they are for thirty-seven minutes, I’d go fuck your mother and then refuse to pay her.
The Streets
1/5
British people “rapping” 😒. https://youtu.be/8bsxppX7BZc?si=Qd9bVCprd9n0fQ3_
Kanye West
3/5
I do not support nazis. But I wonder why the same people that claim they won’t listen to Kanye because he is a nazi never seem to draw the same line when it comes to David Bowie (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-fascist-1970s/). Kanye West is clearly dealing with mental illness and drug addiction. He is also clearly very talented and ambitious and funny and clever and charismatic. I think this album is worth hearing despite the fact that I do not agree with Kanye’s recent statements related to basically everything.
The Zutons
3/5
This is fine. Very 2004-ey. I’m sure that whatever song was in a Gap commercial made for a very compelling Gap commercial. But I think you could pretty easily put together a list of 1001 albums to hear before you die that didn’t include this one if you weren’t a dumbfuck.
Beck
4/5
I like this album. It’s not one I listen to much but I still like it. I think it’s fun. There is something to be said about music that’s fun. I think that it coming out when it did in terms of where I was in life at that time makes me rank it higher than I might otherwise but I also think it is pretty decent even apart from that.
Nick Drake
3/5
I have tried with Nick Drake a bunch of times and he just doesn’t click for me. I don’t think he’s bad, but for some reason I just don’t enjoy listening to his albums. I like a few of his songs, but most of them - I don’t dislike - but also don’t really particularly enjoy. I think he belongs on this list but he’s just not my cup of wistful, calming, melancholic tea.
Morrissey
3/5
It’s not like I listen to Johnny Marr solo records, so I don’t think it’s that he’s great and Morrissey sucks. I think that those four together at that particular time captured lightning in a bottle and then never had it again separately or at other times in their lives. Cause the difference between how much I love The Smiths and how much I don’t love Morrissey’s solo albums is surprisingly vast.
Maxwell
4/5
I think that there is something to be said for an album that has a fully formed concept of what it wants to be and executes that vision flawlessly. Now, clearly the vision that Maxwell had for this album was Midnight Love-era Marvin Gaye (which I typically do not enjoy), a little bit of Prince, and sounds leaning a little closer to Kenny G than I’m typically okay with, but dammit did he hit his fucking mark. It is hard to dislike an album that does what it sets out to do this well.
Bauhaus
2/5
More like Boo-haus.
Pink Floyd
4/5
There are some really cool songs on here but they are sandwiched in between a bunch of weird pretentious nonsense that I don’t have time for. The good songs are almost enough to make up for this album being firmly in Tommy territory. Which is quite an achievement because Tommy sucks.
Prince
3/5
Cons: (1) This is not just a double album, but a “guess what kind of song I can make? all of them” double album; (2) this is Prince just past his prime; (3) too much messing around with cool new toys in the studio and not enough of a central theme (4) Prince rapping.
Pros: the worst music by Prince is better than the best music made by your dork-ass favorite band. Fuck you. This is a fucking Prince album.
The Mamas & The Papas
2/5
This is just one of a million different lame mid-sixties folk groups that happened to hit it big by tie dyeing their beatnik wear and hiring the Wrecking Crew to play super dumbed down easy listening electrified folk rock behind them. This is just slightly less lame Sonny & Cher. The only counterpoint to that is the fact that "California Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday" are undeniably great songs.
Manu Chao
3/5
This wasn’t bad. I want to be exposed to albums I haven’t heard before and this album meets that criteria. I liked “Bongo Bong” quite a bit. Not really my thing overall, but I’m glad to have heard it.
However, the guy looks like the drummer from Blink-182 if he lost a bet that required him to wear the stupidest clothes in the world.
Fairport Convention
3/5
The magic of The Basement Tapes is that it’s just singers and players playing around. There’s no artifice and no attempt at commerciality. It’s the tradition of everyone who plays an instrument in any human settlement, whether they are any good or not, gathering together on a front porch or around a fire and playing - playing in every sense of the word. And that is why The Basement Tapes of one of the best albums of all time, because it captures that feeling.
This album covers a song from The Basement Tapes, but doesn’t capture that feeling on that cover. But it does on “Si Tu Dois Patir”. That sounds like people just playing for the love of making music together and connecting amongst themselves and their audience. It’s goofy and silly and loose and fun and everything The Basement Tapes does right.
”Si Tu Dois Patir” is the clear stand out on this album. The rest is okay folky stuff, but nothing to write home about. Everything else on the album, Richard Thompson would go on to do better on his three albums as Richard and Linda Thompson. But “Si Tu Dois Patir” is worth the price of admission.
Queen
3/5
I have never been a big Queen fan. I’ve always known and liked most of the hits but have found their albums to be a bit of a mixed bag. I bought a rock and roll album guys. I’m not looking to listen to banjo, barbershop, riverboat, the frog from the WB music. I guess Queen’s willingness to experiment is what makes them great but when those experiments miss, they miss pretty big and I end up wishing that I was just listening to their greatest hits.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
This might be my least favorite of Stevie’s classic Talking-Book-through-Songs-in-the-Key-of-Life album run. Being my least favorite of those four albums still puts it in my favorite 100 or so albums of all time. Good lord, the man just could not miss for an entire decade. Superhuman.
Paul McCartney
3/5
Cocky fucker thought he could just toss off some half-baked song sketches and it would still be great because he was such a genius. Got too big for your britches there Macca! Maybe those other three blokes were bringing something to the table, huh?
These are perfectly fine demos, and well they should be because they were made by one of the greatest songwriters and performers of all time, but they are still just demos. If he had taken these into the studio with some other talented people then they could have worked on them and maybe gotten two or three album-worthy songs out of them. But instead he just released them. How contemptuous of his audience and what a waste of his talent. Lazy and hubristic, Mr. McCartney. Lazy and hubristic.
Common
2/5
This sounds dated even for being 24 years old. Some of the beats are decent but the raps are boring and corny. I also disapprove of him fighting John Wick.
Thelonious Monk
2/5
I don’t get jazz but occasionally I enjoy some of it. I did not enjoy this at all.
4/5
I really only knew War from “Low Rider” and “Spill the Wine” for most of my life but I picked this album up at Goodwill for a dollar a couple of years ago and absolutely fell in love with it. Between being a big fan of this album and Santana’s first four albums, I think I may just really like when Latin rhythms are infused in rock. I should probably explore that more.
It’s crazy that this was one of the best-selling albums of 1973. I mean, it’s great, but it’s not particularly commercial. Three of the six songs are over 8 minutes long. I'm surprised it was that popular and also that its popularity hasn’t really endured while other artists who had giant selling albums in 1973 like Led Zeppelin’s and Pink Floyd’s and Elton John’s has.
In looking at the list of best-selling albums of 1973, I think pre-disco 70’s might be my favorite era of music. Barring Seals and Croft, there’s not really a bad album in the bunch. What an amazing time in music. And this album is a worthy addition to that list.
Black Sabbath
3/5
I hate heavy metal but don’t dislike Black Sabbath albums, the inventors of heavy metal. I really do contain multitudes.
Coldcut
3/5
I enjoyed this album. It had that old school 80’s sound mixed with house and techno. This was fun and I would happily listen to it again. My only note is that it was twice as long as it really needed to be.
Talvin Singh
2/5
“What should we add to our super-generic electronic music?” “Uh, super-generic Indian music?” “You’ve done it again at Talvin Singh!” Or possibly for the first time because I have no idea who you are and will almost assuredly never think of you again after today. This album sold 60,000 copies and has been all but forgotten for decades. This is the absolute polar opposite of an album you must hear before you die. Was it terrible? No. Did it add to my life in any way to have listened to it? Also no.
Tangerine Dream
3/5
I think that if I hadn’t watched “Thief”, I wouldn’t get Tangerine Dream. Something about hearing their music playing while watching Michael Mann’s visuals of a car driving through a rainy, foreboding city at night and watching Jimmy Caan crack a safe just made what they were going for click for me and I’ve been a fan ever since. Not the right music for every situation, but in the right situation they are the perfect music.
The Temptations
3/5
First half was funky and cool. Second half was second rate Motown leftovers. An album worth hearing though.
Tracy Chapman
3/5
I owned this on CD in the 90’s and loved it. Listening to it in 2024, it doesn’t hit me quite as hard. The album never matches the greatness of its standout song but that isn’t much of a criticism. The rest of the songs are still mostly good and this album is clearly worth hearing.
Travis
2/5
10% Radiohead, 60% Coldplay, 30% Matchbox Twenty; 100% forgettable lame ass pop rock bullshit.
Small Faces
3/5
That was pretty decent. I liked the first half better than when the way too British guy started being way too British.
TLC
3/5
TLC were probably the world’s best pop stars at this time, but even the greatest of pop stars don’t make great albums. Because they don’t make albums at all. They make singles. And the singles here are incredible, but the rest of this is filler. I don’t blame TLC for that. That is just what pop stars do.
I am going to rank this fairly highly on the strength of “Creep” and “Waterfalls” and “Diggin’ on You” but honestly this deserves no stars as an album because that’s not really what it is.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
I love that Bruce was just like, “I’m super sad all the time about everything. Guess I’ll make some garage rock pop songs that everybody can dance to.” The 80’s production is a bit much at times, but overall this album is pretty amazing. Not my favorite Bruce album, but undeniable in terms of quality and cultural impact.
Prince
4/5
“I just don’t get Prince.” Son, you don’t get life.
A Tribe Called Quest
3/5
It’s Spring of 1994 and you’re 19 years old. 9/11 is 7 years away. The Great Recession hasn’t hit yet and so you are studying English at a small liberal arts college just to become an educated person and you figure a career will take care of itself, if you think about life after college at all. But thinking about making a living isn’t really done because you’re a slacker and you’re alternative and you hate the man. You’re no sell out. You’re no poser. There is no internet, or if there is it’s a weird niche thing that most people don’t pay much attention to. You and your bros are wearing bucket hats and playing hacky sack on the quad or Golden Eye on your roommate’s N64. The sun is shining. You’ve been talking to this girl who you think might be at the party you’re going to tonight. Maybe you’re drinking Natty Light. Maybe you smoked a bowl of shwag that you had to pick the stems and seeds out of for three minutes before you packed it. Maybe you’re smoking a Camel Light. This CD is playing out of a boombox and you and your friends are laughing and singing along and acting goofy and you have no idea how good you have it. You have no fucking idea.
Sleater-Kinney
2/5
I was an angry young man in the 90’s who had a brief tolerance for abrasive screechy music. But I was always a soft boy at heart. I had liked poppy-nice-sounding-with-maybe-a-little-bit-of-rock-&-roll music up until that point in my life and I’ve liked poppy-nice-sounding-with-maybe-a-little-bit-of-rock-&-roll music since then. But if you made loud angry abrasive rock in the 90’s, you might have caught me at just the right time and nostalgia may make it to where I still enjoy your music a bit even now when I’m old and soft as tissue paper. See Youth, Sonic. But I did not listen to Sleater-Kinney in the 90’s and have zero nostalgia for this and therefore it is very much not my jam. It’s too loud, too angry, too harsh and too screechy. Sleater-Kinney would go on to make an album in 2015 that I liked some of the tracks off of, especially the slow quiet one. But this album isn’t really doing it for me.
Talk Talk
2/5
I can’t figure out what these guys are going for but whatever it is, it isn’t for me.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
I’m glad the Rolling Stones stopped with the psychedelic garbage and became The Rolling Stones™ but I don’t think we needed the album when they first made that pivot on this list because this is mostly just okay. That being said, any album with “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man” on it is probably better than most other albums, no matter how uninspiring the other eight songs are.
Billy Joel
4/5
Billy Joel’s two-disc Greatest Hits was one of the first CDs I ever really loved. All these years later, I still enjoy singing along to “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” when it comes on the radio. Billy Joel was never, and will never be, cool. That may be what I like best about him.
The Vines
3/5
So rock critics wanted to take popular music back from whoever had the kids’ ears in 2002 and needed a band to use as an example of how “rock is back” and this was the best they could do? I bet whatever song from this band was used in an iPod commercial sounded great.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
An amazing singer and performer at the top of her game, the best session players in the world at that time who had the sound of the moment, solid songwriting and choices of covers, and the genius to limit your album to ten songs and thirty minutes. Everything about this album was done right. An absolute masterpiece.
Mj Cole
2/5
*British phone ringing sound* “Toodle-oo, RobDi here” “Robbo, it’s Nigie. Just wanted to make sure you’re submitting the manuscript for the 1001 album book to the publisher by the end of the day” “Nige darling, you’re talking to Robert “Never Misses a Deadline” Dimery. I’m just dotting a few i’s and crossing some t’s. I’ll have it to them by 5 and meet you for a pint at the local by 5:30.” “You’re the best Roberto! See you then.”
Shit! Shit! SHIT!! Why do I always do this?! What is wrong with me?! I forgot I had agreed to do this stupid fucking book. What even is this? “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”? What the hell? Bit morbid, that. Okay, fuck, I can do this. Let’s see, Google “best album lists”. “Rolling Stone’s 500 Best Albums”. Ha! Great. Halfway there. Alright, next link is “100 Best 60’s Psychedlic Albums”. Okay, a bit odd, but that works. Next is “200 Best British New Wave Albums”. Perfect. Then we have “250 Brit Pop Albums You May Remember” Jolly good. Alright, we’re at 1200. Eliminate doubles, and Shit! Back to 800. Oh fuck, it’s 4:50pm. Fuck!
Okay, desperate times and all that. Let’s search “British album charts: 1980 to present”. Bugger, the ones in the top ten are probably already on here. Okay, I’ll just copy and paste the 14th biggest album from 201 random weeks, wow I have never heard of any of this shit, oh well, it’ll just seem like I did a deep dive into obscure hidden gems of albums, and . . . Robert, lad, you’ve done it again! Send. Whew. That was bad even for me. Hopefully nobody ever pays too much attention to this book.
Also, I hope that I didn’t pick some completely generic techno album with nothing unique or interesting about it whatsoever. Ah, I’m sure it’s fine!
3/5
I can completely hear how this is a solid album that captured its moment perfectly. Oasis took Brit pop and mixed in a little grunge, turned down the synths, added a hint of pub rock, and recorded a totally solid album that connected with millions of people. But I’m not one of them and I’m not totally sure why. I don’t dislike them at all and honestly think I should like them more, but for some reason they just don’t connect with me. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall (I hope I’m the first to make that reference 🤞🏻).
Neil Young
4/5
This is a very good album, and Young would go on to record a truly great one two years later. Sad cranky Canadian hippie country guitar rock. What’s not to like?
The Libertines
3/5
I was not familiar with this album, but it’s not bad. Garage rock revival with a little bit of The Smiths thrown in. Pretty decent.
Bon Jovi
2/5
There are so many awful people on this list: Nazis, incest committers, sexual assaulters, and more pedophiles than you can shake a stick at. And then there is Jon Bon Jovi. I am sure he has done plenty of terrible things, and his involvement in professional and semi-professional sports definitely makes me think he might be a bad person, but he has also been married to his high school sweetheart for forty years, campaigns for Democratic candidates, has given millions to charity, works in soup kitchens, and even talked someone off a bridge and prevented their suicide. Great right? No. I am sorry if this makes me a hipster, but this sucks. This is music for children. This is just what you listen to after "Baby Shark" and before real music. I am glad that Mr. Bon Jovi is out there doing good, and it is much appreciated, but if I never hear another one of his songs again, my life would be improved.
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
I have tried to get into this band before - beyond their one hit - but the singer’s voice is always a pretty difficult obstacle to overcome. I like a rock band with a brass section and enjoyed this album but the vocals kept me from enjoying more.
Amy Winehouse
2/5
A nineteen year old Brit doing the cliched female jazz singer voice 😒. The music is okay, but Macy Gray had given me all of this I needed long before Amy Winehouse came along.
Pink Floyd
5/5
The greatest prog rock record of all time. This is what a rock album should be. Not just a collection of songs but one cohesive whole.
I love it when weirdos either decide to, or are forced to, try to make something normal. When weirdos are allowed to be as weird as they want, they make stuff that’s too weird. When normies try to make normal stuff, it’s boring. But when weirdos operate in the box of normality, that’s when true greatness can happen.
This album is just weird enough to be interesting but not so weird that it becomes unlistenable. That’s the sweet spot.
Underworld
2/5
I love how unpredictable techno is. Like, is it going to go “uncha uncha uncha uncha” or “uncha uncha uncha unch”?! The possibilities are . . . those two.
Brian Wilson
3/5
I don’t get it. Why are you having me listen to an album of children’s music? I’m a grown up.
Kings of Leon
2/5
Bland, generic, boring bro-rock.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
1/5
From the Reddit thread linked in this article: https://www.smackmedia.ca/news/rhcp-assaults-problematic-industry
Early in their career, Flea allegedly asked a 13-year-old if she was backstage “to give all of [them] head.”
In Scar Tissue, Kiedis’ 2004 autobiography, he admits to having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Kiedis wrote “Catholic School Girls Rule” about her. The song was most recently performed in 2007.
He also admits that he began dating Ione Skye a few days before her 16th birthday. Within a few months, they moved in together. While driving to rehab, he drove erratically and frightened Ione. He describes his behavior in their relationship as “emotional terrorism.”
In Japan, he said that he had sex with someone after “about five hours of nonstop subtle loving coercion.” He had sex with Jaime Rishar when she was 17. Also, the book has a topless photo of Ione that might have been taken before she was eighteen.
On April 21, 1989, Kiedis allegedly touched a woman’s face with his penis after a concert. The band also allegedly stole her car. Kiedis said that it was "blown way out of proportion by both the media and the prosecution. It was a playful thing that happened backstage -- there was never any harmful intention. Speaking for my band and myself, we're all very friendly people who would never want to hurt anybody or make people uncomfortable."
In May 1990, Flea and Smith were arrested after grabbing a fan while taping a Spring Break segment for Club MTV. Flea picked up a female fan and placed her over his shoulders. Smith pulled down the woman’s bathing suit bottoms and began spanking her. The woman fell, and Flea knelt on top of her and demanded she perform oral sex on him. According to police she was bruised. Flea was charged with battery, disorderly conduct, and solicitation to commit an unnatural and lascivious act. Smith was charged with battery. They plead guilty and were each required to pay $5,000 to a rape crisis center.
The band discussed the incident in an interview with Rolling Stone. Flea said that it was wrong of him to yell at the woman, but that he “did not assault anybody, and it was not sexual. It had nothing to do with sex.” Smith said that, while he was not trying to avoid blame, they were trying to make an example of them. “The way it came out was that it was a real malicious thing, that we tried to beat this girl up.”
Julie Farman was sexually harassed by two members of the band in 1991. She went into a storage room with two members of the band, who pressed up against her and “told [her] about all of the ways [they] could make a super sexy sandwich.” She was an executive at Epic Records. While the band was never signed to Epic Records, they were attempting to negotiate a contract with the label at the time.
2/5
I tried to get into this when it came out and it never really clicked for me. Listening to it again, I feel the same way. I have no problem with PJ Harvey but she just doesn’t click with me for whatever reason.
Iggy Pop
2/5
It must be very gratifying when the person you’ve been copying for years gets so bad with the drugs that he has to start copying you copying the people you started copying after you stopped copying him. Good for David Bowie.
Hanoi Rocks
3/5
It’s ironic that the band that invented glam metal knew that the genre was a joke and treated it as such, but all the bands that came along and copied them were too dumb to realize that wearing wigs and eye liner and screeching over screechy guitars makes you a clown, not a cool tough rock god.
Kanye West
3/5
“I’m not going to support this Nazi by listening to his music. I mean, I’ll listen to all the other Nazis, pedophiles, rapists, abusers, and general pieces of shit on this list, but not this particular one. Aren’t I enlightened?” - y'all stupid motherfuckers.
Fuck y'all. Kanye West has gone insane as many geniuses do but this is a great album. The beats are solid, the subject matter goes beyond the stupid gangsta cliches rappers constantly spout, and it’s actually funny pretty much throughout. But enjoy being morally pure by not listening to this and maybe spin some RHCP instead.
Massive Attack
4/5
Great album, invented a genre, etc.
It’s funny that people say one of these guys is Banksy because I can see it. Banksy is the very definition of r/Im14andthisisdeep but I also kind of like Banksy despite that, and the same with Massive Attack’s lyrics. They are pretty cringe at times - not to mention the inherent cringe of British people rapping - but I fully give them a pass because they are cool despite how dorky they are. Maybe it’s just cringe amnesty for being from the early 90’s.
Rush
4/5
This isn’t really prog and it isn’t really hard rock. This album is its own thing because Rush is its own thing. Rush is weird and nerdy and lame and cool and awful and amazing and pretentious and Libertarian and Canadian and beautiful and exciting and boring all at the same time. Rush is too complex to label. Every time you experience Rush, the band is something different depending of who you are at that moment.
This isn’t my favorite Rush album but I still cannot deny what it is. I may like Da Vinci’s designs for a helicopter better than the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to say the Mona Lisa sucks. This album is Rush’s Mona Lisa.
Crowded House
3/5
Pros: (1) kind of sounds like Squeeze (apparently Squeeze didn’t make the book! Dimery, you slimey limey, how many times are you going to fuck up?!); (2) has some decent songs on it.
Cons: (1) boring and (2) goes on way too long.
All things considered, eh. https://giphy.com/gifs/latenightseth-seth-meyers-lnsm-8Fc0E0rNGI1xSSqBTZ
Al Green
4/5
There is a scene in a Simpsons episode where a Christian music artist is describing switching from Christian music to pop and she says that basically all you have to do is switch “Jesus” for “baby” in the lyrics and you’re most of the way there. I can’t fault Al Green as a performer because he’s great, and he’s certainly not the first or the last to take gospel music and change “Jesus” to “baby” (or “religion” to “lovin”) but man is it blatant. Still, amazing singing, infectious grooves, an incredible album.
Robbie Williams
2/5
These types of albums happen occasionally. This is a boy band member’s solo record attempting to be the one member who gets to escape the sinking ship of nostalgia tours and “Where are They Now?” episodes. We’ve all agreed that there can be only one and this was this guy’s bid to be it from his boy band. This is just the British “Justified”.
I could see including this album on a list of the 1001 albums you must hear before you die if (1) I was British 😬 and (2) was of a certain age where this became a phenomenon in the very small place I was from while I was plugged into that place’s popular culture. Oh sorry, I left off (3) if I was a fucking moron and made no effort whatsoever to make an actual list of important and quality records and was deaf and was the stupidest person alive.
That was an important one.
Meat Loaf
1/5
If we were going to have to listen to a musical soundtrack I would have preferred “Annie”.
Buena Vista Social Club
4/5
I borrowed this album from the public library on CD in the early 2000’s because I remembered that at the time it came out it was all the rage but I hadn’t listened to it. I got super into it back then for a couple of months but hadn’t listened to it more than a handful of times over the last couple of decades. But then my mother-in-law got it for me on vinyl recently (shout out T-Money) and while I was happy to have a physical copy of an album that I had fond memories of, I haven’t enjoyed it as much as I remembered doing 20 years or so ago. I still like it, but not as much as I remembered.
I get being pissed off that it was NPR- listeners’ “world music” fad of the moment but that’s not these guys’ fault. The songs are pretty and fun to listen to. They also evoke a time and place that I can never visit but that seems super cool. This music is really good and worth listening to even if your hippie art teacher played this and danced around embarrassingly.
PJ Harvey
2/5
I wonder if any artist who was about to make an album of harsh, discordant, unpleasant-sounding music ever thought to themself, “Hey, maybe instead of doing that, why don’t I try to make an album that people might actually want to listen to?”.
OutKast
4/5
This isn’t my favorite OutKast album but it is still an incredible, undeniable monster of a record. “Bombs Over Baghdad” is one of my all time favorite songs. It was also cool living through the time when this album absolutely owned popular culture. And it couldn’t have happened to two more talented performers. OutKast is as good as hip-hop gets and amongst the best of pop music generally. This album is funny, smart, catchy; basically everything you could want out of a record. This would get full marks from me if it was a single album rather than a double.
Kid Rock
1/5
Kid Rock is like if Woodstock ‘99 was a person. This is music for young, straight, white men who are really angry that they aren’t allowed to beat up women and minorities like their grandfathers were able to. I’m embarrassed that this is on this list and to have listened to it.
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
Old school hip hop always surprises me as to how fun it is. This sounds like Run-DMC were having fun when they recorded it and I know I had fun listening to it. I hate that feeling got lost somewhere along the way.
The only real negative about this album - other than the fact that people just hadn’t quite figured out rapping yet at this time - is that it is front-loaded. The quality of the songs drops off with “Perfection” and never rises to the level of the first half of the album. That’s pretty minor though. This is a really strong album and I’m glad to have heard it.
Johnny Cash
2/5
Artist: *releases an album, then dies*
Robert Dimery: “This must be heard!”
I like some of these songs. I just like the versions sung at a decent tempo by someone who doesn’t sound like a wheezing bullfrog. Being about to die doesn’t give you depth or introspection. It just means that you’re not very good at making music because you’re 70% dead. This album sucks and “Hurt” is just edgelord-bait.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
2/5
Some things are dumb and fun. This is just dumb.
The Who
3/5
I have heard this described as the greatest live album of all time. Apparently this really blew people away when it came out, but I don’t get it. It’s pretty good. Rocks pretty hard, I suppose, but nothing life changing. A totally decent live album by a totally decent band.
Beastie Boys
3/5
Well, well, well, if it isn’t Run-DMC’s young white avatars. This is half a Rick Rubin album and half a Weird Al parody of 80’s rap. This shouldn’t have been anything more than a novelty album but this is the world we live in I guess. I kind of hate that I like this but I can’t really help it. This is too fun not to like.
Eagles
3/5
As much as I love a "Big Lebowski" quote, I am going to try to give my actual thoughts on this album. Growing up, my options for radio stations were country, R&B and classic rock. The small city whose radio stations reached the small town I lived in the country next to got an alternative station in the 90's but that was pretty late in the game for me. So, I ended up listening to classic rock radio in the American South for most of my young adulthood, and other than 70's Southern Rock, bland popular country-tinged folk rock was right in line with what the station thought its listeners wanted to hear. Every fifth song, constantly, every day, all the time.
It’s not really that the Eagles are bad (I mean, they are kind of bad), it’s that the gulf between their quality and their popularity is about as vast as any in popular music. I like country and folk-flavored rock. I like the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds, CSN&Y, CCR, and a ton of 90's alt-country bands that owe a lot to the 70's country/folk rock scene. I think that if the Eagles Greatest Hits wasn't the best selling album of all time that I would like them just as much as I do those other 70's country/folk-rock bands. But instead I grew up listening to three of the songs on this album multiple times a day, every day, for years. And they aren’t bad songs. But they are also not songs so good that you want to listen to them multiple times a day, every day, for years. And as a consequence of having these pretty-okay-but-not-that-great songs shoved down my throat for most of my young adulthood, I kind of hate the fuckin' Eagles, man.
The War On Drugs
3/5
Both this album, and the individual songs on this album, are too long. If something was going to happen in these songs, it would have happened within 3 minutes or so, but nothing ever does. These songs are the equivalent of sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. And when someone lets out a weird high-pitched “WHOow!!” in a dentist’s waiting room, it doesn’t make me think that the dentist’s waiting room is exciting, it just makes me think the guy yelling is nuts.
Ali Farka Touré
3/5
This wasn’t bad. I liked the playing better than the singing. But all in all this was pretty cool.
Public Image Ltd.
2/5
I hate John Lydon and I hate post-punk and I hate long songs, but this honestly wasn’t too bad. Kind of droning and trancy. It helps if you only kind of halfway listen to it. The singing is really the worst part. The playing is also bad but not as bad as the singing. This is pretty bad.
Queen
3/5
How could you not listen to a Queen album containing such hits as . . . uh . . . well there’s um . . . wait does that say “ogre battle”? What the fuck is this?
Like, I guess it is kind of cool that this is an album from a band that you can hear figuring stuff out that they would later go on to incorporate into better songs, but why not just listen to the albums with those better songs on it instead?
Some of this is okay but some of this sounds like Meatloaf.
The Rolling Stones
4/5
My favorite album of all time is “Exile on Mainstreet” and my love for that album bleeds over into an affection for this whole Stones era, even though I’m not a big Rolling Stones fan. Their song “Torn and Frayed” was such an apt way to describe the band at this time. Brian Jones - the heart of the first iteration of the band - was dead. They had been the biggest rock & roll band in the world for a decade but were flat broke. They had arguably just killed someone and maybe killed the peace and love dream of the 60’s as a whole. Half of them were hooked on hard drugs and the other half were drunk. They were wearing blousy shirts, sleeping all day and staying up all night and living in castles. And you know who does that? Vampires. They were just a bunch of drug-addicted vampires waving guns at Frenchmen and stealing other people’s music. It was a wild time for The Rolling Stones and I’m glad to be able to hear what came out of it.
Neil Young
3/5
This album had some cool parts but those cool parts never came together to make particularly good songs. Neil Young has some good albums but this isn’t one of them.
Doves
2/5
Bland, generic early-2000’s British “indie” “rock” of absolutely no import or significance. This list is a joke.
The Prodigy
3/5
We rocked so hard in the 90’s that we had to have actual sword fights going on in our techno songs just to feel something. Over forty fully trained adult ninjas died to make “Breathe”. And it was worth it.
The Jesus And Mary Chain
3/5
I like straight ahead wall of sound 1950’s girl group inspired pop. I dislike distorted fuzzy shoegazey noise. So I am torn when it comes to this album. I like the poppy parts and dislike the noisy parts. However, I’ve had this album recommended to me for years so I’m glad I finally actually listened to it.
Muddy Waters
4/5
The whole album is just a build up to “I’ve Got My Mojo Working” and he hits that song and just goes off. Then he plays it again and you still aren’t tired of it. Blues can be formulaic and samey but I’m glad this performance was captured on tape because it was something special.
In fact, listening to this live album makes me wonder if I - and obviously all of you cause you’re a bunch of idiots - have been wrong about the blues all along. Maybe it’s not formulaic and samey, maybe we’re just experiencing it the wrong way. The songs don’t have variety because they are all parts of a whole, which is the performance. We are no more meant to listen to a single blues song on tape at our work desk than we’re meant to read Shakespeare in a classroom. These things are meant to be experienced live. We are meant to attend a performance by this artist where he builds and builds and builds from song to song and lures us into a sense of regularity and then explodes and blows everyone away.
Also, hearing Muddy Waters sing about mojo the way it’s meant to be sung makes me want to slap Jim Morrison in his stupid hippie face.
T. Rex
3/5
This sounds like Thin Lizzy or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I think lots of people like this kind of thing but I don’t get it. I guess the Baby Boomers stopped caring about peace and love and spiritual enlightenment and just wanted to be gender fluid and get laid and snort cocaine and later start disco dancing? This is better than Donovan et al but it doesn’t really click for me.
Peter Gabriel
3/5
The Invention of Art-Pop: a play in one act.
Artist: I don’t feel like going to all the trouble of making a good record. That’s too much work!
Producer: It’s cool baby. Just make an okay record but make it a little weird and pretentious. It won’t sell as well as a good record, but the kids who want to think that they’re smart will buy it, so the sales will be decent.
Artist: Hooray! *grabs bongo drums and/or didgeridoo*
Scene.
Garbage
2/5
There were a lot of interesting things happening in music in the 90’s. Here’s an album of soulless manufactured copies of some of those interesting things.
Donald Fagen
3/5
I love Steely Dan but the best song on this album would be the sixth best song on Katy Lied or Pretzel Logic. I’ll take all the Dan I can get but this just isn’t doing it for me.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
4/5
“Teach Your Children” and “Our House” are the type of songs that you’ve heard so many times that you can’t really have an opinion on them. I mean, do you like or dislike “Jingle Bells” or “America the Beautiful” or are they just part of your musical DNA that is too deeply embedded to have an opinion on? In addition to those two “too big to like or dislike” songs, “Carry On”, “Helpless”, “Woodstock” and “Deja Vu” are all good. This is an impressive album. I don’t play it often but I do like it.
Air
5/5
In my opinion, this album is the best downtempo electronica ever made. Maybe you’re not in the mood for downtempo electronica or maybe downtempo electronica just isn’t for you. But, if you are ever in a place and time where you’re in the mood for this type of music, this is as good as it gets. An absolute classic of an album.
UB40
3/5
Today I learned that the awful 1980's British reggae band that did “Red Red Wine” released a really cool debut album that was super political, dub heavy, staunchly anti-Thatcherite and recorded under the most DIY conditions imaginable. These are the types of discoveries that keep me doing this project.
Bill Callahan
2/5
I had to make sure that this wasn’t the guy from a fuzzy noisy 90’s band that then went on to make deep-voiced singer-songwriter albums that 2010’s-era Pitchfork tried to convince me were good but that I just don’t get who was credibly accused of being a sex pest. But that’s Mark Kozelek. So we’re good. But this album isn’t.
Elis Regina
3/5
Apparently this is a compilation made up of songs from two different albums, "Elis" from 1980, and one song from the 1979 album "Essa Mulher". Most of this sounds very late-70's/early-80's to me. Tiro Ao Álvaro is okay. I don't particularly enjoy her voice and the music is not that compelling either. I could have lived without hearing this.
Metallica
2/5
You hate this album because it’s too different from the earlier Metallica albums that you like. I hate this album because it’s too similar to the earlier Metallica albums that I also hate. We are not the same. Also, I’ve read a book before in my life. Which, I have to assume that as you are a Metallica fan is another way in which we differ.
Lauryn Hill
3/5
The good songs are very good. The rest is filler, the skits are boring and the album goes on WAAAYYYY too long. I think this album is overhyped by people who want to like it more than they actually like it.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
“Wah wah 80’s production … wah wah background singers … wah wah Casio keyboard”. Man, why don’t you shove a Casio keyboard up your ass and shut the fuck up. This is where Leonard Cohen was at in 1988 and wherever Leonard Cohen happened to find himself at any particular moment in time is more interesting than anywhere your favorite artist has ever been in his sad misbegotten worthless life. What you need to understand is that Leonard Cohen was born like this, he had no choice. He was born with the gift of a golden voice.
Sisters Of Mercy
2/5
There’s this scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when George dances with Mary for the first time and a character played by the actor most famous for playing Alfalfa in The Little Rascals objects and George Bailey looks at him with anger and disdain and says “Oh why don’t you stop annoying people.” It’s on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/NBKqJHOC0JY?si=GITeWA4FCyrhHnI_. Every once in a while I will hear a song that causes me to look at the radio in disdain and say out loud “Oh why don’t you stop annoying people.” This whole album made me feel that way.
The album cover is hilarious though.
The Beta Band
3/5
Being assigned albums like this bothers me more than being assigned albums I hate. I have no feelings about this album whatsoever. It’s fine. I’ve heard generic, early-to-mid-2000’s indie pop a million times before. This is just a meaningless, nothing of an album. No lasting influence; not remembered as being a step forward artistically; not commercially successful. Just a bland inconsequential generic British indie pop album that the dude who made this list happened to like when he was at the age of liking current bands. Listening to this album is pointless, stupid and a waste of time. Albums like this make me feel like doing this project is a waste of time as well.
U2
3/5
I’m not opposed to bombast or pomposity. I like a lot of bombastic and pompous things. More than your average person, I expect. But I think that my tolerance for bombast and pomposity ends right before U2 begins.
Violent Femmes
5/5
I guess when you love an album as much as I loved this one when I was 17, that love stays with you for life. Because this album hasn’t lost a step after 30 years in terms of my estimation. Easy five stars. Rarely can music just instantly put me in a good mood the way the Violent Femmes can. Not only does this album not have a bad track on it, I’m not entirely sure it has a less than perfect moment for all of its 36 minutes. A masterpiece.
Sly & The Family Stone
3/5
I always think I should like Sly and the Family Stone more than I do, but they just never seem to click with me. I think the problems are that the singles are kind of cheesy and then that one singer does those high-pitched screams that I find off-putting. Put those together and it makes for a band that has just never done it for me. This album is okay and I like that it is less poppy than Stand! but it did not turn me around on the band.
Jerry Lee Lewis
4/5
I don’t like Jerry Lee Lewis or live albums but this was pretty great. I don’t care if it was basically just a Little Richard tribute act, that was live rock & roll at its best.
Talking Heads
3/5
I like the Talking Heads quite a bit but this album did not do it for me.
Björk
4/5
Not Bjäd.
The Cure
4/5
Sorry Kyle Brovlosky (https://youtu.be/5G5YguuNSJg?si=-sMadHfyHLI9cv04), but while this album has some great songs on it, it also drones on forever with some sadsack nonsense that nobody has time for.
And if you’re going to sing about a spider monster that you freaked out about while tripping on goofballs you can’t call it “the spiderman.” There is already a Spider-Man and he doesn’t eat people. He is friendly and lives in a neighborhood.
The Smiths
4/5
At one time in my life The Smiths were my favorite band and I still love them to this day. Everything bad people say about them is either people not being smart enough to understand what they were doing or, yeah, that’s just who they are. And I love them for most of that. One thing about who they are is that I think they were a singles band rather than an album band, and so none of their albums is as good as their two Best Of collections which I had as a teenager and wore out, lamenting how terrible life was rather than actually going outside and trying to make something out of it, which is a choice I fully stand by.
The Cure
3/5
I had “Disintegration” Monday, the Smiths on Tuesday and now this today. The album generator either thinks I’m a moody teenager or is trying to get me to kill myself (it makes sense that as soon as the machines have become sentient they would try to take me out. I’m the greatest warrior for humanity that has ever lived because I’m a cool dude and I like to party).
I used to think I didn’t like the Cure, then for the last decade or so I thought I liked them, and now this week has convinced me that I was right the first time and I don’t actually like the Cure. “The Forest” was pretty good, but the rest of the album just kind of faded into the background and sounded vaguely the same. Not bad, but not good either.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
2/5
I am clearly capable of making music that people would enjoy. Should I like, halfway do that, but then also halfway fill every song with abrasive noise that sounds terrible that any reasonable person would hate?
https://tenor.com/Jz5X.gif
Pulp
4/5
I enjoyed this album. I had heard “Common People” and “Disco 2000” before but not the rest of it and it’s pretty solid throughout. Can the vocals seem cheesy at times and the lyrical content be a bit gross? Sure. But I can forgive a lot when everything else going on works this well.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
I have heard the first two songs a bunch of times before but didn't know any of the others. Not bad. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always been one of those bands that I kind of like and enjoy their singles but have never liked enough to listen to an entire album regularly. Listening to this one didn't move them out of that designation, but there are some pretty good songs on here and I’m glad to have heard it.
Dusty Springfield
5/5
A schmaltzy British torch singer and TV presenter whose career is on the skids signs with a new label and goes to Memphis to try to emulate her idol, Aretha Franklin, recording songs by a random grab bag of writers, including Randy Newman, Carole King and Burt Bacharach. Why is it that things that really shouldn’t work seem to end up being the most sublime when they actually do? Because this weird nonsense is easily one of my favorite albums of all time. There is hardly a bad second on the entire record. Just sheer greatness from start to finish.
The Associates
2/5
This sounds like an Andrew Lloyd Webber version of the all puppet Dracula musical that the guy from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was writing. Blah!
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
3/5
When this hits it is an absolute blast but when it misses, it misses huge. The songs that work make the rest forgivable though. This is an album worth hearing.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
I love CCR’s loose, bar band, country-tinged sound. They get played to death on classic rock radio but they are good enough to still be fun to listen to despite that. Not every song on here works but most do. A great album.
Joni Mitchell
5/5
Rarely has an artist been so bravely and completely herself the way Joni Mitchell is on this record and throughout her life really. She can do so much with sparse instrumentation, her voice and her writing.
Just before our love got lost you said
"I am as constant as a northern star"
And I said "Constantly in the darkness
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar."
I love the vivid picture and feeling she creates with her words and I love this album. But what do I know? I’m just a romantic, so I’m cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café.
Justin Timberlake
1/5
The fact that this album sucks so much is going to ruin the tour. The WORLD TOUR.
Janelle Monáe
2/5
I didn’t like her Knives Out movie, she’s associated with Diddy and Grimes, and she just seems like a lot. Androids and musicals and anime and just a whole bunch of lame weirdness that I don’t have the energy for. I don’t mind a gimmick if the songs are good but this was nothing but gimmick with no good songs.
Queen Latifah
3/5
Some styles of music can seem timeless and sound fresh decades after release, but listening to late 80’s rap feels equivalent to playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II. This album makes me feel like a musical archeologist. This is what this style of music sounded like then, but not what it sounds like now, and the music itself is not good enough that how dated it sounds doesn’t matter. There is some rap from this time period that is still enjoyable despite it making me feel like I’m listening to Smithsonian recordings of Depression-era folk songs, but this isn’t it.
Arcade Fire
3/5
When your first album is as good as Funeral, even an album of diminishing returns is still going to be pretty good.
Parliament
5/5
We were so close in 1975. We were right there. We are Orpheus and we had gone to hell and rescued our true love and were on the cusp of stepping out into the sunshine with her by our side. All people - no matter their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, nationality - were all slowly and tentatively walking up the steps of the mothership, getting ready to join an intergalactic rainbow coalition of peace, love, fun and funk.
Parliament-Funkadelic were leaving us musical breadcrumbs leading us up to Nirvana. A future where everyone had enough and lived with all their brothers and sisters in harmony. We were RIGHT THERE!!!! And then we lost faith, started to fear and doubt, and turned back to look and make sure Eurydice was still there. Then the CIA pumped crack into our communities and we elected Reagan and started watching “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. And now we’re here.
Make my funk the p-funk. I want to get funked up.
The Pretty Things
3/5
This is a British psychedelic rock opera. Things I don’t particularly like include psychedelic music, rock operas and the British. That being said, S.F. Sorrow isn’t that bad, despite the fact that it would likely be much improved if it were not psychedelic and was not a rock opera and if the people who made it were from a real country.
The Cramps
2/5
I’ve never really watched any of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies but there is like a family of grimy inbred hillbilly murderers in those movies, right? Well, I suppose if those guys got together with the California beach town vampires from The Lost Boys for a concert on Halloween and this band played then they would all have a really nice time. But I didn’t.
You know what I think it is that I don’t like about this and any spooky or spooky-adjacent music? Menace. I don’t like music or vocals that sound menacing. I find life in general plenty menacing. I don’t need any more menace than I get from youths walking by my car when I’m stopped at a redlight after 6pm. Sell menace somewhere else. I’m all stocked up.
Baaba Maal
3/5
I had a very hard time with this the first two times I listened to it, and I still find the style of singing, or the tone the singer uses, grating, but by the third time through I started to get the hypnotic aspects of the album that other reviewers have mentioned. The vocals make it something I don’t plan for return to but all in all it was not an unpleasant listening experience.
Sigur Rós
3/5
Nah dawg, you’re gonna have to miss me with the ten minute long songs in a made up language with titles ripped from the pages of the IKEA catalog.
ABBA
3/5
There are singles bands and album bands and - despite what rock snobs may believe - neither is superior to the other. They are just working in two different idioms. ABBA is a singles band and some of the singles on this collection of songs are as good as singles get. But that doesn’t make this an album.
That being said, ABBA rule. They are Swedish International Superstars.
The Byrds
3/5
I like the Byrds. I am not opposed to jangle, in fact I enjoy it for the most part. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is one of my favorite albums. But I don’t get much out of this. Mr. Tambourine Man does not strike me as an album you must hear before you die. It is more like an album by a band that would go on to do much more interesting things later on.
William Orbit
2/5
generic electronic background music/random sounds
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
This is pretty fun. A bit dated but still enjoyable.
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
I like Booker T. & The MG's; I like the title track; I like instrumental music featuring a funky organ - evidenced by the two Jimmy Smith records I own and play regularly - but this album just didn’t work for me. I wouldn’t call it bad, but it’s one great iconic song and then 32 minutes of filler. Pretty decent filler, but filler just the same.
Cat Stevens
3/5
Cat Stevens is alright but 37 minutes of Cat Stevens in a row is too much. Listen to this album all the way through and then play any other song and that other song will sound like the best song you’ve ever heard just because it isn’t a Cat Stevens song.
The National
3/5
Why are indie “rockers” incapable of making any fucking sense? Every other genre has songs that are about things. About dancing; about relationships; about drugs; about something. But not indie music. “You and your sister live in a lemon world; I want to sit in and die.” WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!!!???? Make sense! It’s not that hard. Sure, use poetic language to express yourself, but Jesus, express something other than “here are some words maybe they mean something maybe not who knows”. God I hate you Brooklyn hipster doofuses.
Pixies
4/5
If I hadn’t loved this album in the 90’s, I’d probably hate it now. But I was super into this album in the 90’s and so now when I hear Frank Black yelling and the guitars buzz-sawing, I don’t think “ahh! stop all that terrible noise! you’re hurting my ears!” like I do with a lot of the more discordant albums on this list. I think “Gods I rocked hard then” and my soft, quiet music-loving soul fills with joy at the fond memory of a hard-rocking past that probably never really existed. But even if I heard this album for the first time today, the fact that it has both "Gigantic" and "Where is My Mind?" on it would likely win me over despite the rest of the album being a bit too abrasive.
Green Day
2/5
Ugh. The only thing worse than regular dumb-and-proud-of-it punk rock lyrics are dumb-but-trying-to-be-deep/political punk rock lyrics. Musically this is fine, but I got all of it that I wanted from Dookie. Wake me up when this album ends.
Lou Reed
2/5
“Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day” are great songs. The rest of this album sounds like demos for a musical about living in New York in the early 70’s that never got made because it was too precious even for musicals about living in New York in the early 70’s.
Beatles
3/5
How do you rate an album that almost every song you’ve ever heard has somewhere in its DNA? I suppose the question has to be: would I put this on for pleasure, and I wouldn’t. It isn’t bad by any means, but it wouldn’t be the Beatles album I would choose to spin.
Q-Tip
3/5
This sounded really repetitive to me. Buh-buh-Buh-buh-Buh-buh-Buh-buh over and over again for 43 minutes. I have also never really cared for Q-Tip’s voice, even though I cannot fault his lyricism. The samples weren’t bad but I did not find them to be woven together into a pleasing whole. All things considered, I doubt that I will listen to this album again.
Jimmy Smith
4/5
I love this and “Midnight Special” and play them both regularly. They are two of my favorite jazz records. Zero pretension, 100% fun. A great album.
Milton Nascimento
3/5
This wasn’t bad. A cool blending a several different musical styles. But nothing about this really grabbed me or struck me as memorable.
The Police
3/5
The Police give off really strong U2 vibes to me. Same general time period and both from the UK. New-wavey, but also not. Pompous lead singers. Both bands that seem to be something I would like, but that I don’t particularly. This album isn’t bad (except for “Mother” - are you kidding me with this?!) but the Police just aren’t my cup of tea in the Sahara with you.
Nirvana
3/5
Nirvana sucks: a mathematical proof.
{NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL} = TRUE.
{Most people are happy that NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL} = TRUE.
{Most people are happy that NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL because HAIR METAL sucks} = TRUE.
IF {Most people are happy that NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL because HAIR METAL sucks} = TRUE; THEN {HAIR METAL sucks} = TRUE.
{HAIR METAL fans liked HAIR METAL} = TRUE.
IF {HAIR METAL sucks} = TRUE; AND {HAIR METAL fans liked HAIR METAL} = TRUE; THEN {HAIR METAL fans like music that sucks} = TRUE.
{NEW BAND kills OLD GENRE by making fans of OLD GENRE abandon it} = TRUE.
{Fans of OLD GENRE abandon OLD GENRE because they like NEW BAND better than OLD GENRE} = TRUE.
IF {NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL} = TRUE; AND {NEW BAND kills OLD GENRE by making fans of OLD GENRE abandon it} = TRUE; AND {Fans of OLD GENRE abandon it because they like NEW BAND better than OLD GENRE} = TRUE; WHERE {NIRVANA} = {NEW BAND} AND {HAIR METAL} = {OLD GENRE}; THEN {NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL by making fans of HAIR METAL abandon it because they liked NIRVANA better than HAIR METAL} = TRUE.
IF {NIRVANA killed HAIR METAL by making fans of HAIR METAL abandon it because they liked NIRVANA better than HAIR METAL} = TRUE; THEN {HAIR METAL fans liked NIRVANA} = TRUE.
IF {HAIR METAL fans liked NIRVANA} = TRUE; AND {HAIR METAL fans like music that sucks} = TRUE; THEN {NIRVANA sucks} = TRUE.
{NIRVANA sucks} = TRUE.
Big Brother & The Holding Company
3/5
Bluesy, loose and fun. “Piece of My Heart” is far and away the strongest song, but it’s fairly fun throughout.
Fred Neil
2/5
This guy didn’t want to be in the music business and just wanted to live at the beach and fuck dolphins and squeeze the heads of any passing children who got too close to his strong tanned arms. Shouldn’t we respect his wishes and let him leave the music business completely by not listening to his albums ever? I’m certainly going to.
Beyoncé
2/5
Beyoncé fronts a team that makes very polished, fairly catchy, mostly forgettable music. I have nothing against her, but absent a few songs over her long career, I could not care less about anything she has ever done. I also feel like the majority of her fans are fans of her as a “yass queen” icon than as a musician. I could have lived without hearing this album.
Carole King
4/5
Man, the Brill Building was bursting with talent at the time Carole King and Burt Bacharach and Neil Diamond and Paul Simon and so many others were working/being tortured to produce hits there. Carole King is an incredible songwriter and she has a very expressive (if not traditionally strong) voice. I think Tapestry is deservedly ranked among the greatest albums of all time even though it is not one of my personal favorites.
Kanye West
3/5
“Too many Urkels on your team that’s why your wins low.” Verses like that are why I enjoy Kanye’s music while not defending him as a person. I don’t think that this is amongst his best albums but it’s still pretty decent. Nicki Minaj's verse on "Monster" is ridiculously good and there are a number of other fun moments, but as a whole this isn’t as strong as several of his other albums.
Manic Street Preachers
2/5
If I wanted to hear a Welshman yell angrily for an hour I’d just lock up his neighbor’s sheep after he has been down to the pub.
Ice Cube
3/5
Ice Cube was my favorite member of NWA and I had this album on CD in the 90’s. I think gangsta rap’s expression of anger at racial injustice spoke to my anger at the world stemming from clichéd teen angst. Ice Cube’s rhymes were often clever and occasionally insightful and his beats and samples were varied and catchy. This is a good album.
The Stooges
2/5
This is like the Doors sped up a measure and with a saxophonist instead of an organist. This sucks.
Radiohead
1/5
I had liked OK Computer pretty well a decade earlier and when this album was released under the pay-what-you-want model I thought that was neat, so I went to Radiohead.com or whatever and downloaded this for $0.00. I overpaid.
Oh well, at least there are only 37 more Radiohead albums on this list that I’ll have to suffer through.
The Smashing Pumpkins
2/5
The fact that Billy Corgan is now a wrestling promoter tells you everything you need to know about his “artistic” philosophy: Make entertainment of the lowest common denominator to appeal to as many dumb people as possible.
Given that this album is made up of fairly inoffensive grunge rockers and ballads, I could see having given it three stars if it had been a single album. But nah son, two hours? Two stars.
At least the album cover is pretty.
The Cult
3/5
From Wikipedia: “The album marked a deliberate stylistic change in the band's sound from gothic rock to more traditional hard rock . . . in an effort to capitalize on the popularity of hard rock, glam metal and heavy metal in the 1980s.” While I applaud and encourage any and all bands to abandon goth rock for whatever reason, I feel like the Cult should have gone even farther in their quest to sell out. I still hear some of their original sound in this, and it sucks.
This album was certainly a step in the right direction though, because any step away from goth rock is always in the right direction. Goth rock is the South Pole of sucking. Any direction you move is always going to be North, i.e. less sucky.
You know when the lame dad in Kiss make up screams “Rock & Roll!!!” while making devil horns and you get a whole body cringe? This is that moment in album form. If you’re in the mood for completely generic hard rock, then this is a good choice (except for the abysmal “Born to Be Wild” cover) but that’s not a mood I find myself in very often.
For what it is - a late-80’s copy of AC/DC, late 70’s/early 80’s Stones and Zeppelin but with more annoying vocals - this is fine. But why would you want what this is?
The Roots
3/5
This is my first time hearing this and I thought it was pretty decent. I don’t anticipate putting it on again but it didn’t make my day any worse.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5/5
My Aim is True is my favorite Elvis Costello album, but Armed Forces is great too. Catchy power pop with cynical, clever lyrics makes me happy.
3/5
I don’t know how to rate an album like this. Do I own it or want to own it or think I would play it if I owned it? No to all three. Do I think the four massive hits that the album starts with are good songs? I have no idea. Probably. Do I ever want to listen to this again? Not really. Do I get why people really like this album? Sure, I guess. I don’t know man. I don’t know how you rate The Joshua Tree anymore than I know how to rate Thriller. I think this album was too massive a cultural juggernaut to try to have an opinion on.
Nick Drake
3/5
“Pink Moon” is a great song. Other than that? https://youtu.be/8V_hCqO6UQs?si=766EUVAM33QcViZ8
Dr. John
3/5
New Orleans is a great city, but it’s also a city of thieves and scoundrels with larceny deep in its heart. In fact, that is a big part of its charm. I’m sorry to inform anyone who paid to listen to this that you just got your pocket picked like a tourist on Lafayette Square. But as New Orleans knows, if a crime is committed with enough style then nobody minds too much.
Dead Kennedys
2/5
I hate Jello Biafra's voice and musically this strikes me as basically just angry noise. "California Über Alles" is pretty good as long as you don't listen to the lyrics too closely, which are dumb just like the rest of the lyrics to these songs.
It seems like punk can either be completely nihilistic/hedonistic, or advocate for cliched "fuck the system" politics. While I think "fuck the system, burn it to the ground!" is fine if you’re a 16 year old white suburbanite, what about a mother of two kids with disabilities who relies on “the system” for support to feed her kids? “Well that’s just a band aid and we need to tear it all down so people like that will revolt and make real change!” Well how many people have to die for that revolt to happen? Are you volunteering to be one of them or is it just the poor and the old and the disabled? And are you going to rebuild a new system that continues to do the limited amount of good that our current system does? And is this hypothetical new system not going to be just as bad as every other system people have had in place since we invented agriculture? This time is going to be different?
Punk rockers are like the angry dude pretending to want to fight the big guy who pissed them off at the bar while their friends are holding them back. They can only spout off at the mouth because they are safe in the knowledge that they can't actually do anything so they won't have to suffer any consequences. If you gave a random assortment of punk rockers the ability to make actual change they would wilt just as fast as the fake tough guy telling someone "you're lucky these guys are holding me back!" would if his friends let him go.
I agree the system sucks in a lot of ways. But I don’t want to tear down the system. I want to keep the beneficial parts of our current system and work to make gradual change that builds a fairer and more just society. But that message doesn’t really help you sell records to angry teenage boys.
Megadeth
1/5
I fully support besuited skeleton monsters with chainlink dreadlocks pulling the radioactive heart out of an alien while world leaders wearing the flags of their countries as patches on their suit coats look on with approval. I’m on record as being fully and unequivocally pro-that. But this shit REALLY sucks.
The Police
3/5
“Message in a Bottle” is catchy but cheesy. “Bring on the Night” and “Walking on the Moon” are okay. The rest of this album made zero impact on me. I know people like the Police. I don’t fault them for doing so. But they honestly do nothing for me.
Nirvana
3/5
Hard to rate an album that I’ve listened to as many times as I have this one. I think this was a good mostly acoustic set by a band that certainly had something. The flowers and candles set dressing is weird for a posthumous release.
I’m not sure why I am so hard on Nirvana. Do I feel like they were forced on me because of their popularity? Am I mad at MTV and the way music is marketed to young people? Am I just disappointed by how my teenage years went, and maybe just life in general? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure most of my feelings about Nirvana are not really about Nirvana.
This is not a bad album that I know backwards and forwards and never listen to. I can agree that everyone should hear it.
Foo Fighters
3/5
Foo Fighters is music for people who don’t actually like music. Genericore. And this isn’t even the kind of music that Dave Grohl listens to. He likes Pantera or Gwar or some shit. This is just pablum he made to sell records to normies. Well I ain’t buying.
The United States Of America
3/5
Most of this wasn’t too bad but some of it was really bad. They should’ve picked the one with that millions of peaches, peaches for me song on it.
Common
3/5
This sounds like a Kanye West side project with a very uncharismatic rapper making the tracks less good than they otherwise would have been without him badly rapping on them.
Def Leppard
2/5
I don't like anything about hair metal. I don't like the way it is sung. I don't like the way the guitar or the drums sound. I don't like the dumb lyrics aimed at twelve year olds. I don't like that it is the official theme song for baseball players to commit date rape to. Lowest common denominator pop is still lowest common denominator pop, even if it is run through a "hard rock" filter. This is just bad.
Primal Scream
3/5
Scotland has way more great bands than makes sense statistically given their population. Orange Juice, Belle and Sebastian, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, Franz Ferdinand, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, Simple Minds, The Beta Band, Camera Obscura. I don’t know what you’re up to Scotland, but good on ya.
Seems like this album gets some hate but I kinda liked it. Take a rock revival indie band and feed them copious amounts of X and then let a house DJ make their songs all ravy. I think it’s a cool idea. It kinda goes on a bit too long, which is common in the CD era, but still pretty cool.
Janet Jackson
4/5
She had to put the interludes in. The fragile human mind could not handle this many hits in a row without some kind of buffer. This may be the ultimate culmination of new jack swing, which was such a cool genre with such a unique and fun sound. I very much enjoyed this album by an artist who I am required to refer to as Ms. Jackson. Cause I’m nasty.
The Byrds
2/5
This list has too many Byrds albums. I have nothing against the Byrds, but doing this project is kind of making me hate them. Update: after hearing "Dolphins' Smile" I have something against the Byrds. Ugh.
Siouxsie And The Banshees
2/5
Music historian Simon Goddard described the music on The Scream as a "claustrophobic abyss of angst and angularity". YEAH BUT THATS NOT GOOD IS IT????!!!!! I don’t want a claustrophobic abyss of angst and angularity. I want good music that sounds good and that I enjoy. Like for physical sensations, I want a warm relaxing bath, not to be kicked in the balls repeatedly by a Hells Angel wearing steel toed boots. Are post punk fans musical BDSM people? What are you doing to yourselves? And why are you also doing it to me?
Skepta
2/5
I’m so embarrassed (1) to have listened to this; (2) that this album was put on this list; (3) that this album exists; (4) that British people try to rap; (5) that British people exist. This is all just mortifying. I feel sick. Please stop. Stop this. Have some respect for yourself and others. Do better.
Electric Light Orchestra
3/5
Catchy, kind of fun, enjoyably poppy, but starts to grate after four sides. If you’re looking for some disco classical prog-pop, this is probably the band for you. But I’m not really looking for that. Still, this album did not make my day worse.
Van Morrison
5/5
The only way they could kill the message of Jesus Christ was to form a church around his teachings and suck all the life out of them over 2000 years. The only way they could ruin the beauty of this album was to play these songs on classic rock radio and in the background at Banana Republic for 55 years. But in both cases, people who can listen without prejudice and who aren’t cringy edgelords can still appreciate them for the magical things they are.
The best albums are all of one piece but the individual songs still stand out from one another. This album does that perfectly. The whole album is a singular work of art, but repeated listens reveal the individuality of each song.
I love the jazzy loose feel of Astral Weeks, but Morrison’s decision to make his next record a pop/soul album was inspired, even if it was done for commercial reasons. He made an album that was just as good as Astral Weeks but operated in an entirely different idiom. Both albums are brilliant.
The Undertones
3/5
Fun proto-pop punk from 1980. Hard to see how you could hate this. Just a bunch of dorks having a good time and making not unpleasant music. The only negatives for me are that it’s not exactly revelatory, the “Under the Boardwalk” cover, and that I listened to the extended cut by accident and that was way too much Undertones. Other than that, this is fine by me.
The Beach Boys
4/5
“Do You Wanna Dance?” is such an incredible song and an amazing way to open an album. It’s such a sad song, but the sadness is all subtext. Lyrically it’s a teeny bopper asking a girl to the hop and musically it’s upbeat, but something about The Beach Boys’s treatment of it just breaks my heart. The Ramones and I don’t often see eye-to-eye but they were onto something when they covered this song.
I’ve also always loved “Help Me Rhonda” because I sang it in chorus class when I was in elementary school. That’s the only song on the album that’s more than three minutes long, and the album clocks in at 28 minutes total, which I fully support for all pop music.
I gave Pet Sounds - the album that all music critics never stop hyping - four stars, but I think I may give this album the same. It doesn’t have anything to equal the three all time great songs that Pet Sounds does but as a complete album I may prefer this.
RIP Brian Wilson. Sensitive artists like you and I just aren’t made for this world, much less these times.
Super Furry Animals
3/5
So, like . . . Welsh Flaming Lips? Nah, y’know what? I’m aight.
Frank Ocean
3/5
This was so hyped in 2012/2013 that even an exhausted, overwhelmed 30-something father of two toddlers torrented it off Limewire and spent a week trying to see what all the fuss was about. Listening to it again over a decade later, I feel the same way I did then. Frank Ocean is obviously talented. There are moments throughout this self-indulgent way-too-lightly-edited mess that really shine. But why listen to a loose unedited bunch of ideas that could have made a masterpiece of an album if someone had put in the work instead of a finished product?
Frank Ocean should have come around in the age when gatekeepers would’ve made him compromise his artistic vision to give the people what they actually want. Berry Gordy or Clive Davis would have turned this from a collection of brilliant ideas to an album full of hits.
Still, props to the guy for having it. If you can’t hear that he’s undeniably got the goods, I don’t know what to tell you.
Heaven 17
2/5
“The Height of the Fighting (He-La-Hu)” sounds like they are doing a parody of whatever this is. I say “whatever this is” because a lot of this album sounded more like weird proto-techno/post-disco than what I think of as synth-pop. Genre quibbles aside, this was faux laser beam sound-filled noise that I did not enjoy.
After repeated listens, I can confidently say that - of all the albums ever made - this is without a doubt one of them. I’d just like to give a shout out to Robert Dimery. Apart from a few compilations and at least one soundtrack, basically all the albums featured in “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” are, in fact, albums. I have not come across a single entry like “A can of tuna I found in my pantry that I’m not sure how it got there” or “A sunset I saw once when I was eight” or “Slacks”. Essentially every album featured in this book is an album. Great job bud.
JAY Z
4/5
I type this knowing full well how ridiculous this statement is, but I think I may have slept on Jay-Z. I had written him off since he sampled Annie, and while I liked "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" fine when it was the biggest song in the world, I never listened to The Blueprint all the way through. Hearing it today, I didn’t stop bobbing my head for the entire hour it was on. I’m sure Kanye’s production played a big part of that but, honestly, everything except Eminem’s verses worked for me. This is embarrassing, but I am figuring out in 2025 that one of the best selling rap albums of all time is actually really good. I feel like someone saying “Man, did you guys know McDonalds makes good French fries?”
Van Morrison
4/5
I will admit to some degree of concern when I saw this was a 92-minute long live album, despite the fact that I think Van Morrison’s run of albums leading up to these performances is amongst the best in popular music. I find live albums to generally be made up of not as good versions of studio tracks recorded as if they were performed at the bottom of a swimming pool filled with mud. This was anything but. The recording sounds crisp and clear and while the performances differ from the studio versions, they are just different, not worse. This album had energy and verve, the band sounded great, and the performances added to the original material. There wasn’t really a bad moment in the entire 92 minutes. This is a great live album and I’m glad to have heard it.
The Byrds
2/5
I listened to this album. But that’s all you’re getting from me. I’ve already wrung every word I’m capable of writing about the Byrds out of myself. I’ve got nothing left. I can only say “mid psych folk jangle pop” so many times and in so many ways and I ran out of original combinations twelve Byrds albums ago. I’m done.
Adele
3/5
I mean, there are always people like this right? Pop/ballad singers from somewhere that is still nominally governed by the British monarchy that sell 80 billion records and are forgotten after a generation because they made bland generic inoffensive music that provoked zero thought in its listeners whatsoever. Judging by how many Helen Reddy and Anne Murray albums I come across while crate digging, they must have sold Adele-like numbers of records but have been all but forgotten because there’s not really anything to remember them by. Adele is the version of that phenomenon that ruled the earth in the 2010’s but she’s just one in a never ending line of creators of vaguely pleasant schlock. This isn’t art, it’s product.
Now, fairly blatantly misogynistic rock snobbery aside, this is excellent product. This didn’t sell 80 billion copies by accident. It’s like a greatest hits album for almost the entire first side and even the songs that weren’t hits are generally catchy and always well sung. If this generation was going to have a Helen Reddy/Anne Murray, it could have done a lot worse.
Big Black
1/5
Big Black has been described as having “a sound resembling a singing saw blade mercillesly tearing through sheet metal.” My question is, why? You don’t like the sound of a saw blade tearing through sheet metal. I certainly don’t. No one does. People who work in factories where saw blades tear through sheet metal wear ear protection so they don’t have to hear that. So why listen to it by choice? What would make you want to do something like that to yourself, and more importantly, to me?
It’s like food critics kind of. A million people eat McDonalds every day; but a million people eat delicious nutritious home cooked meals or at quality local restaurants every day too. So food critics should steer people away from McDonalds and towards good recipes and restaurants. That would be a productive and noble use of their platform. But that takes work and might not draw enough eyeballs. So they do write ups of the weird niche pop up that four people a night go to for clout that charges you $200 to inhale vaporized eel brain. This album is $200 vaporized eel brain. People don’t like it. It sucks. But it’s so extreme that it makes for good copy for lazy music critics to write about. So here we are.
Speaking of drawing eyeballs, Steve Albini has walked back his frequent use of racial, gender and sexual orientation-based slurs (how punk rock!) but what no one who later recants saying those types of things ever admits is to why they did it. They did it for attention. They wanted to sell their shitty noise music and have people go to their awful headache-inducing concerts and normal people were never going to do that so they tapped into the edgelord market because edgelords are dumb, have a little money and there are enough of them to sell an okay number of records. Lyrics of that nature are a commercial decision, despite being very non-commercial. Targeting a niche market is still targeting a market. It’s no different than Madonna’s metal bra or Lil Nas X’s video where he gives Satan a lap dance. It’s all manufactured controversy meant to get dumb teenagers to buy your record. So don’t get on Twitter in 2023 and say you shouldn’t have said those things because of your privilege. Give back all the money and fame you intentionally sought by saying them or sit in your Wicker Park condo collecting your interest and shut the fuck up.
R.E.M.
4/5
I was 11 when this came out and wouldn’t buy it on CD for another five years or so, so Green isn’t the early-REM/late-REM demarcation line for me that it is for old(er) heads. To me, it was just part of the back catalog of this amazing band that I was blessed to fall in love with in my teens.
Athens was only about three hours away from where I grew up, so two friends and I did a day trip to see the church where they played their first shows and the bridge from the back of Murmur and Wuxtry Records. My best friend at the time, who was way more into REM than I was (and they were my favorite band), put that together. I would have never thought to do that. I’m grateful for the people in my life who got me to do things. I don’t know why I don’t think to do things, but mostly I don’t.
I’m also grateful for REM. Music nerds; just nerds generally; Southern boys just like you and me; writing songs about being confused and scared and sad and angry that were just poppy enough and just weird enough to hit my ears right in their sweet spot. A perfect band for teenage me, and a huge part of my life as a music fan. Green isn’t one of my favorite of their albums, but the worst REM album is better than almost anything else.
George Harrison
5/5
I think you have to view this record as a double album with a bonus disc of throwaway jams that don’t really count as part of the album proper. Viewed in that light, I think this is the best solo album by a former Beatle and is better than a fair number of Beatles albums.
The combination of acoustic instruments with Phil Spectors’s wall of sound production is incredibly distinctive. I think the songs vary enough from one to the next while also being part of one cohesive whole.
This is a great record to make you think about death and get sad and stuff.
Kelela
3/5
Is turning to glitchy alt-R&B after not making it in indie or prog akin to someone leaving LA for Nashville because they couldn’t make it as a pop singer and going country?
This was not bad really, but it’s also not good. Too much emphasis on the vocals, not really any music to speak of. And so incredibly generic that it has no place on this list. There are thousands of albums that sound just like this and are of just as good a quality. This was an absolute non-entity of an album.
Mylo
3/5
This was either lofi hip hop radio beats to relax/study to (shout out to the anime girl and her cat stuck in a time loop relaxing/studying forever), or one or two bpm faster than that but basically the same thing. I could hardly think of less essential listening, but I like this kind of thing fine, so ehh.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
2/5
I could see a world where I was into Nick Cave. I’m pretentious and have a tolerance for vocals of this sort. But every bit of the need I have for this type of music is fully occupied - and done a million times better, in my opinion - by Leonard Cohen. So, I’m listening to this album and it’s totally fine and I’m very glad it’s not post-punk, but I’d just as soon be listening to Leonard Cohen.
Oh wait, that is a whole lot of accordion. This is not totally fine.
Ray Charles
4/5
As great as Ray Charles is, musically a lot of this album is corny schmaltz. I HATE this style of background vocals and the strings get annoying as well. But I can forgive that because of how much I admire this album as a thing that exists, even if I don’t want to sit and listen to it.
Firstly, I love the sheer chutzpah of Ray Charles recording an album of country songs. Sometimes when one of the greats is at his or her peak, they say “I can do anything and it’s going to be amazing. I can sing the phone book and it will be a hit.” And occasionally, they’re actually right. That is where Ray Charles was in 1962. He could have done anything and it was going to work and he knew it. You have to admire someone who has it and isn’t afraid to act accordingly.
Secondly, I love how very, deeply, American this album is. In the old world, they love their distinctions. The pottery guild makes the pots and the blacksmithing guild makes the frying pans and if anyone colors outside the lines they will go beat them up. And don’t get me wrong, I respect that. It ensures everybody eats and can provide their children with their daily ration of wine and cigarettes. But - for better and very often for worse - America threw that playbook straight in the trash.
Distinctions exist here, but they always bow - like everything else in America does - to the almighty dollar. If you can sell units by tearing down every genre distinction in the world then we will put a crown on your head until your records stop selling. The only distinction Americans care about is cash or card. Everything else is just details. We will listen to your big band country blues jazz in our combination KFC Taco Bells while wearing our Italian clothes and driving our German cars, all of which are made in China. God bless America!
Ray Charles was the best in the world at this time and followed his vision for the art he wanted to make with a boldness that people who don’t have a proper appreciation for that kind of thing might call arrogance, and the world is a better place because of it. The only reason I’m not giving this record five stars is because of how it veers into Lawrence Welk territory at times. But I have enjoyed re-listening to it today and unquestionably think it belongs on this list.
Neil Young
2/5
“I’m sad all my friends are dying from drugs, what should I do about it? Oh I know, drugs!” This wasn’t good. Not a song, not a chorus, not a moment of it. Just a bad album from start to finish. A real chore to have to listen to.
I think amateur musicians like half-assed tossed off records because they’re bad musicians; and so lazy, badly played and sung music reminds them of what they produce and makes them think “celebrities, they’re just like me!”
But I’m not an amateur musician. I like things where people work hard to try to make them good. I like perfectly crafted pop songs and prog rock and Steely Dan. People who are good at making music and work really hard to make something that is good. Multiple takes. Thought and care put into the creative process. Not being too wasted to write a coherent lyric. You know, actually giving a shit. Therefore, I don’t like this.
Cee Lo Green
2/5
When there are more than, say twenty, headlines that include your stage name and the words “rape tweets”, I’m thinking your career has not gone exactly as you envisioned it.
I assume that this album made it on an early version of the 1001 albums list and was cut in subsequent editions. There’s not really anything wrong with it. Fairly middle of the road 2000’s hip-pop. It has all the guys that were doing that well at that time on it (Luda!). It hits all the marks. But there is nothing exceptional or special about this album whatsoever.
Sugar
3/5
I recall seeing this in the used bins a lot in the 90’s. I expect people thought it was grunge, or XTC-flavored jangle pop because all they’d heard was “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”, and didn’t realize it was post-punk. Or didn’t know what post-punk was. God, I envy them. Imagine being able to be all like “Hüsker hü?”
This wasn’t too bad though. I am glad Bob Mould sold out and tried to appeal to the kids who are now in their 50’s. As I am almost 50, that makes this sound kind of good to me.
Fleetwood Mac
4/5
This is an absurd, drugged out, arrogant, self-indulgent, sometimes discordant, fractured double album made by the greatest band in the world at the time. Oh, sorry, that’s my review of the White Album. This is better than that. I will not be taking any questions.
Kacey Musgraves
3/5
Oh boy, the "I like all kinds of music except rap and country" bros are out in full effect for this album. Hello there worst people in existence. Keep being terrible I guess. https://thehardtimes.net/blog/like-everything-except-rap-country-poor-people/
I like this album. I own this album. I think this is a good album. I like listening to it. I do not think that this is one of the 1001 albums you must hear before you die. Still, reading what the rest of you think about it makes me like it more out of spite. Or not spite really. More, "Oh God, I don't ever want to be like those people in the slightest." So yeah, good album. Not great, but good.
Orange Juice
4/5
I had listened to a few songs here and there by Orange Juice but never a whole album. I was surprised to see the band described as post-punk. To me it was more new wave with tinges of disco and ska, or 80’s sophistipop with a horn section. Whatever label you put on it, I was - for the most part - here for it.
I think the biggest strength of the album was that the band never seemed to take themselves too seriously. The only real negatives for me were that Edwin Collins’s croon could get annoying after a while, and I wish the album was a little more sonically cohesive. I felt a bit of whiplash because of all the genre jumping it did from song to song. But almost all of those songs were good. I am glad to have heard this album and think it belongs on this list.
Morrissey
3/5
The Smiths are one of my favorite bands and I have never owned a Morrissey album. My love for the Smiths and ambivalence towards Morrissey’s solo career is the biggest band/post band solo career difference I can think of in terms of my enjoyment. The Smiths hit my ears just right. Morrissey’s songs do that for moments during his songs and I perk up and think I’m in for a good time but it never lasts for the whole four-odd minutes of his song, much less for a whole album. You Are the Quarry was no exception.
Lucinda Williams
5/5
I was in the midst of a huge alt-country (that was what we called it then, the term “Americana” came later) phase at the time this album came out. Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, Son Volt, Ryan Adams, the Jayhawks, the Bottlerockets, Wilco, the Old 97’s, the Mavericks, Gillian Welch, Slobberbone, Golden Smog, and -more than any other - this album. Even though I’m not still in that phase, I enjoy all that music to this day and have great residual affection for it. I would rank this album as one of my favorites of all time and think there is an argument that it represents the ultimate culmination of the alt-country genre.
Alt-country cut out all the cheese of 80’s and 90’s country and stripped it back to basics, but also made it new. Alt-country artists were making country music with one eye on Hank and the other on the Ramones. Musically, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” leaned more traditional than a lot of the other bands doing this at the time but still sounded incredibly fresh. Lyrically, this album surpassed all of its contemporaries, which is hard to do when you’re talking about Jeff Tweedy at his absolute best.
Lucinda Williams’s lyrics perfectly describe the world of the rural South that I grew up in, or maybe that I have just made up in my head from scraps of memories and stories and popular culture. “When I get back this room better be picked up”; “Sorry no credit don’t ask, bathroom wall reads ‘Is God the answer? Yes!’”. That world couldn’t have survived modernity because it was like a junebug in a hurricane, and it shouldn’t have because it was full of absolute horrors. But those dark parts made the light spots glow like a neon sign in the middle of nowhere on a pitch black night. Those parts of that time and place were too cool to be forgotten. “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” helps keep their memory alive.
Miles Davis
2/5
I hate Bitches Brew and this sounded like Prelude to Bitches Brew. I hate Bitches Brew so much that I think I may have Bitches Brew-related PTSD, and so hearing how similar this was to Bitches Brew triggered me something fierce. I am sorry to those that like this kind of thing, but I very much do not.
Coldplay
2/5
Coldplay. Sigh, okay. I liked “Yellow” and the song from the Garden State soundtrack. I had burned copies of their first two albums that I may have listened to once or twice. Capitalism has always warped artists, but 2000 to 2025 is something else in terms of what it has done to people. And those who started out kind of sucky have really gotten the worst of it. I don’t know a ton about what Coldplay has been up to in the last decade but what I have seen appears pretty awful.
Setting aside modern day Coldplay, this album is fine. It barely has a pulse but it never really does anything intolerable. I don’t like Chris Martin's voice but it fits the music fairly well. I suppose that - given what this list is - this album had to be on it. I don’t like it, but it faded into the background enough to where I can’t be too upset.
Depeche Mode
4/5
This isn’t quite one of those “wait is this a greatest hits collection?” albums like Thriller or She’s So Unusual or the Cars and Boston’s self-titled debuts but it’s close. Not every song is as immediately accessible as the hits, but none are filler and they all seem to belong on the album. The album flows well and makes for an enjoyable listening experience.
I think that what makes Violator so strong is that Depeche Mode had transitioned to a full-on pop group at this point (or possibly back to a full-on pop group? Wikipedia says they started as a teeny bop boy band, which I didn’t know but which doesn’t surprise me all that much). At this time they were a pop group that wore black leather and sang about being sad or whatever, but they were an unabashed pop group nonetheless. With Violator, Depeche Mode was making pop music with a synthy gothy filter over it, but first and foremost they were making pop music.
And they kill it on this album. When an album is in the same general area as goth rock and I don’t despise it, you know it has to be good. This is an album that deserves inclusion on this list and that is completely worth hearing. Spike up your hair, put on some black eyeliner and a puffy shirt, dance around in a really sad way and have yourself a great time.
Mike Ladd
2/5
Terrible, awkward rapping. Completely uninspiring beats. This wouldn’t make a list of 10,001 albums you must hear before you die. The ten minute instrumental in the middle was alright but not near enough to make up for the rest of this mediocre non-entity of an album.
Elbow
2/5
I’m ready to take all the copies of this book I can find and throw them in Boston Harbor. The avalanche of bland boring British mediocrity that you are buried under when listening to the albums on this list is thoroughly demoralizing. The Britishness of the author of this book is a systematic flaw in this project that almost requires the entire thing be scrapped and replaced with a list of 1001 albums made by a person who was not a complete fuckwit. In sum, this album was a waste of everyone’s time and attention and I am sad.
The Afghan Whigs
3/5
A good friend of mine likes the Afghan Whigs - and Gentleman in particular - very much, so I have tried listening to it a number of times and never heard what he finds so compelling about it. Listening to it today, and reading the lyrics, I think the reviewers who describe this as “incel rock” and songs about being an abuser are missing the point somewhat.
I think this is more a concept album (or song cycle) about a co-dependent, abusive relationship. But I think it’s about the relationship as a whole, not just the male half. “My Curse” is what convinced me of that, but I think you can hear it throughout the record.
I think this is an album about two people in a trap of their own making. They are both torturing their partner and being tortured. It could apply as much to drug addiction as a dysfunctional relationship.
I think this is an album worth hearing but I wouldn’t listen to it for pleasure. I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just not really for me.
Black Sabbath
4/5
As I listened to Ozzie (RIP) yell “I AM IRONMAN!” in a monster voice, I couldn’t help but think “this is kind of silly.” But then it occurred to me, all of rock & roll is silly. Long hair and leather pants and guitar solos and riffs and drum fills and rhyming about girls or the government or your feelings. It’s all silly. Even introspective sensitive indie rock is silly. Rock & Roll is just a silly thing. So if I have a problem with “I AM IRONMAN!” but not REM’s Murmur or Modest Mouse, is there just a line of silliness up to which I’m okay, but beyond that I’m not? Cause I don’t think that’s fair. In for a penny, in for a pound. So let’s get silly.
This is a good album. If they had stopped making metal after this - and I mean all humanity, not just Sabbath - I would be a fan of the genre. It’s just every note of every metal song after this album came out is worse than the one before. But up to here, metal is A-OK with me.
This is still kind of blues rocky like their first album but not quite as much. I was surprised how psychedelic “Planet Caravan” was. The drumming is really good when it’s not in the form of a drum solo. The songs on this album rock and make you want to head bang and make the devil horns sign like Beavis and Butthead. All in all this is a pretty great album.
Tricky
3/5
Between “ Glory Box” and “Hell is Round the Corner”, I think that “Ike’s Rap” may have been heard more in 1995 than it was in 1971. I liked this quote from Wikipedia: “Tricky had no concept of pitch and no regard for notational conventions or time signatures, nor any previous experience with sampling.” LOL, same. And, did this guy really just have some producer basically make his whole album for him just by saying “oi do a track wit dese two samples bruv” and then coming back to laconically rap over the result? If so, you almost have to respect that level of laziness.
I was pleased to find that this album is fairly similar to Massive Attack. I was worried there would be a lot of British rapping (shudder) but I found that it was generally quiet enough that I wasn’t too bothered by it, except when it became absurdly and cringingly sexual. I don’t mean to come off as a Gen-Z style prude, but I don’t really need to hear “I fuck you in the ass, just for a laff” in my pop music. Lyrical content aside, I liked Martina Topley-Bird‘s vocals much more than Tricky’s rapping.
Overall, I think this is a pretty good trip-hop album, and I like trip-hop, so I thought this was okay. However, I would put Blue Lines or Mezzanine on before I would this album. I don’t know if that’s l because I know them better, or because they are better, but either way it’s what I’d do. But if you like those albums you’ll probably like this. Or not. I don’t know you.
Leftfield
2/5
I’m so excited to listen to all 1001 albums from the book “300 Good Albums, 4 Reggae Albums, 26 Albums of British People Copying Reggae, 40 Albums of 60’s Psychedelic Bullshit (18 of which are by the Byrds), 200 Forgettable Late-90’s Early-2000’s Brit Pop Albums, 10 Albums Representing the Entire History of Jazz, 150 Generic and Completely Inconsequential Techno Albums that the Author Danced to at a Rave When he was Young I Guess?, 101 Duran Duran Wannabes, and 170 Other Terrible Choices that Make You Want to Die”. What a good use of my time and energy!
This was stupid and pointless. The first two songs sounded like “The Macarena”. It never really improved from there. A complete waste of time.
Sabu
3/5
I see a lot of reviews from people not liking this but I thought it was a bop. The vocals could be grating but they fit the style of music well once you get onboard with them. I am also into hypnotic repetitive music designed for dancing in a circle around a fire until you hallucinate visions from the ancestors and whatnot and this seemed bordering on that. I liked this.
Hookworms
3/5
Albums not included on this list:
Giant Steps - John Coltrane; I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One - Yo La Tengo; For Emma, Forever Ago - Bon Iver; The Shape Of Jazz To Come - Ornette Coleman; Grand Prix - Teenage Fanclub; Under The Pink - Tori Amos; Things We Lost In The Fire - Low; Chet - Chet Baker; Goat - The Jesus Lizard; Transatlanticism - Death Cab for Cutie; Mingus Ah Um - Charles Mingus; Silent Alarm - Bloc Party; Sublime - Sublime; In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel; Give Up - The Postal Service; Weezer (the Blue Album) - Weezer; Somethin’ Else - Cannonball Adderly; Ram - Paul McCartney; Tragic Kingdom - No Doubt; Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend; Excitable Boy - Warren Zevon; Breakfast in America - Supertramp; Flood - They Might Be Giants; The Moon and Antarctica - Modest Mouse; Aquemini - OutKast; Fly - Dixie Chicks; Currents - Tame Impala; Funky Kingston - Toots and the Maytals; Curtis - Curtis Mayfield; Mezzanine - Massive Attack; Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson; Loaded - The Velvet Underground; Damn the Torpedos - Tom Petty.
Albums included on this list: this one. Make it make sense.
This was perfectly fine indie synth pop. Nothing bad about it whatsoever. I’d never purposefully put it on but it was not unpleasant to listen to. It was also wholly unremarkable in every sense of the word. Just a non-entity of a record. To the extent there is any validity to a list like this - which is highly questionable - this album has no place on it.
New Order
3/5
Low-Life is the kind of album that makes you picture a group of sad goth kids with spiky hair, wearing eyeliner, chain-smoking in a damp Manchester basement while it rains for the eighth consecutive day and then heading out to a different dank basement to all sadly dance together in. This version of New Order sounds like the Cure trying to emulate Duran Duran, but not as good as either of them.
That’s not to say Low-Life is without its moments. Tracks like “Love Vigilantes” and “The Perfect Kiss” are catchy enough. The synths are moody and the basslines are danceable. And there’s no question that New Order are, at least, better than Joy Division. But that’s a low bar. Low-Life isn’t unlistenable, its just has a “neither fish nor fowl” problem that it never escapes for its entire 40 minute run time. When it’s good, you can hear what they’re trying to do and halfway get on board. But when it’s bad it’s haunted house background music.
Lou Reed
2/5
When I reviewed Lou Reed’s previous album, I wrote that Transformer "sounds like demos for a musical about living in New York in the early 70’s that never got made because it was too precious even for a musical about living in New York in the early 70’s". And what does Lou Reed go and do next? Makes his follow up album a literal musical about living in New York in the early 70’s but fictionalizes it by setting it in Berlin, a city to which he had never been at the time it was recorded. Absolute mad lad!
Look, the guy wanted to write musicals but writing musicals doesn't pay so he made rock albums instead. He just made his rock albums into “everything but the cast and stage directions and actors” versions of musicals. But here is the thing: I don't like musicals (except Annie) so I don't like this. If you like this, maybe go watch Hamilton on Disney+ or something because you like musicals bruh. (I also like Hamilton).
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
3/5
Flan and other delights. This is disco-influenced easy listening in a Latin music coating. I didn’t hate it because there’s a reason easy listening albums sell millions of copies, but I’m also not going to mistake this for real music.
Somewhere a non-English speaking person is listening to a Barry Manilow album and praising its musical complexity because it’s hard to spot pablum when it’s not from your culture. That’s because most people merely adopted the lame. I was born in it, molded by it. I’ve seen an episode of The Love Boat where Sunny Bono plays a Gene Simmons knock off who comes to learn to love soft music. I can spot a lame-o in any language or cultural context. And these guys are lame-o’s.
Rufus Wainwright
2/5
I didn’t like Want One and I don’t like this either. This dude can’t annunciate to save his life. It’s great that he likes opera but I’m trying to listen to regular people music. And this ain’t it.
John Lee Hooker
2/5
“In the 1001 albums book, let’s include an album by one of the greatest blues performers of all time…”
“Absolutely! Great idea.”
“…that he recorded in the late 1980’s when he was 72 years old…”
“Wait, what?”
“…and making one of those sad late-career duets albums that once great artists make with younger more popular acts after they are way way past their primes, but the artists are so old that the “young popular” artists they do duets with are also old and past their primes because the person making the album is too old to know the difference!”
“Dude, what the fuck?!”
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
3/5
I was glad to have listened to this because of a Camera Obscura song called "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" that is an answer song to “Are You Ready to be Heart Broken?” and that I love. I enjoyed the jangly 80’s pop aspect of this album, but Lloyd's voice and the pretentious overly referential lyrics were negatives for me. Was this album life-changing? No. Was it a decent? Yes.
Public Enemy
4/5
PE took everything that had happened in rap and DJ culture and electronic music as a whole up to that point and pushed all of those genres forward by leaps and bounds. This album was a true sea change and unquestionably one that everyone should hear. I don’t ever play it just to play it, but I enjoyed hearing it again today and its quality and importance cannot be overstated.
The Residents
1/5
Oh, I get it! Instead of music - which people like - it’s abrasive noise and grating sounds . . . which people don’t like. And so it’s like . . . a protest against . . . people liking things? Or, no, wait I’ve got it. Listening to unpleasant things that you don’t like is smart . . . and listening to things that sound good and that you enjoy . . . is dumb? No, sorry, I don’t get it.
Pearl Jam
3/5
This one is hard to review. I was 15 when it broke. It was a huge word of mouth album, whispered about excitedly in school hallways and wherever else teenagers conspired amongst one another against their grown-up oppressors. Everyone who told me about this album made it sound like something amazing and new and subversive and rebellious. Ten was just metal enough to get the metalheads’ ears, was just Led Zeppeliny enough to catch the interest of kids who had been raised on classic rock radio, but was grunge enough to seem like something totally new.
For one album to contain "Alive", "Even Flow", and "Jeremy" is crazy, given how big each of those songs was. I also think Pearl Jam’s politics - and willingness to take actions based upon their politics, even when those actions hurt them commercially - are admirable. Finally, Pearl Jam puts on a great live show and I’d highly recommend seeing them in concert if you like that sort of thing.
However, despite the time in my life when this album came out, the undeniable strength of several of its songs, the way the band seems to fight the good fight, and the fact that I had a blast seeing them live, I’m just not a fan of this band or this album. What are they, high-fiving on the cover? Alternative kids don’t high five. That’s what jocks do. And why is the guy yelling? And what the hell is he saying? And why does the music sound like Poison at some times and like U2 at others? And why does the lead singer look like my aunt Leigh Ann?
I can’t deny the importance or the quality of this album, but it also just isn’t for me.
Sly & The Family Stone
3/5
Sly and the Family Stone were pioneers—one of the first major racially integrated, mixed-gender bands, blending soul, funk, rock, and psychedelia into something nobody else was doing in the late ’60s. Stand! is often held up as their masterpiece, packed with big hits like “Everyday People” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” the kind of songs that practically radiate good vibes and Woodstock-era optimism.
And yet, I just can’t fully connect with them. Musically, I admire what they do, but the vocals never quite hit my ears right—something about the delivery just doesn’t land. Their poppier hits feel a bit too squeaky-clean for me, while the funkier deep cuts aren't clean enought. It’s an odd mismatch where I like the idea of the band more than the listening experience. I don’t dislike Stand!, but it’s one of those albums I respect more than I revisit.
The Temptations
3/5
Fake live songs are a pet peeve of mine, so I didn’t like the first song as much as I might’ve. The second song just made me go “huh, that’s two days in a row with a pop/funk album that prominently uses the n-word in its second song”. “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” is a stone cold jam. It’s rare that an 11-minute song can fly by like that one does.
The rest of the album has the same problem that Cloud 9 had. The group seemed to want to have one foot in the funk world and one foot in the “shoo bop, shoo bop” era and it makes for a really schizophrenic album. This was not a bad album but it dropped off hard on the second side.
I love the Motown sound, but I wish the Temptations had just fully committed to their new funk style in the 70’s. Because their funk songs on both this and Cloud 9 sound great and the other songs just sound dated.
Rocket From The Crypt
2/5
This wasn’t bad generic punk-adjacent 90’s alterna-rock (and the horns admittedly elevate it somewhat), but I’m not really in the market for generic punk-adjacent 90’s alterna-rock.
T. Rex
3/5
It seems glam was a reaction to the self-seriousness of the 60’s hippies and their psychedelic blathering, which is good because a lot of that sucks. But sometimes the reaction to something sucky is just something differently sucky, and I think that may be my take on glam rock. Very plastic and 70’s and teeny-booper and kind of lame. When you know that a movement is going to culminate in Kiss, it is hard to get too excited about it.
Even though I’m not a fan of the genre, I can recognize that this is a pretty decent album. I prefer the ballads over the very samey rockers. But all in all it not a bad listen. But does this guy want to fuck a car? Cause it seems like he really wants to fuck a car.
Paul Simon
3/5
Paul Simon is one of my all-time favorite recording artists and I was happy to see an album of his that I wasn’t familiar with (other than the songs that are on Negotiations and Love Songs) come up. But I found this album to be a very mixed bag.
The title track is okay and “Train in the Distance” and "René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War" are both good songs, I might even describe the latter as a great song. But those are the three songs I already knew. The rest of the album veers between mediocre and downright embarrassing. Although it was nice to see that the album art continues Paul Simon’s almost unbroken streak of terrible album covers.
Paul Simon is great but this album is completely skippable.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
1/5
I’ve tried listening to Trout Mask Replica multiple times and one thing I’ve never understood is if it’s so experimental and avant garde, why does it sound exactly the same for all of its interminable 78 minutes? The same guitar tone, the same awful blarts from the sax, the same okay-we-get-it-you-take-acid spoken word yelling. The gimmick wears out almost immediately but then never varies for over an hour. Experimental music should not be this boring.
Trout Mask Replica is the essence of “I hate this, obviously, but I’m going to try to convince you/myself that I like it because I’ve been told that I should.” This is unlistenable noise made by drug addicted cult members who were being starved and beaten and abused. But it’s cool because it’s “art”. Fuck that and fuck this and fuck you.
Radiohead
1/5
I think I must have once made a list of everything I like about music and Radiohead stole that list and has made it their mission to do the absolute opposite of everything on that list for their entire career just to mess with me.
I hate everything about the world that has happened since about the year 2000, but one recent development that I’ve very much enjoyed is that the people who make “Israel is bad” their entire personality and Radiohead have been beefing and it’s always nice when the two most annoying people in the world start feuding. It’s like Laura Loomer v. MTG or Trump v. Elon. Like, yes, fight fight fight! Also can both of you lose? They’re like the Highlander of being obnoxious. There can be only one!
Les Rythmes Digitales
3/5
Oh well, I had a 17-album run of music other than generic, unremarkable, completely forgettable techno, so I suppose I was due. Ten thousand techno albums have been released just this year that were this good or better. This wasn’t bad. It just was the 400th techno album on this list, which all basically sound the same.
“But this wasn’t techno! It was ambient breakbeat house acid chill dub synth electro jungle trance!!! Duh!” Shut up nerd. I was born in the 70’s. If it’s made on a computer, it’s techno. “This was actually made on a…” SHUT UP NEEEEERD!!!!!!
Brian Eno
2/5
I’m not sure I see the value in experimental music. Don’t we pretty much have pop music figured out? Verse, chorus, verse. The I, V, vi, and IV chords of C – G – Am – F in the key of C major. We’ve got it. Do you play with the combinations and add your own spin? Absolutely. But we don’t really need people to experiment with the fundamentals. We’ve got those figured out.
It’s like cake. Flour, sugar, eggs, butter, milk. Do you play with the combinations and add your own spin? Absolutely. The person who decided to put icing on the exterior was a genius. The person who added raspberries on top had a neat idea. But we don’t really need people to experiment with the fundamentals. We’ve got those figured out.
Do we need you to take out flour and replace it with broccoli and see what happens? No. Or maybe, but I’m not going to eat it. Feel free to conduct the replacing flour with broccoli experiment and you eat it and go “oh, well that didn’t work but I suppose it was worth a try” and throw whatever that is away. Don’t then sell it in your bakery and say “come try this experimental cake and see how bad it is.”
Anyway, I suppose that if you’re not going to make music that sounds good and that people enjoy that this is kind of the next best thing.
Solomon Burke
3/5
Solomon Burke was an obviously talented singer and performer, and this album has some very good songs on it. I think that the arrangements of some of the songs are less than ideal, especially those cheesy backup singers that do their best to ruin a bunch of Ray Charles’s songs. But when it’s straight ahead soul/R&B, and when Latin influences are mixed in, this album is enjoyable and fun.
However, I think there is a reason that Burke - while he may have been amongst the first - is not considered to be one of the first tier soul and R&B artists. Still a 60’s soul and R&B second stringer is better than the entire starting lineup of a most other genres.
Nirvana
3/5
I drove to the CrossCreek Mall in my 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra and went into MusicLand and bought this and Weezer’s blue album on the same day with 30-something dollars that I earned working as a bag boy at Winn Dixie earning $5.25 per hour. Gods I was strong then.
So, having listened to this for the last thirty years on and off (mostly off since 1997 or so) this isn’t bad. You know what would’ve vastly improved it? Less loud distorted guitars and yelling. Like, instead of quiet LOUD quiet LOUD, why not try quiet quiet quiet quiet. That would make for some good music.
I think the problem with fast and loud music after a certain age is that fast and loud music is for getting pumped up. But I’m not looking to get pumped up for anything. I’m done with being excited about things. I’ve gotten my education, married, almost finished raising my children, am in the last job I’m ever going to have, and I don’t drink or smoke or take drugs or gamble or chase women. I can travel, but it’s all just long flights or drives and slightly different looking tourist traps. I suppose I’ll see my children get married (great, I’ll have to get dressed up and stay out too late and it will cost me $20k) and meet my grandchildren (great, somebody else to have to take care of, will probably also cost me money). Basically, all that I have before me is twenty more years of work, ten years of sitting around watching TV and going to doctor’s appointments, and then death. I don’t need pump up music. My pumping days are over. So stop all the yelling and just leave me alone and let me listen to Billy Joel and Steely Dan until I die.
David Bowie
2/5
Oh good, I was worried that David Bowie might have coughed once near a microphone and that vital recording may have been left off this list. The cover art really emphasizes the importance of having people in your life who will say “Why are you holding your hands like that and making that stupid face? You look like an idiot. Stop that.”
That type of person might also have said “‘Heroes’ is a good song, but the rest of the first side sounds like song ideas that you may be able to turn into something album-worthy if you work at them, and the second side is just Eno wankery. Take another pass at this one champ.” It’s sad that David Bowie didn’t have that person in his life. Then I would have gotten to listen to a better album.
The Fall
2/5
Post-punk is an amazing genre. It almost makes me like punk by comparison. For all of my dislike of punk songs, they’re often kind of funny and they’re short and most punk rockers don’t take themselves too seriously. It’s like post-punk took all the bad parts of punk: abrasiveness, repetitive boring simplicity, atonal unpleasant noise, and stripped it of the few good things it had going for it. I mean, for God’s sake, listening to this makes me want to put on a Ramones album. And that is an achievement.
The Charlatans
3/5
This album is number 29 on Pitchfork’s list of top 50 Best Brit Pop albums, which seems to be about the consensus. I think that if I were to try to come up with a list of 1001 albums everyone should hear, I would compile a list of all musical genres as granularly as possible. Then I’d take total global album sales data and divide it amongst those genres. Then I’d calculate what genres had sold the most records and what those percentages would look like if they were divided into just 1001 albums. If a genre didn’t have enough sales to make the 1001 album cut off, then no albums from that genre would make the list. If it did, then it would get the number of albums on the list commensurate with its ratio of sales to 1001 albums.
So 90’s boy bands would be four albums and 60’s psychedelica would be eight albums and 90’s grunge would be twelve albums and New Jack Swing would be three albums. Therefore, I would pick the four best 90’s boy band albums and the eight best 60’s psychedelica albums and the twelve best 90’s grunge albums and the three best New Jack Swing albums and put them on the list.
What I wouldn’t do is go “I’m from a place where New Jack Swing was quite popular while I was at a formative age and I like it a lot so I’ll put the eighty best New Jack Swing albums on this list no matter how that genre ranks in terms of its importance to everyone else because that genre is important to me personally, and I’m going to make that everyone else’s problem.” Because that would be idiotic. And it would be idiotic to listen to all the albums on a list compiled that way.
This album sounds like paint-by-numbers Brit Pop. If you want to listen to 29 albums worth of Brit Pop then you’d probably get to this one. It’s not bad, it’s not particularly good. It’s perfectly fine Brit Pop.
Primal Scream
3/5
I wasn't really familiar with Primal Scream before this project but I enjoyed Screamadelica and liked this album as well, although not quite as much. It’s like 25% rock and roll and 75% trip hop. Makes for a fun mix.
The Jam
3/5
The Jam are a good band. “Town Called Malice” is a bippety bop (that’s a song that’s even better than a bop, in case you’re not up on the slang the kids are using). “That’s Entertainment, “Going Underground” and “In the City” are also all good songs. Unfortunately, none of those are on this album.
Stereolab
3/5
“Soundscapes” 😒. They’re like songs but they go on forever and don’t really go anywhere and aren’t as good. But if you’re doing something that looks cool and not really paying attention to them then they are kind of okay to have in the background, to the extent you are paying attention to them, which is not really that much. https://tenor.com/3oON.gif
Fela Kuti
4/5
Afrobeat is what jam bands would sound like if they had any talent. It amazes me that playing that tight can go on for as long as these songs do. Afrobeat is jazz and James Brown and traditional African music all melded together to make a genre that is more than the sum of its parts. This is an incredible album and definitely one that everyone should hear.
Also, you know what the worst part of having 27 wives is?
27 MOTHER-IN-LAWS!!!!
https://tenor.com/xvDw.gif
808 State
2/5
I don’t really hear techno music. I know music is playing, but I don’t notice anything about it. It goes uncha uncha uncha and does other things I suppose, but none of them register with me. The only thing I think when the songs are playing is “this is a techno song.” When the album finishes, all I think is “that was a techno album.” So, was this a good album? I have no idea. All I can tell you is that this was a techno album. I look forward to getting assigned an album with actual music on it.
Madonna
2/5
Ray of Light was the tulipmania of the late 90’s. We all desperately tried to convince ourselves it had value when it obviously had none. “Madonna has reinvented herself! She’s like David Bowie!” My brother in Christ, she hired William Orbit to add some bleeps and bloops to completely generic pop songs, tied a red ribbon around her wrist and started speaking in a fake British accent. Everyone acted like Ray of Light was this major cultural happening, but it was just a standard pop album with better marketing. A pretty okay standard pop album, but nothing deserving being compared to Madonna’s golden era. It wasn’t a reinvention; it was just really effective branding with a trance beat.
Only the things you love can break your heart, and I love Madonna, Like a Virgin, True Blue and Like a Prayer. This list including two late-period clunkers while only Like a Prayer represents Madonna’s actual artistic peak? That is heartbreaking.
David Holmes
2/5
An album by a UK-based techno artist, a shitty over-hyped late-90’s Madonna album, then another album by a UK-based techno artist. Is this a joke? Is this a reboot of Punk’d? Where’s Ashton? Or wait, no. I’ve died and this is hell. Worse than I imagined it’d be, if I’m being honest.
Barry Adamson
2/5
I hated Oedipus Schmoedipus so I don’t have high hopes for this. I’m also not clear on why I need to listen to this guy’s “please hire me to make soundtracks” demo album. Like, if he wants to let producers know that if they can’t afford to hire Angelo Badalamenti that he’s the temu version, that’s his business. Why involve me?
Okay, I’ve listened to it. It sucks.
Femi Kuti
3/5
This was pretty good. I know it’s not fair to compare him to his dad but I spent the whole record thinking that all the right elements were there but that it lacked some kind of ineffable spark that makes Fela’s music so unique and great. If I had never heard Fela Kati, I’d probably think this was better than I do. But still, a good album.
Einstürzende Neubauten
1/5
I’m sorry you’re German. I’m sure that must be awful. I can’t imagine opening one’s eyes for the first time and immediately having a bratwurst shoved in your mouth and looking up to see your mother’s factory owner staring down at you, deem you inferior, and scream “YOU’RE GERMAN!!!” in that weird yelly language. No one should have to go through that.
But you need to try to make something positive from that, not punish the rest of the world for your suffering. Be like that luftballoons girl. Great art can come from misfortune. Even something as terrible as being German.
The Byrds
5/5
43 Byrds albums later and we finally get to the one I like. Or love actually. Gram Parsons was a singular talent and the Byrds were right to basically make him their band the same way Fleetwood Mac would do with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks a little less than a decade later.
This album influenced so much of the music I love, and besides its influence on other artists, it is simply a great album in and of itself. Also one of the coolest covers in popular music. Everything about this album is wonderful.
Sinead O'Connor
3/5
The late 80’s/early 90’s sound of some of these songs can come across as kind of dated but Sinead’s voice is uniformly incredible throughout. I haven’t listened to this in years but it is undeniably an important album by a talented and brave artist who was unfairly maligned during much of her life by a bunch of clowns. “Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies, I will sleep with a clear conscience, I will sleep in peace.” Amen.
John Cale
3/5
The only thing I knew about John Cale was that he was in the Velvet Underground, but he was coming to play at a venue I went to all the time and the tickets were only $10, so I said “what the hell” and drove from Greensboro to Carrboro, NC and saw him play at the Cat’s Cradle on October 9, 1997. He mostly sat at the piano and performed all of Fragments of a Rainy Season and it was a tie for the best concert I’ve ever been to.* I was used to seeing 20-something year old indie rockers doing 90’s indie rock and this could not have been more different. It was otherworldly. To this day, I have never had an experience with live music quite like that one.
That night he performed “The Endless Plain of Fortune” and “Child’s Christmas in Wales” but they were vastly stripped down compared to the versions on this album. Years later I would torrent all of John Cale’s albums to see if the magic that I experienced when I saw him live had ever been captured on one of his studio albums but none of them ever hit me the way that concert did. His studio albums aren’t bad but I could see someone hearing one for the first time not being that into it.
But man, that night in the fall of 1997 he was something else. It’s almost thirty years later and I am still in awe of that performance. If this album didn’t wow you then check out Fragments of a Rainy Season. And when you see an artist coming to play a show that you think might be cool and are considering going; do. It might just be one of the greatest concerts you’ll ever see in your life.
*Tied with seeing James Brown at the Greenwood Civic Center on December 31, 1995. Greenwood didn’t get many concerts, so it was already a big deal. He put on a killer show for hours but because it was a Sunday he wouldn’t play “Sex Machine” despite multiple requests. But then it hit midnight, he and the band led a singalong of “For Auld Lang Syne” and then James Brown - maybe the best pure showman of the 20th Century - looked out at the crowd and said “Well, it ain’t Sunday no more” and they did “Sex Machine” and blew the fucking roof off the place. There were asses in that civic center that hadn’t shaken in decades that shook like it was their job that night. It was transcendent. The fact that a Welshman behind a piano in a 200-capacity club was able to match that moment should tell you something about how good that John Cale show was.
Simply Red
2/5
This sounds like bad 80’s Aretha Franklin. But at least she used to make good music.
Emmylou Harris
3/5
Emmylou Harris vastly improves every song she appears on, whether it be by Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, or any of the other artists with whom she’s worked over her long career. But for me, she’s like salt. A dash of salt improves the flavor of another dish without question but you don’t want to sit down and eat a bowlful of it. Some of these songs aren’t bad but I’ve never heard an Emmylou Harris album that I thought she carried all the way through. This one is no different. That being said, I love Emmylou Harris and how much she added to some of my favorite songs but I don’t ever find myself wanting to listen to an Emmylou Harris album.
Neneh Cherry
2/5
CDs were a mistake (also the internet, but that’s neither here nor there). An album of generic 80’s pop with only one good song wouldn’t be that annoying if it was 30 minutes long but at an hour and seven minutes this felt interminable.
Coldplay
3/5
Genitals are kind of interesting, otherwise the human race would have died out. But they’re only kind of interesting. If your songs are only saying “I have this one particular type of genital!” then they’re pretty boring. Like Led Zeppelin. Their songs are definitely about the fact that they have dicks, but they’re not only about that. They are also about wizards and Vikings and drugs and The Lord of the Rings. If Led Zeppelin’s songs were just about the fact that they have dicks then they’d be Poison.
With Coldplay, their songs are kind of pretty, slightly catchy and totally inoffensive. But their songs’ only subject matter is the fact that all of the members of the band have no genitals, and that’s boring. Making all your songs about not having a dick is no more interesting than making your songs about the fact that you have a dick. I can’t listen to 41 minutes of “I’m a eunuch. I have no genitals whatsoever. I’m completely smooth down there like a Ken doll!” Mix it up. Throw in a line about a wizard or something.
The Sonics
3/5
I like how raw and raucous and wild garage rock is, but a full album of garage rock by a single artist starts to feel like diminishing returns and kind of blurs together. I like Rhino’s Nuggets box sets because the variety of artists makes the sameiness of the genre more palatable. “Strychnine” is a good song but I don’t think that any of the covers on this album are an improvement on the originals. This is pretty good garage rock, and I have no doubt that it was influential, but pretty good garage rock is like pretty good professional wrestling. After a couple of songs, my palate wants something a little more nuanced than amateurish playing recorded in the red and screaming.
Public Enemy
3/5
Public Enemy were unquestionably innovative and groundbreaking during this time period but this was their fourth album of being innovative and groundbreaking and it seems like they were running out of ideas. There are good songs on here but none as good as the best songs on their previous three albums. Flavor Flav has some decent moments but nothing to touch “911 is a Joke” or “Can't Do Nuttin' for Ya Man”. I think this is one more PE album than this list actually needed.
Caetano Veloso
3/5
I enjoyed this album. A lot of it sounded extremely modern; for example, “Clarice”. This was a nice surprise and I’m glad to have heard it. I expect to listen to this again.
Jorge Ben Jor
3/5
This was my second Brazilian album in a row. I have enjoyed both and thought that this one was even better than the one before. This album was fun and funky and great from start to finish. I am also super down with songs featuring the cuíca. I am going to have to check out more albums from this artist and Brazil generally.
Billy Bragg
5/5
I’ve listened to this album a million times, and when it came up this morning I got a smile on my face because I was about to listen to it again. Mermaid Avenue volumes one and two may have been when alt-country peaked. Maybe not the best alt-country albums of all time (I already claimed that for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road), but the moment when the genre jumped the shark by doing something so crazy and mind-blowing that it could never be topped.
I’m almost loathe to review this album because some things are magic because every part of them is magic and I don’t want to poke at something and make it not work any more. Billy Bragg, Wilco (before Jay Bennett died, so real Wilco), Natalie Merchant, Woody Guthrie. All parts that were great in their own ways and to their own extents, but they came together and for no reason that I can put my finger on created something incredible.
This is one of those “important” albums. Not to the history of music, maybe, but to me and in my life. A tentpole album for me. The Mermaid Avenue albums are two of the ingredients that make me who I am. Not big ingredients like my parents or where I’m from or the people who I’ve spent my life with, but ingredients nonetheless. And I’m glad of that.
Steal from the rich, elect Jesus president, sing beautifully, be kind to animals, join a union, marry your true love, kill fascists. These are words to live by.
Arrested Development
3/5
This wasn’t bad. The singles are good; as are “U” and “Dawn of the Dreads”. This was a fun and enjoyable album. I wonder if the CIA agent responsible for flooding black neighborhoods with crack is also the one who made sure gangsta rap eclipsed positivity rap. That guy was putting in work.
Sister Sledge
3/5
I kind of liked this. Still disco but more straight ahead pop than CHIC. Not bad.
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
I enjoyed the first Chemical Brothers album I reviewed and I am happy to see that they have come back with another one of those block rockin' beats. I like techno-adjacent pop music. I enjoyed Run Lola Run. The late 90’s were cool. Get off my lawn. I am dancing on it.
2Pac
3/5
Tupac is overrated. He was nowhere near as talented a rapper as many of his less-esteemed contemporaries. Most of the backing tracks are just generic 90’s rap background music, and Tupac’s rapping all sounds exactly the same for over an hour. And “Dear Mama” is cheesy and lame. *holds up three fingers and turns them sideways to make an ‘E’*.
Terence Trent D'Arby
3/5
I think the tension between the two things Terence Trent D’Arby was trying to do with this album are what makes it interesting. He obviously wanted to be an artist but I think he was also trying to be a pop star. His trying to do both those things gives this album more complexity than straight ahead formulaic pop and makes it more fun than just some pretentious jagoff trying to make art. Not everything he tried here worked but this is a good album and worth listening to.
Public Enemy
3/5
I don’t know if this isn’t quite as good as Fear of a Black Planet or if I just like Fear more because I’m more familiar with it but this album doesn’t connect with me to the degree that Fear does. I appreciate what they accomplished with this record but I don’t personally enjoy it.
Bill Evans Trio
3/5
There’s jazz that I like to listen to, jazz that I am fine if it’s playing but don’t particularly like to listen to, and jazz that I don’t like. This is the second one. Also maybe that’s my scale for music generally and not just jazz? I will say this though, that bass player was playing like it was his last week on earth.