Unfortunate you started with this one because now everything else has to live up to the greatest/most influential soul/R&B album ever recorded

some of this sounds like it was recorded with a water bottle over the microphone but still good. the bass and rhythm section carry the whole thing. enjoy the glory days before REM discovered what a mandolin was

i owe you an apology. i was not familiar with your game. turns out my vendetta was against the song Ironic and not alanis morissette in general. i had heard most of this album before (shopping centre carparks, ads for air fresheners, walking past worksites tuned to Triple M) but never listened... i cannot truly beef with this many borrowed chords and melodic tension, no matter how much you mistake irony for misfortune or decide to sell yourself out to the late 2010s jukebox musical nostalgia complex. alanis, we were once ronin who served warring shogunates. you remember - the stakes seemed so high. but at this late hour, i have more respect for my Sister in the Blade than for any master. let there be peace...

a true inspiration to all autism-coded individuals that you too can make one of the greatest art rock albums of all time, as long as you all absolutely fucking hate each other. sometimes that is art's greatest crucible. Talking Heads 77 and Remain in Light are in the Matt Canon for a reason. some of this album fails, but I dont care. all I want is ambition. pop and rock music shouldn't be afraid to make your brain itch.

wait, this isn't the classic 2000 smash hit from power metal superstars Stratovarius? Oh well, i'm sure that's coming later in the list. this is surprisingly good for what i expected to be a one-song album. it's worrying when the only reason anyone knows a second song from you is because it was in a James Bond movie. we're getting into Men Without Hats territory at that point. but this was actually pretty good, although some of the songs sounded like bad spandau ballet impressions at times. a-ha probably have sentries posted to stop tony hadley cutting their brake cables every morning. however does anyone need to listen to this before they die? probably not. it's fine but not really important. no one's getting their worldview expanded unless they've never heard a norwegian man sing an E5 before, in which case it's more of a 1001 singles to hear before you die situation u feel me

You miss the old Kanye? not a fan of Burzum kanye? Still on his meds kanye? me too, man. when he seemed to understand that "persona" used to mean mask. aesthetically I love the schizo-baroque edifice of the MBDTF era more than the smooth soul beats preppy Kanye, but this is something for the kids to listen to after all. A few songs overstay their welcome (Spaceship especially), and the album itself is probably slightly too long, but at the end of the day, who cares.

Prince albums can usually be divided into two categories: where Prince is On One, and when he is not. When he's on, he's the greatest pansexual imp to ever pick up a musical instrument. But unfortunately, he was often led astray by leading the life of a medieval king, flitting between being obsessed with Jesus or getting all the pussy in the world. This album is the exception: it's both On and Off, sometimes in the same song. I don't know why the academic opinion is that this is Prince's best one, and after listening again, I still don't. The musicianship is insane but large chunks of this seem juiceless to me. I don't know. At least it's not that weird concept album about ancient Egyptian genetic memories solving racism

in my younger and more vulnerable years, I once spent an entire lunchtime arguing with one of my Year 10 music teachers about whether Joni Mitchell sucked or not. really I was rescuing him from ripping bongs and day-drinking in the staff room, which is usually how he spent his lunchtimes. one time he pegged a recorder at a kid and ran out of the room crying because, for some reason, playing a recorder along to some afro-cuban beats in 7/8 wasnt enthralling to a class of 14 year olds. his wife was a substitute teacher at the school and nothing gave me a more visceral understanding of freudian sexual development than seeing those two together. anyway suffice to say that I don't get joni mitchell at all. music for people who own 4 airbnbs for tax purposes and refuse to fix the plumbing in any of them. the best thing she ever did was temporarily quit the music industry to become a morgellons awareness activist

I've never heard this before and it fucking ruled. It's almost chamber rock but for people who keep rosin next to their H. They clearly love the Beatles with the reverb washed, beautiful vocal harmonies and contrapuntal lines. The string arrangements elevated every song they were used on. However, they also loved The Beatles a little too much so some of the songs felt structurally derivative and unsurprising, but if "derivative of the Beatles" was a mortal sin then 90% of the music made since 1963 would have sent its creator to hell.

Perfectly fine to listen to, competently written and produced, but why should I listen to this over the million other competently written and produced 2010s albums that sound like this? My main gripe is that so many of the quiet songs made the bass guitar really prominent but then gave the bass absolutely nothing interesting to do, just eighth-note dicking around on the root of the chord or something. I assure you that your bassist use more than one finger fellas

chic doesn't get credit for being sort of an art project more than a hit machine. its much more congenial to group Nile Rodgers with cold krautrock avant-gardists and conceptual artists. chic was an experiment in personality-less music, not that the music has no personality but that it's monolithic with no central personality to attach everything to (cf Donna Summer or Marvin Gaye - even groups like Funkadelic are about personalities taking turns rather than the subsummation of personality itself). that's nothing like black popular music of the time, and that fact has been lost with how ubiquitous shit like Le Freak or Good Times ended up becoming. the whole album has this huge, chrome sheen to it. it isn't warm-sounding, and it feels like it's being beamed to you from a funky spaceship through like five enormously thick panes of glass. its no wonder disco imploded soon after chic because it reached its conceptual apotheosis; where else is there to go for a music premised on repetition and massed crowds if not complete effacement of identity itself?

its such a shame we were denied hendrix's inevitable jazz fusion turn. the man made sounds with his instrument that were unfathomable at the time, and also just played like no one else did, or has since. look at the pile of optimistic-eyed guitar-aspirant corpses that Little Wing has left in its wake. always sounds wrong, because no one else can do that shit

this was way more inconsistent than I remember, but the highs are really fucking high. it's not about the music here, it's the lyrical pyrotechnics and the pre-2008 eminem attitude. I dont think a musician has been worse served by getting off the drugs (see the "you have to be brave" tweet) - but also the gangsta rap braggadocio that he's taking to its logical conclusion doesn't really exist in the same way anymore, and neither does Family Friendly Rap like will smith, so the joke is lost now. he's billed as a sorta hip hop prankster/enfant terrible but i don't think that's quite the full story. makes it hard to properly assess it nowadays, I think

Good and quietly influential in the urban spiritualist/conscious rap mode but comes across as a little too hat backwards, we've-had-a-lot-of-fun-today nowadays. I think it's the flow, since that type of rap was popular when educators who should've been pastors began trying to be cool with the kids, so it became the de facto hiphop style of the daggy trying to seem down with the kids. none of that is jungle brothers' fault though, but it makes de la soul better to listen to

i wonder what it's like being the other guys in oasis. do you hang around and just do your job while watching noel and liam murder each other with vox ac30s? this has a much bigger sound than definitely maybe, probably because this is about what happens once you've made it - you're no longer plunking your way through rock songs in the garage but playing to massive stadiums. the tension isn't just between the brothers but between oasis and the long shadow of the beatles. it's anxiety of influence: the album (although if you played this to harold bloom it would've given the poor dude a seizure)

there's some great music on this album but too much fucking around for this to be truly good. i swear city, country, city just sat on the same 2 chord vamp for 8 minutes straight, which is usually my sort of shit, but they didn't do anything with it to make it my sort of shit. it felt like listening to the sort of band practice you have in your teens where you start playing your repertoire but get bored halfway through the first song and end up jamming on it for the rest of the hour. from the gospel of francisco vincent zappa: "we was playing the same old song / in the afternoon, and sometimes we would / play it all night long / it was all we knew, and easy too / so we wouldn't get it wrong"

i feel like I would appreciate this a lot more if I smoked cigarettes. you need to be driving a car with wood trim interiors when you listen to this. or a 1972 pontiac (i wouldn't hold out much hope for the tape deck though). however proud mary almost gets this a 4/5 completely on its own. you can sit around chooglin as much as you want after that.

to me steely dan are eternally frustrating because they always found people with insane musicianship, got the tightest performances out of all of them, only to then waste them on glorified on-hold-with-Telstra music. they flirt with being interesting but never commit to it. ohh look at our chord extensions and our add2 chords that we pretend are some fancy new thing we invented by giving them a stupid nickname ooooh. fuck outta here. you have all the ingredients to make me like you and you let me down. that is a far greater crime than just being shit in the first place.

are you a bad enough dude to self-title half of your discography? condemning generations to go "is that the one with the banana or the other one?" i think this album (and velvet underground in general) is so hard to talk about because they are so influential that they don't seem novel or groundbreaking any more. we miss why they mattered or what made them stand out. THAT BEING SAID THOUGH, i would only enter a room with lou reed in it en route to killing him with a hammer. lou reed is a corpse with a reputation hanging off of it. unfortunately his band is ok. but his band is also better when john cale is in it. i've got plenty more to say about that discount ben stiller-looking ass but I will save it for when this stupid fucking list probably forces us to listen to transformer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnVkRvOQY-8 (there's better postpunk and echo and the bunnymen got better later on anyway)

the drummer on this thing deserves a medal. surprising amount of weird shit going on under the hood which makes this more interesting than the usual thrash/borderline death metal of this era - but also more annoying because it makes me wish they doubled down on it. never thought i'd hear latin-inspired drumming on a thrash metal album, but now I have.

there's a hilarious picture of black sabbath performing in the gap between heavy metal music appearing but before people had worked out the heavy metal visual aesthetic, so they're still in full on flower power, folk music uniform, looking like they should be singing Build Me Up Buttercup. ozzy is singing under a rainbow with glittery silver boots. tony iommi doesn't have a moustache. this album's ok. too much cocaine in this one (or not enough, cf bowie's station to station)

Whichever british studio tech dork got out-alpha'd by eric clapton and let him turn up a marshal for the first time on that bluesbreaker album has a lot to answer for. because that's the only reason we have to put up with that asshole now. people only thought he was god because they'd never heard a cranked jtm with a les paul before. even the beatles at that point were still getting dweebs saying "oh but the microphone manual says it must be kept at this level, quite impossible to turn down I'm afraid chaps, could you instead turn your instruments down, there's a good fellow". if george harrison gets to turn up on rubber soul, we never have to hear from this enoch powell wannabe and the history of rock music remarkably improves.

why the fuck is this list making us listen to scritty fucking politti. why? did we warp into the 1001 albums you must play to prisoners in guantanamo bay list by accident? this is an album of fake songs they play in the background of 80s pornos. you expect an offshoot of a weird marxist artistic/musical collective to sound like, i dunno, laibach or something, not like wham if you kicked george michael in the balls first. everything bad about 80s pop is here: gated reverb, digital chorus and nasally pseudo-italo disco vocals without any of the alien charm of it. i'm sure gramsci is down there doing some solid RPMs after hearing this glowing tribute from a band so dedicated to his ideas that they created a perfect example of what capitulation to cultural bourgeois hegemony sounds like

if the ending of ziggy stardust is orpheus getting torn up by wild animals (fans of rockstars) then this is orpheus's head wandering the underworld and screaming (america). i'm probably in the minority since I like this better than ziggy stardust, but i don't think it's terribly useful to reduce bowie's shit to rankings like that - it all works together too much