The blues is there for the taking and I'm all for reusing it's tropes—frankly it's hard NOT to—but there's one too many lazy lyrical cliches here for me. The Cramps and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion do it better than this. Not to mention RL Burnside. Jack and Meg probably do it with more conviction too. I've only ever heard songs from this record in snippets and on truck commercials but I do like it more than I thought I would. Also, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Black Crowes, Black Star, and Black Lips are all better.

Nations were founded on less. If you don't like this then you don't like livin'.

The point for me of listening to and reviewing these 1001 albums is multitudinous: It makes me think about music in a thoughtful way that I can write about, it exposes me to things I haven't heard, and it reminds me of things I've heard but have forgotten about. Having said that, some genres of music and specifically, some albums, just remind a person of things that are so deeply ingrained that it's impossible to hear them in a fair or clear context. I was at the height of my indie record store employee snobbery when this came out and I hated everything about it and I dismissed it as techno garbage. I've since learned how the songs were assembled via vinyl samples on floppy disks fed through an old Atari computer and I think that's pretty cool but it's still too repetitive and amphetamine spazz out for me though. More than anything though it's just boring. And in keeping with my aforementioned snobbery: DJ Shadow does it better. Way better.

A "desert island" album for me and at times in my life, my favorite album bar none. There are at least a half dozen movements in music that were directly influenced by these songs and probably way more than that. There's also that Peter Buck quote about only a few hundred people buying Velvet Underground records but that all of them started incredible bands. You can just mainline this one straight into my vein. Also, I'm just now realizing that I have much more to say about the records I don't like. Probably because if I think it's good then the music will sell itself.

This record is a poppier Dark Side of the Moon or a less speedy Can't Buy a Thrill. It's fine but I prefer those records if I'm being honest.