Back in highschool I blind-bought Expensive Shit/He Miss Road and loved it. I'd always intended to go back for more but never did until today. Felt like hitting the jackpot when this dropped.
This is less noisy and more jazzy/post-punk than I expected. The pokes at New Wave and Michael Jackson in the song titles seemed to imply something like Dead Kennedys - I Like Short Songs. Some songs do hit the expected punk takes on politics and capital-s Society (Viet Nam, Shit from an Old Notebook) but the album ranges from very concrete and mundane (a verbatim note from the landlady about not using the shower) to abstract and poetic. I can easily see how this might blow your head open as a kid in the 80s, especially if you were coming from Top 40 Radio and your parents' record collection.
I don't care for a lot of the vocal performances on this one, aside from the comradely group chants, but I can appreciate this album as a cultural keystone of the late 60s that I had completely overlooked until now. I'm sure I'd heard The Weight and (covers of) This Wheel's On Fire but never knew their origins. I enjoyed the early synth and electric organ flourishes on a few of the tracks, too.
Exciting stuff. I hadn't heard stuff from this early in James Brown's career before and it was cool to find out that he had already taken on the "hardest working man in show-business" moniker and that his vocal style was already fully formed.
Back in highschool I blind-bought Expensive Shit/He Miss Road and loved it. I'd always intended to go back for more but never did until today. Felt like hitting the jackpot when this dropped.
I'd already heard some of this as a consequence of having been alive in 1993 but I'd never heard the full thing. I was too young for it then and I'm too old for it now. Snoop mentions being 18 in one song, so I can totally see how you'd go nuts for this if you were like 14 or 15 when it dropped. The early 80s P-funk samples would sound like your childhood and you'd be in the market for something loud and transgressive
I'm not inclined to really love acoustic guitar folk music but listening to this album for the first time brought to my attention the updated version of "Father and Son" that has him, aged ~72, singing in the role of the father against a recording of him at 22 as the son. The original version was Fine but the combination of his young and old voices in the update is surprisingly affecting.
The start of the title track is to sudden amorous changes of mood what the Wilhelm scream is to guys falling to their deaths
These guys must have fallen into some obscurity after their heyday. Most of the 20th c. artists on this list I recognize either from having heard one of their big hits, seeing them mentioned on one of VH1's boomer nostalgia documentaries, or at the very least, having flipped past their section at a record store. As you might guess from the title, this is dancey psych rock, perfectly suited to a party scene in some late 60s AIP movie called like Professor Vampire and The Talking Bikini
I love the progressive impulses that motivate this album and the early 90s hiphop sounds but oh my god "Children Play With Earth" is so funny: "Okay, the way kids are living is 100% European African boys and girls: Set down your Nintendo joysticks right now Unplug the television and make way for an old vision Which will now be a new vision Yes, Headliner, lay the foundation Dig your hands in the dirt (that's right) Children play with earth (that's right)" As a kid I did spend time running around outside and playing in the dirt but I also loved videogames and I cannot think of something less likely to work than telling kids to put down the Marios and go play with "the earth that eventually will take you"