Many of the songs are like silt deposited in a riverbed, with layer upon layer of synths and keyboards and then guitars and eventually a topmost layer of vocals, all building upon each other, forming new vertebrae of the track’s spine or disintegrating entirely. Keeping track of all the components in “Shout” is like a mindfulness exercise. In an age where attention-grabbing chaos was accelerating, it was — and remains — a maximalist call for minimalism, or at least a focus.
Others like “Everybody” and “Head Over Heels” are built from simpler structures and rely more on bombast and singing. I don’t love the lyrics on the album as whole, but they’re often just oblique enough to avoid being maudlin and yet are strident enough to connect to. In any case, they take a backseat to the textures of the production.
As befits the name of the album, the songs don’t often feel connected to each other. I’m not really sure “I Believe” belongs here, and it’s amusing that the lead single was “Mothers Talk,” which is the most derivative track of Talking Heads/Simple Mind. But that only heightens the joy of the flow from “Broken” into “Head Over Heels,” and ultimately the sonic crescendo of “Listen” that seems to bind the experience together.
Favorites: Head Over Heels, Shout, Everyboy Wants to Rule the World, Listen
Least: Mothers Talk, I Believe
I don’t have a deep connection to the Stones. Whenever I listen to one of their albums, though, I find the A-side singles (Brown Sugar, Wild Horses) are much less enjoyable than the B-side rockers (Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, Bitch) and end-of-album oddballs (Moonlight Mile, Sister Morphine).
More engaging than I expected, but nothing really enduring for me. Lots of solo artist angst, living la vida juvenil (including a BritPop song called South of the Border…?), and shoutouts to the people who didn’t believe in him. He has charisma and I understand why he became a British star, but it isn’t for me.
Favorites: Life Thru a Lens, Clean
Least favorites: Ego Agogo, South of the Border, Old Before I Die, Let Me Entertain You
Fierce energy and fresh lyrics drive the album forward through a variety of rock/punk/pop styles. I liked the first half better on the second listen and the second half better on the first listen. I think that speaks to both the overall quality of the album and to how tedious some pockets of songs can be. Hynde is consistently engaging, but the rest of the music didn’t always carry the same charisma or sharpness as her songwriting and singing.
Favorite album of the list so far. Absofuckinglutely incredible. Chuck D’s rhyme schemes and breath control are still thrilling. Flav’s ad libbing has become essential to modern rap, and their chemistry of style and substance is unbeatable. And the production somehow steals the show from them, over and over and over again. How does it still manage to sound so avant-garde almost 40 years later? Fucking brilliant, in every way.
Favorites: Bring the Noise, Terminator X To The Edge of Panic, Don’t Believe the Hype, Rebel Without a Pause, She Watch Channel Zero?!, Caught, Can I Get a Witness
Least Favorites: I guess Show Em Watcha Got, but only because Jay-Z stole it? Maybe Security of the First World
This album feels like the epitome of the best an exercise like this can be: the discovery of something that I should have known long ago, which I never knew I was looking for, and yet that slots right into a hole somewhere and illuminates it.
Favorites: St. Olav’s Gate, Love At The Five and Dime, The Wing and the Wheel, Goin Gone, Banks of the Pontchartrain
They begin to grow into their famous sound, ditching (some) prog for harder, faster, glammier guitar-and-drum rock. Still, the irreplaceable part of Queen is Freddie Mercury, but the band’s identity in prog-ness means they have to defy expectations by inserting unstrategic weirdness, so Mercury is frequently sidelined for blah compositional arty tracks. You can still feel the foundations for their next few albums, when they figured out how to stop chopping off their feet for effect, but it doesn’t feel fully realized yet.
Peaks: Brighton Rock, Killer Queen, In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited
Valleys: Tenement Fuster, Bring Back Leroy Brown, She Makes Me,
My note could easily spiral out of control into a 5,000 word essay, which speaks to the magnificence of the work of art at hand. I suppose the central questions when listening to this in 2025 are: is Kanye an artist wrestling with his inner demons and baring his soul for the world to see? Or is Kanye an artist with inner demons wrestling with the world for acceptance as he is? And how much do you really care if he’s trying to use his music to grow or to be seen?
For me, all the evidence points to boastful self-mythologizing. I have no doubt that Kanye was tortured internally. I have severe doubts as to how self-aware he was about anything, other than feeling like he was coming apart at the seams and needed to blame someone else for it. This contributes to the incredible care he puts into every tiny detail of the music, and all the songs he left on the cutting room floor (I’m still salty “Christian Dior Denim Flow” didn’t make its way onto the final record); however, that makes it impossible to ignore the blockheaded obduracy of what he actually says throughout the record.
“Runaway” is famously the least contrite self-reckoning in wax, but the emotional keystone of the album is “Blame Game,” which I cannot for the life of me hear as anything more than a maniacal sex addict pissed that he can’t both fuck other women and also be able to call up his girl at 2am whenever he’s ready for her: “Fuck arguing or harvesting the feelings // Yo, I'd rather be by my fucking self.” That the song ends with a fairly disturbing Chris Rock appearance doesn’t help. It’s a skit which might be funny on a Chris Rock record, but which is jarring when coming from Kanye — Kanye, who is so famously touchy and unfunny that on “Gorgeous” he needs to respond to the South Park episode, thereby fulfilling their entire point that he takes himself too seriously. This isn’t a “Big Brother” or a “Street Lights,” where West seems to have some contrition or melancholy; he’s committed himself to the hedonism, to locking away the demons and hoping their rattling around inside will keep him productive.
And the demonic rattles do work, for some of the album. The prog rock influence continues to age well; no one else could have pulled off the King Crimson sample on “POWER” and the guitar-driven “Gorgeous” still stands out as one of my favorites (it doesn’t hurt that when it drags on 30 seconds too long, as do most songs on the album, he gets Raekwon to save it). “All of the Lights” is some of Kanye’s best storytelling, esp for a man so famously incapable of subject matter other than himself. “Monster” and “So Appalled” are inimitable posse cuts that somehow fit the flow and tone of the album, where most artists’ vision would be overwhelmed by having that many guest spots in a row. And I’ve always loved the euphoria of “Lost in the Woods.”
But it’s hard to escape the fact that what Kanye seems to have done for the rest of his career is lock away any capacity for self-reckoning, and that this is the record which demonstrates it. The GSH coda is especially off-putting. Is “America” Kanye’s problem? How, after all of this soul-baring, does Kanye not realize he’s his own problem?
The answer to that is why I can’t separate art from artist, and why it matters to me that he’s lost interest in human growth and just wants to be seen. The thing that drives him to be both a buffoon and a monster now is the same thing that drove him in making this record. The inescapable feeling I have of listening now, 15 years later, is of stumbling into the room of an egotistical Gregor Samsa. The closer we get to Kanye, the harder his carapace feels. I can’t help but be revulsed on nearly every track, from “swallowship” to “still get laid in the afterlife.” That he’s a sociopath was obvious at the time — I think it’s one of the reasons his more introspective label mates don’t get verses — but as the very same thing that drove him to sonic heights continues to drive him into insane depths, I can only find his hubris brittle and beetle-like.
Of course, maybe I’m just being unfair because of how fucking brutally Kanye got market-corrected by Kendrick.
Highs: Gorgeous, Power, Lost in the Woods
Lows: Blame Game, Hell of a Life, Devil in a New Dress, Runaway
Fun and energetic. Love the rollicking guitar riffs and pace of many of the songs. Sounds anachronistically like a 90s garage band mixed with 80s glam rock, so I can dimly see why it’s included here. But the singing and overall polish leaves much to be desired.
Tops: Malibu Beach Nightmare
Drops: Sailing Down the Tears, Ice Cream Summer
The inclusion of audio from the musicians’ conversations about recording and how to play certain songs strengthens the overall feeling of disparate groups jamming, jelling, into a fusion of America sounds.
My main criticism of the album is the sheer length. As an archival treasure trove of an effort to unite sounds, it’s excellent; as a single collection of tracks, it’s overwhelming.
Some standouts: Dark as a Dungeon, Wreck on the Highway, I Saw the Light, Tennessee Stud
Innovative, playful, harmonious. I can see why they’re so influential. There’s maybe a personal cap at which I can enjoy the psychedelic drones and high-pitched loops, but I can recognize why they’re beloved.
Peaks: Daily Routine, Summertime Clothes, Taste
Pits: Brother Sport
Not as consistent as later albums, but still a rollicking good time. The grimy characters and late-night stories
hold up well, and they bring an urgency and consistency to a range of styles.
Peaks: Dancefloor, When the Sun Goes Down, From the Ritz to the Rubble, Red Light Indicates Doors are Secured
Pits: You Probably Couldn’t…, Fake Tales of San Francisco
Could only come from Cleveland, after the river catches fire and before the balloons smother people on the lake. In a record presumably designed to defy most pleasant expectations, the guitar work consistently stands out and engages. The singing… honestly, maybe it was Stockholm syndrome, but I started to enjoy it later in the record.
Really reminds me of the work of Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives.
“Every last viewer is tuned to the method / Known to be a method, no magicians, not a trick”
The origin of skits in hip hop. The precedent for has-been rockstars to expropriate earnings from younger artists. An all-time classic situation of a group hating their lead single. And a pervasive, infectious joy in the creative freedom that open sampling and spoken poetry can provide.
Peaks: Plug Tunin, Potholes in My Lawn, Eye Know, Buddy, The Magic Number
The peaks can be quite high for the album, with her demo-like guitar riffs and funny, incisive lines cutting at what it is to Liz in Guysville. Sometimes those peaks wash out in the whole album, which gets a little lost in the concept and the response to the Stones (I wish Phair’s track-by-track Spotify playlist made me appreciate this album relative to Exile on Main Street, but it very, very much did not; I’m not sure how much the conceit was real or for show, but it doesn’t much matter in comparison now).
Peaks: 6’1”, Soap Star Joe, Explain It To Me
Pits: Glory, Canary, Stratford-on-Guy, Shatter
I bought this CD off eBay in 2011. Solid, enjoyable, but I don’t think it transcends. Still disappointed they didn’t bring Del the Funky Homosapien in for a feature.
The seamless, shimmering production and stylistic menagerie mash together into some kind of glorious, proggy-pop pipe bomb. I still find my attention wandering elsewhere, though, and I still think that’s because in the furious blitz of forms and techniques, the unifier is Mercury’s voice. I respect the band’s democratic approach to songwriting, but it leaves a mildly unsatisfying sense of semi-coherence. Still, I think this is about as good as that approach would ever get for them.
She shouts out Timbaland a few too many times, but in her defense, not many debut albums are going to kick things off with a run of singles as viciously smooth as “Hit Em”, “Sock It”, and “The Rain.” Throughout the album, ME marries radio-ready R&B hooks with fluid braggadocio about as well as any 90s album could.
Peaks: Izzy Izzy Ahh, The Rain, I’m Talkin
Pits: the number of times I’m reminded who the producer is
As someone who never cared much at the time for her stylistic controversies that are well-documented by Wikipedia, I think the synth-pop sound and production shines and sounds almost out of time. When she gets rolling, she makes the bouncy pop, catchy songwriting, and revealing singing all sound so *easy* — like watching a basketball star glide down the court for a dunk. However, for my taste, there’s a lot of repetition (“Out of the Woods” x 100) and she tends to hit me with an anti-frisson, moments of discord that detach me from the music (the bridge in “Shake It Off”, every “stay” in “All You Had to Do Was Stay”; there’s something in nearly song, honestly).
Peaks: Blank Space, Shake It Off, the non-chorus of Style, Clean
Pits: Bad Blood, Welcome to New York, This Love
