While I don't think I would ever reach for a Kate Bush record, I also don't think I've ever heard a bad Kate Bush record. And this one is no exception to that rule.
But the sheer scope of songs like "Reaching Out" is inspiring.This is the culmination of everything the 80s became...in every good way.
Toward the end I got really tired of the wailing and there wasn't as much to hold on to as I would have liked. But Rocket's Tale pulled me out of that malaise and the monster "This Woman's Work" showed up like a siren and I could see Tori Amos and a million songwriters being born.
It's obvious to me that The Kleptones and Girl Talk and others do not exist without this record. And I am not well versed enough in the genre to talk with ANY authority.
But this is eminently listenable and explosive. It builds on what I loved about Public Enemy (and they must be on this list somewhere) but this is not a political polemic. At least not obviously. This is to Hip Hop as Brian Eno was to Glam Rock. OF the genre but building on it and creating something new, yet familiar.
In the end I found myself losing interest. This could be because it is over an hour long, as most albums of the 90s were and, while none of it is filler, I just think that's about 15-20 minutes too long to sustain interest. It really doesn't matter the genre.
In the early 00s this night club/60s soul revival exploded into our lives. Led by Amy Winehouse, there was Duffy, The Pipettes, Estelle, Adele, Lily Allen, Sharon Jones...it was everywhere. And when it popped up on a playlist or a blog or my radio, I always listened. But I never deep dived.
Amy's story is more well know to me than any of her albums in full. So, it's weird that I would start with Frank and not Back to Black. But, that's the order they came out and that's what 1001 albums generator demanded.
I rarely agree with Pitchfork but when they are Christgau are on the same page I listen to them.
This is not an album I must hear before I die. It's a pastiche of retro ideas without actual songs. It's the artist that comes on around midnight in the bar, everyone's drunk and she just left working costumes backstage for her 99 seat theater company's production of a local playwright's reimagining of a popular comic strip.
Highlights:
Fuck Me Pumps
Amy Amy Amy
I'm glad that this album was chosen because I have listened to it on a variety of systems over the years but the one thing I never did was plug headphones in and listened while I spun the vinyl. I've played it in my car and on a CD player but putting the remastered version on with high end noise cancelling headphones presented a new experience. One where each member of the band is able to breath on it's own. And that proves the reason this record is timeless and one for the ages.
That said, it gets really sloggy in the middle. One mid-tempo beer fest raise your lighters track after another.
Boy is this thing front loaded...
In my high school there were not a few brown paper text book covers that were bedecked with renditions of the Yes logo. And, yes, it's a great logo. For some inexplicable reason the only Yes album I bought was Tormato. And I loved it. And I bought zero Yes albums after that. Didn't even indulge in the catalog.
I was also stunned when my college roommate, who had such impeccable underground and cult tastes, and was responsible for my artistic awakening, turned out to be a Yes fan.
So, here we go. Into the first Yes album that matters, apparently.
It's 1971. We are just 16 years removed from "Rock Around the Clock". That hurts my brain to think about. 13 years prior to "The Clap", Chuck Berry was invigorating the world with his expansion of Sister Rosetta Tharp. And here is Steve Howe blowing people's minds in a pub.
While listening to "Starship Troopers" I found myself thinking about Tom O'Horgan and Experimental Theater of the 70s. This suite would fit in perfectly into that world.
Is "I've Seen All Good People" the proggiest folk song ever or the folkiest prog song? I can't tell. It still sounds fresh and interesting 55 years later. Well, maybe not fresh. But certainly interesting.
Do I get a little weary towards the end? Yes. "Perpetual Change" was the one that did me in.
For the most successful Funkadelic record it's weird that it's not available to stream, no?
My son loves James Brown and we were talking about soul and rock the other day and I was saying how incredible it is that Rock Music, invented by Black people, from Sister Rosetta Thorpe to Big Mama Thornton to Chuck Berry and all the way through Jimi Hendrix, is now considered a White Sound. The scene including the modern Black shredder in Sinners encapsulated that, in a movie about White people literally sucking the life out of an entire culture.
So, I loved the fact that the biggest hit on this is "Who Says a Funk Band Can't Play Rock?!" and the lead guitar is as good as anything anyone from Hendrix to...I dunno...every white kid that wanted to BE Hendrix ever tried.
Does it lose a little steam toward the end? Umm...yeah. But I think that's also by design. It's a record from the 70s. You are supposed to lose yourself in this thing, not sit and critically review it for some stupid blog.
How does one even approach this record? It's a time capsule of a time, that shows that nothing really changes and the heart longs for what the heart always longs for.
At the same time, it has been rendered parody over the past decades by the likes of O' Father, Where Art Thou and A Mighty Wind.
It's very early, pre-rock country. And it's fine. But I don't know why it's in the top of this list. Fine does not equal greatness.
I don't know if this is the first but it HAD to have been one of the most influential of it's kind because this sounds like every single television show from the 50s all the way through the 70s.
And I mean that in the greatest way possible.
How many times have I listened to this? I am surprised that my original 1977 vinyl copy still has grooves, it's been played so much.
Obviously this belongs on this list. It plays like a Greatest Hits record because every song has been ubiquitous for the past ~50 years. And deservedly so. Immaculately produced this is an album from the sky. It's remarkable and rewards with every subsequent listen.
I heard about Korn 30 years before I heard their music.
I was driving a cab overnight in the sleepy, Meth infected desert town of California. The dispatcher was some girl, name unremembered. We talked about music because, fuck me, there were no rides. Except the nightly lab specimen and the one guy who hired me to take him to the bus station every morning so he could go to work.
"Have you heard of Korn?" She asked. And she wouldn't stop talking about them.
I talk about my location because I was about the same distance from Lancaster as Lancaster is to Los Angeles. So, they were local.
I heard some of their music on MTV but I never listened all the way through.
This is the soundtrack to Gen X depression. From the imagery on the covers to the music. It's all schism and chaos. It's primitive rage borne from soul wrenching. Inorganic but also purely meth capital desert bloomed.
If you took a lot of Meth and forced Rage Against the Machine to listen to nothing but Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nine Inch Nails all day long, this is what you get.
It opens like a jazz ensemble warming up and then seamlessly merges into the monster hit, "Black Magic Woman", which has always, I guess, been a jam song and THAT song crashes into Gypsy Queen and I want to be at the Hayden Planeterium for the Abraxas Experience.
It does get a bit samey-same after a while but just as I wrote this, the vocals on Mother's Daughter came in to save us. To be honest, the Santana-penned tunes are the least interesting.
There was a time when alternative and rap converge. Almost like each genre was giving cred to the other. Rap reviving rock and rock helping rap make inroads into the mainstream.
I miss that. We are so siloed these days.
Sometimes this sounds just like Beasties and that makes sense, contemporaries will contemporary.
Discordant and angry, subversive and challenging and any other host of adjectival couplets I can think of.
Members of this group would work on, of all things, Sesame Street. And when I think about it, it makes perfect sense. Sesame Street was sort of subversive. Targeting the poor and the underprivileged, Sesame aimed to educate and used the tool of the elites, advertising, to do just that. It worked. For a while.
