I don't know much about jazz, but I know this album and I know it's great. Scores of people smarter than me have explained why.

David Bowie has some great albums, but I don't think this is one of them. It got a lot of attention on release for the big genre swing, but in 2025 it mostly sounds like Bowie doing R&B not nearly as well as the artists who helped invent it. "Fame" is great, but I could do without most of this album.

This is going in the "not for me" pile. I appreciate the craft behind these songs, and I recognize that this is some of the best pop music of the time. But I'm kind of allergic to that 80s pop sound.

I guess I had no idea what The Temptations sounded like, because this is much funkier than I expected. Songs in the second half like "I Ain't Got Nothin'" and this group's version of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" are closer to the soul vocal group that I think I was expecting. But songs like "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" and "Funky Music..." have much more going on instrumentally and are more jam-oriented than I would have guessed. I especially love the live opening track, which really highlights what an incredible band they were.

Physical Graffiti find Led Zeppelin at the height of their success and (maybe) their musicianship. But this album is also the beginning of the end of their creative streak. There are great songs on here, arguably some of the best they ever wrote, but the album is also bogged down by its excess.

This is one of those bands I think I'm supposed to like, but it doesn't do anything for me

Great songwriting combined with uncompromising experimentalism make one of the greatest albums of all time

Not my personal favorite Beasties album, but probably their most important one. They abandoned the ironic frat boy rap/rock of their debut (which much of their fandom didn't realize was ironic) and, with the help of the Dust Brothers, produced a sample-heavy masterpiece. Chuck D says that when Public Enemy heard it, they realized they needed to seriously up their game.

I was kind of meh on this one until the final track

I was about to chalk this up as more well-crafted 80s pop that I just don't have a taste for, but then "Mother" started. I had to check that I was still listening to the same album. It sounds like it would be more at home on a Birthday Party record than here. It at least made me think I should listen to this album a little more closely to see if there are any other interesting surprises. There were not.

I felt like I had put a fair amount of time in this album, heard several impressive guitar solos, a lot of high-pitched wailing, a couple slower sections, definitely enough to get the overall feel of the album. I was getting a little bit bored with it, though, and checked to see how much was left before I can move on to something else. I was still on track 2 3 Stars UPDATE: I got to the part on Strange Kind of Woman where the singer starts a call and response with the guitar, so I'm downgrading this to 2 stars