1001 Albums Summary

just not my thing i think! haven't really listened to blues for 10-odd years, and when i did i preferred it more acoustic, muddier (lol), deeper. this would be a killer kind of thing to see live but i don't get much out of sitting down and listening to it

as someone who came to metal through Deafheaven, Converge, and Holy Roar Records (remember them?) rather than the Big 4, this was such a fun first listen. the metal of 1986 feels more fluid, exploratory - it feels like this would be a thrash record with some serious qualifications these days, given the prog and goth and doom of it all. the open-road, shark-like velocity of tracks like Battery aren't dulled at all by the fact that chunks of Welcome Home just sound like the Cure - instead, they're colored by it, anger sharpening the pathos, pathos guiding the anger. in 2026, it's easy to hear this as a record made of its building blocks - speed and politics from punk, song structures from prog, soloing from classic rock, atmosphere from goth - but it's just So Fucking Fun to hear these guys putting those things together in at-the-time revolutionary ways. found this really illuminating and weirdly grounding as a piece of genre history - a feeling that is, in part, the point of a project like this - on top of being a good fucking time

had never really found My Bowie Record - a song here and there, sure, a few listens through Ziggy and Low after he died 10 years ago, but i've never been a proper fan. this thing, though, is just wonderful - title track obviously great but its precedent jam, Joe the Lion, an uptempo freakout about suicidal depression, is even more my speed. all of side a calls to mind the same face of the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights, another gated-drum and funky-bassline chronicle of life under fascism (although Scott and company allow themselves to get a little more pointedly political). unlike side b of that record though, which is Some Bullshit, the second half of "Heroes" is analog-synth brutalist-chic goodness, gorgeous crunchy greyscale ambient, the perfect soundtrack to finding a cold and ugly place very beautiful. and then there's the last track, which is, in tribute perhaps to Nite Flights, also some bullshit. down a star for that one, Dave

just really annoying, man. and i like the title track! that's not even the one i mean! that song is smarmy coming specifically from Lennon but is, as a sentiment, pretty affecting to me. but so much of the rest of this is shitty, bland blues-rock with horribly whiny lyrics. no clue what anyone gets out of the inside-baseball of How Do You Sleep? or Lennon breaking into his angry rock 'n' roll guy voice to deliver some of the dumbest lyrics he's ever written on Gimme Some Truth. the final two cuts are my favorites here - sweet, vulnerable, genuine - and even those have a line each that make me want to take this guy's lunch money. whatever, man, was always more into George anyway

he was twenty! it's hard to believe, but at the same time, it's so, so obvious. it is incredibly 20-years-old to be this direct, this naked. for all of your memories, real or invented - dead friends, gunfights, birthdays, nights spent doing genuinely nothing - to push up against each other, jockeying for significance in your young mind. when you're from someplace where much of the world tells you your life doesn't matter, it makes sense that, defiantly, every moment would start to burn a little hotter in your mind's eye what isn't very 20-years-old at all is just How Fucking Good this record is. it is just really explosively good. you could pick this thing apart, select a few lines that are throwaway or silly or repetitive, but Illmatic is an act of portraiture, and works best when viewed whole. you see the entire young man - one who sometimes lives dangerously, sometimes frivolously, sometimes reflectively, like we all do one way or another. that's not to say that the record doesn't work at the micro level at all. it does, fabulously, especially when Nas is in present-tense reportage mode. there are moments that feel like being grabbed by the scruff of the neck and being plunged into the ice-bath of a life that is almost certainly harder and more violent than yours. that second-by-second retelling of a stickup on N.Y. State of Mind, which reveals in one quick line that the whole story Nas has been so high he hasn't realized or cared that the building he's robbing is full of children? insane, terrifying storytelling. the production, too, gives you these little moments all the time. the "aren't i hot shit" beat switch on Halftime, that mournful, melting sax solo closing out Life's a Bitch, the blurred, staticky chorus of ghosts on Memory Lane. wonderful stuff, always so considered back to the age thing - there's a lyric i can't find now where Nas alludes to being a quarter of the way through his life. it really cracks this thing open for me - the gravity with which he treats the little things, the mental effort put into the rhyme schemes for bars about smoking weed or meeting girls. his childhood and adolescence were a significant chunk of his life! if you look at CDC data for life expectancy for Black men born in the 70s in the US, he would more accurately have been looking at a third of his years gone by. from that perspective, man....what a shame it would've been to not make this record. to be that age, and that fucking good, and not think the petty crimes, young loves, joint hits, friends gone (to the grave or the state) are worth writing about. what a damning, thoughtful, generous thing to do, bringing these things so vividly to life

biased, imperfect reviewer that i am, i think my impression of this record as whole is being colored by the presence of Arabian Knights, which is a monstrous song. that's not to say that religious fundamentalist communities can't be incredibly misogynistic, but jesus. we've seen, over and over again, since October of 2023 and many times before, where this dehumanization of Arab men gets us. it's a hell much worse than any foretold on this album the thing though is that this is a quite cool record, punchy and theatrical - i especially like Into the Light, which has a nice bit of Cocteau Twins to it, and Night Shift. i recently played in a band with a friend who loves Siouxsie, and now that i listen to her, it's cool to hear how much of this is in our music i know the actual review is slight, which might seem a bit bad-faith, but a lot of these post-punk/goth records will probably be similar like-not-love things for me. it's a sound i never have trouble with, but it's never a favorite either

front-to-back perfect pop music! endlessly catchy, brilliantly sung, wry and tuneful and very wise. i've loved this record for a year or two now and can't go a week without getting a song from it stuck in my head. "it's too 80s" "bad production" genuine skill issue you need to get more earnest now!!!!!

not opposed to disco in the Disco Sucks sense, but more in the sense that there are wires in my brain crossed a certain way as to make me enjoy grooves that are slower, more spacious, deeper. the rhythm section in these more uptempo songs is too quick, it glides along too cleanly along to really dig into anything a lot of this is context, of course - my kitchen with a glass of wine is the best way i'm willing to approximate a dancefloor on a sunday evening, but it's not the same. i'm sure Le Freak (burying the lede here - not a favorite!) goes nuts when you've mixed its plastic buoyancy with the sweat and skin of a crowd of beautiful people, and those Rodgers guitar licks are great absolutely anywhere pretty unreservedly in love with Savoir Faire (talk about slow, spacious, deep) and I Want Your Love, which uses the devotional aspects of gospel to make something hot and tense and desperate. otherwise, this is a respect-more-than-like situation, stunning musicianship without many songs i'd reach for day to day

i don't think many people would describe The Smiths' music as angry. they're stereotypically too po-faced, dour, depressed for anything that resembles a fire in the belly. but if not angry, then what the hell is this record? it's far from the histrionics found on occasion on their debut, but its social-issue songs weren't quite as sardonic and conceptual as they'd grow up to be - instead they're straightforward, plainspoken, very bitter and very very angry. as such, i think of this as the prickliest Smiths record, the one that lines up the least with a certain superficial perception of the band. there aren't really any great pop songs here, in the same way that the other three records have sprinkled on and the compilations contain in droves; What She Said is probably the strongest hook, and that song's dense, muscular swirl is fairly opposed to the breeziness of many Smiths hits. those highwire Johnny Marr guitar parts are here, but they're too slippery or too far down in the mix to stick in the head. bassist Andy Rourke gets what used to be Marr's spot, and fills the record with post-punk spikiness and muscular funk that aren't sprightly or pretty in the way the band often was these instrumental qualities do little to temper the record's sadness. this is a Smiths album, so we have to talk about sadness. it's here on Meat is Murder, and it's real. it's not particularly romantic, and it's certainly not cut with humor, completely upending the line so many defenders like to pull out - "you know, Morrissey's actually really funny!" and yeah, he normally is, but here he's telling us that jokes can be cruel, barbed, acidic coming out of the wrong mouth. he's recounting what might be a young girl's last words. he's gasping, dying, but somehow still alive, making the final stand of all he is - which admittedly, is actually pretty funny to say before continuing to live for at least 40 more years and being a huge weird bitch the whole time, but he certainly isn't joking when he sings it. on a lot of this record, as pointed out above, Morrissey's too angry to be funny OR sad, and despite what he'd claim on track 2 of his next record, it's a very righteous anger. it's on behalf of the defenseless, the innocent the small and frail: apart from the slaughterhouse-bound elephant in the room, he's angry on behalf of children. The Headmaster Ritual is just a beast of a way to begin a record, indicting the power and corruption rampant in English schools - corporal punishment is the oft-touted subject of the song, which isn't wrong, but its real, chilling bite comes from the sex of it all. Morrissey's always had a way with the sinister, more coercive side of sexual desire, and i think missing it in this song - "he grabs me and devours, kicks me in the showers" "the military two-step down the nape of my neck" - is to misread the severity of what he's protesting. things are no better at home, further down the tracklist, where the abuse is more narrowly physical but no less rampant, no more avoidable the final track is infamous, and look, i'm not putting it on for fun. i don't listen to it at all outside of this tracklist, but i think it's a natural extension of the callousness and brutality laid out in the preceding songs. from Headmaster to Barbarism to Meat is Murder, there's a clear line - how can our schools be civilized if our houses aren't, how can our houses be civilized if they gather around the meat of a slaughtered animal every night. it's the root of this brutality for Morrissey, which.........i don't know, man. i eat meat, but i get it. people like to close their ears to this one because Morrissey's annoying, but he's backed up by both highfalutin philosophers and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so it's not like he's the only crank in the world like this. i think this gets under people's skin more than they like to say. anyways! that's The Smiths' second record, a couple fun rockabilly tracks surrounded by these brutally sad, very empathetic songs. if anyone's read this far, you'll have gleaned they're a very important band to me. i really relished the opportunity to return to this record, which was a bit too frosty for me to love during my high-school obsession phase. as an adult living in a world that often seems alienated and callous, i found its opposition to cruelty, violence, austerity, and close-mindedness to be incredibly moving. it seems required on this site to bring up what an asshole you think Morrissey is when writing Smiths reviews, and yeah, of course, but it's just horribly sad to me how someone writing such empathetic music could turn out that way. who knows, man, at least he gave us these songs

like if the make-a-wish foundation covered adult tracheotomy patients

nice little mood piece with a few very pretty songs, but kind of a silly inclusion on this list, even next to other records by the same band

i'm passingly familiar with music from Mali, so expected the ripping guitar work, which is great! like desert-blues breakout Tinariwen, this is just a little bit too shiny to really scratch the itch for me, but that doesn't diminish how talented the players are. doubt i'll be back to the album but man, these guys must absolutely smoke live

feels very dated in its conception of what's cool, what's edgy, what's rock and roll. honestly totally fine with the material here, besides some scattershot annoyance at the degree to which Jack White is Doing A Voice, but any media landscape that sees this as new, exciting, essential feels very far away. very sturdy collection of songs that will hopefully continue to inspire 12-year-olds to dig into guitar music, good for the background otherwise

i was fucking around on my acoustic a few days ago, and wrote the bones of a little song. hammering on and off the low e, a few more plaintive notes on the higher strings, a couple fingerpicked embellishments, but always a return to the warm, plumbing bass notes. it was gentle, it was propulsive, it was lovely, it was... Which Will. i'd just been fucking playing Nick Drake's Which Will, a perfect little song which has definitely been written and recorded before. but i think the fact that, for just a second, i thought i might've come up with the thing is a testament to the universality, the deep, old, essential nature of the best songs here. drake's guitar work isn't flashy or complicated, but it's nuanced and beautiful. every strum feels like he's digging a little deeper into the music, plumbing another depth. the vocals have a similar quality - hushed but purposeful, earthy, far older than any 26-year-old should sound. i've heard drake's lyrics described as cryptic or insular, and maybe i'll give you the latter, but lyrics like the aforementioned Which Will and Place To Be are incredibly plain, burnished and writerly but very clear. those two songs, in particular, are very genuinely perfect. dusty little jewels. as the rating reflects, i have to admit i'm not totally in love with every song on the record - even on something so short and spare, a few bits feel inessential. but i've always had a strange relationship with this one, where i know the first few songs hugely well but don't usually sit through the full thing, so with my increased familiarity, i could easily see this being a 5. for now, i'm off to learn his songs properly, and maybe stumble through one of my own, so communicative of the power of one voice and one guitar is this wonderful record

the first time an album on this list has cultivated, for me, that most special of all effects: it has invited me to listen more deeply. it's coy, and strange, and quiet, in a way that draws me completely into it. i have the urge to untie it and pick it apart i've known the title track for years, and it's stunning - there's a plainspoken decisiveness to all its lyrics that i find heartbreaking and warming at once. the rest of the record operates in a stranger mood, one that's hard to pin down, often drawn towards death, evil, misanthropy, but really funny and horny about the whole thing. even the lighter tracks are cryptic - especially Knockturne, a gnarled, imagistic take on the love song, sung very quietly and with a lot of sweetness felt totally beguiled by this record, and very sure of the many charms it will take longer than 24 hours to reveal to me. wonderful stuff!

never spent any proper time with Curtis Mayfield before today, grateful to have been given the opportunity! think i might not be the first person to have had this opinion, but what a fucking vocalist. so much vulnerability and tension in his voice, captured beautifully - you can really hear every bit of enunciation through the mix, and it really works. the political nature of this album has seen it compared to What's Going On, but Mayfield is so much less smooth a vocalist than Gaye (who I do love) - there's so much wonderfully audible effort. on the darker tracks, like my favorite When Seasons Change, it sounds like he's walking a tightrope, close to collapse or breakdown at all times and the band, man, jesus. should ask this record for a loan because it's got deep fucking pockets. the groove on Billy Jack is just immensely nasty, drum-tight but loping, elastic, alive. there are things here i like a bit less - plenty of others have mentioned Jesus as a lowlight and like, yeah, i can't disagree. i understand why, to Mayfield, it's of a piece with this record, but it doesn't hang as well together for a non-believer. the more down-the-line political tracks on the second half of the record also aren't quite as impressive as Billy Jack and Blue Monday People, which make the record's themes personal and visceral. still, though, just a fucking great piece of music, with a couple of new favorite songs in a genre i love but don't know nearly as well as i should. very happy to expand my education a bit and add a pretty stunning album to the collection

staggeringly great writing from one of modern lyricism's best. she's so cutting and conversational and smart here, so deft with perspective, both cynical and empathetic. hard to see how any Blue acolytes took this as an abandonment when it boasts lines like "and you were in the parking lot/subterranean by your own design/the virtue of your style inscribed/upon your contempt for mine" maybe it was the knotted, hard-to-parse argument-song Don't Interrupt the Sorrow, a track which any Joanna Newsom fan with a yen for exegesis should look up immediately. more likely, though, it was the jazz. the noodly, layered, ever-shifting jazz, way less shiny and straight-ahead than the likes of Steely Dan would ever put down. i think the proggy complexity of these tracks really suits Mitchell's lyrics, and does some fantastic meaning-making itself on tracks like The Jungle Line and Harry's House/Centerpiece, the latter of which uses the genre's semi-antiquated reputation to the song's incisive benefit and man, so much of this is just Gorgeous! the sighing horns on The Boho Dance, that repeated lyrics at the end of Sweet Bird, the Bound 2 gospel-eruptions of Shadows and Light - all stunning. masterful, complex record, probably my favorite Mitchell and one of the more perfect sets of words anyone's ever set to music

first real experience with Public Enemy and, like, hm. always thought i'd love them, and maybe Black Planet or Nation of Millions will click harder, but i'm not in love with this. it's a very angry record, which is fine, cool even, but there's a kind of haranguing quality to it when you combine the sentiment with its length that is a challenge, especially with my habit of listening to these multiple times to really wrap my head around them. Chuck D (wonderful voice, incredibly cool, genuinely really excited to hear more of him) has a real bitterness towards other Black people on this record that is certainly earned and complicated and really not my thing to dissect but it makes things a bit less righteous and more lecture-y. still, though, this is just a very cool block of sound. sampling's great, production is funky in a sort of loud, sweaty way, and when the lyrics are on point (which they mostly are) it's really easy to get caught up in the energy. also, just scrolling through their discography, and man, what an incredible set of album covers. just such a cool, cohesive, accurate-to-the-music set of visuals. anyway, that's not really relevant. i liked this! i think i seem negative because this has been a week of total heaters from the generator, and i expected this to be another one. oh well!

nice voice but i'll never really get along with these folkie adult-choirboy types (james taylor, when this list gets to you, it's on notice). i do genuinely like Everybody Loves Me, Baby - rousing, caustic Dylan-lite - and The Grave, everything else isn't worth much

really wanted to love this for nostalgia's sake, and for 9 minutes, i totally did - Jesus of Suburbia is a bratty, pathos-laden power-pop epic, incredibly confident and winning. but this doesn't last - the politics, though refreshingly bold today, wear thin really quickly, and then we're left with a lot of overwrought balladry and rock n roll with very little bite. i'm happy that this album once sounded dangerous and important, and you could do so much worse than lots of what's here, but i'm 28! I've moved on and that's fine

would be pretty easy to dismiss this as The Killing Moon and eight other songs, and like.....it's easy because it's true. but i just can't bring myself to not enjoy this kind of jangly, gothy proto-indie. just my kind of thing, man

Fever to Tell was always my YYYs record, so this one was new to me besides the first two tracks - the second i'm a little bit tired of, the first is staggeringly good. with the rest, it's similar to that previous record in that they're a loud band whose best songs are quiet. most of the songs here are solid, but the quavering, vulnerable Soft Shock and, much later in the tracklist, Hysteric, a head-over-heels infatuation song which comes surprisingly close to capturing the lovely heartbeat-pulse of Maps. have never listened to the record in between this and the debut, but this is very much the sound of a band with legs to me - one that knows what makes them good and can transmute those qualities into directions that couldn't have been entirely predicted, especially back then. i think it'll endure in my head for a little while - it's hard not to be moved, ecstatically or sentimentally, by Karen O's wonderful voice, or the nakedness of some of these songs

have loved 21st-century Fiona for a long time now, so was very happy for the opportunity to go back to the beginning! i know people love this one, but to me, it's very much her first record and she was very young! stunning voice as always, and the run of tracks from Sullen Girl to Slow Like Honey is pretty inarguably great, but a lot of the others go on too long, and the jazz influence on display here is a little stale compared to what would come later. always listenable, always beautifully sung, just very much her first record

the generator's first Dylan! hell yeah dog. nearly half of these tracks are stone-cold all-time classics, and the comparatively throwaway ones are lovely - Oxford Town is a looser, more conversational take on protest music that loses none of its power for its attitude, and Bob Dylan's Dream is tear-jerkingly plainspoken and lovely. he does get a little silly with it at points, but i love it when Bob gets silly with it! he wouldn't be the same songwriter if he couldn't put Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance on the same record as Masters of War. love Bob so much - my first favorite artist, a fan from age three - and the genius of his early work, so quickly surpassed, is stupefying. can't wait to read reviews of this on here and get really mad about comments on his voice

as someone who hasn't had the urge to listen to zeppelin for about 15 years, i'm shocked by how much i like this! all the blues-rock i've been given so far has been middling at best, but i'm reminded why these guys are the best of the genre - big, heavy, dead-eyed grooves, played by a fucking massive rhythm section will always do it for me. there's a sweetness and playfulness to disc 2 that caught me off guard as well, and from the peak of Kashmir through the four following track might be the record's best stretch. it's kinda dumb, and it's not all essential, but there's purpose behind the spread here. Physical Graffiti feels wandering, searching, imposing, a band who could pump this shit out in their sleep looking for various ways to go further. good stuff!

don't like this at all! the vocal jazz/city-pop thing feels fake, and the 90s rock songs buried under it are dreadful

musical theatre for dumb guys. production's great, appreciably silly, overall good hang

genuinely quite tickled by this very earnest record, which uses dub as a launching point to access all sorts of music which exists in that deep, repetitious vein. perfectly reasonable mission, unfortunately undertaken by a white British guy with a signature hat. it's really silly, and doesn't feel like it's in particularly productive conversation with any of the genres Wobble's pulling from, but it's far from boring! flamenco, raga, Jez's terrible music from Peep Show - nothing's off limits here, and like. that's Not a Good Thing. but it's kinda fun anyway!

my best friend is a big Paul Simon fan - she'll come up again when we get to his solo work here - and i remember her playing America a lot the summer before our senior year of college. it was hot as hell, and we were kind of almost adults, and both our futures and the country in which we figured they'd take place seemed complicated and romantic and grand. now i live thousands of miles, a continent, a hemisphere away, and America just makes me feel sick. as a place, it seems flat, and small, and mean, and so does a lot of the rest of the world, and i'm completely unable to conjure up the romantic grandeur of what's undoubtedly the best track on this record the rest is just...a bit odd? lovely little vignette-y songs, often wistful, occasionally way too cute, sometimes jarringly experimental, though that bar is low for these guys. i really admire them both as songwriters, and love Simon as a singer, but the ping-ponging of this record between something more conceptual and songs about how it would be nice to go to the zoo (sure) or be a cornflake (what?) doesn't work for me all too well. this was a (very pleasant, very listenable) bit of a miss, and i'm looking forward to work by the duo that's maybe a bit more central between the poles of being labored and carefree

came for chungking express and a jens lekman sample-source, stayed for the wonderful vocals! the second half of the record is a bit more cookie-cutter, but it's all so well-sung and pleasant, and the good stuff is genuinely emotionally diverse and interesting. lovely!

fun, clever, surprisingly tuneful little record - it's easy to see how new wave grew out of bands like this when early punk was so arch and jangly. it's probably not gonna blow any minds if you're, like me, knocking on the door to your 30s, but these Adverts are good hangs! extra significance for being the first completely new to me artist so far - was fun to have no concept of what to expect

i feel like the Run DMC guys would appreciate, conceptually, keeping it real. and so: man, i fucking Hate the two big songs from this record. Tricky is the most annoying song in the world and anything involving Aerosmith sucks shit automatically. so, we're left with a bunch of Run DMC deep cuts, which are kind of okay. cool production, tolerable rhymes. maybe there's gold hidden after the first chorus of Dumb Girl but i heard it start up and just decided that track wasn't for me. highly influential and important but wow has this aged poorly!

wonderful, beautiful, very big music, earnest enough to meet the challenges of one's most difficult experiences but loud enough to drown them out if need be. the last four tracks are particularly great - long, unwieldy pleas for divine intervention or, barring that, getting totally obliterated on a million different drugs that's to say nothing of the record's infatuation with the earliest days of rock n roll, which i find very powerful. love how these guys elevate the sounds they grew up with into something blown-out and cosmic, like they're trying to impress upon listeners the outsize influence of those records. just beautifully sincere stuff, love this!

practically everyone on here's got at least one musical opinion that would make me say "what the fuck are you talking about" so here's mine for many of you: i just can't do it with Stevie Wonder. i've tried! i've tried so many times, and it just slides right off me. the vocals are too smooth, instrumentals too cluttered, songwriting too simple. i'm rarely upset by his music, but i just don't feel it like so many others do. and so, like songs in the key of life and innervisions, which i'll return to for this project, i think this is a fine record, well played and well sung, clearly very deeply felt, that just doesn't excite me at all. was really hoping to be made a convert, and i guess there's still time, but i think he's just not my guy :((

love this record, a consummate performer at the peak of his vocal power. the version of Bring It On Home had me fully in tears at like 11am

find it very hard to get excited about conscious rap which, as a genre tag, feels stuffy and moralizing, more focused on being an alternative to something else than anything in/of itself. it also immediately invites itself to scrutiny - i find the homophobia and misogyny here a lot harder to forgive when Common's positioned himself as a healthy alternative to hip-hop's regressive aspects. maybe he's only interested in the aspects that feel regressive for straight guys, i don't know. the whole thing of pretending there isn't any "consciousness" to Mobb Deep's street-level grindhouse, or Wu-Tang's comic book mythmaking, is so silly. but! i'm reviewing a record, not a movement, so i do have to say that this is pretty listenable as a collection of songs. it does sometimes get preachy, the awkward moments stick out really noticeably, and like so many potentially-good hip hop records it's just way too fucking long. but i just can't stay mad at the Dilla production, the lovely Soulquarian features (god, was D'Angelo a breath of fresh air) and the energy and inventiveness, which i have to admit to, of Common at the center. he's a sturdy MC with a kind of warm expansiveness to his lyrics - i can't say i find him too exciting, but you do get the feeling he was going for a real everything-record here, and i did find myself wrapped up in that. won't return to this, but it does seem like a really well-executed example of a certain thing that isn't entirely for me. looking forward to getting to Be, which appears more focused - here's hoping!

turns into a kind of pleasant much once you get past the first two tracks. fine songs, but just kind of insistent and loud, big simple drum parts and chiming guitars and not very good lyrics. it all glides right past me. that opener, though...not sure if anyone's ever come up with this take but that's a pretty good song!

monstrously produced, very well-rounded, hugely entertaining record during which i found myself hanging on Cube's words, wondering how sideways he'd approach the next line. the best stuff here uses that insane charisma to create a persona that still feels prescient - virulently angry, shamelessly prejudiced, a whirlwind of bad vibes that's loudly condemned and secretly revered by anything even approaching mainstream America. much has been made in the 1001albums comments of this record's misogyny, which is notable. far be it from me to be the Misogyny Arbiter, but it feels more like intentional (and poorly aged and clumsy) controversy-courting, as well as a part of Cube's general mistrust for nearly everyone. i don't blame anyone for being turned off by it, but between the man's 30-plus-year marriage and the fairly self-deprecating turn he takes on It's a Man's World, it goes down easier for me here than on other records. taken as a whole, i think this is a wonderful album of character work and a canny assessment of the place of hip-hop and Black men at the end of the American 20th century, AND it sounds good as fuck! i get what there is not to like, but also, man, what's not to like?

often guilty of reviewing the reviews on here, but jesus, you're all weird about sex! i'm sure many listeners claiming they have no way of relating to this album have had it, and if you haven't, you've wanted it, which gives you plenty to chew on regarding Heaux Tales. when it's not being had on this record, it's being desired, discussed, dismissed. which is, in my experience, like life! i'm not sure why we've collectively decided something so central to human experience isn't worth singing about especially when it's being sung like this, because good lord can Sullivan sing! she's got this agile, androgynous voice that bowls me over on pretty much every track. whether she's slipping into a kind of knotty, diaristic cadence on the opening track or belting through the closer, she always impresses. this does, to me, extend to the lyrics and stories. they're blunt, they're sexy, but they're layered, especially when you look at them across the record. i think the more straightforward tracks work well to show the absolute power sex can have over us, why it so complicates things, the high we're chasing - it makes the cynical use of sex on Price Tags richer, and the absence of connection on Lost Ones more devastating. the latter really deserves a mention - i was broken up with by the person i thought (and still, delusionally, graspingly think/hope) i would marry at the beginning of the year, for reasons completely my fault, so naturally this made me cry so hard i dropped a mug of tea all over my desk and had to tearfully, snifflingly clean off my laptop/phone/rolled-up Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie poster anyway! sex, love, power, self-worth - all essential, visceral parts of being alive, all worth writing about. can't wait to get back on this soapbox even more loudly when Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On comes around

dylan returning from the wilderness but still on the back foot, dejected, wary, wandering around with his beating heart in one hand and a knife in the other. his take on the blues here is very warm, but in a blurred, spacious kind of way, and it's never raucous or vague like so many blues records can be. the lyrics, whittled down to their essentials, are gorgeous, so plaintive and naked in their hurt, anger, humor. one of his finest records, familiar sounds whipped up into a singular miracle