1001 Albums Summary

I mean No Sleep Till Brooklyn is a classic the rest is w/e. TMNT ass band. Not my vibe.

I have ADHD. A shocking revelation, I know. But it makes actively listening to music hard. I bring this up because Tidal is half of a good album (for me) and half a bad album (for me). If I tell you the songs I liked were Sleep to Dream, Shadowboxer, and Criminal, you'll probably roll your eyes and call me pedestrian. The thing is, songs like Sullen Girl, The Child is Gone, and Pale September have this sort of rolling, lulling quality to them that make them (to me) feel like plinking at a piano aimlessly while singing. I will not remember these songs after I have listened to them. Their sound waves will undulate through one ear and out the other and I will barely remember having ever listened to them. Give me a few years and I'll swear to you I've never listened to this album at all. While I was listening, I tried to keep a running log of my thoughts of all the songs. Just little sentences, so I would remember what I thought while listening to that specific song (the album is nearly an hour long, yo). What I wrote for Sullen Girl was "shallow musicality" and I don't mean "shallow" in some sense of lacking artistic depth, I mean literally the range of notes and how they are arranged are not very deep. It's like listening to 1-2-3, 1-2-3 over and over again. Half of this album is that way, to me. The other half of the album pushes Apple's voice to the front more, and those I tend to like much better than the ones where the piano has a more central focus. One callout I'll do though is that the *lyrics themselves* fuck in every song. I also don't want to be That Way about it but during The Child is Gone I thought to myself, wow, in the 90s people probably dismissed the fuck out of this as a "woman album" because it's very much a kind of expression of the frustrations of being born a woman in this world. (And at least one reviewer (not us, I mean like, A Critic) did, it looks like, haha ha... ha...) Favorite Song: Slow Like Honey (for whatever reason it defied the trend of shallow-ness without being a song like Criminal, if you get me.)

I suspect me saying this will be a recurring theme: "I can recognize the skill and position of this music, but it's not really for me." Beastie Boys I think were like a strange phenomenon, whereas this is a much more intentional reversal of then-trends. A commentary of sorts. I'm basically just repeating the wikipedia article on that but what I mean is I can *tell that* just from hearing it and knowing when it was made, which makes it a very good commentary. The flow and rhythm of the vocals are smooth, there's a great groove on many of the tracks. But I was checking the album about halfway through and was like "wow that much left huh." Somehow it runs into a similar problem as Fiona Apple did for me, but for different reasons; a lot of the tracks blur for my ADHD brain with only a few standouts. Right now I got "Plug Tunin'" on as I write this specific sentence and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, but at the same time it's like, wait, when did I get down to track 18...? A lot of it blurs together like that. Maybe repeated listens would help distinguish it but I don't feel motivated to do so. It's good, but not my stuff, yeah. Favorite Song: The Magic Number

Maybe by the end of this I'll have heard enough rap and hip-hop to have a better framework for forming opinions with it. Genuinely I haven't heard a whole lot. It's funny because this is the exact kind of record my parents would've hated me to have had in the house when I was young but listening to it now... I imagine there's people in the US for whom this album would be shocking, and those people suck. Today it's not very shocking to me but in the 90s probably, yeah. Anyway, Chuck D's voice is really good, huh? Favorite Song: Who Stole the Soul?

Get thee hence.