1001 Albums Summary

So buckin' futch.

“Atlantic City” is a perfect song, and other than that this has a good mix of hainted midwesty guitar strumming and Springsteen hooHOOs

I was all excited to get "Kind of Blue" on 1001 Albums – it's in contention for my favourite album ever – and I went on YouTube to listen and got this different version that (for whatever reason) wasn't marked as such, and after the initial "Huh? Wha?," I settled in to listen to that one (faster rhythm section, slower – in the sense of less jam-packed, hence less adventurous, but as a result actually more percussive and better suiting the faster rhythm) and now it's one of my favourite albums too. I'm sure we could repeat that process indefinitely. That's the amazing thing about jazz in general and modal jazz (=less closely bound to chord progression) in particular, but I feel in some way I can't explain like musicologically about this album in particular: That sense of a structure built to support infinite possibilities.

Iconic bassline starts. Q-Tip seems to have hyperrhythm somehow when he raps, like more rhythm than rhythm. And I like their little stories and nonsensical observations, and surprise references to things like chemical compounds and Ralph Kramden. And Busta is here! Overall, this is fun :)

This is really smooth and I was having a kind of blah morning due to dispute with landlord, deadlines etc., and Solomon Burke helped, and I wonder how much guys like Solomon Burke got up in the morning and had their coffee and looked out at the East River or whatever and thought "I'm helping people all over the world right now."

"Rolling in the Deep" is a sweet fucking song intrinsically, but what makes it an all-time classic and gives this whole album its oomph is Adele's vocal art – those little voice tricks, the absolutely limber oscillation between buttery straight notes and vibrato and melisma, the split-second lip of falsetto at the start of phrases. Also the backup singers, also the percussion. Just very immaculate.

Smooth but effervescent, peach and tobacco notes, looks like a model 'cept she's got a little more ass.

It's a good self-development exercise to take the allegedly artificial, hollowed-out genres like marimba-heavy Latin jazz and try to hear them like they were when they were fresh. Tito Puente's orquesta is inventive and committed and makes the task easy, while simultaneously making you move your meat suit.

I know Beck's a weirdo, but there's still this part of me that thinks this is the coolest music can be and I'll be (white, this is very white music) (free, or at least free to wallow in history's last organic musical landscape before Napster etc.) and (21, or 19 anyway – I feel like 1999 is around when this kind of 90s rock+beats eclecticism got definitively superseded, barring a few latecomers like the Avalanches) forever.

It's nice, the sound envelope is really smooth and perfect, and the familiarity of the style is appealing and engaging, like, you can imagine people with misophonia using this as therapy because the sounds are exactly what you expect them to be. Though I presume many people with misophonia would completely disagree with me here! This is raising the unrelated question, what is people with misophonia's relationship with music in general, generally speaking? Anyway, this is nice. I gave it a three for me, partly because I don't want to give a million fives in this exercise, but I think it probably deserves a four objectively, whatever that means.

At its best this reminds me of that thing where boomer blues rockers in wraparound shades move their face forward and back on their neck in time with the music instead of nodding or shaking their head. At its worst it makes me think of a kid I knew who used to drop his pants and strum his junk like a guitar and go "deener-neener-neet neet neet neet neet."

This is nice, but if I'm honest there are at least three Tribe albums I prefer to it, and I see Q-Tip also has an extensive subsequent career that I haven't perused, so I'm not even sure if it's his best solo joint.

Any Fela/Afrika 70 you can just sink into, but this one is just so chock full of horns and polyrhythms and politics (people would go "Zombie!" when they saw soldiers in the street) and the man, the persona, the hater of zombies and lover of life. I love it.

Cool hot fun weirdo aesthete magpie buffalo music.

Love that loose, ragged old punk sound. Lots of minor chords here to make it sinister. The Damned always get talked about in the same breath as the other punk originators but I kinda kept missing out on them – this feels like music that could grow on me, like I'd love it more the more familiar it gets. Like an alternate canon, like Marvel’s “The Sentry.” Only he’s fascist and these guys are antifa!

I’d forgotten about the collagey aspects of this album, the surprising sounds that emerge and submerge. It’s very beautiful.

This is nice. Dried flowers, cardamom, plywood cabin with smell of dust and sun. It's a lot like a second "Pink Moon," but I have room for a second "Pink Moon." I wonder if Nick had lived if he'd've given us a ... purple sun.

Let it be known that I declined to give this album five stars solely because of "Run for Your Life."

Heavy little monsters emerge dripping and ravenous out of a vat of sludge, wink, and dive back in.

This is trying to be like "raunchy" and have "attitude" but it's so fucking cringe. There's a very specific kind of unhygienic about them, like cigarette breath and cat hair, like wearing the same stained pants because they're your cool rocker pants (until you pop the button trying to do them up). And like, they're sloppy drunk and all over you and when you don't reciprocate they try to neg you by asking if you're gay? And they don't even have any tunes, except "Back on the Chain Gang," and that isn't even on this album.

This is what scans as "cool" to me deep inside, and I wonder why I've failed to make the The Thes' acquaintance for so long. It's compendious – the parts that edge on 80s industrial, like the beat of the first song, go hard; the veins of synthpop and C-86 are agreeable; the pop-musician-style jazzy licks are objectively kinda bad but cute; the Erdal Kızılçay instrumental choices, the big beat reminiscent of Shriekback, the snarly bits from a regular voice aiming for something self-undermining yet still alarming, "little tough man" or summat (like Stuart Murdoch's arms); there's just so much here, and they creep and posture through it like Grant Morrison psychopomps in training (even the uninvited rape metaphors and talk about "moral decay" evoke a world, they do). Shades of "Red Right Hand," Daniel Lanois, Plus from Us, bands like Orange Juice, New Order, Human League, Echo & Bunnymen, a little white post-funk, .... All in all, the the The The Thes's are deffo the biggest discovery for me from this project so far.

Tupac’s just such a mid pretty boi with his (self-)conscious self-mythologizing lyrics and his nose ring. I feel like he’s lucky he got the THUG LIFE tattoo when he did because it was probably the least silly in his plausible range, like on a whim he coulda just veered into the median and decided to get, like, DEAR MAMA or BIGS UCKS or … FREE DUMB

Hmmm, well, there's a Punjabi friend of mine who is often funny and dismissive about the basic-bitchness of European or white people food as compared to the wide world of subcontinental spice mixes, preparations, blooming the flavours, etc. – "It's not food, it's the ingredients of food." That's a bit how I feel about the blues? It's music – this is not meant to be an edgy take – but sometimes it feels more like the ingredients of music? Muddy W is fucking great at it and so it has a nice purity, as opposed to some of the very florid blooze men who feel like they're singing nursery rhymes or "Happy Birthday" or some other very inert thing. Nevertheless, my ears don't know how to hear stuff about "got my mojo working'" and "I'm yer hoochie koochie man" except very post-post-post-post-modernly, which is to say, you sprain your eyeballs from rolling 'em so hard.

This has at least, like, five perfect gangsta rap opuses, at least three of which I can rap along to word for word (except the n-word ofc). The way this music makes me feel makes me want to forgive the misogyny, I'm ashamed to say, but I'm proud to say nothing could make me forgive the skits. Songs-only version please.

Oh damn, this is HEAVY! And HAUNTING! And I'm learning that Deep Purple are not only "Smoke on the Water," they're HAUNTING and HEAVY and great.

Some of the songs are riveting, dark, without an iota of humour. I like those ones a lot. Some of them wallow cartoonishly in bloodlust – those ones are harder to take, but they all have so much craft in them that you can't help but walk away shaken and impressed. (I'm thinking of a comparison case like Warren Zevon with "Excitable Boy" – love Zevon, but the dismissive loucheness of the "he raped her and killed her" line is trivializing and off-putting, compared to Cave who grabs you by the jaw and makes you look into the heart of darkness.)

Seems paint-by-numbers now, but back then it was when "alternative" became "alt-rock" and the nineties hit their stride.

Tender, contemplative electronica; pre-dawn yearning and prescient pre-millennium tension (little did we know how much tension the new millennium would bring!) and a constant Indian counterpoint that often becomes "point," a tradition of which I know so little, and memories of a skinny, curious, elaborately hoodied former self I don't often enough spend time with.

Compared to imperial-phase Amy this has less tattoos, less arch sensibility, more "sultry" jazz crooning and by-the-numbers r&b melisma. Feels a bit like 1950s cosplay (the "Frank" of the title is Sinatra), except there are so many tells--the bari sax lines with their modern, post-funk, post-rap conception of rhythm (which obviously has its place, but while the instrument's timbre sounds okay when you're hearing it, the licks in question sound banal and boring when you sing them yourself); the "crackly vinyl" effect with the too-loud, too-crisp drums over it; the lyrics about having fun gay and trans friends, the point of which seems to be to establish that Amy has fun gay and trans friends.... "Fuck Me Pumps" is a no-longer-timely takedown of football WAGs that starts out singing "F me pumps" (why?); the final line keeps catchily coming back at me in the form "Fuck me in your fuck me pumps," which is nicely polymorphous, but ... that's not the actual line. Overall, this makes me think of the time when I was 21 I tried to change my email address to aportraitinflesh@hotmail.com (it's a David Bowie line, if you must know) and my very sweet and good but very square friend immediately emailed me like "Ooooh, nice new email, sexy, I like it! Gotta go with the attitude" and I grimaced very hard and never used that email again (Amy being Carol in this scenario); or once when we were at karaoke and the very wholesome blonde kiwi girl my girlfriend worked with sang "Sexual Healing" dead straight, and Heidi couldn't handle the cringe and dragged me up to sing "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood ("Relax / Don't do it / When you wanna cum"), because "It's the same as what she just did to us!" (Amy being poor horrified New Zealand Amanda). It's not as detached OR as messy as her later work and comes across as performative yet bland, despite her talent.

"Like a bird on a wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free" "When it all comes down to dust / I will kill you if I must / I will help you if I can / When it all comes down to dust / I will help you if I must / I will kill you if I can" "I'd like to tell my story / Before I turn into gold" "I have changed my name so often / I have lost my wife and children / But I have many friends / And some of them are with me" "We told her she was beautiful / We told her she was free / But none of us would meet her in / The House of Mystery" "Into this furnace I ask you now to venture / You who I cannot betray" "I found a silver needle / Put it in my arm / It did some good / It did some harm" "I cannot follow you, my love / You cannot follow me / I am the distance you put between / All the moments that we will be" "Don't try to use me or slyly refuse me / Just win me or lose me, it is this that the darkness is for" "But I know from your eyes / And I know from your smile / That tonight will be fine ... for a while"

The band is great, but this one has always felt weirdly flat to me, compared to its reputation. Partly the recording seems inconsistent—parts sink and emerge, in an irritating not a good way. The audience are too quiet, contrary to the idea that hearing JB play at a Black theatre was a spiritual experience. I’m sure it was, but this recording doesn’t capture it for me (to the point where I’m slightly wondering if something is wrong with my earbuds?!).

"C'mon guys! The awful abject foreverness of death is making its big push, and we gotta help Leonard Cohen push back!"

“Plunderphonics”? Or is it … Australian Shibuya-kei?

This is a bit weird, but I’m about to start an overdose outreach practicum and on the hardest days, the hard days there are bound to be, when someone with a lifetime of addiction and trauma spits in my face or whatnot, I’m going to remember that there’s a tiny beautiful Lou Reed inside them, that the only way out is through, that only chaos can give birth to a dancing star.

Aftermath has been a bit of an ambivalent, difficult one for me to peg. “Paint It Black,” normally track 1, is probably my all-time favourite Stones song; but “Stupid Girl,” track 2, is probably my all-time LEAST favourite Stones song, and then the rest are a bunch of mediocrities and mediocrities-plus (I’m somewhat fond of “Lady Jane” and “Under My Thumb,” the latter as flagrant camp.) I tried to trade in my copy of this album recently for a few bucks credit toward I think Doechii or something and they wouldn’t take it—maybe they feel the same about “Stupid Girl” as I do. Anyway, rating-wise Apple Music on me: Their version of this album doesn’t even have “Paint It Black” on there (replaced by “Mother’s Little Helper,” another one of those somewhat-faves), so I can read it based on those preponderant mediocrities plus the sinister “Stupid Girl.”

Aah this is beautiful music! I love her voice, the limberness of it like a kite or a sail—she is literally from Alabama, but her voice is more like halfway between folk and country and makes me realize how much of standard country singer voices are an affected style and not just singing with a Southern accent. The music here somehow feels global in scope, to the far-flung Anglo-Celtic diaspora as conventional country is to the US South and West portion, and the yearning this music evokes in me is to be just diaspora and not colonial—and its tinged with sadness and adventure and waves hitting cliffs and flags of places that never were.

Oof, I dunno, this is danceable and I appreciate when an artist goes as saxophone forward as Femi does here, but to be frank when I listen to these modular chunks of Afro-choogling, vehicle for insipid meandering on themes like "Will Africa ever unite?" and "Will Jesus ever come?," and compare (unfair as it is and ashamed as I am of it when I take a sec to think, as someone who works with kids and thinks kids always come first and knows how suffocating a parent's legacy can be) to papa Fela's polytropic arrangements and era-defining balance of personal pomp and punk politics and just like sinuous joy, I can't help but feel that the succession was too much for Femi and he'd've been better off just playing alto in a Sunday church band or just goin' out like Kendall Roy.

I know the mothership is up there, and it's the world's best party to the left and the world's chillest hangout space to the right, and you're greeted by Lollipop Man, alias the Long-Haired Sucker, and there's a big bowl of superfly sunnies (because you got to wear your sunglasses, so you can look cool), and I'm Starchild's third stepcousin twice removed (adoptive, but who's counting?) and they call me "Mr Marty Flash" and my leopard coat is polyester and my lil moustache is ratty but I'm always, always welcome.

I still understand this music, but I appreciate the cartoonish overcommitment on songs like “Mannish Boy”—“I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a full-grown man, I spell ‘him’ H-I-eng” (??). I love the hilarious smart stupidity of lines like “Well my lady roll up with the bus driver / And you know that don’t seem right” (and all the fun lines get repeated over and over again, because all the lines get repeated over and over again). You can see the outlines of a mythic character, a superhuman jukejoint warrior capturing the spirit of e.g. the Garth Ennis Wolverine (getting shot and stabbed and flamethrowered and derangedly repeating “the ol’ canucklehead, the ol’ canucklehead”) or the titular dude in Sonic Youth “Kool Thing” (“uh huh,” “tell it like it is,” as Kim is roasting him), or Prince in “If I Was Your Girlfriend” (if I was your girlfriend I wouldn’t be a sex pest). I guess what I mean is I’m finally sort of getting the blues as a libidinal eruption. Helps that there’s no songs here about like I’m cranky at my woman cuz she overcooked my eggs because she cooked his eggs just right. (Actually that’s a phenomenal line? Am I on the verge of turning into a white blues man?)

Nice music for nice people.

Art school boys turn celebrity pop band play with lo-fi aesthetics. Take any of those elements out and this wouldn’t be the extraordinarily friendly, grounding, perfectly pleasant sensory experience that it is.

Well, I'm sorry, Dandy Warhols, we used to be friends, but from the vantage of 20 years off the hype machine, you feel like minor figures in my life and the life of music.

Haha this one came up on the same day I dropped it back in the free box outside the record store. Nuff said, I guess!

Okay, this will be fun: For a previous album (Dire Straits) I said it "reminds me of that thing where boomer blues rockers in wraparound shades move their face forward and back on their neck in time with the music instead of nodding or shaking their head" and also sometimes "a kid I knew who used to drop his pants and strum his junk like a guitar and go 'deener-neener-neet neet neet neet neet.'" But this one has way more head-bobbing white blooze man energy! I give it 6.5/10 neck-sliding white blues men, a new record, and hence crown it the king of the head-thrusting blues rockers. Who will dethrone it??! (If an album in this competition is really hard to take, I'll also assign it a "junk-strumming kid." This one is kinda bland, but you wouldn't say "hard to take.")

Scarborough Fair, more folk song than folk song. Patterns in clouds, and yearning to be home. That green machine, kinda freaky but not sinister. One indelible sunny spring day in San Diego in '98, kickin' down the cobblestones with nothing to do and not even fussed that Aja had no rhymes for me. Dangling conversations, desultory philippics, Sixties intellectual shit interspersed with heartstopping beauty--flowers that never bend (but transcend), Emily (whoever I may find her), thought and feeling merging on the underground wall. And now the news, your nightly cry. One of the really good ones.

This literally slowed my step to the point where people looked at me funny on the street. It changed the alignment of my chfunkras. And that was all before the start of the trenchant social critique!

Bangers from start to finish, and in some way, I can’t quite define, still the beginning of our cultural world, at least for white Anglosphere lefties like me. Like, it’s not the fucking Beatles!

Can’t think of much music that makes me feel more in love with life and people and the weirdness and coolness of it all than this. I gravitated to Hounds of Love the most when my dear son Emmett was little, and now that my sweet daughter Renée is here I’m gravitating towards it again. That says multitudes, I think.

Frenetic!

Usually, I like my noise with a little more music … BUT NOT ALWAYS

There is something charming about this standards collection of thin, occasionally off-tune warbling and basic-ass, canned-sounding instrumentation, there is.

Exquisite. The more things happen to you, the more joy and sadness mix. Listening to Anohni and her crohnies (Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright etc.) now makes me think about how much mixing they've done since I first loved this music 20 years (!) ago.