I’m enough of a Beatles fan that I bought their entire discography when the 2009 re-releases came out. And yet, somehow, I never really listened much to their post-breakup content. As a result I’m hitting this album mostly fresh.
Side A opens with the title track, one of the two ‘big’ McCartney/Wings songs that everyone knows, along with ‘Live and Let Die’. I’ve heard this song numerous times, but had somehow failed to notice the first two movements or, in fact, the storytelling aspect of the song. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the lyrics previously? It feels very much like a late Beatles song, like it would fit on Abbey Road where they were showing off their respective trajectories.
And of course, that immediately leads into very ‘Live and Let Die’ horns, leading into a throbbing fuzzed out bassline for ‘Jet’ and lyrics that seem awfully focused on whether the Major is a “lady suffragette”, whatever that’s supposed to mean in this song’s context? It feels a bit like the song was an excuse for that repeating line and… what?
‘Bluebird’ feels in line with some of the late Beatles songs again, and is kind of a jarring change tonally from the previous song, slowing way down into a love song about gaining freedom from… something?... that goes more jazzy than the Beatles ever did, again showing McCartney’s changing style and musical growth. It’s an odd middle track in this case, though, given that after it settles to its conclusion, you immediately get hit with the almost ABBA-like bassline that drives ‘Mrs. Vandebilt’ and its weirdly nihilistic lyrics leading into lunatic laughter and then… organ music and ‘Let Me Roll It’, the album’s slowest track, rolling almost too slowly? The little jogs in the guitars after each chorus are at least interesting, but I can’t say it makes for a terribly exciting end to the side.
Side B ends up feeling almost like a different album entirely, for most of its runtime. It remains in the slow-paced ballad space through ‘Mamunia’ and its glorification of standing in the rain (which I can agree is worth doing now and then), and ‘No Words’ despairing at a one-sided love, before settling into a song that is absolutely a wake, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’, in which ‘Jet’ comes back to say hi. This does at least help to start tying the album together more overtly, even if it feels decidedly out of place in a song that is quite literally about a death, but then it turns around and brings back the refrain from ‘Mrs. Vandebilt’, too, leading into the album’s finale, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’, a more upbeat song with utter nonsense lyrics that are mostly just there to let the album wrap with another musical theme that prefigures ABBA, along with lyrics that don’t feel especially sensical, but then, this particular song isn’t really about the lyrics, it’s about the music. In a return to the style of the aforementioned ‘Live and Let Die’, this builds into an orchestral surge that builds and builds in a way akin to the way that ‘A Day in the Life’ ended back on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, only when it breaks, unlike A Day in the Life’s chord fading to silence, the Band on the Run suddenly returns to lead us out. Oh good, they really did manage to never be found.
I do feel like this is kind of motioning at being a Sgt. Pepper’s kind of concept album-alike, but as with Sgt. Pepper’s, it kind of comes apart in the middle, only vaguely maintaining the pretense. That said, I can’t fault it for this; there’s plenty of great songs here, and if the album has trouble finding itself in the middle, it’s only because this was Paul coming out of arguably the lowest point in his career and finding his footing again.
7.5/10. A few bangers that I won’t hesitate to listen to again here, but it doesn’t feel like McCartney has quite the same magic here as some of his later collaborations with John Lennon had.
Oh, hello, political album.
So, I’m coming into this completely cold. My normal music sources don’t play soul/funk music, so I’m not familiar with this genre in general. I wish I was. I should be. Hopefully that’s going to change by the end of this thing.
I am completely the wrong person to be talking about a lot of the themes here, though. I live in a region that has been predominantly White for as long as I can remember. There were *no* Black kids in my high school, in a town that didn’t crack 5000 population until around the time I was starting college. My entire exposure to non-White/Caucasian/whatever-epithet-you-prefer culture comes through media, and even then, largely through osmosis.
Now, all that said, I can at least try to come at this in something resembling empathy. This is probably not the best album to be the first funk album I’ve ever listened to, but there’s still a lot to enjoy here. I love the instrumentation across the board here, and the way that the tracks give the music a lot of time to build up before Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto comes in and establishes the statements that his songs want to make.
I came into this with a very different idea of what I was going to encounter than what I got. The A-side opens by giving us a track about senseless urban violence, a brief eulogy that stays away from going anywhere near being a dirge, lyrics even calling out that it’s all too common an event, that it’s hard to truly mourn when it’s been so clear that it was coming. So, like… I know that the Conscious Hip-Hop genre is a thing, but I was not expecting that kind of content in a 1970s funk album.
The center of the album, the rest of the A-side and the start of the B-side knows exactly what it wants to say after that. Look after your own, your neighborhood is a community, find strength in togetherness, in shared faith, in the knowledge that everyone is suffering together. But all too soon, it comes back to the darker thesis statement. The stereotypes about Black people are that they’re violent toward each other, that they’re someone to fear, and that’s not right. Practice what the Good Lord preaches, let love defeat fear, and stop destroying community where it should be propping you up. Poverty is everyone’s problem, and climbing on your neighbors’ backs to try to get out instead of working with them to lift everyone is only going to drag everyone down.
This is not the album I expected. This is not the album I wanted right now. But all the same, this is an album I’m glad to have heard. I don’t know that it’s an album I would return to, though. I can appreciate the artistry, and the messages, but that’s not a place I often want to go in my listening.
10/10 for artistry – this is an album that knows what it needs to say what it’s trying to say, and has precisely that, no more, no less. 10/10 for messaging, as well. However, I have to rate based on enjoyment and likelihood of returning to this album or my numbers are going to be skewed in a way that doesn’t help to sketch out my musical tastes, so unfortunately I think the most I can give this is a 6/10.
Not the score I want to be giving the album, but as a gauge of enjoyment on anything besides a purely intellectual level, it’s probably the most honest
OK, this is a *lot* more like what I was expecting yesterday when I put on the other Curtis Mayfield album. I’m not especially familiar with the soul/funk genre, but this one’s more like what I think of in the genre, and the whole thing just feels more… summery? I found myself really getting into a lot of the tracks here, and unlike on *There’s No Place Like America Today*, I can absolutely see myself listening to this album again.
The most obvious difference that stands out in Mayfield’s singing in this case is that he seems to be using more of his vocal range, not spending nearly as much time in the higher register that seemed almost hesitant and wispy at times on the later album, particularly in that album’s “Billy Jack”. All of the lyrical songs here feature Mayfield giving it his all, delivering another message album but seeming almost more sure of himself and the strength of his statements against drug use, drug sales, even engaging with the business, with The Man.
The A-side opens with a thesis statement in “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”, directly calling out the way that drug use destroys families, pulls people apart, keeps the already poor stuck in a cycle of poverty. This is immediately followed by “Pusherman”, a first-person ode to the life of a drug seller, that draws attention to the façade that hides the uncertainty and fragility lurking underneath. This leads into “Freddie’s Dead”, a flat refutement of even that façade of the Pusherman, pointing an accusing finger at how the drug sellers pull others into their orbit, and just drive them to their deaths in the street. The side ends with an uptempo instrumental track that sounds like exactly what it claims to be, a “Junkie Chase” scene through the streets of the inner city and lets the orchestral aspects of this album’s band show off. It’s an enticing end to the side, to say the least.
The B-side comes up in a more mellow manner, a smooth bassline that gets your head bobbing before the horn section jumps in and heralds Mayfield’s love song for this album, “Give Me Your Love”, a promise to stay by his lady no matter what. It’s followed by an outright roasting of the pusher life, “Eddie You Should Know Better” directly calling out how getting into that lifestyle makes you into the kind of person that nobody should be idolising, that everyone knows will turn on so-called friends when it’s a threat to the bottom line.
The beat speeds up again for “No Thing On Me”, a song that focuses on the way that keeping your head up high and staying out of the drug game altogether helps you keep your hope and stay out of the spiral of destruction that only drags everyone around you down with you. It mellows into “Think” after that, a wind-heavy instrumental track featuring, of all things, an oboe; this is perfectly placed in the album, a slow moment to focus on what you’ve heard before, the arguments against taking the too-good-to-be-true easy way out of poverty when it just serves to push everyone else deeper. Why go for drugs when you can have your own innate natural high? Better to stay clean and clear. And this leads straight into the title track, “Superfly”, a finale that directly lays it out again: If you get into the selling game, you’re more likely to end up dead than making it to anything like the American Dream. Better to do things the right way.
I come out of this with a much greater appreciation for Curtis Mayfield than I was left with after *There’s No Place Like America Today*. There’s more to grab onto here; the message is just as potent as the later album, but the wrapper is more approachable if you’re not familiar with the genre.
Solid 8.5/10 for me on this one.
If you had told me before starting this journey that my first 5-star album was going to be 20+ Cuban musicians, many of them at least forty years into their careers, having a traditional music jam session, I would have called you crazy.
*Buena Vista Social Club* locked the score before the third track was even over.
Now, this isn’t to say that I went into this album expecting not to like it. It’s more accurate to say that I had no clue what I was going to hear at all. This album is one that I was sort of peripherally aware of in the context of having seen it in music sections at stores when it came out, but I didn’t know what it was, and besides I didn’t really buy a lot of music at the time. I’m not sure I would have even picked it up off the shelf, to be honest; my CD collection at the time was a mix of soundtrack albums and electronic music with a couple of Weird Al albums and a random disc of Beatles covers mixed in; I had a few more cassette tapes but that was a similar assortment, with a couple of Blue Note samplers in place of the electronica and a collection of old radio programs given to me by my grandmother in place of the soundtrack albums.
So, this would have just completely missed my radar. 90% of my musical education after that came in the form of Rock Band video games, so… yeah. That kind of limited things since I wasn’t really getting out into the more varied genres outside of rock on my Xbox and pop or classic rock in the car.
Basically, I wasn’t in the market for something like this.
All that is to say… I never would have known what I was missing. Never knew what I was missing. The musicians on this album don’t show any sign that they had just been thrown together to record a few albums then scatter again, and you can hear how they’re just *enjoying* themselves in the studio.
I know there’s a documentary that came out about these sessions. I don’t think that’s enough. I want to know what they were playing and recording that didn’t make it onto this album, or onto the 25th anniversary re-release.
I really, really hope there will be more treasures like this one hiding in the next 1085 albums, because I need more surprises like this.
Yes, I know I barely talked about the album here, but let’s face it, everything is subjective and this is what my mind said I should write here. 10/10, the only thing that disappoints me is that I had the original release instead of the 25th anniversary version so I don’t have a second disc of this immediately handy. And that’s not the album’s fault.
It’s hard to have grown up in the Pacific Northwest in the 90s and not have heard of Nirvana. At the time they were active, most of the music I was hearing was country, of all things (please note: Neither of my parents listens to country anymore. They both quit when they divorced almost three decades ago. As I understand it, they didn’t *start* until after they were married. I don’t know what to make of that.) so this band came and went without my having been familiar with their music; my entire exposure consisted of Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana” and that told me what they sounded like I guess? And then, of course, Kurt Cobain’s death was all over the news.
I’ve heard more of their music on the radio more recently, but never really put the effort into, like… digging in. I’m not sure this album really helps with that, but I can absolutely appreciate what I’m hearing. And I appreciate it a lot.
It’s hard to judge an acoustic live album when I’m not especially familiar with the band’s studio sound on a lot of these songs. I mean, leaving aside the Grateful Dead where you’re arguably doing it wrong if you’re not listening to live, you’re getting something vastly different from the norm. Even so, the musical talent on display here is anything but hidden. The sound I expect from what I’ve heard of Nirvana previously is here, stripped down to its essence, and the set, with its mix of Nirvana originals (but not their big hits for the most part) and covers, lets the band show its range. It’s a fascinating way get my first exposure to many of these songs, and makes me wish I’d encountered this album far sooner in my life.
Now, all that said, I find myself kind of wishing I was watching this concert rather than just listening; I’m forced to imagine what the band members are talking about when they banter between the songs. Alas, I’m only listening. Still, this is absolutely an album that’s going in my list of all-timers. I can see myself listening to this one more than a few times just on its own.
…
And I was mostly done writing all this out and then “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” came on. Cobain belting out on the second half? That cinched it. No wonder that was the closing song, I’m imagining that even with three cups of tea, that did something to his throat akin to what “Twist and Shout” did to John Lennon at the end of recording *Please Please Me*. Brilliant way to close the set.
10/10, easy.
