1001 Albums Summary

Really good, can't believe I'd never listened to this one before. My knowledge of rap in general, and this period of rap specifically, is very spotty; this album seems to me to represent an important point in the transition from the Sugarhill Gang and Run-DMC era of hip-hop towards the time of Biggie and Tupac. The older style of flow is largely still there, but the lyrical content is becoming more aggressive, explicit, and straightforwardly political. The beats are excellent; the MCs can all hang with each other lyrically (apparently Ice Cube wrote "almost half" of the lyrics on this album?); the tracks cover a wide variety of subject matter. The back half is certainly weaker than the front but most tracks still hold up.

Very good if you like approachable pop punk. Some very memorable tracks, including a few I had forgotten about, and Green Day's sound is distinctive enough for them to be easily differentiated from other pop punk bands.

Restrained, elegant, loping, somewhat spare soul music with low-key but irrepressibly funky beats. Very crisp production, but not featuring the most memorable of Mayfield's melodies. Comparable in some ways to the contemporaneous work of Isaac Hayes, but Mayfield has a very different voice, no string section, and generally less bombast. Christgau gave this a D+! What the hell!

A punchy 34 minutes of blues; King has the audience in the palm of his hand, which lends the performance a frenetic energy. King is introduced as "the world's greatest blues singer," which sounds odd only because I think of him in his later years first and foremost as a guitar player. The first and last tracks are rhythmically unusual and make the whole thing feel a little off-kilter. I may need to relisten to this one a few times before I come around to the idea of enshrining it as one of the greatest blues albums of all time.