New Order may have recorded indifferent songs, but I could only think of a handful of terrors before scouring their solo careers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
Notice I included many songs written before 1965, years too often slighted by compilers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
In love in 1988, I gave “The Flame” more attention than it deserved. But Robin Zander sings the hell out of this make-or-break ballad, and Rick Nielsen’s mandocello is front and center. Thus began the most reviled period of Cheap Trick’s history, during which Zander recorded a duet with a Wilson sister not even as sharp as “Almost Paradise” and they competed with Poison and Whitesnake. But I’m no fan of power pop, so classing up hair metal ballads strikes me as no different. I wish I’d been there during their live peak. I rely on my knowledge of a couple studio albums and The Essential Cheap Trick.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
With a slim oeuvre for which my colleagues have made grand claims, D’Angelo has used writer’s block as a kind of incubator: for thirteen years he watched as Brown Sugar and Voodoo matured into R&B touchstones, unsullied by mediocre contractual follow-ups. At the turn of the century I preferred other Soulquarian releases like Mama’s Gun and Things Fall Apart, not to mention his fellow mononym, the crucially Sade-besotted Maxwell; what they lacked in accretive density they compensated with forthrightness. A dumb binary, I realized later, especially when the accretive density was as tasty as devil’s pie without the addictive qualities.Speaking of “Devil’s Pie” — it inspires D’Angelo’s ambivalence. Not lyrically — he’s an example of why submission to the eddies of his bass lines and the silt of his harmonies produces useful tensions. The moment in that track when hand claps joins the scratching and granitic groove laid down by Questlove as D’Angelo repeats the title hook reveals the potency of devil’s pie as an aphrodisiac, mephitic and deadly. 2014’s Black Messiahreached new heights of studio craft: the stentorian piano of “Another Life”; yet another tumbling opening of a groove in “The Charade”; the sitar as bridge joining East and West, engaged in diplomatic back channel communications with Roy Hargrove; the mumbled imprecations meant as prayers but, despite their unguent qualities, sharpened with menace.Still, I reach for Brown Sugar most in 2017—the impishness with which he scrubs a metaphor of Mick Jagger’s eros-inspired sensationalism.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
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I knew I’d joined a special place when the first act Stylus Magazine inducted its Hall of Fame wasn’t Joy Division, Talking Heads, or Brian Eno but…ELO. Tireless enthusiasts of British pop but with progressive-rock roots, Electric Light Orchestra at their best recorded pop as otherworldly as the (in)famous spaceships yet as familiar as Jules Verne. Jukebox heroes whose material absorbed the other jukebox competition.I hesitated, it’s true, before including “Evil Woman.” “Evil Hook” is more like it — damn! The chorus sung in falsetto answered by Richard Bevan’s clavinet. Misogynist, there’s no denying it, except like most dorks closeted with their addled dreams synchronized on synthesizers, they get their idea of women from other songs or their own suppressed lust. In essence, the speed and detail and delight of the music mitigates, to my ears, the dumb, received tropes; women couldn’t be evil if they inspired a love-as-lust ode as addled as “Don’t Bring Me Down.”Expert magpies (“Shine a Little Love” is Lynne doing ABBA doing disco, or perhaps ABBA heard ELO’s use of strings and thought, “Hm…”) and precise trend reflectors (“Hold Me Tight” became a hit in 1981 just as American pop music was drenched in homages to the fifties), ELO could get exhausting, especially when in a rotten mood their songs remind me of bumpers or Saturday morning cartoons from the dawn of the Reagan era. So much of Lynne’s work presaged the dork futurism of Gary Numan and Trevor Horn’s use of call and response harmonies singing at the top of their range while pianos tinkle and a singer tries keeping his equilibrium in a world intent on banishing his awful hair to obsolescence. Perhaps this explains Lynne’s alignment later in the eighties with Tom Petty and George Harrison. It had to be more than “It’s Over.” Otherwise they would have dialed the number of the dude from Supertramp.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
This Beatles acolyte learned the lesson: he imitated their eccentricity because he was a natural eccentric and a natural songsmith, not because he wanted to write Great Songs. For a while they poured out of him; he was the shaggiest, loveliest, and most self-destructive of the seventies singer-songwriters. His was a doomed project, for meshing Nelson Riddle’s orchestral pop and the American Songbook tradition it invokes with a Vietnam generation’s fetish for revelation sounded impossible then, and it hasn’t worn well. But he and Carole King should have composed more soundtracks for children’s TV — imagine sequels to “Chicken Soup with Rice” written by the author of “Cuddly Toy”!And “Spaceman” is more devastating than “Rocket Man” and “Space Oddity,” fools.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
No way in hell will I essay my own context-building, not when exemplary profiles by Philip Gourevitch and Jonathan Lethem exist. Besides, my intro to James Brown I credit to an episode of The Cosby Show in which Rudy Huxtable did her best “baby baby baby” lip syncing to “I Got That Feelin’.” What Gourevitch wrote in 2002 about “Please, Please, Please” strikes me as definitive:
The song doesn’t tell a story so much as express a condition. The singer might be speaking from the cradle of his lover’s arms, or chasing her down a street, or watching the lights of her train diminish in the night; he might be crouched alone in an alleyway, or wandering an empty house, or smiling for all the world to see while his words rattle, unspoken, inside his skull. He could be anyone anywhere. His lover might be dying. He might be dying. He might not even be addressing an actual lover. He could be speaking of someone or something he’s never had. He could be talking to God, or to the Devil…Speech is inadequate, so the singer makes music, and music is inadequate, so he makes his music speak. Feeling is stripped to its essence, and the feeling is the whole story. And, if that feeling seems inelegant, the singer’s immaculately disciplined performance makes his representation of turmoil unmistakably styled and stylish—the brink of frenzy as a style unto itself.
Facing such a statue in the park, I saw fit, more than ever, to include songs I wanted to hear again, hence the absence of “I Got You” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” On the other hand, I included a track from 1991’s forgotten post-prison Love Over-due called “(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On,” boasting some of the most ferocious rhythm lickin’ of his career — and that’s saying a lot. Also a contender is “What Do You Like” from James Brown Plays the Real Thing, designed to showcase his organ playing. He’s also responsible for one of the more galling examples of plagiarism in popular music: forget “rewriting” and use the verb “re-releasing” Bowie’s 1975 “Fame” as “Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved)”; it works because “Fame” is a monster and so is Mr. Lickin’ Stick.Sigh. An evening I anticipated listening to new music I’llnow spend listening to Star Time. Sigh.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
How fitting that James Murphy released his last album in 2010, for LCD Soundsystem lives in a climate-controlled space where college students and post grads, downloading songs onto their new smartphones, got excited about voting for Barack Obama. To say the music is “dated” is redundant—all music sounds like the time in which it was recorded. Also wrong. If anything, the collar-loosening white boy boogie of “Dance Yrself Clean” and “Daft Punk is Playing in My House” predated the ways in which the Silicon Valley ethos of app-ready affluence established itself in the last three to five years: dancing to “I Feel It Coming” after a few pints of the local microbrew. LCD’s 2010 show at the Fillmore presented the act at its best, with Murphy and Nancy Whang trading instruments and losing themselves to the music. He started losing me with the singer-songwriter material that won him praise a decade ago: all that “In My Life” stuff. I included a couple moments anyway because I won’t renounce my past.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
Searching for progenitors, Americans might have stopped at Neneh Cherry’s “Manchild,” in which a lulling, dazed beat refuses to so much as shudder as strings rumble and crack. But it took hearing “Protection” at an Edinburgh pub in the summer of 1997 to start my walk backward. So did an excellent Finsbury Park performance a week later, during which they debuted new material. Tricky (Kid) was another story. By the late nineties Massive Attack were Gap music: “Inertia Creeps” and “Teardrop” accompanying the choosing of V-neck shirts. A delightful wrinkle, for 1998’s Mezzanine contained their thickest music. I missed the samples and Mushroom on 100th Window, Shara Nelson always. Hence, “Unfinished Sympathy” atop my list, first heard by yours truly on the Sliver soundtrack (Heaven 17’s “Penthouse and Pavement” too!).Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.