Middlemarch. The Changing Light on Sandover. Get Up On It. When I’m seventy, I’ll be divining their mysteries. Even if D. Boon hadn’t died in a car accident in 1985, The Minutemen suggest plumbless depths. Marrying the terseness of Wire to an adoration of classic rock produced musical haiku whose undulating bass riffs and shouted hooks ultimately owed nothing to no one. I can’t even say I’m a devotee; I’m still figuring out how to listen to them, and it’s a thrill. To realize slop and precision is some kind of feat, hence their CCR and Steely Dan covers (adducing the precision side) and “Bob Dylan Wrote Political Songs” (adducing their sloppy-visionary side)The most amiable of double albums, Double Nickels on the Dime is also among the deepest. I’ve owned it for fifteen years yet I look at the track listing and couldn’t hum a bar of certain songs — and that’s fine. I look at the list below and have trouble recalling certain riffs too. Boon’s furtive tone is, of all people’s, like Dionne Warwick: he’s sharing a conversation which listeners may or may not be able to follow, babbling and crooning as required, wondering if you know the way to San Jose because he wrote the directions down on a scrap of cig pack paper he lost. George Hurley can be as spare as Robert Gotobed or insert a roll as unexpectedly as Keith Moon. Negotiating between Mike Watt’s stentorian bass runs and Boon’s chikka-chikka riffs defined the Minutemen’s tension — see “Mutiny in Jonestown.”I titled this post after a lyric in “The Price of Paradise”; awed by CCR’s “Don’t Look Now,” they wrote their own distillation of what they’d learned about American life under a frightening president, in their case Ronald Reagan, i.e. life is cheap and, to quote the song, you die without dreams. Hi! It’s 2017. 3-Way Tie (For Last), its host album, has a tune called “The Red and the Black,” named after Stendhal’s classic novel about political intrigue in post-Napoleonic France. Imagine if Boon had lived long enough to read about Iran-Contra.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

People aren’t born with good taste; it’s a phenomenon you edge into if you’re lucky. Plenty of kids grew up with KISS and Save Ferris records. Peter Gabriel was my first Serious Crush, and with all due respect to Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter, I still love the old frog. In the summer of my sophomore year in high school, which coincided with one of those century-long breaks between albums that older Gabriel fans had learned to expect, I checked what was then called Security out of the public library. Tribal drums. Oblique references to Jung. A song called “San Jacinto” boasting i in its last forty-five seconds the creepiest Fairlight sample — some kind of manipulated basso whistle — in recorded music (fans know the one I mean). A song about shocking the monkey that might’ve been about shocking the monkey whose video creeped the fuck out of me as much as the Fairlight sample in “San Jacinto.”As correctly as carpers have dismissed the eighties as a time of rapine and greed, it was also a period when musicians enjoyed the largess of label recording budgets; if you were a Peter Gabriel, this meant a last shot attempt to exploit growing stardom to make an album that honored his influences. So was a perfect gateway. Fairlights, sure. Also: hi-hats, Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, Youssou N’Dour, the poetry of Anne Sexton. In “Sledgehammer” Gabriel wrote and sang the only convincing Otis Redding homage by an English public school graduate. With “In Your Eyes” he created John Cusack and Ione Skye for the purpose of watching them fall in love to a song about the kind of desire from which doorways to a thousand churches, light, and heat spring. In some ways “In Your Eyes” is one of the subtlest of Bowie tributes. Think about it: the church of man-love is such a holy place to be.Three years passed before he released a lumbering, sincere record About Relationships. Anticipation led to a high chart placement for US — it’s hart to remember that Peter Gabriel was a genuine star in 1992 — before the mass audience he’d gained in 1986 realized “Steam” wasn’t another “Sledgehammer,” although, boy, did it try. As my interest in most of his records waned, I still listened to Passion. This ostensible soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ celebrates relationships too: Gabriel’s to music from many lands. Unlike his forebears he respects distance; he’s an art school rocker who used to dress as a flower, after all. Turns out this distance gives him the proper respect for the sounds of Zaire, Sudan, Morocco, and Ethiopia. Passion contains the most committed music of Gabriel’s career. Even when the arrangements get bombastic, he’s generous enough to allow the players to do it on their own terms. Often the synthesis of Gabriel’s keyboard and percussion effects and these native players is breathtaking.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

An embodiment of the ancient English law stipulating that camp is acceptable when accompanied by the poses of masculinity, Queen didn’t move me much even after the death of Freddie Mercury. I resented how high school classmates had no trouble with Mercury’s mincing but had no time for Bowie; if only the Dame had wiggled his skinny ass, strummed power chords, and shouted chants about wanting it all! Research later revealed the number of fun songs in their catalog, and I’m sure later albums conceal baubles that my tentative efforts haven’t uncovered.As readers might imagine, my list leaned toward the yearningly homoerotic and the silly. If I’m honest with myself, “Back Chat” would top this list.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Hi, Q! I didn’t even include your arrangements and conducting for the Count Basie Orchestra or Billy Eckstine, or your scores for In the Heat of the Night and The Color Purple. I can even devote a paragraph to your stewardship of New Order when they got an American label and genuine promotion. From The Wiz to Tevin Campbell, you’ve been involved in democratizing R&B: thanks to you, more (white) people listen to it without its losing a note of interest.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

To imagine twenty years ago that I’d compile a twenty-song Smashing Pumpkins list in 2017 is like thinking I’d deliver Ronald Reagan’s eulogy. But the Pumpkins, whose innovation was to find hard rock wrinkles in Butch Vig and especially Alan Moulder’s shoegaze mixes, were intermittently formidable, despite Billy Corgan — in every sense. I recoil from his voice. I can’t deny how dense the Pumpkins sounded when Corgan wrote worthwhile material. “Crush” was my introduction in fall 1991, receiving airplay on my top 40 station’s Sunday evening “modern rock” Sunday shows. “I Am One” and “Rhinoceros” followed. Their breakthrough two years later came as no surprise — for all Corgan’s complaints about Stephen Malkmus and cred he kept a hawk’s eye on the marketplace. After 1998, sorry, I lost track of them. I thought twice before including “1979” because I can’t forget how he mangled a perfect hook and decent lyric with a mouth full of cotton candy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more

For a decade, Terius Youngdell Nash was R&B’s best producer-writer, making everyone from Rick Ross and Mary J. Blige to a young pimply Justin Bieber sound good. He has faltered in the last six years, but after the surfeit of collaborations and works for hire, who could blame him and sometime partner Christopher “Tricky” Stewart if their powder ran dry?The Prince comparisons were too on-the-nose, not when Ready for the World was eager for a Wiki link. Nash’s high, effete voice and commitment to the love-you-down wasn’t as weird as Prince’s. Give him this: like the Purple One he understood that he wrote best for women. Electrik Red’s How to be a Lady Volume 1 remains one of the fleetest and sassiest of the millennium’s R&B albums, and chances are you haven’t heard it if you’re not on my social media lists. Rihanna’s performance on 2007’s “Livin’ a Life” also needs a shout-out; in the last two years she seems to have rediscovered its distinctive empathy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Matching guitar crosstalk with a lead singer whose pinched tones were like balsamic vinegar on the arugula-dry instrumental bits, Television remain sui generis. My introduction was their 1992 reunion album, which, I swear, deserves to be embraced as fully as their seventies work. As cool as an Old Fashioned on a terrace in January, this eponymous album puts a parched Tom Verlaine against his and Richard Lloyd’s excess; it’s the equivalent of watching Maureen Stapleton Interiors and her uninhibited red dress dancing. And Lloyd’s fiery rhythm work had just gotten a full workout on Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend. This is the sort of band that spells “glamour” with a u and comes up with solos to match; this is the sort of band whose songwriter-guitarist comes up with a phrase as piquant and lyrical as his best lead line.I included Verlaine solo tracks because they’re essential.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

For the most spectacular comeback of my lifetime, Tina Turner copped not an inch to the Madonna market. She sang Terry Britten and Graham Lyle’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” from the point of view of a middle aged woman who has seen enough bullshit from young songwriters and producers, many of whom are more desperate than lovers; she has learned to live on reflex. So few popular songs take this point of view that thirty-three years later the triumph feels more earned than ever. Fortunately, Tina Turner kept going. Her best material embodies wanderlust, intrinsically and conceptually: she travels from producer to producer, like her women do for kicks, often ending up burned but with a je ne regrette rien attitude.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Replacing the beret for a skull did wonders for Tom Waits’ cred. Movie ballads, sea shanties, Keith Richards collaborations, Delta blues, eating worms for Francis Ford Coppola — he’s beat you. His voluminous catalog defeats me; I relied on the CD-R I burned in the early 2000s of the beer ‘n’ Beats stuff and have fitfully kept up with his career since he and wife/chief collaborator Kathleen Brennan released album after album of songs about brawlers, boozers, and bastards this millennium. I prize Bone Machinemost, bought in January 1993 and to my ears the peak of his clink-clank ethos whose shrewdness allowed him to issue more than a few maudlin things that attracted him to Rod Stewart (I adore his “Downtown Train” by the way). He let Marc Ribot pull Beefheart-inflected melodic noise from his guitar, allowing him the space to treat percussion like a second lead. Give him this: he found a way to fuse Flannery O’Connor, Howlin’ Wolf, and Streisand.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

In 1990 when I discovered Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto, Nine Inch Nails didn’t come up. Melodic, entranced by rock star poses, Trent Reznor had no patience for the happiness-in-slavery submission to beats and noise of industrial, which marked him as a star from the beginning—NIN, not Consolidated, were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1991. I’m not a fan—this kind of hysteria makes me question the idea of sex itself, for if you’re heaving and shouting and lisping and drooling so strenuously, you must be more desperate than I need at the moment. But I can’t deny Reznor’s manipulation of self-destructive zones that stop just short of demilitarized zones. His most sustained recording is Broken, when he figured out the connections between Adam Ant and Adam and Eve. I wish I had seen his 1995 tour with David Bowie, with whom he formed a poignant bond: a tour that didn’t deserve its slings, according to the clips I’ve watched.Visit our partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.