Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

95. T. I., Trap Muzik

JB: I ain’t gonna front: I’m somewhat in the position of a jazzhead in 1969 who totally digs Bitches Brew and is convinced that this rock & roll stuff is the music of the future, but wasn’t at Woodstock and can’t really say with a lot of authority what the aesthetic differences between the Velvet Underground, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin are, he just knows he likes their records. I haven’t been following any of the hip-hop scenes, mainstream, underground, East Coast, West Coast, Southern, etc. for any real amount of time, and my references are all the grab-bag of randomness that any dilettante can expect. The difference is that the jazzhead in ’69 didn’t have Wikipedia.

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Marvin Gaye, Trouble Man

File Between: Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield

Comments: The followup to the groundbreaking, consciousness-raising, and just plain awesome What’s Going On was a blaxploitation soundtrack. Nothing wrong with that; we’ll be checking in on quite a number of soundtracks from major black artists that came out in 1972. There is, though, something wrong with the fact that Marvin Gaye’s angelic voice only appears on about half of the tracks — and only has any particular lyric to sing (rather than smooth improvising) on a grand total of one. The sequencing of the record is highly idiosyncratic, too: it opens with a near-ambient jam entitled “Main Theme From Trouble Man (2).” The sharper, funkier “Main Theme From Trouble Man (1)” doesn’t show up until well into the second side. The music is all good, shifting between mellow and atmospheric to tense and funky, and deep into side two, exploring the uses of space-age synthesizers in a way that’s not the furthest thing from what certain European prog acts were up to at the time. But on the whole it’s mood music, feeling more like What’s Going On outtakes than like any kind of artistic statement.

A Keeper? The various pieces are all good; it’s just kind of a muddled whole. Good thing current technology allows me to separate out the pieces then.

Vinyl Rip: Trouble Man

Jonathan Bogart: Welcome, folks, to a few weeks of a rountable discussion of Entertainment Weekly’s Bullshit List Of The Top 100 Albums From The Past 25 Years. I’m Jonathan Bogart. I like all kinds of music, and have said so at length (see the rest of my blog), but somehow I’ve managed to miss most of the albums on this list. Partly this is because the album isn’t my preferred method of consuming music, especially albums made in a post-LP world, partly it’s because I’ve been too busy listening to music made well before my lifetime — but mostly it’s because the vast majority of them haven’t struck me as being worth the effort. But I’m a big believer in listening with an open mind, and I’m going to be listening to every record on the list and letting you know what I think about it. Mark, how about yourself? This whole roundtable was your brainchild, so what made you want to talk about the list — and what do you think are the five worst things about it?

MarkAndrew: Well, fellow Bacardi Johnny Bacardi linked to the list, and I wrote a four hundred work comment and realized I had a lot of stuff still to say: About the idea of a pop music canon, about list-making as vehicle for historical narrative, and about the albums themselves, individually and in context. Most “best of” music lists are narrower in scope, but express a clear and fairly myopic view of “Good.” The EW list has two fairly myopic views of Good. There are albums that are important in the fairly small pool of musical generes the magazine’s staff listens too (Rakim, R.E.M), and there are albums that sold well. I can imagine there was a lot of bitterness and lost friendships among the people that cobbled this together, I can just imagine the Spoon fans going “Alright! Alright! We’ll put Shania Twain on! Please put the gun down.”

So I was kind of fascinated with the process of making this list, and wanted to see what kind of narrative it creates if we take it at face value as the history of quality music over the last twenty-five years. It’s an interesting “Let’s Pretend.” Plus I thought it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to find some kind of common reviewing grounds that would work for Britney Spears, Johnny Cash and Tupac all at once. And I want to dog on the Postal Service in public.

Top Five:

1. Lack of diversity beyond top forty and college radio standards. No jazz, blues, only two maginally folksy albums very little electronica or dance music, nothing classical or remotely avante garde, no spoken word of musical theatre nothing that isn’t in English, and, like, 98% of the albums are from American or European artists. It’s just really limited in scope.
2. 1983 is a horrible year to start if the list makers wanted to thoroughly explore their favorite genres. For a list with so much interest in pop, hip-hop, and indy-rock, it seems bizarre to make your parameters so that Michael Jackson’ Thriller, R.E.M.’s Murmur and the early Sugarhill recordings are left off. Go back to ’80 or so, stick those three albums on the list and you have a much more complete musical history.
3. Some strangely clueless picks about which albums should represent which artists, even deserving artists. Mariah Carey is a scary talented singer, but you wouldn’t know it from Emancipation of Mimi. Crooked Rain is a fine, fine, Pavement album, but Slanted and Enchanted was the low-fi shot heard ’round the world.
4. Not to be all music-nerdy, but there’s too much pop crap. If your greatest albums list starts with George Michael. Well, that’s just NOT a good sign.
5. 29. Breakaway Kelly Clarkson (2004)
   30. Appetite for Destruction Guns N’ Roses (1987)
   Note than 29 is supposedly better than 30. I rest my case.

JB: I’m not sure we can fault Entertainment Weekly for being what it is; if the list went more avant-garde or outside of the English-speaking world, it wouldn’t be EW. What puzzles me more is the lack of recognition Britain gets for its pop scenes. Portishead’s okay, I guess, but no Massive Attack or Tricky? No Stone Roses, Blur, Pulp, Streets, or grime? Maybe my Anglophilia is showing a bit, but seeing a list like this without Pills, Thrills N Bellyaches or Psychocandy is just weird.

And finally, a disclaimer: I reserve the right to change my opinion at any time about any or all of these albums, the songs therein, or the people who made them. Except for those few albums I already know well, this is all based on a single listen, and who the hell listens to an album once?

Anyway, let’s go!

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The Edgar Winter Group, They Only Come Out At Night

File Between: The Eagles and Blue Öyster Cult

Comments: Edgar Winter is largely remembered as Johnny Winter’s brother, one-half of the oddest blues brothers in rock & roll oral history — they’re both albinos. But where guitarist Johnny has some actual cred on the blues and shredding circuits, keyboardist Edgar is best known for two slight hits from this record, the cheerful slice of boogie-rock “Free Ride” (which I first heard in a note-for-note cover by alt-Christian band Audio Adrenaline in the mid-90s) and the gloriously ridiculous instrumental “Frankenstein,” whose monster guitar/synth riff is very nearly the least interesting thing about it; I’m more partial to the jazz fusion section and the robotic synth solo towards the end. The rest of the record is an easy-going blend of hard rock, country-rock, and blues-rock, rarely memorable but also rarely embarrassing. (Though the rhumba-inflected “Alta Mira” manages to be both.) Despite Edgar’s name being up top, they were an actual band — Ronnie Montrose, later famous for his solo work, was the guitarist — everyone contributing writing credits and sharing vocal duties. It didn’t last, apparently; this was their peak.

A Keeper? It’s not the vampire-glam promised on the cover, but I’ll always like “Free Ride” and “Frankenstein,” and the other stuff is listenable enough.

Vinyl Rip: Autumn

So, now that I’ve got that out of the way . . . .

I’ve been listening to a lot of something that’s hard to define. Frank Sinatra is it, at least until he signed with Reprise and tried to compete with the rock & rollers. Ella Fitzgerald is it, except when she’s doing straight-up jazz. It’s not jazz, it’s pop, but it’s not pop in the teenage hormones-and-attitude sense either — that kind of pop was being invented (by Elvis Presley, to be unforgivably reductive) at the time, and was an unspoken rebuke to this kind of stuff, as this was an unspoken rebuke to it.

I’ve settled on the term “Adult Pop,” because the themes, the emotions, and the clear, sophisticated elegance of the orchestrations and productions all belong very much to a grown-up world, and a vanished grown-up world at that; the baby boomers will never be this grown-up no matter how many grandchildren they have. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.) This, by the way, is album music: the teen-pop of the era was all on 45s. When people try to tell you that the Beatles invented the album or some shit like that, tell them no way. Frank Sinatra and June Christy and Mel Tormé and Ella Fitzgerald did. (Okay, jazz guys like John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman perfected it. But that means the Beatles are third place at best.)

It could also be considered the final decadence of what Wilfrid Sheed calls the jazz song, that form of American popular music invented by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern and George Gershwin and which is often called, in the crass dialect of marketing and publicity, the Great American Songbook. But the stuff I’m talking about is very much not jazz, though the spirit of jazz runs through it in the complex, shifting rhythms and startling chord changes, and of course in the fact that many of the personnel who made it, both behind the microphone and in the orchestra, also made jazz.

Anyway. So I’ve been listening to it a lot, and figuring out what I wanted to hear over and over again, and I’ve made (as is my nerdly wont) a four-CD collection of what I think is a pretty great mix of songs, with a definite flow to them for once. These aren’t necessarily the best, but they’re the most evocative and tell the story I wanted to tell with the set.

Details: the time period I’m drawing from is roughly from the crystallization of the long-player format in about 1955 to the British Invasion in 1963. Quite literally: after about 1960 there’s a steep decline in the kind of stuff I mean, and after 1963 it’s pretty much nonexistent. (The peak year seems to have been 1957.) It’s the age of high fidelity sound and massive recording budgets and brilliant orchestrators and incredibly proficient studio musicians. There are a couple of outliers at either end of the chronology; that’s fine. Anyway . . . .

I divided the four discs into seasons, and appropriated some vintage advertisments to use as the cover art, then smushed each disc into one streamable mp3. So without further ado, may I present:

The Adult Pop Box

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1. Mel Tormé “It’s A Blue World”
2. Peggy Lee “Black Coffee”
3. Helen Merrill “Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year”
4. Little Jimmy Scott “They Say It’s Wonderful”
5. Ella Fitzgerald “Day Dream”
6. Anita O’Day “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square”
7. Dinah Shore “My Funny Valentine”
8. Barbara Lea “Am I In Love?”
9. Billy Eckstine “I Love You”
10. Carmen McRae “All The Things You Are”
11. June Christy “Spring Is Here”
12. Billie Holiday “I Get Along Without You Very Well”
13. Blossom Dearie “They Say It’s Spring”
14. Sarah Vaughan “April In Paris”
15. Rosemary Clooney “Blue Rose”
16. Sue Raney “I Get The Blues When It Rains”
17. Chris Connor “My April Heart”
18. Jeri Southern “Isn’t This A Lovely Day”
19. Nat King Cole “Lost April”
20. Julie London “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”
21. Johnny Hartman “Long Ago And Far Away”
22. Frank Sinatra “I’ll Remember April”
23. Nina Simone “Lilac Wine”

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1. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong “Summertime”
2. Nat King Cole “Day In, Day Out”
3. Peggy Lee “Lover”
4. Teri Thornton “Blue Skies”
5. Frank Sinatra “Summer Wind”
6. Julie London “Memphis In June”
7. Ella Fitzgerald “Too Darn Hot”
8. Joe Williams “Too Close For Comfort”
9. Dick Haymes “The Long, Hot Summer”
10. June Christy “Something Cool”
11. Chet Baker “I’m Old Fashioned”
12. Helen Merrill “It’s A Lazy Afternoon”
13. Etta Jones “Don’t Go To Strangers”
14. Lorez Alexandria “Lush Life”
15. Dinah Washington “Ill Wind”
16. Anita O’Day “Tenderly”
17. Barbara Lea “The Very Thought Of You”
18. Keely Smith “When Day Is Done”
19. Rosemary Clooney “In The Cool, Cool, Cool of The Evening”
20. Mark Murphy “Firefly”
21. Blossom Dearie “Teach Me Tonight”
22. Nina Simone “Don’t Smoke In Bed”
23. Tony Bennett “Darn That Dream”
24. Carmen McRae “The Night We Called It A Day”

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1. Anita O’Day “Indian Summer”
2. Hoagy Carmichael “Baltimore Oriole”
3. Jackie Paris “A Cottage For Sale”
4. Beverly Kenney “Born To Be Blue”
5. Julie London “Blues In The Night”
6. Nat King Cole “Stardust”
7. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong “Autumn In New York”
8. Chris Connor “A Foggy Day”
9. Johnny Hartman “Autumn Serenade”
10. Sue Raney “September In The Rain”
11. Lorez Alexandria “But Beautiful”
12. Chet Baker “Let’s Get Lost”
13. Dinah Washington “Invitation”
14. Nancy Wilson “Guess Who I Saw Today”
15. June Christy “Shadow Woman”
16. Billy Eckstine “I Cover The Waterfront”
17. Louis Armstrong “There’s No You”
18. Frank Sinatra “Lonely Town”
19. Ella Fitzgerald “Lost In A Fog”
20. Jeri Southern “Coffee, Cigarettes & Memories”
21. Mel Tormé “Dancing In The Dark”
22. Dick Haymes “The Nearness Of You”

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1. Helen Merrill “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home”
2. Mel Tormé “Moonlight In Vermont”
3. Carmen McRae “Misery”
4. Abbey Lincoln “Lonely House”
5. Blossom Dearie “I Walk a Little Faster”
6. Ella Fitzgerald “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”
7. Mark Murphy “The Meaning Of The Blues”
8. Chet Baker “Grey December”
9. Dean Martin “Sleep Warm”
10. Ray Charles & Betty Carter “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
11. Johnny Hartman “Stella By Starlight”
12. Dakota Staton “The Party’s Over”
13. Billie Holiday “The End Of A Love Affair”
14. Frank Sinatra “When Your Lover Has Gone”
15. Julie London “Cry Me A River”
16. Etta Jones “Out In The Cold Again”
17. Sarah Vaughan “Vanity”
18. Tony Bennett “Lost In The Stars”
19. Nat King Cole “For All We Know”
20. Peggy Lee “As Time Goes By”
21. June Christy “This Year’s Kisses”
22. Dick Haymes “The Way You Look Tonight”

Further Theoretical Box Sets may show up here from time to time, depending on my appetite for time-consuming audio crunching and lengthy upload times. Let me know what you think, huh?