493: Earth, Wind and Fire- 'That's the Way of the World'

http://open.spotify.com/album/739zIKWH5IhKL4Eg4zu1ug
I suspect that one look at that album cover there would give you at least a vague idea of what kind of band we're dealing with here. Look at the outfits! Look at the afros! At least some members of the band can't even stop dancing for a routine photo-shoot! One member is having so much fun he seems to have collapsed! That fellow on the far right who seems to be taking the whole thing extremely seriously!

That's right: it's Scandinavian Death Metal!

02:49 What an opening track, 'Shining Star' careers out of the speakers like a funky rhino ('Funky Rhino' is now reserved for my next band's name, sorry) sounding like the theme tune to a 70s Tv show where Stevie Wonder plays a blind cop who can only solve crimes through his amzing skill of feeling 'vibes'

07:36 The title track is obviously where Lenny Kravitz 'got the inspiration for' 'It Ain't Over Til It's Over'. The song's so smooth that it doesn't so much play as it winks at you slowly from across a bar, sends a mohijto over and offers you a Silk Cut

08:22 Incidentally, this album can join such alumni as 'Parade' by Prince and, erm, 'Ben' by Michael Jackson as 'classic soundtracks to films no-one can remember to save their lifes'

11:32 'Happy Feelin'' is extremely appropriately named; unlike most 'happy' songs ('Shiny Happy People', 'Don't Worry Be Happy, etc.) it doesn't make me want to join Al-Qaeda in attempt to wreak my vengeance on the decadent west

17:05 'All About Love' starts off as a generic soul ballad- nice enough but hardly earth-shaking- but swells into brass-based bedlam in the chorus that's so sultry it's all you can do to stop yourself dry-humping the speaker. Just me? Gorgeous coda at the end too

21:35 The start of 'side two' (how deliciously archaic!) is another absolute stonker, 'Yearnin' Learnin'' makes me wish, not for the first time, that I had a huge afro and a pair of platforms. Ok, it's the first time I've wished I had a pair of platforms...

26:54 'Reasons' is a beautiful ballad, with a fantastic vocal performance. The orchestration and horn arrangements all across this album are just perfect.

29:24 That drum fill in 'Africano' has been sampled by at least 62'345 acts. Isn't the flute such an underused instrument in pop music? There isn't a single record that couldn't be improved just a little by it's inclusion- FACT!
Oh sorry, did I say 'FACT!'? I meant 'OPINION!', sorry, it's evidently very easy to get the two confused

39:17 The gospel-funk (it exists, I have heard it) of 'Seen the Light' ends with a recording of traditional African music, and our journey's over brothers and sisters

Brilliant. With exception of the two albums I was already au fait with this is the best album I've heard by a considerable distance. There simply wasn't a bad song nor a dull moment (though if I was being cruel I'd argue that perhaps the closing track went on for longer than was probably necessary), and I'd honestly put 'Shining Star' in my top 20 best album openings of all time. The sound was both lush and abrasive, beautifully produced but always teetering excitingly on the edge of total chaos. Not only would I listen to this album again, but after I write this I'm straight onto Amazon.

Pearl Jam next. Sigh. After having so fun locating my inner black funk player, I now have to exhume my inner 14 year old teenage boy

A-

494: Cyndi Lauper- 'She's So Unusual' (1983)

http://open.spotify.com/album/2aZG65CSBMeTKr0YNfsFMe
She's got red hair
But we don't care
Cyndi, Cyndi Lauper


It's almost impossible to have a dedicated opinion on Cyndi Lauper (go on, try it. Can't can you?); in the 25+ years since this, her debut was released you really can't picture one person either desperately falling in love with her music or despising it to the point of sledgehammering records (even though this album sold sixteen MILLION copies!!!! Have you ever met anyone who could even recall seeing a copy lying around a vague aquaintance's house?). What can you possibly say about her? She did that song about girls having fun that isn't actually half as irritating as it could be; she's so New York that she pronounces her hometown 'Noo Yoik'; plus this album contains a cover of 'When You Were Mine', which is one of my favourite Prince songs, and I'm all ready to absolutely despise it. Still, 'Time After Time's quite nice isn't it? This may be a short entry...

01:41 The opening track, a cover of The Beats' 'Money Changes Everything', is pretty good actually, a bit like The Pretenders fronted by one of Fraggle Rock

04:41 While we're on the subject of that voice- it has all the necessary ingredients-nasal, shouty, brattish, etc- to be epically infuriating, but it's a credit to both the producers and Lauper herself for utilising it in a way that very rarely makes to want to chew your ears off

05:35 Aaah, 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun'. Everytime I hear this song I instinctavely look round my shoulder to check for any onrushing hen parties. To be fair though, the song could have been officially the most annoying song of all time in the wrong hands, but in the end it's actually quite enjoyable bubblegum pop. Ok yes, it's still a bit annoying...

12:04 'When You Were Mine' is rubbish. Yes, I know that it was never going to have much of a chance, but they've taken a strange and spikey new wave pop song and liberally spunked Magic FM juice all over the production desk. Even Cyndi Lauper herself sounds almost disinterested at times (well, by her standards anyway, which is 'feverishly excited' to most people)

13:15 Ewwwwwwwww, whispered outro. Didn't the Geneva Convention define them as a justifiable act of war in 1998?

14:44 'Time After Time' now?? Well this is just hit after hit isn't it? Well, right up until the end of this song and I realise that I don't know any more Cyndi Lauper songs.

15:56 It's a nice little song though isn't it? No-one's pretending that it's 'Marquee Moon', but it may dull that constant hankering for self-obliteration for four minutes or so

17:31 Another whispered outro!!! One more of those and I'm writing to my MP

20:38 'She Bop', as the so-Cyndi-Lauper-you'd-probably-presume-she-was-taking-the-piss-is-you-chose-to-invest-her-with-that-kind-of-self-awareness title suggests, is pretty silly but enjoyable stuff

23:51 The synth solo at the end of 'All Through the Night' veers past annoying and into nauseating, but the rest of the song is a pretty expertly crafted mid-tempo pop ballad, one you'd imagine absolutely despising after the radio plays it 16 times an hour for about two months

28:17 It was actually the law during the mid-80s that every succesful pop album required at least one song that could be feasibly described as 'reggae-tinged' or as having 'a Caribbean flavour', hence 'Witness'

33:11 'I'll Kiss You, with its synth squelches, synthesised slap bass and lyrics about visiting Gypsies, probably sounded dated back in 1983. This kind of production was probably killed off by the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System

35:09 'He's So Unusual', despite being just a 45 second music hall pastiche, almost made a smile break across the craggy facade that was once my face. No mean achievement.

38:04 'Yeah Yeah' is a slight train wreck of saxaphone solos, squeals and comedy Japanese voices which, admirably, Lauper's strength of personality manages to just about save from being an absolute embarrassment. And that's all folks!

A pretty much perfect example of 80s pop all told, there's nothing in it's 10 tracks you'd describe as filler, almost each and every track has you unintentionally humming along by the second chorus and when you learn that the first six tracks were released as singles those humungous sales start to make a lot of sense. I still wouldn't describe any of the tracks as classics, or even particularly great, but even on the songs that may have turned out to be absolute stinkers the power of Lauper's personality just about manages to carry them over the finish line. Will I listen to i again? Intentionally? I doubt it, but it was 38 minutes of unpretentious fun that didn't at any point make me want to stick needles in my eyeballs. A success, of sorts...

C

495: Husker Du- 'New Day Rising' (1985)

...ah thank God.

After nearly a week recovering from the horrors of Kiss, when I saw that this was the next album on the list I almost wept tears of relief. While most people would place the also-great 'Zen Arcade' above it as Husker Du's (I apologise in advance, but I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my time finding the umlaut on my keyboard) best album, I believe that the band semi-jettisoning their hardcore roots for a slightly more poppy sound produced easily their most enjoyable listen, and paved the way for Bob Mould's future career making ever so slightly twisted hard pop records. In the 'against' column however, there's always that horrendous accusation that the band had a larger part than most in creating what we now know as 'emo', so to some that may colour their affection of the band in a 'unproven child abuse' kind of way.

00:18 Christ, you do forget quite how loud Husker Du could be, the title track sounds like jumbo jets having angry sex

01:14 Few people can scream as well as Bob Mould though, he's definitely up there with the Frank Blacks of this world

02:04 This is all marvellously unhinged, and fantastically exciting as a result

03:28 'The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill', and most of this album in fact, is pretty much as good as guitar music

gets. Anyone thinking of forming a band should by law at least have a passing knowledge of this album

06:39 'I Apologise is a pretty useful blueprint for Bob Mould's next band Sugar

12:14 Would Bob Mould be more famous now if he hadn't so stubbornly refused to change what is possibly the most unattractive name in rock? He sounds less like one of the most influential figures in 80s alternative music and more like the Lib Dem counsellor for Swaffham

14:01 This media player tells you what percentage of a way through a track you are, how marvellously unnecessary. I'm currently 51.65% through 'Celebrated Summer'

16:05 Husker Du had a fantastic talent of somehow making essentially collections of buzzsaw guitars and strangulated yelps sound as melodic and poppy as The Supremes

19:39 It always baffled me when people ponder why it was REM who made it big rather than Husker Du, surely in terms of radio-friendliness it's like wondering why the Pet Shop Boys became big over Einsturzende Neubauten

20:35 Ok, a bit of an overstatement, but you get my drift

22:06 'Husker Du, Du, Du, Captain Beefheart ELO...'

23:35 '59 Times the Pain' is probably as close you're gonna get to describing Husker Du's sound in three minutes and eighteen seconds

26:03 I mean, he may as well call himself Ted Damp...

26:49 I do think he has a really underrated voice though

29:46 I can imagine that there's people out there who really resent 'Books About UFOs', and it does sound likes it's been airlifted from a completely different album (even by a completely different band), but I honestly think it's one of the most joyously perfect little pop songs ever written, and to hold absolutely anything against it is a spiteful crime akin to farting on a kitten's lunch.

32:26 In fact, I think the album takes a bit of a nosedive into almost wanton unlistenability after it ('I Don't Know What You're Talking About' excepted), almost like the band were overcompensating ever so slightly

33:26 Mick Clammy...

33:49 Actually, 'Mick Clammy' sounds pretty cool, you can imagine him being the bass player in X-Ray Spex

36:35 Listening to it now, 'Whatcha Drinkin' is actually a pretty good punk song, it just sounds a little generic compared to most of the songs preceding it

41:44 A taped studio conversation states- oh the japes!- that 'it's the last song on the album, nobody cares what it sounds like' and we're done...

A classic of it's genre (whatever that means, it's a classic in any genre) and hasn't lost one iota of ferocity in the near quarter century since its release. I'd be surprised if there weren't at least one other Husker Du album on this list, and it would be entirely deserved

More of the same next, pretty much: Cyndi Lauper

A

496: Kiss- 'Destroyer' (1976)

http://open.spotify.com/album/2oPeCzPDtjkm2Ux5r7edAb

Seriously, where do you start?


It's hard to dislike Kiss really, even if they're less a band and more of a strange mutated offspring of unchecked capitalism where nobody bats an eyelid when a group of paunchy middle-aged men turn up at your door- looking like they've just returned from a Dungeons and Dragons live role-playing game and decided to get their faces painted at the county fair on the way home-and try to sell you a pack of condoms with their faces on them. Gene Simmons is a postcard from a paralell universe where one man can dress up like Liberace's dungeon keeper, profess undying admiration for Margaret Thatcher, before showing off his admirably large tongue, spitting fake blood all over you and claim to have slept with over 1000 women. And he's the bass player. Gene Simmons will be 60 this year.


In a sense listening to Kiss's actual music is like going to a exhibition of Ronald McDonald's water colours, but there's a big part of me that knows I'm going to enjoy this record; I'm hardly expecting Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports', and I can pretty much guarantee you that I'll never have the inclanation to listen to this album again, but fuck it, it's Saturday afternoon and I'm adequately prepared to rock

00:30 It starts, like countless classic albums, with a radio report of a truck crash. The driver of the truck was uninjured in the collision

01:29 Strange sound effects, snatches of old Kiss songs...

02:30 I can now confirm to myself that 'Detroit Rock City' is a huge stinking turd of a song, I've never really given it enough attention before to make a fair and balanced judgement

04:24 Remember to vist http://www.Kiss.com/ and buy some official Kiss nasal spray, only $16.99

05;20 The song finishes with another car crash. These crazy Detroit drivers

06:15 Paul Stanley sings the chorus of 'King of the Night-time World' more like the king of Ovaltine and Radox baths, he has the singing voice of a man who's never stayed up past Crimewatch

08:33 Ok, both the opening tracks have been absolute pish. Onwards and upwards though, aye

09:08 Why on Earth would a song called 'God of Thunder' start with children shouting??

09:44 'I was raised by the deeeeeeeeeeeeeeemonns'

10:38 'I command you to kneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel before the God of Thundeeeeeeeeeer!'- this really is too ridiculous for words, it's going to be very hard to get through this album without mentioning Spinal Tap...

11:52 'I bring the dark to quease thee'- brilliant

12:51 Don't forget to visit http://www.kiss.com/ and book your official Kiss anti-natal classes, starting September, $245.66 a session

14:19 No, no, no, you can't seriously expect us to take a lighter-waving uber-ballad called 'Great Expectations' after we've just sat through 'God of Thunder'

15:30 Even Freddy Mercury might consider this a bit overwrought. Is that a childrens choir???

17:48 Most producers use a mixing desk, this one evidentally used a trowel, I think there's a song in there but...

18:51 After this, visit http://www.kiss.com/ and buy your very own official Kiss shoe-horn, only $12.84

20:15 Hehe, that song was called 'Flaming Youth'...

21:55 'Sweet pain': I personally don't think the world needs to hear Paul Stanley singing about S&M, but I guess it's too late now...

24:06 This is more like it!

24:24 'Shout it, shout it, shout it, shout it out loooud'!!!!!!!!! Finally I am awaken from my slumber, this is a classic slice of dim-rock

25:42 The air guitars are out now. Heeellllllllllllloooooooo Milton Keynes!

26:28 A piano, this can only be bad news

27:22 Words cannot describe the horror of 'Beth', it is truly, truly an abomination, I actually feel like I'm going to vomit

28:11 A fucking string section?? I thought this was a fucking Kiss album??? How are you supposed to vomit blood and spray fireworks from your crotch to this???

29:18 'You really like my limousine, you really like how the wheels roll'- wheels have other ways of rolling?? This is truly an insight into how the other half live...

29:36 'You like my seven inch.... platform heels'- very clever!

31:30 Have I mentioned http://www.kiss.com/? There's currently a sale on official Kiss colostomy bags, now just $45.52 for a box of 12

32:20 This song- quite literally- has bells on...

33:46 The album ends, in predictable preposterous and bewhildering fashion, with what sounds like a lazer fight in a football crowd, before that sodding childrens choir does a little reprise of 'Great Expectations'. Sweet Moses smell the roses

I'm not going to mince my words here; that was a unmitigated fucking turd-festival. I like a bit of pomposity and preposterousness (phew), and the odd ridiculously overblown ballad here and there isn't bad (although I draw the line at the horrendous 'Beth, which did at least twelve times as much damage to my health as the cigarette I smoked while listening to it), but apart from the (brilliant) 'Shout it Out Loud' the other 9 tracks didn't have half a tune between them, not even old tracks on the ground indicating a tune may have passed through days earlier, not even the encrusted droppings of a tune, not even a small mosquito of a tune, encased in amber, discovered millions of years later by curous scientists.

Kiss, you have wasted a half hour of my life, and I want it back

E-

497: Public Enemy- 'Yo! Bum Rush the Show' (1987)

http://open.spotify.com/album/1wiSjwzZjO3zt6VrUsATfC

Surprisingly low down this, you could make a decent shout for this being one of the most influential debut albums of the last 25 years (look out for my next blog, when I attempt to listen to Rolling Stone's '500 Greatest Debut Albums of the Last 25 Years'- my reaction on finding out number 1 is '1 Polish, 2 Biscuits and a Fish Sandwich' by the Outhere Brothers is a classic) and, while the production values on tracks such as the title track may leave some of the album sounding massively dated (not to mention the very occasional blast of casual misogyny which, depressingly, don't sound very dated at all) much of the album manages to retain its massive visceral impact and capacity to excite. Plus, in 'Timebomb' and 'Public Enemy No.1' it contains two of the greatest hip-hop songs of all time (even Puff daddy couldn't manage to make the latter sound bad). This is also the first album so far that I own, so this next 45 minutes is going to be more of a refresher course really

00:07 That intro to 'You're Gonna Get Yours' still sounds amazing

00:53 'Suckers to the side, I know you hate, my 98'- I've never been quite sure what a '98' is, a smaller version of a Mr. Whippy?

02:23 'My 98 automobile...'- that'll be it then

05:03 Aaaaaaaaaaah, 'Sophisticated Bitch', what a charming slice of good ol' fashioned woman-hating. To be fair, it's slightly incorrect to state that this kind of lazy sexism is endemic in a lot of hip-hop, when in fact it's endemic in a huge swathe of male-made music, from rock, to pop, to classical (Verdi's 'Rhapsody for a Skank Ho' being a case in point)

08:21 The AOR guitars date the song slightly too

08:31 'Yo Chuck, run a power move on them'- someone ran a power move on me once, it was most unpleasant. No-one's ever bum rushed my show though... Unless you count that one time in 1996... Shudder...

10:56 'Miuzi Weighs a Ton' sounds like a slowed down demo of the kind of furious white-noise of samples and mixing sound they'd pretty much perfect on their second album

13:09 The Outhere Brothers' Best-Of is called 'The Fucking Hits'

14:00 The Outhere Brothers have a Best-Of????

14:16 'Timebomb' is one of those fantastic songs that, on the surface, don't seem to do anything much at all- all it is is one tiny sample repeated ad infinitum with Chuck D rapping breathlessly over the top, no chorus, no break, no cow-bell solo (although that would've only improved it)- and yet somehow, magically and completely illogically, it sounds like an almost perfect pop song.

17:40 Aaaaaah, 'Too Much Posse'- the massively unhinged Flave Flav song that's as much an obligation on a Public Enemy album as the really, really rubbish Ringo song is on a Beatles album

19:05 'Too much posse' sounds like an odd complaint, I can't imagine that going down too well in the old west; 'Sorry Rattlesnake Bill, I know you wanna go and rescue my daughter from those Injuns too, but we've simply got too much posse, and you were the last to join...'

20:45 How amazing is 'Rightstarter'?? I'd completely forgot about it, I think this may qualify for a list of 'fantastic forgotton songs on classic albums' list. I'm on it...

22:48 'Mind over matter, mouth in motion, can't defy cos I'll never be quiet let's start this'- brilliant.

23:45 To be fair to 'Rightstarter', most songs that were sequenced one track before the monolithicly amazing 'Public Enemy No.1' are always likely to be forgotten'

23:55 'Monolithicly'???

24:45 I am completely, embarassingly in awe of this song like it was captain of the football team and I was the speccy bookworm who's never even held a boy's hand. Is there a more viscerally striking and complete statement of intent in the history of recorded music?

26:54 Well, yes, 'Cleopatra Comin Atcha' obviously...

27:03 'All you suckers, liars, you cheap amplifiers, your crossed up wires are always on fire...' Ah oui, oui oui!

28:48 'MPE' is a strange mix of classic PE sirens and turntable assault and minimal verses that actually make it sound more like 'I'm Bad' by LL Cool J. As I keep stating: this isn't necessarily a bad thing...

31:33 Chuck D wouldn't truly nail the incendiary politics and social commentary until the second album, a lot of his lyrics here are just classic rap bravado (usually about how heavy his uzi, funnily enough)

34:00 Actually, the title track doesn't sound half as dated as I remember it being (is that possible??), and is actually closer to the sound of their later, more complete, work than a lot of the tracks on the album

37: 41 The heavy metal guitars on 'Raise the Roof' have Rick Rubin's big hairy palm marks all over them

40:16 'At School I'm cool throughout the week'- I hear that

40:30 Did he say he's 'down with the Greek'??

43:25 'Megablast' is just bizarre

44:27 Backwards vocals... Did he just say 'worship satan and kill all your friends'????

44:48 Ah no, it actually says 'shop at Lidl', fucking sell-outs...

46:49 A spectacularly pointless instrumental, and we're done...

An album that absolutely still deserves to be called a classic, in my memory they was a lot more filler and dud tracks than there actually was, and the standard throughout is actually consistently very high. 'Yo! Bum Rush the Show's problem is that Public Enemy's next two albums raised the bar for what hip-hop could actually achieve so high that their debut can't help but sound like a dry run for what the band were about to achieve, but although it does suffer in comparsion to their later work (as would 99.9856124% of all other records) it can still stand up on its own as one of the greaest hip-hop albums of all time, and reaistically should be a lot higher in any definitive list of greatest albums.

Kiss next, from the sublime...

A

498: ZZ Top- 'Tres Hombres' (1973)

http://open.spotify.com/album/0Em8m9kRctyH9S3MTXAHvY

Aaaaaaaaaaaah ZZ Top, the Topmeisters, the Zizous, Zizop or just simply 'The Top', it doesn't matter how many nicknames you make up for them on the spot, for some strange reason they just kick all kinds of ass don't they?

It's the beards isn't it? It's those long, lucious, tick-fostering belly button ticklers for which you'd walk over hot coals just just to poke with a tiny stick while squealing 'BEARDY BEARDY BEADY!' to yourself. Just me?

And guess what the only one without a beard's called? Go On? have a guess which one of ZZ Top is the only one not to have a BEARD while both the other two BEARDed gentlemen quite clearly have BEARDs??? Give up? It's Sylvester Cunningham...

I jest of course! it's Frank BEARD! Oh praise the lord for such bountiful gifts!

Of course, I'm under no illusions as to what this album will be like; I can only remember ever hearing three ZZ Top songs- 'La Grange', which is fucking brilliant, 'Gimme all your loving, which isn't, and 'Sharp dressed Man', which I can't actually remember very much at all, and I've braced myself for 'Tres Hombres' being 'La grange' plus 9 other songs which aren't as good as 'La grange' but sound remarkably similar. I mean c'mon, they're one misjudged hair-replacement advert away from being the American Status Quo, but I love them all the same, and this is at least going to be fun.

00:43 I'll be honest, I didn't expect my first thought to be 'Hmmmm, 'Love is the drug' by Roxy Music', that Bryan Ferry is a thieving Charlaton! And a massive tit too, but I'm sure there'll be time for that later...

03:06 I have a sudden urge to go out and buy a Stetson and some tight Levis Strauss...

04:41 Thankfully, on the basis of the albums first two tracks, the band seem to have packed the tunes as well as the boogie into that cow-skin suitcase of their's. Is that a melody I hear?

06:22 I have it on good authority that Billy Gibbons rider includes two big cow-pies, with the antlers coming out of the pastry and everything. Oh, and a mechanical bull, otherwise he's just not going on stage

08:10 This isn't quite as exciting as a song called 'Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers' should be, but it's hard to supress an urge to grab a nearby tennis racket and pose in front of the mirror

08:35 Isn't cow pie just steak pie?? That Desperate Dan's a fucking bullshitter if you ask me, you wouldn't call your sausages 'pig-tubes' would you?

09:34 From now on I'm calling all my sausages 'pig-tubes'

10:21 Shock! AC/DC nicked the riff off 'Shoot to Thrill' straight from 'Master of Sparks'! Everything I believe is wrong...

12:54 Listening to 'Master of Sparks', the similarities to Queens of the Stone Age become a lot more apparant and you begin to understand why Josh Homme rates the band so highly,

13:26 It's a sign of the times that I read 'Hot, Blue and Righteous' as 'Hot, Blue and Ringtones'

14:20 The song itself however is a slight and unfortunate right turn toward 'dad-rock'. It also sounds a lot like the more, ahem, 'radio-friendly' songs on the last Kings of Leon album

17:17 'Move Me On Down the Line' = The Foo Fighters. This is fun, like an FM rock word association game

18:42 Billy Gibbons was Jimi Hendrix's favourite guitarist, funnily enough

19:58 'Precious and Grace' brings up predictable nausea that I get every time I hear something resembling a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song

22:34 'La Grange' is such a brilliant song, the aural equilavalent of a silver Jack Daniels belt buckle worn by Robert Mitchum.

25:39 None of the songs here outstay their welcome by a second, which I can imagine getting more and more rare the deeper I get into the 70s

27:24 Pork chops are 'pig-hammers', gammon's a 'pig-frisbee'

28:18 Two minutes in, 'Shiek' hasn't quite decided what it wants to do yet. It might want to hurry up

33:35 The slight anti-climax of 'Have you Heard' and it's by-the-numbers boogie comes to a close, and it's time at the bar gentlemen please.

A pleasant surprise, if I'm being honest, while the wheel remains resolutely un-reinvented, it's a simple, unpretentious collection of very decent songs, and, may this may sound ridiculous considering it's little more than classic American barband blues, there was actually a lot more variety than I was expecting. easily the first album I've listened to on this list whioch I might imagine being one of the best 500 of all time. 1000 at least...

And besides, it's over in half an hour, so even if you hate it it'll be finished before you know it

B

499. Albert King- 'Born Under a Bad Sign' (1969)

http://open.spotify.com/user/lexleeson/playlist/2Byd1JwNe5Ex5GE3XogyIY

What do I know about Albert King? I know he's a blues singer. How? Because it says so on his Spotify biography (it also states that 'Albert King is truly a "King of the Blues," although he doesn't hold that title (B.B.King does)', which strikes me as a bit uncalled for, they just love to build them up to knock them down don't they these music journalists). I know that I quite like that album cover which I saw for the first time about four minutes ago, and I know that Homer Simpson once sang what I'm pretty sure is the definitive version of the title track, so I'm definitely open to suggestion here'

00:34 'Hard luck and trouble have been my only friend, been on my own since I was ten'- did I mention this was blues?

03:27 The great thing about Blues music is that, when done well, it can inject a strange euphoria into such miserable subject matter and almost become a celebration of suffering, or of surviving, that can be peversely uplifting. I'm not convinced that this is particularly great blues thus far though

05:03'Crosssaw Cut' is barely a blues song at all, full of Staz Soul brass and rock n' roll licks, this is obviously a very 'modern' blues album. Well, modern in 1967 anyway

05:32 Doodly-doodly-doodly-doodly-DUM-de-dum-dum. Do Blues guitarists ever get tired of playing that one riff every other song?

08:03 'Pretty Woman is just one note away from turning into the theme from Shaft. This is, of course, a good thing

10:27 Blues my aunt's anus, this just sounds like one of those Godawful funk 'work-outs' that were obviously great fun to play but are about as fun to listen to as EST

13:26My mind's starting to wander

14:10What effect would the early introduction of ecstacy had on the blues scene?

15:06 Would we have heard Blind Lemon Jefferson sing a bluegrass version of 'Everybody's Free (To feel Good)'

16:42 HowlingWolf adding a few blues licks to SL2's 'On a Ragga Trip'?

17:33 Call me a phillistine, but I just don't see how much of this differs in any real sense from about 1'654'982 other blues singers?

19:40'I Almost Lost My Mind' is pretty great though, and a very welcome change of pace (evrything up to now has followed the classic chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug scale), makes you yearn for that make-believe world where drunken barflies start singing slurred torch-songs on the pub piano, rather than trying to start a fight with ther own pork scratching while their urine soaked jeans slide slowly toward the floor

23:46 'I wanna be your personal manager baby', is he actually using the song to advertise his services as a PA? They have web-sites for that kind of thing now. I await his next song 'Data Entry Clerk' with baited breath

26:12 'Laundromat Blues'- well, Pauline Fowler will do that to you

31:55I must say I'm very disappointed with the lack of suicidal self-loathing and murderous tendancies on this record. When does he do the song where he shoots his wife because he finds her in bed with the family daschund?

32:14 The daschund then shops him to the police, and he's writing the song on death row, obviously

32:34 Ah, 'the slowie'

32:59 Slow song I mean, Eric Clapton hasn't made a guest appearance (yet)

35:18 'I see your face on every flower, your eyes on the stars above', oh come on

35:02 'Play it pretty'- I'd prefer them to play it 'slightly less deathly dull', but maybe that's just me

35:59 And that'll be it...

Not a bad album, not a good album; if the greatest album of all time (for the sake of arguements let's say 'Party Hard' by Andrew WK) was stationed on John O'Groats and the worst ('Just Enough Education to Perform by The Stereophonics) at Lands End, then 'Born Under a Bad Sign' would probably live just outside Coventry city centre. Underwhelming.

The album that is, not Coventry city centre...

D

500: The Eurythmics- 'Touch' (1983)

http://open.spotify.com/album/1JdHaHbRQ9oujxir6QhMHV

Sweet merciful Christ... Immediately the potential pitfalls of what I have volunteered for hits me in the stomach, I feel like a new recruit being helicoptered over the Cambodian killing fields and only just grasping the true horrors that I will have to face. No one needs to listen to a Eurythmics album now, no-one! They're like Polio- they have caused countless suffering in the past but their irradication is a sign of how far we have come along as a species.

I mean, come on, Eurythmics are a band that exist entirely of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, the pop equivalent of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Even if you make it a trio and chuck in someone impossible to truly dislike, let's say Andi Peters (bass guitar, has to be) to try and even things out a bit, that's still a hideous concoction. I can understand how we didn't know as much about either of them 25 years ago, but today it simply wouldn't be allowed to happen.

It's fair to say I'm not looking forward to this....

0:20 Welcome to the 80s...

2:03 'Here Comes the Rain Again'- the sound of Heart FM, although strangely enough for an early 80s synth pop

record it really doesn't sound that dated, a lot more contemporary than La Roux ever sounds anyway

3:32 'Ooooooooooooo-ooooooo-wooooooooooooooo-hey-hey-hey-heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!'

5:32 'Regrets' sounds like Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love' played on stylophones and Speak n' Spells, which isn't necessarily a bad thing

7:18 Oh sweet jesus this is actually quite good, the minimal production isn't a million miles from Prince. This wasn't supposed to happen

9;09 It sounds a lot like Prince, how was Dave Stewart involved in something so agreeable?

11:20 This makes a lot more sense- 'Right by Your Side' is an absolutely abortion of cod-carribbean soul- all steel drums and rolling tongues, truly, truly awful. I feel a lot better now

11:35 'Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-Da-da-da! C'mon c'mon c'mon!' Enough now, you're only embarrassing yourself

12:39 Didn't Annie Lennox win an Oscar once? I'd hardly put her on a par with Ray Parker jnr.

14:08 'True Blue' is a mess off slap bass and dramaticly stabbed synths, and as such sounds like a chase scene in Miami Vice. To be fair tho, about 37% of all music in the 80s sounded like a Miami Vice chase scene

14:50 Awful chorus too...

17:35 Every song so far has been at least 60 seconds too long. Eeewwwwww! Bass solo!

21:32 'Who's That Girl' is one of those songs that has about 78% of the ingredients needed to be really good, but somewhere along the production line someone sneezed in the box and it didn't quite work out. It starts off relatively interesting in a glacial Kraftwerk kind of way, but at some point decides it'd prefer to be a bit of a drippy synth ballad.

22:04 I wonder if Ray Parker jnr. will have an album in here

22:26 Actually, it's probably unlikely isn't it? One can dream though...

26:14You know occasionally on albums you can just tell which tack was the last one the band recorded? Where it sounds so half-baked and lethargic that it practically collapses out of the speaker while moaning 'what do we need 10 tracks for anyway??'? Where you can just picture a record executive tapping his watch on the other side of the glass in the recording studio? Yeah? Well welcome to 'The First Cut' (ironic, I suppose)

27:43 It still hasn't finished though

27:58 Now it has

29:51 They probably thought 'Aqua' was a good idea at the time...

33:55 'Hoooooooooooooo-woo-wa-wooooooooooooooooo'

37:40 Regardless of whether I like it or not, when I hear a song like 'No Fear, No Hate, No Pain' that at least tries to do something a little left-of-centre and different, I can't help but appreciate it a little. So while the song is a bit of a mess (plus it has fucking gun-shot samples and anti-war lyrics you can place comfortably alongside Culture Club's 'war is stupid, people are stupid' in terms of pacifist poetry), at least it's interesting

37:54 That voice is fucking awful at times tho

38:30 Jesus, this sounds like the theme tune to Jet Set Willy, how on Earth is this supposed to last seven minutes??

39:38 A slap bass solo!!! May God have mercy on us all...

40:42 Five minutes to go...

43:11 In what universe does this song possess enough in it to last this long?

44:25 You just know this is the one they'd close their gigs with, and drag it out for about half an hour while people left to catch the last bus

45:36 And it's over- one side of a ninety minute cassette; perfect

Well, it didn't make me want to pour sulphuric acid in my ear, which means I've lost a bet with myself. In fact, and I never thought I'd say this, it wasn't actually a terrible album at all, a handful of absolute shockers, one or two 'will this do' specials, a couple of interesting failures and, unbelievably, a select few good songs. Large chunks of it sounded like the kind of experimental electronic music you wouldn't equate with the same continent as Annie Lennox, and although I can probably name at least 500 albums twice as good as it off the top of my head, to my eternal shame I actually enjoyed some parts of it

I feel dirty

C

Introduction

What I am about to tell you may shock, disturb and even repulse you, so I don’t know, you might wanna sit down: I have never listened to a Bob Dylan album. Not intently anyway, I may have once sat in the kind of über-cool bar that only sell Macedonian lager in tiny bottles while Bob caterwauled his way through ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ in that imitable Jimmy-Saville-holidaying-in-the-Swiss-Alps style of his in the background, or been cornered at a party by some coked up prick yammering on about the screenplay he’s just about to get started on while dear Bob spouts lyrical genius about Spanish grasshoppers drinking soup from consulates’ knee-caps (or something) over our heads, but I have never once deliberately and intentionally sat through an entire record of his apparent genius. Neither have I heard ‘Exile on Main Street’, ‘Rubber Soul’, ‘Dusty in Memphis’, ‘Lexicon of Love’, ‘Exodus’, ‘A Kind of Blue’, ‘Joshua Tree’, ‘Harvest’, ‘Bat Out of Hell’, ‘Otis Blue’ or almost countless other ‘classic’ albums in popular music’s canon. I can’t even name a Steely Dan, Allman Brothers, Crosby Stills and Nash, Funkadelic, Can or Supertramp song. And none of this has ever bothered me before.
See, I love music. Sorry, that should read: I LOVE music; listening and talking about music I love, like, or even despise has been consistently the biggest and most important part of my life since before I could even attempt to moonwalk, and I still try to procure new music as often as is humanly possible, experiencing dozens upon dozens of new albums every year, amassing a CD collection the size of most WW2 Battle-Cruisers.
However, I have always been firmly against canonisation, which has always seemed to me to be nothing more than a method used by middle-aged music journalists (98.2% of whom are white and male) to a) continue to set the agenda on what is considered good music, and b) perpetuate the irritating myth that music reached a incontrovertible peak in about 1969[1] and has been getting rapidly worse since. So, as a child of the 90s I have never once really felt the need to go back and investigate pop music’s classics, or even never had the time- why go all the way back to the 1960s to listen to ‘Astral Weeks’ when Future of the Left’s second album was released a few months ago and is FIVE TIMES as good (possibly, I’ve never heard ‘Astral Weeks’)!?- which means while I could wax lyrical over what I think is The Auteurs’ best album and why Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ is actually superior to ‘Nation of Millions’, I could never really argue how much the former’s lyrical savagery owes to The Kinks’ Ray Davies, or how much the latter’s style was informed by Gil-Scot Heron…
Ok, I could, and I pretty much just did, but at the moment every argument I make is only 38% knowledge and 62% bullshit. But imagine if I could truly claim to have heard every album that the popular music press considers ‘classic’?? What do these monsters of critical and public acclaim actually sound like to virgin ears? What if I procured something like, oooh I don’t know, Rolling Stone Magazine (the world’s biggest music magazine, so AOR and in thrall to the 60s/70s that it actually comes with a free beard and a pair of Levis Strauss, and probably thinks that U2 are the most exciting band in the world right now) list of the 500 (that’s FIVE HUNDRED) greatest albums of all time, and listened to them all. In order. Would I actually die before completing it? Will I actually go insane before completing it? Exactly how many Beatles albums would I have to sit through? Will the ingestion of all of this popular culture make me some kind of cultural superhero, dispensing pearls of music wisdom like sticky white goo from each of my wrists? Or will it just turn me into that guy who hangs around your local bus stop, you know, the one who angrily tells himself off for farting and only wears trousers on days beginning in ‘T’?
That, essentially, is what this probably never ending blog is about, I will attempt to buy, beg, borrow or… erm… ‘borrow’ all 500 albums in an attempt to listen to every one of what Rolling Stone Magazine considers the greatest artistic achievements of popular music so far, and blog on each one, whether I liked it or (hopefully, just for the entertainment value, I’d hate to get through all of this and realise that Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ is actually better than Ultrasound’s seminal 1999 self-titled debut) hated it. I will most probably own, or at least be very familiar with, a great deal of the more modern records, but I’ll write about them all the same. Of course, this is all based on the assumption that no good records were released after November 2003,but when you consider only about 8 of these albums were released after 1980, that’s not really a problem. And of course I’ll probably give up before I even reach ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran
There’ll also be album reviews and self-important ramblingss and all the other rubbish you’d expect on a blog. Wish me luck, if I do one a week this will only take me (quick calculation) NINE YEARS AND EIGHT MONTHS????!!! Jesus…

[1] about the time of Woodstock, which is still celebrated today for cementing the hippy movement’s promotion of selfish gratification against collective movement, placing itself firmly in opposition to more ‘conflicting’ movements such as, ooh I don’t know, women’s lib and civil rights, and starting the slow death of socialism in western nations… Phew, not quite sure where that came from