Check out a particularly fun year as we reach the HALFWAY POINT in this daunting, but now seemingly achievable, blog series!
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone unturned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #30 in the series. My random number generator says that our next year to tackle will be 1992.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1988
Here we are at the official half-way point of Found or Forgotten. When I kicked off this blog series five years ago, I didn’t really imagine that I would make it this far. Once I realized how many albums I was listening to in preparation for each list, combined with the word count precedent I inflicted on myself, I assumed that this would be a pretty short-lived project. But, I’m still having fun! This blog series is mostly just a way to combine my passion for music with my hobby of writing and discover some great albums along the way. The act of writing itself is almost enough to sustain me, but the feedback I’ve gotten assuring me that at least someone is out there reading this stuff has been the piece that keeps me motivated to follow through. To that end, I really need to thank Scott for allowing me to use his platform to post these lists and be a part of the site (not to mention naming the series). I have zero interest in learning how to cultivate my own web presence, or pursuing engagement through social media, so I can confidently say that having access to Flip Flop Slap Fight has removed a barrier to entry that I would have never overcome on my own. Sitting here today, I can envision completing this project with all sixty entries (probably before I’m fifty) which is not something I’ve really been able to do before. Here’s to another five(+) years!
On to the music, then. The late eighties and early nineties represented a golden age for both hip hop and heavy metal. The two youth-oriented styles of music were coming into their own and evolving in a torrent of creativity and one-upmanship. It may seem odd from a 2021 vantage point, but these genres have always been connected in my mind. At the time, they both seemed so visceral, so impolite, so dangerous. They were largely ignored or frowned upon by the boomer rock establishment that wanted nothing more than to brainwash us into thinking that blues and rock and roll were somehow unique in their capacity to be high art. I think that’s why we saw the awkward marriage of rap and metal throughout the nineties. They may have had little to do with each other aesthetically, but artists from both camps likely recognized in each other the same outsider status. It made sense to link up in defiance, and while that led to plenty of regrettable music, it also left us with some precious gems littered among the detritus. But that’s a story for a future post. In ‘88, only Public Enemy and Anthrax were flirting with a rap/metal entanglement, but each of those forms stood on its own as among the most vital and exciting things on offer throughout the American musical landscape. Looking back now, that is still evident, and my top ten reflects as much. As for rock music, it was ripe for its own upheaval by this point. We would have to wait a few years and suffer our share of Firehouses and Nelsons in the meantime, but the forces that would eventually topple the prevailing sound were already fomenting in a handful of acts from this era. The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Jane’s Addiction – all of the elements of grunge were present among rock’s underground, perhaps barring a Butch Vig figure to bend the sound towards the commercially viable. It was a year of great vibrancy and renewal underneath the banality and status quo that dominated the charts. My second-best album features a track called “Revolution Calling”, but nothing embodies revolution like the music of number one.
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back – Public Enemy
Public Enemy has the best song titles in the history of hip hop, nay, the history of modern music. Back in the days before Google and streaming platforms, the adventurous music lover would often have little to guide their decisions beyond the information presented on the album cover. If I happen upon a CD with titles like “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and “Terminator X to the Edge of Panic” in the used bin as a teenager, I’m walking out of the store $8 lighter. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back opens with an intro track called “Countdown to Armageddon”, intimating that armageddon starts with track two. That’s probably why the album sounds like the apocalypse in the inner city, with beats approximating the noise of sirens, helicopters and munitions exploding. The production team of Public Enemy is named the Bomb Squad, which is apt because the music they make has an unmistakably ballistic quality. Hip hop’s evolution was super-charged throughout the eighties and nineties, with a series of quantum leaps that impacted the entire culture. Run DMC created the first complete hip hop album in 1984, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane revolutionized the art of lyricism in ‘87 and ‘88 – every creative leap seemed to lead to a ripple effect that impacted the sound for years to come. The Bomb Squad’s production on this album was one of those quantum leaps, but it’s ripple was weirdly stunted. Dr. Dre’s G-Funk sound and RZA’s dirty minimalism spawned countless imitators, becoming the de facto modes of their respective coasts in the nineties, but no one was able to successfully copy the constant barrage of recursive samples, squealing horns and fingers-on-the-chalkboard scratches that made listening to Public Enemy feel like a panic attack inside a Long Island night club.*
Conventional wisdom has always dictated that you sequence an album with the best tunes up front, hiding away the filler cuts on the back half. PE doesn’t do conventional. There are two straight bangers in the first six tracks, “Bring the Noise” and “Don’t Believe the Hype”, but the rest of that opening stretch amounts to transitional interludes, including the one dull spot on the entire album which happens to be a four-minute showcase for Flava Flav. Flav is like horseradish butter or perhaps sautéed mushrooms, in that he compliments the well-seared ribeye that is late-80’s Chuck D surprisingly well, but you would never consider him a meal unto himself. Starting on track seven, “Louder than a Bomb”, the album charges forward unrelentingly like it has been fired from a bazooka and doesn’t let up until it has demolished everything in its path. “Rebel Without a Pause” is perhaps the standout track, a perfect encapsulation of the contained savagery of the group’s sound, but it is far from the only killer moment. How about the saxophone from “Security of the First World” which sounds like the world’s most sultry air raid siren? Or the opening line to “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” which is in the pantheon of great opening lines in all of music, despite the fact that it doesn’t even rhyme?** And then there’s the part in “Night of the Living Baseheads” where the beat cuts out and is replaced by a cacophony of samples (most prominently Run DMC), Chuck D starts his next verse and then the beat crashes back down like a hand grenade in your skull? It’s all just so brilliantly executed. Chuck D shines on this album and it would be hard to imagine another emcee weathering the storm of the Bomb Squad’s production without sounding somehow diminished. He isn’t on par with Rakim or KRS-One from a technical standpoint, but he commands the microphone like few others ever have. His combination of conviction and a natural authority in his deep baritone make his verses sound like proclamations not lyrics. Prophet of rage (again with those great titles) might as well be on his business card. And so you have the definitive emcee/hype man duo, an all-time great production effort, lyrics of substance, and a thematic cohesion across it all that combines to make a classic that remains as exceptional and unrelenting today as it did more than thirty years ago. Existential dread never sounded so funky.
* The album is so hard to replicate, in fact, that the group’s own Fear of a Black Planet fails to capture the magic just two years later. I know I’m in the minority as far as this opinion goes, but It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is a singular album for me.
** The line goes “I got a letter from the government the other day. I opened and read it, it said they were suckers.” Some of it is Chuck’s delivery. It’s up there with “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” in my mind.
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Operation: Mindcrime – Queensryche
Like Public Enemy and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Operation: Mindcrime is immediately recognizable as Queensryche’s greatest achievement. I’ve already ruminated on the nature of concept albums and rock operas while writing about the works of, naturally, Pink Floyd and The Who and Radiohead, and this is one that fits squarely into the rock opera camp. Let’s examine the story – The characters are few, four in all: Nikki, Mary, Dr. X and Father Williams. Nikki, a disillusioned young man, gets recruited into an underground terrorist organization as a hitman. The organization’s leader, Dr. X, keeps him occupied with work and clouded by heroin. He performs his job well, and after a while he falls in love with a teen prostitute named Mary. There is a priest (Williams) who has taken her in and may or may not be in love with her as well. His involvement with the organization is likely, but unclear. Before long, Dr. X orders Nikki to kill the priest and Mary, the former of which he does with no problem. The latter he struggles with. In this struggle is the heart of the tale. In the Hollywood film version, the two would go on the lamb, eventually repenting for their sins and ultimately killing Dr. X and destroying the terrorist group along with him. That possibility is hinted at here, but the reality is much more grim. The final act of this story involves Nikki wandering the city streets alone, one eye looking out for his former associates, but mainly cycling through anger, frustration, sadness and self-loathing brought on by the fact that Mary is dead. All the while, presumably, going through heroin withdrawal. He ends up in a mental institution, off of smack but still doped up on meds, where he remembers the whole thing clearly for the first time.
This being the band’s magnum opus, they have toured exclusively on the back of the album, playing it in full, and the accompanying videos that play in the background suggest a Manchurian Candidate-style science fiction brainwashing. You could sort of read that in the lyrics, but I find that it works much better if Dr. X and the Underground operate the way that real terrorist organizations do: Find someone who is inclined towards rebellion, sever their ties to the outside world, shackle them with ties to your world (drugs, sex, blackmail) and use them up until they are no longer viable. The narrative is a little vague, I may have made a few cognitive leaps in my description, but the broad strokes are very legible. “Suite Sister Mary”, the bombastic psycho-sexual drama between Nikki and Mary, is less a song than the middle act of a story, and the framing device of Nikki in the hospital is made clear in the opening and penultimate tracks (before closing with the show-stopping “Eyes of a Stranger”). Lyrically, Queensryche get to have their cake and eat it too. They spend a good portion of the album lambasting the ills of American society, and unchecked Capitalism in particular, but they also make it clear that violent Communist revolution is no solution. Operation: Mindcrime isn’t interested in solutions.
This is grimy, dark music with ugly lyrics. The band provides a brooding soundscape that suggests fog, rain-splattered cement and flickering street lamps. Yet, the soaring guitar work of Chris DeGarmo and Michael Wilton (especially Wilton) pierces the darkness like streaks of neon, and the rhythm section is aggressive and dynamic. Scott Rockenfield’s drumming sounds like some combination of tribal ritual and gang warfare. Geoff Tate is a divisive singer, amping up the operatic and musical theater stylings of Bruce Dickenson and Rob Halford, but he is undeniably a virtuoso. Imagine a James Hetfield or Phil Aneselmo trying to match the searing intensity of the guitar lines in “Speak to Me”… and then describe it to me because I can’t fathom most metal singers even attempting it. Operation: Mindcrime is what happens when a group of extremely talented individuals is fully bought into their vision. It is admittedly a strange vision, and one that would have come off as corny if that commitment wasn’t absolute. Running that risk is what leads to the greatest art, however, and this remains one of my most treasured albums of all time.
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Straight Outta Compton – N.W.A.
N.W.A. fully epitomizes the dual elements that defined gangsta rap in its golden era. They are scary, and they are fun. How old you were when Straight Outta Compton dropped probably dictates what side of that spectrum you fall on. Too young, or especially too old, and they were scary as hell. I was on the cusp of my tenth birthday in the summer of ‘88, and generally oblivious to the group’s existence. By the time I picked up my own copy of the album, however, I was fifteen years old, a.k.a. the perfect fucking age to be exposed to N.W.A.* I thought they were a blast, naturally, but also a little bit scary. Maybe scary is the wrong word, but they were definitely transgressive, and listening to the CD felt like a transgressive act to me, and of course that made them all the more fun. Honestly, that sugar rush of excitement still grips me every time I hear “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge”, because I know what is about to follow is so aggressive, so raw, so unapologetic that it’s going to get my adrenaline pumping no matter how many times I’ve heard it before. I remain in awe of how such nihilism can be presented in such a celebratory manner. The big knock against gangsta rap is that it glorifies violence and misogyny, and while that can be a hard argument to refute, I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate. Of course Ice Cube and MC Ren and the others would contend that they are just representing the reality of their existence at the time, but that is probably a bit disingenuous as well. What really seems to be going on is if the media at the time was going to paint black people as violent criminals who contribute nothing of value to society, and no amount of evidence was going to sway that portrayal, then at least N.W.A. was going to present themselves as the most violent, the best criminals, and the antithesis of contributing members of society. “Fuck respect” as Eazy E raps on “8 Ball”. I can’t pretend to place myself in the mindset of black youths, but hell, it resonated with me, a middle-class white teen from suburban Virginia.
Few hip hop producers land on a truly iconic, instantly recognizable sound. Dr. Dre did it twice. The laid back G-Funk grooves he introduced with 1992’s The Chronic were predated by his production on the N.W.A. and D.O.C. records. The beats are hard, funky and immediate. They are bare bones, almost utilitarian, but they grab you by your throat nonetheless. Not only does the production stand on its own, but it fully serves to showcase the rhymes, as Dre knows when to drop the beat to accentuate the emcees. As far as rap groups go, N.W.A. are terrifically well-balanced. Ice Cube, clearly the breakout star even in ‘88, is the Muhammed Ali of the crew. He balances high-wattage charisma with nimble wordplay and knockout impact. MC Ren is a viper, all steely intensity and coiled aggression. He knows how to modulate his flow, speeding up his rhymes midway through the verse to devastating effect, and kills every punchline. Eazy E isn’t intimidating like Ren, or a technical marvel like Ice Cube, but he is nothing if not authentic. Plus, if N.W.A. were a heel stable (which is what they were going for) they needed a prolific shit-talker who could mouth off to everybody regardless of size, and then hide behind his tougher partners to escape any form of comeuppance. E called himself “the villain”, and indeed the whole group seemed to revel in that designation. Every actor and pro wrestler knows it’s more fun to play the bad guy, and that’s the magic formula that allowed N.W.A. to become the most indefensible, yet inescapably enjoyable, act of their era.
* I bought the album at the mall, natch, and promptly blew out my friend’s car speakers listening to it on the way home. We were all metal kids, and while an act like Rage Against the Machine (a favorite of his, as I recall) is not a stranger to some low end, nothing had prepared us for the weaponized bass of Dr. Dre.
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Nothing’s Shocking – Jane’s Addiction
Do people care about Jane’s Addiction? I’m not trying to be flippant, it’s a legitimate question. Like, I know that everything has somebody that cares about it, and that the general populous will never care about Jane’s Addiction… the general populous doesn’t care about the Beatles, to be honest, and that is becoming more true as time goes on. I mean among people that are into music beyond listening to corporately curated playlists on streaming services and can recite artist’s discographies in order of release and like to debate things like who had the best guitar tone of the nineties or what is the best Wu Tang solo album.* Among people like me, in other words, does Jane’s Addiction register in any kind of way that sparks discussion? I ask this not because I expect an answer (this is, for the most part, an asynchronous conversation after all) but because I pay attention to people like me who talk about things that I talk about online, and I don’t hear Jane’s Addiction come up hardly ever. And one thing I’ve discovered after listening to Jane’s Addiction in earnest for the first time in my life while writing Found or Forgotten, is that maybe we should be talking about them. If I think about Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, for instance, that is an album that is beloved by some and well regarded by all, and it seems to get its fair share of the music conversation. Nothing’s Shocking is similar to Siamese Dream in a lot of ways – they both have a reverb-drenched guitar sound that adds punch to the grooves and provides neo-psychedelic codas for the handful of longer songs, they both have idiosyncratic yet invested vocalists who write lyrics that don’t traffic in typical rock platitudes, they are even mixed and engineered in a very similar fashion. The most stark difference is simply that Jane’s Addiction released their album five years earlier, when nothing sounded like this. Somehow, instead of elevating their work in our collective eyes for blazing the trail that a lot of 90’s rock would travel, it’s like we just sort of forget that they were around. Taken out of the context of the late 80’s, I think this is an excellent record. I love the Black Sabbath-meets-Chili Peppers grooves of “Mountain Song” and “Ocean Size”, the surprising use of horns and steel drums in “Idiots Rule” and “Jane Says” respectively, the overall dynamism of their entire sound. Taken within the context of the late 80’s, it may just be the best rock album of the era that isn’t Appetite for Destruction.
* It’s Jerry Cantrell and Liquid Swords, by the way.
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…And Justice for All – Metallica
The story behind Metallica’s fourth album has a massive impact on how it sounds, and probably how it’s perceived. I imagine most people who are reading this already know the history, but here is my simplified version just in case. After releasing the best heavy metal album of all time and enjoying the greatest success of their young career, Metallica lost their beloved bass player in a tragic bus accident. Cliff Burton was not just a part of the rhythm section, however, he was a massive contributor to the Metallica sound and, by all accounts, the soul of the band. Nevertheless, the remaining members quickly picked up the pieces, hired a bass player they didn’t particularly care for, and recorded an album with him while pretending he wasn’t there. Some of this is perhaps conjecture, but not really. The resulting album, …And Justice for All, is undeniably a Metallica album while also missing some unidentifiable component of the Metallica sound. Well, not unidentifiable, I guess, it’s the bass. Specifically Burton’s Geezer-Butler-on-quaaludes-and-speed sound, but more generally any kind of bass sound, because they buried Jason Newstead so far back in the mix he might as well have not showed up. These are the facts, and they are not deniable. What I’m not so sure about is the other impression I’ve always gotten from this album, and that relates to the “soul of the band” part. I have always considered Justice more clinical and more dispassionate than the band’s first three albums. It still comes across that way to me, but I don’t know if that’s just because I know the story so well at this point. What is indisputable, though, is that the quality of the songs is stellar. The things Metallica is great at, maybe best at, are all here in abundance: Precise and harmonious transitions, exquisite pacing, melodic hooks, impeccable sound fidelity. And it’s heavy, possibly their heaviest album in fact. It could conceivably be your favorite album of theirs, and I couldn’t really fault your opinion. I expect if it were divorced from the story behind it and divorced from the expectations of their flawless discography up to this point, I would consider it in the absolute upper echelon of heavy metal. In context, however, I have it just below that echelon, but none of that robs me of any enjoyment whenever I listen to “Blackened” or “Harvester of Sorrows” or “Dyer’s Eve”.
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Seventh Son of a Seventh Son – Iron Maiden
If Metallica was the best metal band of the 80’s, and I think that’s indisputable, then Iron Maiden was the clear second best. In fact, you could take the more controversial but still highly defensible position that they were the second best 80’s band overall, with all due respect to Talking Heads and the Police and Guns N’ Roses, et al. Starting with their debut in 1980, through multiple personnel changes, and finishing on this, their seventh (natch) studio album of the decade, Maiden maintained an incredible level of quality for such a prolific period of output. The music was also very much a product of its time, and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son wears its 80’s origins on its sleeve. “Moonchild” boasts a synthesizer intro that could well have been featured in an era-appropriate movie montage, possibly as a rag-tag group of slouches prepares for the big regatta race against the rich jerks from across town. The drumming, the guitar tone, Bruce Dickenson’s singing – all of these things point to a distinctly period-specific album that has more than a bit in common with Dio and the Scorpions and Ozzy’s solo work. Basically, everything in the hard rock/metal category pre-Metallica. The thing is, that is a valid sound. It can be great, and there are moments of greatness here, particularly the three-song stretch of “Can I Play with Madness”, “The Evil That Men Do”, and the title track. The floor is pretty high as well. It is ostensibly a concept album about man’s dual relationship with good and evil featuring heavy religious overtones, but that could pretty much describe every Iron Maiden album. I don’t find that the concept holds things together nearly as tightly as Operation Mindcrime, and the lyrics are largely best glossed over. It’s hard to overestimate how fun this album is, however, and that is probably the best distinction I can bestow upon Iron Maiden: They might be the most fun listen in metal history. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is definitely not a top three Maiden album, and it might not be top five, but the fact that I enjoy it so much points to the band’s incredible legacy of good music.
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Follow the Leader – Eric B and Rakim
The late eighties featured a slew of elite emcees who were utilizing lyrical tools heretofore unheard of in rap music. KRS-One, Kane, Chuck, Cube, Kool G Rap, LL Cool J… all special, but Rakim was the king. He was not the most substantive lyricist of that set, but none of his peers matched him in terms of precision, of nuance, of gravitas. Simply said, Rakim has a microphone presence that is unparalleled in his field. Subsequent rappers like Lupe Fiasco and J.I.D. would ultimately lap their forefathers in terms of wordplay and flow, but for all the artform has evolved over the years and decades, no one else has so quietly but firmly demanded your attention on the mic. Moreover, just twelve months removed from the iconic Paid in Full, Rakim took his best-in-class rhymes and leveled up for Follow the Leader, outpacing the competition yet again. Paid in Full is the better album, but there is little question that Rakim’s rapping was never better than it was in 1988. With his sights set on proving his supremacy in the rap game, Rakim performs some incendiary show and tell. He spends verse after verse on classics like “Microphone Fiend”, “Musical Massacre”, and “Lyrics of Fury” explaining how ill he is on the mic while simultaneously backing it up with rhyme skills that leave no doubt to the veracity of his claims. The R pulls out a litany of state-of-the-art techniques like complex internal rhyme schemes and (a favorite of his) sustained alliteration, and then pulls them out again and again, constructing an impenetrable fortress of dope verses to fend off his challengers. He is so single-minded that he actually sacrifices some of the thematic balance that the duo had employed previously. Eric B’s production is dark and ominous, with no trace of the party atmosphere that DJs came up cultivating and that brightened their prior release. Still, he serves his partner well, providing a backdrop that is equally as tough-minded as his all-pro front man. This album is so focused on its mission that there honestly isn’t that much to say about it. All you really need to know is that it goes hard, and stands to this day as an elite example of rhymecraft for the sake of itself.
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Lies – Guns N’ Roses
I have a complicated relationship with Lies, as I expect most GN’R fans do. There are elements of it that scream inessential, or demand to be criticized. It is a relatively short EP with a previously released fake live side and an acoustic side, the type of thing that a more prolific rock act would have tossed out to fill a brief gap between their serious-minded albums. It also has the group’s most problematic lyrics, which is a high bar to clear, frankly. The thing is, though, GN’R didn’t release a lot of music, especially for being the most popular band in the world at the turn of the decade, so that makes Lies hard to dismiss out of hand. They also rarely flashed these two sides of themselves – the raw, lean, pre-fame band that turned so many heads on the Sunset Strip, and the raw, lean, acoustic band with a pitch-black sense of humor. Those happen to be good looks on Guns N’ Roses, perhaps more so than what they became in the mid-90’s prior to their initial dissolution. Finally, this is a really good crop of songs, especially the one that is the hardest to swallow from a lyrical perspective. Axl never made it easy for his fans, that’s for sure.
Side one is a blast of glam rock fury, recorded in ‘86 and originally released as Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. I know now that these are studio recordings with phony crowd noise, but you can just picture a show like this in a sweaty L.A. club. After attending countless dour and brooding rock and metal performances in my life, I would kill to see a band this aggressive yet un-self-conscious enough to cover Rose Tattoo’s “Nice Boys”. The other cover presented here, “Mama Kin”, is cool in that it helps pull the thread from the Rolling Stones through Aerosmith right into GN’R, but it’s also just a really good song that fits into the band’s wheelhouse perfectly. The two original tracks, “Reckless Life” and “Move to the City”, stand up to the covers with no problem, and offer early entries into Axl’s favorite two themes. The musicianship on this side is unpolished even in relation to Appetite for Destruction, but it is full of energy and potential. Slash is showing some shredding here that feels slightly influenced by Eddie Van Halen, a trait that he would excise completely by the band’s official debut a year after these songs were recorded. Duff McKagan, my personal favorite gunner, is also a maniac on the bass guitar, keeping the pace crackling along with, or possibly in spite of, Steven Adler’s drumming.
Side two kicks off with the massive hit “Patience”, which you either love or hate depending on your opinion on power ballads and how much you dock GN’R for the style’s proliferation in this time period. I think it’s a great song, particularly the part after the bridge with Duff and Izzy Stradlin singing back-up vocals. Acoustic “You’re Crazy” is the definitive version of the song in my opinion, presented here in the form it was originally intended – a swaggering, menacing, Stonesy blues number. Duff’s bass positively slithers behind Axl’s worn-down vocals, and they make you forget that the song was originally offered as a throwaway piece of thrashy filler for Appetite. “Used to Love Her” is cheeky and dark, if a bit of a trifle. The lyrics to that one (“…but I had to kill her”) would be enough to spawn a social media backlash and a think piece in Vulture if it came out today, but they seem to be pretty tongue-in-cheek by my estimation. It’s album-closer “One In a Million” that remains perversely the album’s best track and it’s hardest to listen to. Rose found it somehow necessary to pack in some really ugly racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the first two verses. I’m not convinced that Axl was actually that person when he recorded this, but he is able to conjure the small-minded, ignorant kid from Lafayette, Indiana convincingly enough that I still flinch every time I hear the song. The sincerity he sings those horrific lyrics with is evident throughout the rest of the weary, ragged vocal, and injects a real beauty into the balladic later verses. It is compositionally excellent and the delicate picking from Slash and Izzy really sing, it’s just… those opening two minutes are really rough. Guns N’ Roses’ history is littered with controversy and self-inflicted wounds, and in that regard Lies might be their quintessential album.
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Skyscraper – David Lee Roth
I’ve never been a big Van Halen fan, or at least not relative to someone with my background and musical proclivities. I mean, I love “Panama” and “Ain’t Talkin’ About Love” of course, I’m not a monster, but I’ve never really thought that the group was particularly competent at stringing together entire projects. Sammy Hagar is an undeniable upgrade over David Lee Roth in terms of pure singing chops, and the Van Hagar albums are possibly better constructed (if infinitely more boring) than the Roth albums. Yet, when it comes right down to it, Skyscraper is my favorite album by anybody ever associated with Van Halen. Still, its impossible to talk about this album without applying the Van Halen lens to it. Steve Vai and Mark Bissonette are terrific musicians in their own right, of course, but at least on this album they are deployed very much in the mold of the Van Halen brothers. Check out the drumming on “The Bottom Line”: It’s clearly 90% inspired by Alex Van Halen on “Hot for Teacher”. In many ways, Skyscraper plays like a direct sequel to 1984, more so than Roth’s prior albums or any of the Van Hagar stuff. That record saw Van Halen heading down a poppier, more 80’s-style path that became the template for Roth’s solo career, while the band went further down the rabbit hole into over-produced synthesizer rock. The result is that Skyscraper holds up as a fun, summer rock record that checks all the boxes you would want for a breezy listen. It has great playing from Vai and company, loads of charisma from Diamond Dave (e.g. the reminiscent “Damn Good”), and a handful of incredible hooks (“Just Like Paradise”, “Perfect Timing”). Even the filler (“Hot Dog and a Shake”, “Stand Up”) is inoffensive and features a respectable level of craft. I can see how someone who considers Van Halen or Van Halen II a masterpiece would take exception to the commercial concessions offered here, but alas, I am unburdened by such opinions. I don’t have any illusions about the thematic merit of Skyscraper, or suggest that it pushes any boundaries, but it is pretty much all I want out of a David Lee Roth project, and I like it even more now that straight-forward rock with a solid backbone is so much harder to find than it was thirty years ago.
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Vivid – Living Colour
“Cult of Personality” is an undeniably iconic song. It’s right up there with “Walk This Way’ and “When Doves Cry” and, I don’t know, probably some bullshit Madonna put out as one of the most iconic songs of the entire decade. Deservedly so, because its a brilliant song. From Vernon Reid’s killer opening riff, to the verses that end like a chorus, to the chorus with its shifting lyrics (“When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies” becomes “When a leader speaks, that leader dies”), back to Reid’s shredding solo – everything works about this song. So much so, that it tends to dominate the conversation about Vivid and really Living Colour altogether. If the only thing Vivid had going for it was its lead single, however, then we’d be spending this time talking about Ice T or Lucinda Williams instead. To be fair, the album does coast for the next few tracks after its stellar opener, hitting us with well-performed but ultimately filler-ish songs that probably should have been sprinkled through the back half of the record. Things pick back up with “Open Letter (to a Landlord)”, though, and continue at a steady pace from there. Reid is the star of the show, with his unorthodox and aggressive playing keeping the average material interesting and truly elevating the material that was already great. Will Calhoun’s hammer-blow drumming is also a highlight, and even though he would ultimately be replaced by the superhuman Doug Wimbish, bassist Muzz Skillings has no trouble keeping up with the band’s potent mix of hard rock, funk and even prog elements. Corey Glover is perhaps not a particularly special singer, but he knows how to apply his craft for maximum effect. I tend to be skeptical of any front man whose most prominent qualifier is “son of”, but Danny’s kid is decidedly not outclassed by his highly skilled bandmates. During the era of “Nothin’ but a Good Time” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, it was refreshing to have a mainstream rock act spend more than a single cursory power ballad addressing the societal ills of the day, and especially coming from a fundamentally black perspective that is still widely under-represented in rock and roll. But while “Funny Vibe” and “Which Way to America” are overtly racial, that is not all that Living Colour are interested in. Did you know they cover a Talking Heads song on this album? Did you know that Mick Jagger sings backing vocals on “Glamour Boys”? Did you know that “Glamour Boys” is one of the most pure, unironic joys in the history of rock music? I just learned two of those things, and I’ve had this album so long that I owned it on cassette. All that to say that we’re all probably due to revisit it, especially if you are only familiar with that one big hit.
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Honorable Mentions
Hip Hop: Power – Ice T; By All Means Necessary – Boogie Down Productions; Long Live the Kane – Big Daddy Kane; Critical Beatdown – Ultramagnetic MCs; Tougher Than Leather – Run DMC; Strictly Business – EPMD
Metal: Keeper of the Seven Keys: Part II – Halloween
Rock: Lincoln – They Might Be Giants; Kingdom Come – Kingdom Come; Naked – Talking Heads; Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 – Traveling Wilburys
Other: Lucinda Williams – Lucinda Williams; Even Worse – Weird Al Yankovic; Zibuyinhlazane – Ladysmith Black Mambazo
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