The Greatest Albums of 1991

What does teen spirit smell like, exactly? Come explore the music of 1991 with me and maybe find out. (Probably not.)

Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1991.  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 un-turned, 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 #23 in the series.  My random number generator tells me that 1961 will be the next year to tackle!

Check out my previous entries here.

The Greatest Albums of 1991

1991 marks one of the bigger transitions in the history of rock music. The prevalent sound of the 80’s, at least from a commercial standpoint, was the cock rock (or hair metal, if you prefer) of bands like Motley Crue, Def Leppard and Poison. The sound has its roots back into the mid-70s with the rise of arena-ready acts like Journey and Cheap Trick, and while there were other pockets of evolution across that time frame (punk, new wave), the shape of FM radio and MTV was hammered into place by a leather gloved hand wielding a Fender Stratocaster. Growing up, it seemed inconceivable to me that terms like “guitar solo” or “power ballad” would largely disappear from the vernacular of popular music. After such a long period of dominance, however, the rock landscape was due for a shake-up, and Seattle, Washington was the source for that disruption. Just like Seattle native Jimi Hendrix blasted onto the scene in 1967 to upend the rock establishment, a trio of bands dropped albums in ’91 that seemed to counter the glossy sheen and deliberate lack of substance that characterized many of the popular acts of the time. Having lived through this time as a young teenager, I enjoyed both the incumbent sound and the new one (and I still do), but it was clear that battle lines had been drawn. Grunge music would pretty much finish off the viability of cock rock as a major commercial force, and while grunge didn’t enjoy nearly as long in the spotlight, it performed its job with finality. Acts that had just recently been on top of the world were transformed into laughingstocks almost overnight. “Fun but vapid” was no longer a winning formula in the rock world, and really hasn’t been ever since. Resquiesce in pace, sir Tommy Lee.

Hip hop was experiencing a similar upheaval, although the outcome ended up being two branches of the rapidly evolving artform, rather than the insurrection occurring in rock and roll. While pop-based acts like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were tearing up the charts, gangster rap had certainly been the coolest form of hip hop for several years. Dr. Dre would drop a record in 1992 that would ensure the continuation of gangster’s dominance throughout the 90’s, but a new approach had started to take hold in the form of a collective of like-minded NY artists, known as Native Tongues, who started to make noise around 1989. Much like any other aging fan of gangster rap, I now have to reckon with the moral dissonance brought on by the frequently horrific lyrical content of those records and their approach to violence, women and homosexuality. Native Tongues rap tripped over those same topics from time to time, but the overall vibe is much more palatable to a modern sensibility. Lucky for us, the two best rap albums of 1991 are towering masterpieces that show off the best that each of these sub-genres have to offer, and they are both guilt-free listens to this day.

Speaking of moral dissonance, rock music is hardly immune. Before reexamining it for this post, I would have assumed Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik was a surefire top ten album for me but, similar to Ice Cube’s Death Certificate, it is a previously beloved record that I can’t really stomach anymore. It’s funny, there’s not really any rhyme or reason for which problematic content I can shrug off and which makes me cringe, but I definitely know it when I hear it. Elsewhere in music, Public Enemy teamed up with Anthrax to re-record “Bring the Noise”, launching the complicated history of heavy metal and hip hop joining forces in the 90’s. That particular collaboration was a success, although I don’t think it necessarily improved upon the original track. I’m looking forward to going back and evaluating the often perplexing, occasionally brilliant, and frequently lousy marriage of those two genres in future posts. Prince had moved on from his genre-smashing, wildly brilliant run as the 80’s best musician and settled into what I call the “New Jack Prince” period, which is generally best forgotten. Other genres continued on their various courses (heavy metal – in a good place; country and jazz – not so much), but it is the two divides in rock and hip hop that define 1991 and dominate my top ten. Let’s take a look.

1. Nevermind – Nirvana

The first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, it sounded like a revolution. I now know, having delved deep into the music of the prior couple of years, that Nevermind‘s sound was presaged by acts like the Pixies and Jane’s Addiction (even more so than Nirvana’s own Bleach). In music though, we rarely award points for being first, but rather for being resonant, and there is no question, Nirvana’s breakthrough album resonated with my generation in a big way. Nevermind and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, released 15 months apart, were the last massive albums of the pre-internet era. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive that the internet, so good at connecting people across the world, would spell the end of monolithic pop culture. I suppose it makes sense in the context of people finding like-minded peers for even their most niche proclivities, so they don’t need to be subsumed into the prevailing pop culture to find connection. Make no mistake though, in the fall of ’91 and on into the following year, Nirvana was it. Everybody I knew owned this record, and Nirvana sat uneasily next to Guns N’ Roses as the one of the biggest acts in the world.

The reason Nevermind caught on was how refreshing it sounded in the context of popular music at the time. The reason it holds up is that literally every song is a killer. I defy you to find a weak track on here, and they all happen to be sequenced beautifully as well. Even subtle things, like ending “Lithium” on the line “I’m not gonna crack”, and then singing “Polly wants a cracker” to kick off the next tune, show that the band’s give-no-fucks attitude didn’t apply to crafting a great album. “Polly” is slow, restrained, almost quiet, then they come in on “Territorial Pissings” like they’re the Stooges circa Fun House, and it all works. Butch Vig’s production is crystal clear, without sacrificing any of the rawness of the music. It is one of the better-sounding albums I’ve ever heard. While the playing isn’t complex, it is just about perfect. While GN’R were indulging in every studio excess they could imagine, their rivals were creating the 90’s version of Appetite for Destruction. I’m sure neither band’s front man would appreciate that comparison, but they are both collections of great, loud, no-frills garage rock that launched their respective bands into the stratosphere of popular music.

Speaking of front men, Kurt Cobain is largely revered as Generation X’s John Lennon, an artist that Cobain himself saw as a personal hero. That’s apt, in that I tend to keep them both at arms distance because they seem like self-important assholes much of the time, but there is no denying the brilliance of either one as a musician. Cobain birthed Gen X in many ways, as his caustic mix of pessimism, apathy and sincerity became the default affectation for my generation. The lyrics on Nevermind are uniformly nihilistic, featuring such cheery stanzas as: “My mother died every night; It’s safe to say, don’t quote me on that” and “Monkey see, monkey do; I don’t know why I’d rather be dead than cool” and “I’m so ugly, but that’s okay ‘cause so are you.” In a tragic case of foreshadowing, the first three tracks each feature lyrics about guns. It could all come across as obnoxiously edgy, accept that you hear Cobain sing, and its clear that he believes every word, whether you understand the meaning or not. While the hooks are incredible, and the production is stellar, its really that genuine emotion that made Nevermind a phenomenon and makes it one of the most worthwhile listens even today, almost thirty years after it took over the world.

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1. O.G. Original Gangster – Ice-T

Ice-T is an unqualified American success story, having performed a precarious career shift towards exponentially more mainstream credibility and stability not once, but twice. First, from being a legit criminal on the streets of Los Angeles* to a having a celebrated rap career, and then from rapping to becoming a successful multimedia star, including a decade-plus stint on a primetime television show. For extra style points, he also released a string of heavy metal albums and convinced middle America he could play a beloved police officer ten years after the release of “Cop Killer” made him their number one enemy. Yet, purely as an emcee, I think Ice is criminally slept on. Original Gangster is his masterpiece, and in the discussion for greatest gangster rap album of all time.

Throughout all of that professional evolution, Ice T was evolving artistically as well. His fourth album came out right after emcees like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane had revolutionized what it meant to spit bars, and Ice leveled up his skillset to remain competitive. Despite his west coast affiliation, this really sounds like a NY rap record, with production that was clearly influenced by Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad. It is an album of epic scope, but it isn’t bloated (“M.V.P.s” comes close, but I still find it fascinating), and it is jam packed with ill verses and punchlines (my favorite: “I eat guardian angels”). Revisiting the album today, what stands out the most is Ice’s humanism. NWA’s brand of gangster rap is exemplified by the Ice Cube line “Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money”. Mobb Deep ratchets the nihilism up to the point that their viewpoint is simply “Life ain’t nothin’”, full stop. O.G. manages to be gangster without glorifying that type of lifestyle or suggesting that anyone should settle for it. Tracks like “New Jack Hustler” are anthropological studies, not merely gangster fairy tales.  Even the gangster fairy tales (“Midnight”) end with the crew shot up and cops at the door.  Ice takes time out to support the homosexual community, victims of child abuse and, uh, MC Hammer.  He’s also the funniest rapper, at least to me anyway. His dry delivery on “What About Sex?” and “Bitches 2” speak directly to my sense of humor. I don’t fully understand why Original Gangster doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as Straight Out of Compton or The Infamous Album when it comes to discussing this type of music, but it certainly deserves to be. I’ll take it over The Chronic all day.

* Pimping and bank robbing are two of the more commonly cited activities that Ice has been associated with, but trying to parse truth from reality when it comes to rap stars’ criminal backgrounds is a fools errand.

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1. The Low End Theory – A Tribe Called Quest

A Tribe Called Quest is undoubtedly in my top five hip hop acts of all time, but I find that I engage with them differently than most other rap music. Under most circumstances, my brain tends to compartmentalize individual rhymes or beats, and that is doubly true for the hip hop made around the time that Tribe was in their prime. I could talk through my favorite RZA hooks, Black Thought verses or Biggie Smalls punchlines for hours, but I experience The Low End Theory holistically, like it’s hard to parse out all of the specific elements. Maybe hard is the wrong adjective… it just doesn’t occur to my subconscious mind to do so. Instead, I tend to zone out on the vibe and the way that everything flows together so smoothly. Tribe is often referred to as jazzy, but that extends far beyond their beat selection: They produce art that actually approximates great jazz records. Sure, I could figure out my favorite Sonny Rollins solo if I really had to, but I tend to absorb Saxophone Colossus all together and don’t consider the individual ingredients that make it so engrossing. Q-Tip is certainly considered a hip hop icon, but I’m not sure he gets enough credit for the way these records were produced. His approach affords the group access to a wide range of emotional tones that weren’t really available to other rap artists at the time. Up until the emergence of Native Tongues (inclusive of De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers), rap had been either overtly aggressive, or decisively party-centric, and many acts wouldn’t co-mingle even those two aesthetics throughout their careers. Low End offers up a range of tunes that are melancholy, playful, mellow and dark. Yet, lest they be written off as incapable of performing hip hop as it had been laid out by their predecessors and peers, Tribe also gifts us the all-time posse cut, “Scenario”, featuring snapping braggadocio straight from a Queens street corner cipher, and gravel-voiced newcomer, Busta Rhymes, stealing the whole damn album out from under everybody on its final verse. With their second effort, the group took the approach they achieved success with on Peoples Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm and perfected it.

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1. Temple of the Dog – Temple of the Dog

At the risk of setting off the fire alarm with a scorching hot take, I believe that Pearl Jam is the band best suited to backing Chris Cornell. Obviously, he formed a lucrative and (mildly) artistically successful pairing with the Rage Against the Machine guys in Audioslave, and his long-standing membership in Soundgarden produced the highest volume of material as well as the best album he’s been associated with (1994’s stellar Superunkown). Yet it’s this album, cranked out in a mere fifteen days, that really taps into the soulfulness of Cornell’s voice. This is unmistakably grunge (potentially the first real grunge album, depending on how you classify Alice In Chains’ Facelift), but the music leans pretty far away from metal or punk influences, and stretches way out to let Cornell lay in on every track. “Reach Down” and “Four Walled World” exercise his ability to nail muscular rock histrionics with conviction, but check out the dirty blues of “Call Me a Dog” or the smooth near-R&B of “All Night Thing” for examples of his versatility. I don’t know that we ever heard him this unbridled again, which is a shame considering that he is easily his generation’s greatest rock singer. Eddie Vedder, a world-renowned and massively successful rock & roll front man, offers an easy point of comparison on “Hunger Strike”. That isn’t one of the better Cornell vocals on the album, but its almost comical how much he outclasses Vedder on the track. It’s not just about technique, though. He shares with Vedder (and Cobain, and Staley) an earnestness that injects the music with gravitas, particularly on this, a tribute to his roommate and Mother Love Bone singer, Andrew Wood, who had recently succumbed to a heroin overdose. That sincerity is what separates Cornell and his peers from someone like Sammy Hagar, by all rights a very good rock singer from technical perspective, and the defining reason why grunge was able to permanently stamp out the influence of 80’s cock rock once and for all.

I know this review has been all about Chris Cornell so far, and I do think it is one of the great rock vocals of all time, but I don’t want to ignore the work that Stone Gossard, Mike McReady, et al put in to the instrumentation. It’s true that Temple of the Dog was initiated as a tribute to Wood, but it covers a lot of ground thematically, and the band expertly keeps up with the various musical styles called for by individual tracks. There is a lot of dynamism from song to song, or even intra-song, as the they ratchet up the heaviness or lay back in the cut. Whether they are playing bright and clean, or trafficking in grunge’s signature swampy, crunchy tone, they never let the beautifully written melodies suffer. When scientists crack the code on alternate universes, one of the first things I’m interested in is the one where the band we know as Pearl Jam moved forward with Cornell instead of Vedder, and what kind of magic that produced.

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1. Ten – Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam and I parted ways shortly after the release of this album. Vs and Vitalogy are probably more revered by their fan-base, but I was never able to connect with them outside of a couple of tracks. Looking back, they are a clear #4 in terms of how I view the four pillars of Seattle grunge, yet there is something to be said for their longevity and willingness to follow their own muse. There was an inflection point shortly after the release of Ten where the band could have pivoted to focus on becoming the biggest rock act of the nineties, but their ethos of no-bullshit and no-compromise turned out to be more than just posturing, and I respect that. Despite my preference for the other three acts over the course of their careers, Pearl Jam was second only to Nirvana in my eyes at the end of 1991. Ten doesn’t feel as revolutionary as Nevermind, but it rivals that album as far as stacking up great rock tune after great rock tune. The two lead singles, “Alive” and “Even Flow”, remain as rousing and anthemic as they did before we realized what those lyrics were about. So does “Jeremy”, the story of a junior psychopath that became the band’s unlikely crossover hit, and I’m far enough removed from its constant airtime in the early 90’s to finally be able to enjoy it again. What makes Ten great, though, is the fact that the album cuts are just as strong as the singles. “Once” kicks things off with militant, driving percussion and lyrics that are fitting for an album populated by violent outcasts shaped by their environments (“I got a bomb in my temple that is gonna explode; I got a 16-gauge hidden under my clothes”). “Porch” takes us on a journey from an up-tempo rave up to a haunting instrumental section that’s both melodic and foreboding, then back again in a tight three and a half minute package.  Eddie Vedder’s singing style may be the unfortunate progenitor of the Chad Kroegers and Scott Stapps of the world, but it was completely novel at the time, and could be manipulated to display a surprising array of emotions, from the vulnerability of “Black” to the menace of “Why Go”. Ultimately, what lands the album in the top half of my list is that it is so musically and tonally cohesive, without constraining its highly skilled musicians from crafting distinct, and excellent, individual songs.

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1. Badmotorfinger – Soundgarden

The best way I can think to approach Badmotorfinger is by comparing it to other albums in the top ten. It is Chris Cornell’s second entry on the list, and while I prefer his vocal on Temple of the Dog, he shows off a different skillset on this album. Heavier, more intense and less soulful, his performance perfectly matches the character of the music. Kim Thayil and company always find atypical sounds for a hard rock band, and this album is no exception. While it undeniably shares DNA with Nevermind and Ten, it also remarkably has a kinship with Metallica and the Use Your Illusion records. For example, “Face Pollution”, with its unconventional time signature shifts, could be a Metallica track and “Drawing Flies” wouldn’t sound at all out of place on a Guns and Roses album. I don’t suppose there is any connection to Original Gansgter, but Soundgarden did cover “Cop Killer” at Lallapalooza, so that’s something. Back to the vocals (I know, I’m sorry, but this is likely the last time I’ll get to discuss Cornell in one of these posts). Grunge music, particularly Soundgarden, traffics in many of the same dark themes as metal, but where a vocalist like Hetfield sings as an observer or a critic, Cornell sounds intimately familiar with that darkness. He channels it into powerful, gnarly, nearly superhuman belting, as if he’s unable to contain it anymore. Unfortunately, the genuine darkness that is vital to grunge’s effectiveness has turned out to have tragic implications, with three of the big four faces of the scene dead by suicide or overdose. I hate that so much great art seems to require it’s creators to be seriously troubled, extracting a pound of flesh for the price of its own existence, so to speak, but it helps when the legacy of those troubled souls remains so powerfully moving.

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1. Use Your Illusion, I & II – Guns N’ Roses

It’s hard to overstate how big Guns N’ Roses was in 1991. Despite having released only one LP and one EP to date, anticipation for the band’s full-length follow-up to Appetite for Destruction was massive. Even after the rise of the Seattle scene made 80’s hard rock passe, GN’R was still the biggest band in the world, and they shared the world stage with aggressively anti-rock-star rock stars like Nirvana, occasionally creating sparks (see: 1992 MTV Music Video Awards). When you are the most popular act walking the face of the Earth, its hard not to have an ego, and one expects that Axl Rose didn’t need much help in that department. Ego leads to thinking every idea you have is a good one, and unbridled success leads to no one checking that ego when you decide to pull an album together. No on in their right mind could suggest that the Use Your Illusion albums wouldn’t have benefited from a little editing. It’s a double album so stuffed to the gills that each cd tested the storage limit of the medium. Yet, while I will never understand why we needed a second dreary version of “Don’t Cry”, or how all of Axl’s bizarre ad-libs made onto the record (“cool ranch dressing!” indeed), I enjoy elements of nearly every song. You could take the intro to “Right Next Door to Hell”, riffs from “Back off Bitch”, bridge of “Perfect Crime” and the outro from “November Rain” to create an all-time classic, but I don’t mind having them spread out across a whole album. And occasionally the unbridled id of the band would produce something deliriously perfect, like “Double Talkin’ Jive”. Their ambition also led to a handful of long, complex odysseys with a lot of changes, and they do a great job on epics like “Estranged”, “Coma”, and “Locomotive”.

It’s certainly possible that my love for this music is rooted in nostalgia, at least to some extent. This was the soundtrack to my early teens, and I couldn’t even estimate the number of times I’ve played Use Your Illusion II. So many memories are attached to it. It’s one of the more vulgar rock albums of all time, and that created quite a buzz in the Tipper Gore, parental advisory era. I recall making copies for a friend that had hers confiscated by her father once he caught wind of the lyrical content, and my mom must have picked up the clue somewhere because she asked to see the liner notes one night. I had to make a hasty decision between volume two, which has the absurdly obscene “Get in the Ring”, and volume one which features the choice couplet “I called my mother, she’s just a cunt now”, none of which accounted for the random images of topless cyborgs and shit that graced both volumes. I went for the less conspicuous filth of volume one, in case you’re wondering, and whatever she ended up reading, it didn’t result in restricted listening in any case. Regardless of my personal attachment to the band, I feel like they have been unfairly relegated to the hair metal dustbin by subsequent generations. They really have more in common with the Rolling Stones than Bon Jovi, however, and Use Your Illusion offers up a lot of evidence for that. Slash is uniformly excellent across even the filler tracks, and rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin is the album’s secret MVP. The songs he contributes provide some grounded, gritty blues to balance out the Elton John influenced excess of Axl’s tracks.

Anyway, these albums deserve a full listen at least once in your life, but if you want to know how I pared it down into a bluesy, heavy-ass Stones pastiche, here you go:

Track 1 – Pretty Tied up;  2 – Dust N’ Bones;  3 – Don’t Damn Me;  4 – Locomotive; 5 – You Ain’t the First;  6 – 14 Years;  7 – Estranged;  8 – You Could Be Mine;  9 – Double Talkin’ Jive;  10 – So Fine;  11 – Shotgun Blues;  12 – Breakdown

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1. Metallica – Metallica

Ah, the infamous “Black Album”. As many metal fans would be happy to tell you, this is the album where Metallica sold their souls, gave up their integrity, and crafted an album with the express purpose of (gasp!) selling records. Despite the fact that it was my entry point into the band (expressly due to those same reasons, most likely), I have bought into this narrative to some extent over the years. I was surprised to find that I didn’t even have the album in my music collection anymore when I went to go listen to it. I’ll offer this as a counterpoint, though: The black album is far less of a drop off in quality from And Justice for All than that album was from its predecessor, and it isn’t just because Master of Puppets is the pinnacle of the entire heavy metal genre. Justice reads as a more mechanical, less inspired version of the formula that they perfected on their prior two albums. With Metallica, they attempt something entirely different, and I appreciate the band taking a new approach when they started seeing diminishing returns from the thing that made them legends. Yes, the songs on the album are far less complex and not nearly as heavy as something like “Disposable Heroes” or “Harvest of Sorrow”. That doesn’t make them bad, necessarily, and in fact, many are straight up bangers. “Sad but True”, “Wherever I May Roam”, “Don’t Tread on Me” – all great, with good hooks, and easily digestible. They wouldn’t sound as good if they were stretched out to the standard nine-minute run time, so Metallica makes the wise choice not to do that. I haven’t done the research, but I would be shocked if “Enter Sandman” and “The Unforgiven” weren’t their two biggest singles of all time. There is something to be said about a thrash metal band creating something so universal that it’s been played at countless sporting events around the country over the past thirty years. By shifting to, essentially, hard rock, they finally figured out how to move forward without bassist Cliff Burton, and the bottom end on this album sounds fantastic after they basically mixed Jason Newsted into oblivion on Justice. James Hetfield’s growl has gotten more robust and technically accomplished, making it capable of becoming more of the focal point that it must in this incarnation of the band. To be fair, there is no redeeming “Nothing Else Matters”, and I will listen to the album an order of magnitude less than Master of Puppets, but I am happy to have it back in the rotation with a fresh perspective on it. And everyone knows Load is when Metallica actually sold out anyway.

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1. Screamadelica – Primal Scream

How’s this for a stacked week of music releases? From 9/17/91 to 9/24/91, half of my top ten albums of the year dropped:  Nevermind, Use Your Illusion, Badmotorfinger, The Low End Theory, and Screamadelica. If you’re like me, that last entry onto the list will be less familiar to you than the others (or not familiar at all). If that’s the case, then this is going to sound weird. Screamadelica starts off with a hazy riff on the Rolling Stones (“Movin’ on Up”) before left-turning into a couple of tracks that have more to do with acid house than rock and roll. From there it bounces around in between, frequently settling on something that sounds similar to The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Stoned and Dethroned crossed with Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating Through Space (both released later in the decade, mind you). I am not well-versed in techno or electronic music, and don’t have the vocabulary to discuss it coherently. I’m also not sure if this is good house music or lousy house music, because I don’t have more than tangential experience with it. I will say, if I had heard “Slip Inside This House” and “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” before I heard the opening track, I wouldn’t have continued listening to the album. Again, not because its bad, but because that’s just not for me. Yet, in context and surrounded by the rest of the material that I have a better frame of reference for, the clash of musical styles works. Especially listening to it among all of the super-serious hip hop and super-super-serious grunge of 1991, Screamadelica is lively and refreshing and fun. It’s not really pop-adjacent, it’s way too weird and drugged out for that, but it does want to make you dance, or at least grin and nod your head appreciatively. Increasingly, I find I have room for music like that.

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1. Step Into the Arena – Gang Starr

This was the era of great east coast emcee and DJ duos pumping out hard, lean, no frills hip hop. Some rappin’ ass rap, so to speak, not watered down by R&B or pop influences. Eric B and Rakim, Kool G Rap and DJ Polo, and Guru and DJ Premier (known as Gang Starr) are preeminent examples of this approach. It’s the kind of hip hop that’s for real hip hop heads, with perhaps limited appeal to a casual audience. To me, its like mana from heaven. Growing up white middle class in Richmond, Virginia doesn’t exactly make it easy to relate to the trials of inner city life as described on Step into the Arena, so it’s up to the beats and rhymes to stand on their own. They do. Premier crafts hard tracks from break beats and piano loops, horn squeals, and strategic record scratching. This isn’t about taking a hook from a popular funk or disco tune and building a hit around it, it’s real song-craft. Guru has the same quality as Eric Sermon of EPMD, and even Kool G Rap to some extent, where his vocal dexterity is just slightly deficient, which serves to really punctuate the complexity of his rhyme schemes. There is a downside to flowing too pretty, in other words, in that it actually detracts from the power of the lyrics. If you caught up with Netflix’s hip hop reality competition, Rhythm and Flow*, you saw successful artists like Big Boi and Snoop Dogg  dress down emcees who spit a flurry of intricate rhymes so fast that the audience couldn’t understand what the hell they were saying. If your writing is good, you need to let it breathe a bit, and Guru’s style lets the listener in on how skilled he is in crafting his lines. There is a great hip hop tradition of emcees extolling their lyrical prowess in their songs, and Guru is no exception (see the title track for example). He’s also about more than that, however, and produces thoughtful examinations of his community and spins tales that highlight its various facets. The idea of being “real” is played out in hip hop, but this is a prime example of what that’s supposed to mean.

* I have mixed feelings about Rhythm and Flow. I enjoyed it well enough, and respect the artists involved, but I get the same feeling as I used to get watching those old VH1 Hip Hop Honors ceremonies. It’s like, “Congratulations, hip hop, you’re fully mainstream! Enjoy the crushing mediocrity that will now be demanded of you.”

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Honorable Mentions

Metal:  1916 – Motorhead; Arise – Sepultura; Night of the Stormrider – Iced Earth; Wretch – Kyuss; Industrial – Pitchshifter

Hip Hop:  Cypress Hill – Cypress Hill; De La Soul is Dead – De La Soul; All Souled Out – Pete Rock & CL Smooth; Organized Konfusion – Organized Konfusion

Jazz/Funk: Amen – Salif Keita; New York Reunion – McCoy Tyner; Another Hand – David Sanborn

Rock:  Blood Sugar Sex Magik – Red Hot Chili Peppers; For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge – Van Halen; Slave to the Grind – Skid Row

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