Covering the music from the era that I grew up in always hits a little different. Join me as I walk back through the music from the year I turned fourteen.
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 #31 in the series. My random number generator says that our next year to tackle will be 1970.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1992
If 1991 was the year of grunge, then 1992 was the year of heavy metal. No less than half of my top ten are metal albums, and the grunge album at the top of the list is the most metal-leaning that the genre ever got. Instead of the thrash that dominated the 80’s metal scene and remains peppered throughout my honorable mentions, the most impactful metal albums of the year were groove metal, alternative metal, and even rap metal (before that term got a bad reputation.) This is the music of my high school years, and so it packs a particular nostalgic punch for me. It is my own personal “Golden Age of Metal”, so to speak, much like a generation north of me would likely point to the aforementioned 80’s thrash era and the directly younger generation might conceivably consider late 90’s nu metal as the pinnacle of heavy music. That rose-tinted perspective doesn’t really extend to other types of music, though, at least for ’92. Hip Hop had a down year, with a handful of solid, workmanlike records punctuated by the massive cultural phenomenon that was The Chronic. The next couple of years would usher in Wu Tang, Nas and Biggie, followed by Mobb Deep, Jay Z, The Roots and Outkast, not to mention the first wave of Wu solo material. That is my personal “Golden Age of Hip Hop”, but we haven’t quite reached it yet in the year that I’m covering today. I’m not sure that 1992 stands out as a particularly exceptional year for music in aggregate, but it is one that I had a blast exploring. Any excuse to throw on one of the albums in my top 10 is a good excuse, so let’s dive in and see what made the cut.
Dirt – Alice in Chains
In theory, Lane Staley should have been happy in 1992. Alice in Chains’ debut album, Facelift, had been a success, and the band was riding the wave that positioned Seattle-based grunge as the hottest movement in music in nearly a decade. He was in the grip of a catastrophic heroin addiction at the time, however, and he found himself unequal to the task of shaking it off. It is as if he was staring down his own imminent death, and despite full clarity, could find no way to avoid it. That is the plight that is documented on Dirt, the heaviest, darkest, most auto-biographical entry into a genre that values those qualities above all else. At this point heroin had claimed the lives of countless musicians, but it still had an aura of chic, especially to artists who emulated the geniuses who coincidentally made brilliant music while hooked on the drug. Dirt is brilliant music, but it is not chic. It does not romanticize anything, least of all drug use, and it presents a uniquely unflinching glimpse into the mind of an addict who is barreling towards a tragic early demise.
The album starts like a slap in the face, with Staley’s pained howl followed by the aggressive, engine rev riff that propels “Them Bones”. It is a song that sets the tone, both for how heavy and ominous it sounds, but also for lyrics that evoke death, decay, and specifically burial imagery. The theme of an early grave is omnipresent on Dirt, in the lyrics, in the title, in the album art, in the way that Staley’s cracked voice sounds like he is breathing dust and dead air. At one point he sings that he’s eaten the sun, and that’s about how he sounds. Yet, it’s a stunning vocal performance. Lane rivals Chris Cornell in terms of raw power and emotion, and he was never better than he was here. Despite all the darkness and nods towards inevitable tragedy, I wouldn’t categorize the album as nihilistic. It’s almost the opposite, in fact. It’s desperate. Staley may not allow himself to believe that there is a way out of his current predicament, but he is passionately opposed to said predicament nonetheless. Parallel to all the sooty, earthbound lyricism is a lot of flying imagery, suggesting that the singer yearns to break free of the shackles of his addiction. Only, as he sings on the haunting power ballad, “Down in a Hole”, his wings have been so denied.
When I look back on the heavy metal from this era (which, as I’ve established, I cherish), the one thing that falls flat for me is typically the lyrics. It’s so blustery, and puerile, and un-specifically anti-authoritarian that it makes sense that it appealed to teenagers at the time, but I have a hard time taking it seriously as an adult. The lyrics of Dirt, which I tend to consider metal just as much as grunge, are the polar opposite. They are deeply confessional, and while they employ poetic stanzas and heavy use of metaphor, I consider them highly specific. I’m not calling Staley and Cantrell the same as Lennon and McCartney, necessarily, but they are much closer to that than they are to Phil Anselmo or Zach De La Rocha. Speaking of Cantrell, he shines on the album, contributing dynamic and complex guitar lines and vocal harmonies in equal measure. The rhythm section holds up their end of the bargain, particularly Mike Starr’s supple bass work that elevates tracks like “Would” and “Rain When I Die”. Given the circumstances of Staley’s decline following this record, culminating with his death by overdose in 2002, it is easy to view Dirt as almost unbearably morose. Yet that realness, that rage, that sense of a star going supernova before it finally snuffs out completely has made it one of my favorite albums of the past thirty years, and it has only gotten better with age.
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Vulgar Display of Power – Pantera
If ever there was an album cover that represented the music contained within, it’s this one: Pantera sets out to punch you in the face repeatedly across each of these eleven tracks. The prominent metal of the 80’s balanced its focus across three variables: Speed, technical proficiency, and brutality. Pantera is plenty fast, and plenty proficient, but it’s the brutality of their playing that seems to be the real driving force behind their sound. The first words that get repeated on the album are “bones in traction”, after all. They also happen to have a love song of sorts, but in it the word “love” is paired with “fist”, “scar” and “break”, respectively. The band’s playing is muscular and aggressive, completing the aesthetic laid out by the rest of their presentation. Yet, it isn’t as if Pantera abandoned the sounds of their predecessors in search of their own voice. Rather, they reconfigured them to create not just the best metal album of the 90’s, but its most definitive as well.
Pantera’s evolution from performing corny hair metal with stage names like Rexx Rocker and Diamond Darrell to becoming groove metal’s foremost act occurred over several years, and they were very deliberate about how they crafted the sound that was perfected on Vulgar. The openings of “Fucking Hostile” and “Rise” recall the punk-adjacent thrashing of 80’s Anthrax, for example. The pre-chorus of “By Demons Be Driven” is very obviously an homage to Judas Priest’s “Breakin’ the Law”. Even Phil’s singing is calculated. The ratio of shouting to talking to singing feels analogous to James Hetfield, but while I think that is simply the extent of what Hetfield is capable of vocally, Anselmo has employed various styles in previous recordings, some of them more musical than what he settled on here. He is purposely trying to sound badass, in other words, and he’s doing a good job at it. The real trick to their sound, however, is shifting their tempo down a couple of notches and focusing more on groove than on transitions. It’s the Black Sabbath model, more or less, just updated to include the prior twenty years of advancement in thrashing (thrashvancement?) It ends up making them sound completely novel in the landscape of the early 90’s, and their approach (with bands such as Machine Head and Biohazard) is the direct bridge to acts like Gojira and Mastadon.*
Musically, this album is a showcase for the devastating** rhythm section of Rex and Vinnie Paul, and they get us from one crushing groove to the next with efficiency and aplomb. More so, though, it’s a showcase for the eternally underrated Dimebag Darrell. True to the band’s ethos, he’s not about playing all the notes he can squeeze into a riff or a solo, but rather making the ones he does play count. I’ve always been surprised by the lack of mythmaking around Darrell, given his prominence in the metal scene of the time, his all-around talent, and of course his tragic murder on stage in 2004. Don’t get me wrong, he’s hardly treated like a footnote, but compared to, say, the tragic cases of Cliff Burton or Lane Staley, it doesn’t seem like he’s given his due. From a lyrical standpoint, Vulgar Display of Power almost reads like a violent self-help seminar. It is very much about overcoming obstacles and perseverance and unity, and while the lyrics are not bad in a relative way to the genre***, they border on platitudes at times. Regardless, they are sung with enough conviction that you are liable to ignore the generic nature of the ideas and even find yourself pumping your fist from time to time. Look, I’m just analyzing because that’s what I do here, but when you are listening to prime Pantera, the analytical part of your brain shuts down to make way for the rush of adrenaline that they incite. Metal has evolved in many ways over the past thirty years, but it has never punched you in the mug more powerfully than Vulgar Display of Power.
* I feel like I’m way out on a limb here, by the way. I don’t do a lot of research on music history for these posts because that feels like regurgitating information that already exists, and I want to make my own connections throughout the project. I’m generally not one to question my musical opinions, but given the expertise and passion in the metal community (and even specifically in my peer group) I’m cringing a bit at the potential for coming off as ignorant with my comparisons. Oh well, unscarred by trials and all that.
** I spent some time googling implements of destruction to describe the rhythm section but quickly realized that all the cool-sounding power tools and heavy machinery have already been used to name other metal acts. Shout out to Nailgun and Demolition Hammer, I guess.
*** Ok, let’s be honest, “I crush your rush; I rule, you fool!” is bad relative to any genre.
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Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine
If Pantera brought groove back to heavy metal, Rage injected straight-up funk into the genre. Critics at the time fixated on the hip hop influence, and this might be the first album tagged with the “rap-metal” designation, but that emphasis seems to be purely focused on Zach de la Rocha’s vocal approach. Musically, Rage Against the Machine plays more like a metal version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or even Tower of Power. A lot of metal wants to bowl you over with a deluge of sound, but Rage is much nimbler. I think it comes down to the guitar, which is far sparser and more percussive on this album when compared to the prominent place that the instrument holds in the vast majority of metal. It’s even a little odd to me that Tom Morello is treated as Rage’s co-front man, given how much space he cedes to Timmy C.’s bass work here. I suppose that’s due to his style, which is remarkably unconventional. If you listen to the solo on “Killing in the Name“, it sounds like a dial-up modem mixed with a circular saw – he just did things differently than the army of Dave Mustaine and Randy Rhoads disciples out there at the time. In general, each instrument is given a ton of space to stand out on its own, and the production team does a killer job keeping things crisp so that no drum fill or guitar screech gets lost in the shuffle. The album opens with a bassline that sounds like the synth soundtrack to a high-tension heist scene, which then crashes into a wave of crunchy guitar before settling into a funky, mid-tempo groove that puts the spotlight on lyrics about stooping down and handing out beatdowns. I don’t remember specifically hearing it for the first time, but I do remember how it made me feel, and it still makes me feel that way today. For that reason, I consider it one of the most effective introductions to a band’s catalogue of all time. The album proceeds from there with formidable grooves, piercing splashes of guitar, and Zach de la Rocha screaming and, yes, sort of rapping about the various injustices of the world. The thematic thrust of Rage Against the Machine (band and album) is that the people in power always exploit those who are not in power, and we should disassemble the mechanisms that allow them to retain that power, violently if necessary (and possibly preferably). They are not nuanced lyrics, but they are plenty earnest. De la Rocha doesn’t come off as a pretender making calculated decisions to appeal to teens, regardless of how clearly his approach would obviously appeal to teens.* To be honest, screaming “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” into the shower head has a pretty strong appeal even into your forties.
* The appeal to teens is possibly specific to my generation. As a Gen X’er, I have gone from being exhausted by my peers’ all-consuming cynicism, to bemoaning the lack of cynicism exhibited by younger generations. In a conversation for a much different blog, I would be interested in exploring the ways that they are clearly shaping the world in their image, and how much or little that has a material impact on the power systems that Rage was warning us about.
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Check Your Head – Beastie Boys
Beastie Boys’ evolution across their first three albums is astonishing. They moved from the minimalistic, hard-hitting production of Rick Rubin on License to Ill to the funky, kaleidoscopic production of the Dust Brothers on Paul’s Boutique, both of which took advantage of nascent sample-clearing policies that pretty much allowed artists to pull from any source they wanted with impunity. Then, for Check Your Head, they kept the sprawling and omnivorous approach that the Dust Brothers employed but turned to live instrumentation and new studio effects to bring it to life. They also tossed off their delinquent, party animal personas for a more uplifting and true-to-life representation of who they were as artists. It’s quite the arc, and despite their dissimilarity, those first three albums remain the group’s finest achievement. Individually, the fellas were never elite lyricists for any era they touched on. Collectively, however, they are the epitome of adding up to more than the sum of their parts. The way that they dip in and out of each other’s verses is one of my favorite techniques in all of hip hop, and I love how their personalities and styles play off of each other. Ad-Rock and Mike D are like flip sides of the same coin, with very similar voices and points of view, just with one going over the top and spazzing out with his delivery and the other acting more aloof, providing a flat affect and more measured bars. MCA adds the gruff-voiced guru into the mix, and I struggle to think of a more iconic trio in rap history. The ability to find cohesion across different styles doesn’t apply to only their lyrics, however. Check Your Head is incredibly ambitious in terms of tackling different genres, be they funk or psychedelia or punk or hip hop, not necessarily in that order. Look at this mid-album stretch, as an example: “So What’cha Want” is the album’s second single overall, and second to feature heavily distorted vocals over a fuzzy boom bap beat. That flows into a track that pits mumble-mouth hip hop royalty, Biz Markie, against aggressively Republican guitar shredder, Ted Nugent. Next, a cover of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Time for Livin’” calls for a heavy dose of the soul and funk treatment found on other parts of the album but is instead performed as a cross between punk and metal. It’s unorthodox, but the dramatic aesthetic-shift actually serves to highlight the underlying sturdiness of Stone’s composition. Then we transition into “Something’s Got to Give”, a jam that sounds like “Planet Caravan” mixed with something off of the second side of the Trouble Man soundtrack. What’s most absurd about those four tracks (and the remaining 15 which offer similar boundary-blurring expanse) is that it all flows together immaculately. To put a finer point on the degree of difficulty here, the Boys’ follow-up album, Ill Communication, attempts the same trick but fails to stick the landing, despite containing a handful of individual tracks that trump anything off Check Your Head. Even the Beasties couldn’t successfully follow their own blueprint a second time. It is probably a super minority opinion that this is the greatest hip hop record of 1992, what with one of the genre’s most enduringly popular touchstones yet to come on the list, but it’s that album-long cohesiveness that leads me to judge this effort so favorably and keep the album in my rotation all these years later.
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Angel Dust – Faith No More
Angel Dust is not the most influential metal album to be released in 1992, but it may be the most creative. Mike Patton, probably most famous for his work with Faith No More, is less of a metal purist and more of an omnivorous mad scientist. His stints with Mr. Bungle, Peeping Tom, Lovage (and many more) sprawl across rock, jazz, punk, trip hop and lounge. That restless spirit is evident on Angel Dust more than any other Faith No More album. If Pantera, Rage and Tool were pushing the genre into a new frontier, FNM were beaming in from another dimension (and let’s not forget, they had already tackled rap-metal on The Real Thing, three years before Rage Against the Machine). Let’s examine “Midlife Crisis”, the album’s centerpiece and what would probably be the group’s most enduring single if it weren’t for that damn fish flopping around in the “Epic” video. Within the first 30 seconds, it is a weird song. It launches with an oddly syncopated drum pattern made up of live and programmed drumming, followed by a seemingly random horn squeak and moody synthesizers before Patten drops in with some breathy talk-singing directly on top of the beat. The chorus transitions us into a more traditionally rock-oriented hook, but later in the track the group has a bizarre hip hop breakdown that samples the Beastie Boys’ “Car Thief”. It is highly unconventional for the album’s lead single, and that approach is mirrored all over the album. “Malpractice” starts out exceedingly heavy, with multiple time signature shifts, transitions to a placid xylophone interlude set over top a throbbing beat, and immediately switches to a section that predicts what Rick Rubin would be doing with System of a Down a decade later. Then, “Kindergarten” plays it relatively straight, stylistically, but when you pay attention to Mike Patton’s lyrics, he is convincingly exploring the existential angst of a six-year-old. It’s all over the place, but the band does an amazing job of making all this off-the-wall stuff into a proper album where individual songs benefit from the ones surrounding them. There is a unifying gothic quality to their sound, with lots of piano and organ, as well as consistently deployed elements like middle eastern flourishes and electro-funk snippets. That’s the dichotomy you get from Faith No More, at least on their best day. You can marvel at the bizarreness of the spoken self-help mantras on “Land of Sunshine”, the grotesque character study of “RV”, or the prep school cheerleading squad featured on “Be Aggressive”, but those choices do not detract from the sturdy bone structure of the songs. Then, when they play it relatively straight with something like “Everything’s Ruined”, they are savvy enough to make it some of their best material so that it doesn’t feel flat in comparison. I don’t think Faith No More, in general, gets the love that they deserve for refusing to settle into formula, both in their lyrics and in their song structures. That goes double for Angel Dust, the strangest yet most completely successful album in their catalogue.
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The Chronic – Dr. Dre
I’m not sure there has been an album as culturally important as The Chronic since it came out. I don’t mean in terms of sales – Shania Twain outsold Nirvana, but we know which one had the bigger impact crater – but in terms of being inescapable at the time it was released and remaining a touchstone for popular American music so many years later. In the early 90’s, you simply could not avoid this album. There were the MTV videos, of course, with their low budgets and iconic moments. If you are near my age, you can probably immediately recall that girl walking into the party and getting sprayed by forties, or my dude flipping the table during a contentious game of dominoes, or, oh man, that little kid dancing to “Nothin’ but a G Thang” and freezing at the perfect spot after “it’s like that and like this and like that, and uh, it’s like this…”. It was a pivotal moment of self-discovery when I realized that I could never hope to be as cool as that four-year-old. There was a prominent HBO documentary around that time focused on gangs (gangs were HUGE in the 90’s), and The Chronic might was well have been the official soundtrack. Most importantly, at least as a teenager, it was just in the ether. Everybody was listening to it, seemingly, and I would bet that it is one of the biggest “my first rap album” albums in the history of the artform. I’ll get to why I think it has such an impact in a second, but let’s first acknowledge how crazy it is that such an album was able to break through in the way it did. A decade prior, most Americans had never heard the term “hip hop” and wouldn’t be able to explain what “rap music” was. Then, in ’92, you have this unapologetically gangster rap album blowing up with literally zero concessions to mainstream audiences. All of a sudden, the phrase “Deeeeeez Nutz!” is a prominent part of the fabric of our collective consciousness. It’s wild to think about.
So why The Chronic and not something by Big Daddy Kane, or Gang Starr, or Ice T? The easy answer is Dr. Dre’s genius for beat making. With this album, Dre crystalized a brand new sound that he had been toying with, dubbed G-Funk, a tip of the hat to its obvious P-Funk influence. Yet, while plenty of artists were content to sample discrete elements from George Clinton and company’s massive catalogue and call it a day, Dre crafted music that approximated the way that Parliament made you feel without just lifting the chorus from “Bop Gun” or “Dr. Funkenstein” (although he did plenty of that type of thing, too). I barely need to describe G-Funk, since it was west coast rap’s default mode for about six or seven years, but it combines chunky, languorous bass with a high-pitched counter melody on synthesizer, and typically some female backing vocals. It’s a very musical style of hip hop, and therefore more accessible to a wide audience. The best six or seven songs on The Chronic stack up favorably with the best half dozen on any hip hop album you care to bring up. Same thing with the best two or three skits (shout out to Snoop and D.O.C. on “The $20 Sack Pyramid”). Towards the back half, however, the quality starts to suffer enough that I couldn’t confidently award it a top three finish for the year. Dre the rapper has nothing on Dre the producer, but while he can get lazy enough to rhyme bitches, riches and snitches on a verse, he does possess a nimble enough flow to execute some tricky tempo changes and clever internal rhymes. I doubt he wrote more than 30% of his own verses on this record, but I’m not sure that’s a thing we should really be up at arms over.
There are a slew of emcees that lend their services to Dre on the album, something that has been consistent across his career as a talent-finder and star-maker, but none of them make a fraction of the impact that Snoop Dogg does. I’m so used to Snoop as a pitchman and weirdly safe sort of mascot for hip hop culture that I forgot how supple and cool and just plain different he sounded when we all heard him for the first time. One featured spot at the age of nineteen, and his legacy was already cemented. Emcees at the time, specifically emcees on gangster rap albums, tended to be intense and aggressive. Snoop was the opposite – laid back, melodic, effortless. He was instantly the coolest motherfucker in the room, and the fact that he didn’t seem to really be trying at it made him even cooler. So you had Dre’s familiar presence on the mic, the evolution of his song-craft, and the sense that Snoop was doing something you had never heard before. All of those elements combined to make The Chronic arguably the most popular rap record of all time.
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Love Deluxe – Sade
There is no one like Sade. That may sound strange coming from someone who has evoked her name at least a couple times in trying to describe someone’s sound, but I have to confess – those claims were specious at best. What I was really trying to convey was that those artists (inevitably of the female R&B variety) had an air of aloof coolness when compared to their contemporaries. Sade is the queen of cool, and… aloof is the wrong word because it implies detachment in a negative way… maybe its better to say her coolness feels alien and unknowable. She is Galadriel in the forest and we are Frodo, struck with a combination of awe and desire and fear. Aquemeni is the coolest hip hop album I’ve ever heard, and the coolest line on the whole thing is “Sade is in my tape deck, I’m movin’ in slow motion boy”. This all sounds like fawning hyperbole, I know, and Sade is not like on my personal Mt. Rushmore or anything. It’s just that I have a hard time describing her music because I’m too focused on the way it makes me feel to really pay that much attention to the way it sounds. It is smooth, obviously. Her voice is supple and withholding. There is not a moment of strain or a fragment of vulnerability – that’s where that aloofness rears its head. She may be yearning or she may be professing her love or she may even be singing the plight of a Somalian woman in poverty, but she is always in complete control. The music, vaguely Caribbean, wraps her voice in a gauzy blanket, never showy or serving anything but to provide her singing with a soft place to land. The song-writing is good, but other than “No Ordinary Love” and the previously referenced “Pearls” they tend to blend together a bit. This is a vibe album, ultimately, and the vibe is that it makes me feel as cool as Big Boi when I’m playing it, slow motion and all.
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Opiate – Tool
As much as I appreciate the great career that Tool has had, spanning several decades at this point, I sometimes wish that they would pull forward more inspiration from their original EP. You won’t find any moody, labyrinthian epics on Opiate, although the seeds are there for that. Instead, you get six lean, aggressive metal tunes with solid hooks, and while I like the direction Tool ultimately went in, I could stand to have some more of those in their catalogue. This EP is 27 minutes long, and there isn’t a wasted moment (excluding the fine but ultimately pointless hidden track), even the parts where Maynard acts snotty to the crowd during a live performance. That is one element that has remained consistent through the band’s career, and it is inextricably linked to them at this point. Keenan is a big personality – an erudite vulgarian who tackles big themes but also has a brazenly sophomoric streak, and a winemaking, capital-A atheist that can be a bit of a prima donna. He’s a metal singer whose lack of metal gimmickry (not cookie monster, not operatic, not a rap-shouter) has led to him standing out in the genre. He can croon, he can spit pure venom, or he can channel his inner-Sade and sound sexy and aloof. Not all of that is on display here, necessarily, but enough of it is to serve as a great introduction to one of metal’s most beloved and unique voices. Another thing that becomes immediately clear listening to Opiate is the intricacy and novelty of Danny Carrey’s drum playing. Again, this is a ways off from that live clip of “Pneuma” that made the rounds a couple of years ago, but you could already tell that he was approaching the music differently than his peers, and also had the technical ability to push the limits in any way that he wanted. If you are familiar with Marx’s term “opiate of the masses”, then you will likely intuit the theme of this album. I’m a Christian, but it generally doesn’t bother me to listen to music (or whatever) that challenges my perceptions. America is a predominately Christian society, and one of art’s primary functions is to challenge the status quo. Besides, if you’re afraid to engage with opinions that are different than yours, aren’t you admitting that your beliefs are on shaky ground to begin with? That said, I know that Keenan is successful in his provocations by the way that the title track gets under my skin. It might be the best song the band would write until 1997’s Aenima album, and yet the utter contempt that he injects into the lyric makes it a tough listen. I’m sure that would be music to his ears, and it’s a testament to how well-formed this emerging artist was on their first showcase for the world, even if they hadn’t unspooled their first 9-minute opus just yet.
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Harvest Moon – Neil Young
Neil Young, similar to Jay Z or David Bowie, falls into the camp of artists whose greatness I recognize on a fundamental level, but I do not connect with on a commensurate scale. Don’t get me wrong, I listen to and enjoy their music, but they simply aren’t “my guys”, you know?* I also want to clarify that putting Neil on my list is not some sort of concession to popular opinion – I truly think this is the ninth best album of 1992, although it does seem odd that the first time he would show up on one of these lists would be in the 90’s. We’ll hear from him again, sooner than later rest assured, but also recall that he was enjoying some re-kindling of his popularity in the grunge era. That was due in no small part to simpatico flannel enthusiasts like Eddie Vedder lending some of their cultural currency to an artist they grew up idolizing, but also, I think, in no small part to the general excellence of Harvest Moon. I haven’t listened to every eighties Neil Young album, certainly, but there is a sense that this is the first spiritual successor to the music he was making during his artistic peak. There’s little doubt the title calling back to his 1972 classic Harvest is no mistake. The grunge music co-sign is a little ironic, though, in that this is one of the most beatific Young releases, featuring none of the edgier rock sounds he flashed frequently throughout his career. That’s not to say I can’t detect the influence of this album. Alternative rock acts from the late 90’s and 2000’s, in particular, seem to have been paying attention. “Such a Woman” could very easily be a Flaming Lips song, provided it was gussied up with a few psychedelic touches. Likewise, “Old King” is very much in the Trampled by Turtles mold. As I mentioned before, however, when I look back on this album it resembles nothing more prominently than vintage Neil Young. “Unknown Legend”, “You and Me” and “War of Man” range from evoking late-60’s CSN&Y to mid-70’s solo Neil, and they don’t suffer from any early 90’s signifiers that would allow you to differentiate them were all that stuff jumbled together on a streaming playlist. In that way, Harvest Moon is a touch anachronistic, especially as I have been praising all of the cutting edge rap and metal of the year. And so, if my 1992 playlist feels a little off balance whenever this music pops up, that’s ok. When you are presented with the simple, transcendent beauty of the title track, you’ll find it is welcome in any setting.
* The counter to this would be artists like The Clash or Pavement, whose greatness I can infer from their reputation among smart, music-savvy people, but whom I do not listen to and have found no personal affinity for despite several efforts to do so.
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Body Count – Body Count
When I find myself pondering the existence of Body Count, something, I assume, we all do from time to time, the persistent question that keeps surfacing has to do with Ice T’s relationship with heavy metal in the early 90’s. Mainly because it’s such a bizarre album, I want to crawl into his head and figure out how it came to be. The cynical view would be that Ice simply saw a potentially lucrative side-hustle and went after it. There’s precedent – that’s basically his hip hop origin story. I don’t really buy into that, though. He was just coming off New Jack City and Original Gangster, so I would question if forming a metal act was really the strategic move that seemed most likely to bolster his profile or line his coffers. Ice has always claimed to have an interest in rock and metal music, so it seems more likely that was the genesis of the project. Even then, you would expect him to recruit some ringers that were intimately familiar with the genre to help him navigate his first metal album. You can’t tell me that Scott Ian or Kerry King wouldn’t have been down to collaborate on something like that. Instead, you have Ernie C and Mooseman and Beatmaster V, not exactly metal luminaries, pumping out what is, frankly and with love, amateurish music. Hell, Ice could have found more competent instrumentalists and songwriters from local Richmond acts that I used to go see in high school. And yet, would better music have led to a better album? That sounds like an obvious question on its face, but I’ll submit to you every Body Count record after their self-titled debut where they vastly improved their playing. Those albums are pretty terrible, and so represent the odd case of musicians improving their craft to the music’s detriment. Why I love this project has a lot to do with the fact that these guys clearly love heavy metal, but they really don’t know very much about it. Ice was pretty clearly just like “Metal bands play fast and loud and sing about some wild shit? Got it. We can do that.” That naivety led to something unique, a cross between punk and hardcore and thrash that has hip hop skits and a front man who doesn’t really sing or scream or even rap his verses. It also has the craziest lyrics of nearly any album I’ve ever heard. Metal has always had dark subject matter, but the range of options is still mostly limited to a selection of approved topics: War, or sex, or religion, etc. Ice takes the opportunity to just write anything that comes to mind, and it is amazing. It is inconceivable to me that a song like “KKK Bitch” could exist in any other context, but I’m so glad that we have it to treasure for generations to come. The most obvious example of the band’s give-no-fucks attitude is “Cop Killer”, an escalation of NWA’s “Fuck the Police” that managed to piss everyone off even more than that song. Things get even weirder with “Evil Dick” and its barely-a-metaphor metaphor complete with simulated orgasm breakdown, Ice describing a hilariously strange encounter with a voodoo priestess in the swamp, and on the aptly titled “Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight”, preaching tolerance through the immolation of his racist mother.
Body Count is all adrenaline, no artifice. The band did not know how to make a heavy metal album, didn’t in fact know enough to know that they didn’t know how to make a heavy metal album, and so they made one anyway. The result is so un-self-conscious and fun that it justifies its own existence.
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Honorable Mentions
Metal: Countdown to Extinction – Megadeth; Images and Words – Dream Theater; March or Die – Motorhead; Meantime – Helmet; Soul of a New Machine – Fear Factory
Hip Hop: Mecca and the Soul Brother – Pete Rock & CL Smooth; Daily Operation – Gang Starr; The Predator – Ice Cube; Runaway Slave – Showbiz & A.G.; Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde – The Pharcyde
Pop/Rock: Incesticide – Nirvana; Us – Peter Gabriel; Sap – Alice in Chains; Core – Stone Temple Pilots; Apollo 18 – They Might Be Giants; 40oz to Freedom – Sublime
Country: Sweet Old World – Lucinda Williams; Every Time You Say Goodbye – Alison Krauss and Union Station; The Bottle Rockets – The Bottle Rockets; Hollywood Town Hall – The Jayhawks
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