1997 is a year that features some incredibly creative and difficult rock and pop music, as well as the last, excessive gasp of hip hop’s mid-90’s peak.
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 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 #11 in the series. My random number generator tells me that our next year to explore is 1966!
Check out my entry on 1960 here. Check out my entry on 1969 here. Check out my entry on 1974 here. Check out my entry on 1978 here. Check out my entry on 1982 here. Check out my entry on 1989 here. Check out my entry on 2003 here. Check out my entry on 2004 here. Check out my entry on 2015 here. Check out my entry on 2016 here.
The Greatest Albums of 1997
I spent much of 1997, spread over my freshman and sophomore years at college, exploring music. I wasn’t, however, exploring a whole lot of the music of 1997. Instead, I was unlocking the pleasures of Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and Miles Davis (among others) thanks to my roommates, dorm mates and newly acquired access to the internet. Mainstream rock and hip hop were in transition from the versions that captivated me in high school, so it made sense that I spent my energy elsewhere. Grunge music, though unfortunately named, was the logical and artistically fruitful reaction to the dominance of insipid pop-metal at the turn of the prior decade. By the end of the nineties, grunge’s melancholy and dark earnestness had coalesced into the emptier and more mercenary nu-metal movement (’97 was the year of the now-infamous Limp Bizkit’s debut). The Wu-Tang Clan had completely changed the hip hop landscape in the middle of the decade with their dark, moody beats and cerebral, often spiritual rhymes. Yet, as with the second and third wave of any musical revolution, we were soon awash in acts who reveled in the surface features of the Clan’s sound, but lacked the same level of talent and inspiration to really do it justice. Organized Konfusion, Jedi Mind Tricks, Killarmy, et al. produced perfectly competent and inoffensive records, but I was bored to tears listening back at them while I was researching this post. Meanwhile, the genuine article still manages to mesmerize me with their staggering double-album opus that came out that summer.
The year’s other massive, double-album release from a mid-90’s rap icon signaled the future of hip hop headed into the 2000’s. The biggest song of 1997, in any genre, was undeniably “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems”, and its Puff Daddy-produced pop-rap would set the table for the Master P’s and Lil’ Bow Wows of the world, who would come to dominate the landscape in the wake of all those Wu-Tang clones. Maybe Killarmy wasn’t so bad after all… Of course, if studying the history of popular music has taught me anything, it’s that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It seems likely that the hollow, commercial excess of No Limit and Bad Boy contributed to the rise in popularity of “backpack rap” at the turn of the century, namely acts like Common, Black Star and the Roots.
Barely on my radar at the time was the evolution of indie rock, continuing unabated from its roots in the Pixies and Sonic Youth. To be honest, I’ve only very recently learned to appreciate indie rock, but I have uncovered some really good entries into the genre in recent years – at least they are indie rock insomuch as they share the musical qualities I equate to the form. Very little interests me less than categorizing albums based on the distinction between major and independent labels. Regardless of that distinction, there were several long, challenging, but ultimately rewarding rock records released in 1997, and many of them made it into my top 10.
OK Computer – Radiohead
It was never going to be anything else. Sometimes I have a pretty good idea what my top album will be for a post, but it’s subject to change, and sometimes I can’t even remember what albums came out in a particular year. There are some years, however, that I knew my #1 when I decided to start this project. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I won’t be. So, when 1965, 1973, 1984 and 1995 roll around, one album is already locked and loaded (sorry, no spoilers). 1997 was the same way, and while I discovered some great music prepping for this post, and re-discovered some music I had neglected for a while, I’ve always known that OK Computer was going to wind up as my favorite album of the year. It’s one of the rare works that is so profoundly good that it is immediately apparent as soon as you hear it: This is a complete album, a classic, and once the initial excitement wears off it will still be a classic, because that’s what it is at its core. In fact, it’s so evident to everyone that if you haven’t actually heard it, you are liable to be turned off by how obnoxiously the rest of the world is fawning over it. That’s the position I found myself in when I first took notice of Radiohead.
As I mentioned in the intro, I was a burgeoning Pink Floyd fan when this album came out. In addition to every critical outlet crowning it the album of the decade, several were positioning it as on par with Dark Side of the Moon, which begged incredulousness from a college sophomore who was binging that album for the first time in his life. To add fuel to the fire, Thom Yorke responded to a similar comparison with a snotty remark about how if OK Computer was a concept album, it wasn’t corny and obvious like Floyd… something like that, although I can’t find a source online, so who knows. Anyway, it was enough to put me off of even sampling Radiohead. Then one day, as I was working in the electronics section of my local Target, we got the latest version of the video that we were forced to play on loop which was full of horrible clips of pop music and dumb movies. And this month’s video had a clip of “Karma Police”. You can’t imagine how cathartic that 30-second snippet sounded amidst all of the Len and Green Day and SheDaisy. By the end of the day, there was no way that I wasn’t going to buy that album, and sure enough, I knew after the first listen.
Here’s the thing, it is the best album of the decade, or at least the best rock album. And I couldn’t admit this at the time, but it is absolutely on par with Dark Side and frankly makes albums like Animals and The Wall sound corny and obvious in comparison. The central concept, the isolation of our technology-enabled modern life, comes through so clearly, yet is so subtle, that all of the tracks feel completely unified regardless of how different they may be. It has a gorgeous sonic landscape that fits the theme, a chilly urban vista with lots of dark corners. Yet clever ideas and meticulous studio production don’t mean much without good songs, and that is where OK Computer is most impressive. The pure adolescent passion and drama of “Exit Music (for a Film)”, the epic prog rock vitriol of “Paranoid Android”, the swooning extraterrestrial melody of “Subterranean Homesick Alien” – all great. Sure, there’s “Fitter Happier”, but I consider that more of an intermission than anything, and every other track is vital.
On an album that is difficult enough to seem impenetrable at times, Yorke provides an occasional, crucial lifeline. One minute he’s sneering about Gucci little piggies, then the next thing you know, he’s singing angelically “rain down… on me…”, and it doesn’t really matter what he means, just how he makes you feel. Similarly, when he sings “For a minute there, I lost myself” on “Karma Police”, you can identify, because you have been losing yourself in the album for several minutes and he’s just pulled you back momentarily. It’s powerful stuff, and no number of replays has sapped it of that power for me. I expect that there are still people out there who are avoiding this album, because Thom Yorke hasn’t gotten any less snotty, and the praise hasn’t become any less obnoxious (case in point…), but all I can say is give it a shot. Music this perfectly realized doesn’t come around very often, and you don’t want to miss out.
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space – Spiritualized
Jason Pierce wastes no time laying out his mission statement on the opening track of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space: “All I want in life is a little bit of love to take the pain away”. Not only is it pleasantly alliterative and poetic, but it pretty much sums up the driving theme of the record in a neat little package. There is nothing neat or little about the subsequent album, however. Sounding like a hundred musicians of various genres got sucked into a black hole and then exploded back out in a massive jumble of guitar rock, punk, psychedelia, gospel and art pop, Ladies and Gentlemen is spacey, long and difficult. Damn, though, is it beautiful.
What’s most impressive is the way that Spiritualized manage to combine the intensely personal with the massively orchestrated. It’s chaotic, but in the best possible way. Love is chaotic at times, and so is heart-break and longing and all the jumbled up feelings that go along with that stuff, especially if you invest in it as wholly as Pierce does here. Fueling that chaos are the drugs that are frequently referenced throughout the album and presumably being used by the artists during the creative process, given the abundance and specificity of those references. Pierce talks about track marks in his arms, having his breakfast off of a mirror and finding the psychological effects of his infatuation to be more potent than DMT. The subject also pops up less explicitly through metaphor, like in the “Cool Waves” washing over him in the gospel-tinged song of the same name. For a while, I took “Cop Shoot Cop” to mean some sort of intra-police squad violence, but I’ve come to realize it’s a sequence of verbs: Cop some heroin, shoot it up, cop some more.
Ultimately, Ladies and Gentlemen joins Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Alice in Chains’ Dirt in the pantheon of great heroin albums. It is less dark than those albums, though, at least in tone, and more vibrant. Nearly everyone can identify with falling head over heels for someone, and being heartbroken, even if you can’t relate to the specific coping mechanism that is employed in the aftermath. No matter what, we should all be able to enjoy this incredible, messy classic.
Wu-Tang Forever – The Wu-Tang Clan
I bought this album literal minutes after it was released. I know that doesn’t sound too impressive in an age of digital music, but in 1997, this required that I stood in line outside of a Peaches record store at midnight in order to purchase a physical copy of the CDs. It’s the only time I can recall doing so. The fact is, after the Wu-Tang Clan released their debut album in ’93 and proceeded to take over the world with a string of incredible solo albums, an inescapable clothing line, and even their own MTV Rockumentary, the release of Wu-Tang Forever was the must-attend event of the summer to my friends and I. The album is far from perfect, but it still managed to live up to our heightened expectations as we spent the rest of the night in my living room listening to it over and over again.
Ice T once commented that the astonishing thing about Wu-Tang was that they were nine guys who could all rap. Ice was used to running around with a posse and a couple hype guys and the inimitable DJ Evil E, and sometimes he let them “rap”, but like the hangers-on of every other hip hop wizard in history, they couldn’t actually rap. Here, on the group’s second full-length album, the clan unleashes the full arsenal of all that talent to staggering affect. RZA’s boldly symphonic production kicks off “Reunited”, followed quickly by a verse from his cousin, the GZA, who intones with trademark gravitas: “Reunited, double lp, world excited; Struck a match to the underground, industry ignited”. Soon, the Ol’ Dirty Bastard growls out a diatribe that includes the line “I don’t walk, I get carried”, which metaphorically speaks to his elevated stature among emcees, but also literally to the fact that was heavily impaired most of the time. Then RZA unveils a new staccato flow that manages to be more vicious than it is awkward. Finally, Method Man bats clean-up, and it becomes clear that these hip hop superheroes are operating at the height of their powers. With the exception of Masta Killa, who would improve his slightly sleepy delivery on his 2003 solo album No Said Date, and Ghostface Killah who would spend the following decade developing into one of the greatest emcees of all time, the individual members of the clan are never better than they are on Forever.
The very next track features a RZA innovation that has lived on in other producers’ work ever since, the sped-up soul sample (or “chipmunk soul”). Though he employs a stable of apprentices on the album, RZA’s production is complex and sophisticated without sacrificing the trademark grit that made the group stand out from the predominant G-Funk sound when they first came out. The combination of his innovative beats and the massive bench of great lyricists makes for an overwhelming abundance of top flight hip hop. Sure, it falls into many of the usual double-album traps (did we really need space for overwrought Tekitha showcase, “Second Coming”?), but the highlights come at an exhausting clip. Every member has their spots where they shine: Inspectah Deck’s insanely verbose opening verse on “Triumph”; Ghostface’s emotional description of a crime scene on “Impossible”; U-God’s curvilinear flow on “It’s Yours”. More than anything, it takes me back to that summer night twenty years ago and the communal joy of dissecting every line of this overstuffed masterpiece with my friends.
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Baduizm – Erykah Badu
It’s probably fair to say that D’Angelo kicked off the neo-soul movement with Brown Sugar in 1995. The genre didn’t get its first great album, however, until Erykah Badu debuted with the earthy, slinky Baduizm. Badu got a lot of comparisons to Billie Holliday at the time, and while that assessment doesn’t really hold up in hindsight, it made sense in contrast to pop-leaning belters like Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey. She immediately differentiates herself on the album’s three opening tracks: “Rimshot (Intro)”, “On & On” and “Appletree”. The first thing that’s evident is that Ms. Badu seems impossibly cool, what with her cyphers that keep rollin’ like a rolling stone, and all of her artsy friends (ooh-we-ooh-we-ooh). Her aesthetic is a cross between smoky jazz club and a mystical hippie commune. More importantly, none of those songs are about boys. By the time Erykah does get around to talking about relationships, there’s none of the standard I’ve-got-a-crush or somebody-did-somebody-wrong tropes on display. Instead, we get to explore the morality of being in a relationship with a drug dealer, the possibility of resurrection as a solution to bad timing, and why that one dude didn’t take her to see Wu-Tang. It’s important to note that the core themes of respect, monogamy and self-actualization do not stem from the Katy Perry model of realizing that you can sell more records to young girls with that message than by being a teenage sex kitten. Authenticity has always been evident in Badu’s work, strikingly so in her introduction to the world. It’s hard to explain how fresh this all sounded in ’97, and it’s probably the first soul music I was able to connect to in any significant way since Sade and Prince in the 80’s. Pro Tip: Cut the unnecessary “Certainly” remix at the end of the album and replace it with “Tyrone” off of her live record that was released the same year.
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One Day It Will All Make Sense – Common
Amidst all the Wu-Tang and Nas wannabes in the East, and the still plentiful G-Funk holdouts in the West, Common was coming up in Chicago, doing his own thing. He had feuded with Ice Cube over lyrics on his debut album, back when having beef was all the rage in the hip hop community (and he would go on to get plenty of lyrical mileage out of the incident), but true to his reputation as an anti-thug, he had squashed it by the time his second album came around. Now, he was more interested in spirituality, parenthood and, across a late-album three-track opus, finding out who stole his shit. The soulful and jazzy No I.D. production and cerebral rhymes of Common sound like they are from an entirely different universe than the prevalent gangsta rap of the time, or even the more high-minded but still gritty rap of the East Coast. One Day is far from corny, though. This isn’t Digible Planets or PM Dawn, and Common spits plenty of fire to keep old school purists happy, particularly on the battle-ready rapping of “Hungry” or “Making a Name for Ourselves”. He also partners with future-girlfriend, and fellow top-10 of 1997 artist, Erykah Badu on the breezy “All Night Long”, gets heavy with Lauren Hill on an anti-abortion song that thankfully skews personal and not political, and shows off his story-telling ability in the “Stolen Moments” tryptic about a home burglary. The strongest track might be “G.O.D. (Gaining One’s Definition)”, where Com and Cee-Lo Green wax philosophical on the nature of religion over a serene but engaging beat. It’s another pleasure that you couldn’t find anywhere else at the time, on an album chock full of them.
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Homogenic – Bjork
Approaching a new Bjork album is an intimidating proposition. You never really know what you’re going to get, and you aren’t likely to receive a soft landing into whatever alien soundscape the Icelandic nymph has dreamed up. That reputation began in earnest with Homogenic, a striking departure from her first two albums that commits to its peculiar blend of strings, icy vocals and electronic beats. She didn’t invent the sound out of whole cloth, however, and the already popular Portishead was almost certainly an influence. Yet, Bjork differentiates Homogenic by ratcheting up the complexity of the shimmering music and the emotionality of the vocals. It’s an incredibly dreamlike experience, with no conventional song structure to cling to as trippy orchestration slithers around stuttering beats, while Bjork sings her cryptic lyrics as if they are in another language. Yet, if the pieces don’t all fit together neatly, they still combine to beautiful results. Imagine one of those art installations that doesn’t seem to make any sense from one angle, but when you look at it from the right vantage point, it creates a complete picture. Much like Thom Yorke, there are also these wonderfully moving moments where her vocal breaks through with something that feels profoundly human. “Joga” comes to mind (“you push me up to this state of emergency”). In a year that boasts an avalanche of creativity, this album may be the most inventive of them all.
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Perfect from Now On – Built to Spill
One thing that still irritates me about a lot of indie rock (and this is not specific to that genre) is the impression that some artists are too cool to care about hooks. Look, not every song has to be primed for NOW, This is Music!, and tracks produced with no regard to anything but the hook represent a bigger sin, but making your music catchy is not the same thing as pandering. Yet, I really like Perfect from Now On, and damned if there is a single hook on the whole album. These tracks are all extended jams, short on structure but heavy on texture. I can picture myself reading those statements and determining that Built to Spill is not for me. When I think of Phish or the String Cheese Incident, I think of similar descriptions, but in a very negative context… boring noodling and meandering solos that are arbitrarily sprinkled throughout the inexplicably long run time. I’ll be honest here, I don’t even know that I’ve ever heard a whole song from either one of those bands, and I’ll be happy to eat my words once this project leads me to their work, but that’s the impression I’ve built over the years. What makes Perfect from Now On different is that everything has meaning. These aren’t lazy jams designed to stretch out for thirty minutes in concert. The songs may be eight minutes long without a verse-chorus-verse structure to break them up, but there is clearly a high level of craft that very deliberately builds each tune in complex and unexpected ways. Doug Martsch sounds like the prototypical indie singer, with a reedy voice that recalls Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock and Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. So, he might not have a chance on “The Voice”, but that’s the type of vocal that is called for on this album, buried slightly in the mix and not very pretty. It’s just another layer among the guitars and cello and Moog and Mellotron and everything else that the band pulls out to weave this tremendous tapestry.
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Lonesome Crowded West – Modest Mouse
Few rock singers do “angry” better than Isaac Brock. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t play one-note rage the whole time, but fluctuates between seething incredulousness and full-on wrath without resorting to cookie monster growling or tough guy posturing. Maybe it’s just because his lisp gets more pronounced the more passionate he gets. Either way, he gives Modest Mouse a tense energy that perfectly complements his jagged guitar playing and the rhythm section’s turn-on-a-dime dynamics. Lonesome Crowded West is loaded with such anger and suburban malaise. It’s a long album, chock full of short, caustic songs, but just when they start to become abrasive, the band pulls out something longer and more intricate to balance things out. A song like “Trailer Trash” is in sync with the album’s themes, but comes across a little more delicate or vulnerable. By the time it winds down over the last few tracks, things mellow out into a note of, not hope, but at least resignation. “I’m trying to drink away the part of the day that I can’t sleep away” doesn’t exactly suggest that Brock has come to terms with his disenfranchisement, but at least it’s a strategy.
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Life After Death – The Notorious B.I.G.
The placement on the list of this album, which can objectively be considered a sprawling mess with moments of true embarrassment, falls entirely on the ample shoulders of Biggie and his outsized talent and charm. Despite a relative dearth of recorded material, he remains my favorite emcee, effortlessly holding off the likes of Ghostface and Black Thought from beyond the grave, despite the fact that they continue to evolve and release great music. Engineered by a swarm of producers of various quality, Big’s presence is such that he never loses command of the affair, no matter how disjointed it becomes. His flow is so effortless that everything clicks whenever he’s on the mic. Look at this tossed off line in the Jay Z-assisted track, “I Love the Dough”: “Biggie get rich-y like Lionel, shiiit.” The inflection on the “shiiit” suggests that even he’s surprised that he has the charisma to pull off the pun that preceded it. And while Jay proves to be an agreeable, if not equal, collaborator, Smalls is also saddled with saving songs that feature far less talent in support. His verse on “Notorious Thugs” finds him adopting Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony’s signature flow, and absolutely murdering said group with it, as if it were they who were clumsily trying to cop his style. The two worst rap verses in my music library belong to Puff Daddy and Mase at the beginning of “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems”, and yet by the time Biggie utters “gats in holsters, girls on shoulders” halfway through his verse, the song is cemented as an unimpeachable classic.
Alas, even the herculean talent of Smalls can’t save some of the weaker moments. There are a few tracks that I’ve long since jettisoned from my library, none so offensive as the remarkably ill-conceived “Playa Hater”, in which Biggie attempts to croon a treacly R&B number to disastrous results. Ultimately, though, Biggie left us with but two precious albums and some offhand tracks here and there. No amount of dubious production or perversely outclassed guest verses can take the shine of such a precious treasure trove of his music. When left on his own, and given solid beats to work with, he produces tracks like “Hypnotize”, “The Sky is the Limit” and “10 Crack Commandments”, which need no qualifications in their praise.
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The Mollusk – Ween
I don’t care for Ween. Oh, I appreciate the fact that they are world-class musicians, but their brand of mean-spirited irony has always rubbed me the wrong way. That being said, there’s no way I could possibly resist the batshit charms of their epic sea shanty concept album, The Mollusk. Picture the craziest Clutch album you can think of, with the cabaret sensibility of mid-70’s Queen and detached sardonicism of Frank Zappa. Gene and Dean lead the listener through a psychedelic world of aquatic Lovecraftian wonders, drunken barroom singalongs, and enough different voices to make each bizarre character that populates the album stand out on their own. All the while, they get to show off their ridiculous versatility with several styles of music colliding, but not clashing, across the track list. Most importantly, they seem to be having fun, and it’s impossible not to join them once you get past the fact that such a thing as this even exists.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Pop: Dig Me Out – Sleater-Keaney; Give It Back! – The Brian Jonestown Massacre; Dots and Loops – Stereolab
Metal: Whoracle – In Flames; Album of the Year – Faith No More
Hip Hop: Soul Assassins, vol. 1 – DJ Muggs & Various Artists; Uptown Saturday Night – Camp Lo; Jewelz – O.C.; When Disaster Strikes… – Busta Rhymes
Folk/Bluegrass: So Long, So Wrong – Alison Krauss & Union Station; Sound of Lies – The Jayhawks; Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club
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