The Greatest Albums of 1998

Looking back on this crop of music from the late nineties, I uncover an affinity for several albums that passed me by the first time. As a college student at the time, I guess I was just too busy studying and enriching my community to notice.

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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 #38 in the series.  My random number generator tells me that our next year to explore is 2013.

Check out my previous entries here.

The Greatest Albums of 1998

I have recently started re-examining the big hip hop hits of my teenage and young adult years. I’ve been a hip hop fan since the third grade when Run DMC and the Beastie Boys were first making waves on MTV, and I have remained heavily invested since then. For many years, in fact, I harbored a misplaced sense of authority on which rap artists were credible and which ones weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously trust my own opinion on what constitutes great hip hop, but I don’t know what gave me - a white, middle-class kid from the Virginia suburbs - such a perceived sense of discernment that I felt confident dismissing entire acts (Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem - even Outkast, ironically) upon my first listen. Anyway, here are the top five hugely popular 90’s & 00’s hip hop tracks that I have recently come around on:

5. “Oh Boy” - Cam’ron feat. Juelz Santana

4. “Rebirth of the Slick (Cool Like That)” - Digable Planets

3. Tie - all of DMX’s singles

2. “Ride wit Me” - Nelly feat. City Spud

1. “Regulate” - Warren G feat. Nate Dogg

Oh man, can you imagine the mental gymnastics I had to engage in to convince myself that I didn’t enjoy “Regulate”? Suffice it to say, there was nothing quite so entertaining on the Killah Priest or Jeru the Damaja albums that I was spinning instead.

Found or Forgotten imposes a structure that makes me challenge these long-held beliefs. It’s one of the blog series’ most important functions, truthfully, and it doesn’t just apply to successful rap singles. While I always come away from each post with a haul of new music that resonates with me for the first time, it can be hard for that music to crack my top ten. The nineties, in particular, is a time period where I was forging my identity as a music fan, and so much of my personal canon comes from this era. My opinions on the golden age of hip hop, and on grunge music, and on 90’s heavy metal have calcified to such a point that out of the seventy top ten slots from the decade so far, only twelve albums that I wasn’t previously a fan of have made the cut. Surprisingly, however, a full five of the top ten albums of 1998 are ones that I was previously unfamiliar with, or simply uninterested in. That has made for an interesting writing process, as I alternate between putting long-held and deep-rooted ideas to words and grappling with my opinions on music that I am hearing with very fresh ears. Hopefully it lends itself to an interesting reading process, as well. Let’s dive in.

1. Aquemini – Outkast

With all due respect to Mobb Deep, EPMD, and the #2 act on this list, Outkast is the greatest hip hop duo of all time. I’ll even go a step further and declare that they are on my personal Mount Rushmore of hip hop groups, full stop.* They combine the chemistry that is necessary for such an honorific with a high degree of combustibility, which makes their catalogue one of unparalleled growth and creativity, but also one that inevitably ends in a weird dissolution where founding members Big Boi and Andre 3000 barely seem like they are performing the same genre of music anymore. Aquemini marks the approximate midpoint of that journey, and perhaps because of that, it feels like the perfect moment where the pair’s diverging artistic sensibilities create an exciting dynamism in their music, but not yet to the point of strain. I’m not breaking new ground with this take, by the way. The chatter around the idea that they were not entirely on the same page was already loud enough in ‘98 for Andre to address it in the album’s opening verse, and it hadn’t yet reached the fever pitch that it would hit in the 2000’s. That verse is a marvel, actually. It finds Three Stacks** spinning a series of vignettes, each one starting with the stanza “Return of the gangsta, thanks ta’...” and ending with an increasingly more defiant and ironic “Get down”. In it, he tackles subjects like the state of the modern family in downtown Atlanta as well as the state of his rap group at the end of the nineties. Big Boi, on the other hand, lays out a calm, simple verse that opens with the lines “Man, a n**** don’t want no trouble; a playa just want to kick back with my gators off and watch my little girl blow bubbles.” He goes on to expound on the lengths, criminal and otherwise, that he is willing to go to avoid that trouble, but his tone suggests he is sincere in his desire. Andre, on the other hand, wants trouble. His verse is so urgent and passionate that he has to rush to catch up by the end of each bar. It’s like he has all of this pent up frustration and he can’t get on with the rest of the album until he expels it off of his chest like a shotgun blast. For example:

“Return of the gangsta, thanks ta'

Them n***** that got them kids

That got enough to buy an ounce

But not enough to bounce them kids to the zoo

Or to the park so they grow up in the dark

Never seein' light 'til they end up being like yo' sorry ass

Robbin' n***** in broad-ass daylight, get down.”

Or:

“Return of the gangsta, thanks ta'

Them n***** who get the wrong impression of expression

Then the question is - ‘Big Boi, what's up with Andre?

Is he in a cult? Is he on drugs? Is he gay?

When y'all gon' break up? When y'all gon' wake up?’

N****, I'm feelin' better than ever, what's wrong with you?

You, get down!”

I truly think it might be the greatest album-opening verse in hip hop history, and I enjoy Big Boi’s verse almost as much. The dichotomy between them is not just between calmness and vitriol, however, but also illustrates the most obvious and commonly cited difference between the two members of Outkast. Big Boi is “street level”, a master lyricist in his own right, for sure, but more prosaic and matter of fact. Andre is the king of the abstract. In another part of his verse, he admits that rapping about hoes and clothes and weed may get you popularity, but he suggests instead “let’s talk about time travelin’, rhyme javelin, something mind unravelin’”. Both approaches have value, and for one beautiful album they coexist seamlessly while elevating each other in the best way possible.

Ok, do you mind if we move off of the first song? I imagine you don’t. Aquemini proceeds from “Return of the ‘G’” in a sprawling, psychedelic fashion that highlights the group’s knack for storytelling and pension for dynamic song-craft with funky hooks. On “Skew It On the Bar-B”, they team up with Raekwon the Chef, who sort of ignores the assignment (as he is wont to do) rapping a verse that feels somewhat at odds with Outkast’s more high-minded ideals. Yet, it still crackles with energy, and hearing Wu Tang and Kast on the same record is certainly just as spine-tingling as Rae promises in the intro. Later, they connect with George Clinton on “Synthesizer”, a sci-fi rumination on the ills of modern society that illustrates that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on P-Funk in their hip hop DNA. The centerpiece of the album’s first third, however, is the supremely joyous, danceable single, “Rosa Parks”. Compared to earlier, celebratory singles like “Player’s Ball” and “ATLiens”, “Rosa Parks” boasts a fuller, warmer, richer sound and an even more confident set of verses from Big Boi and Andre. This is the moment in time that the group was reaching its full potential, and all of those qualifiers - full, rich, warm - could be applied to the story-heavy middle of the album as well as its more jazzy and abstract final stretch. Songs such as “Slump”, “West Savannah” and “Da Art of Storytellin’” (parts 1 & 2) leverage that warmth and a melody-forward production to lay the foundation for rhymes that highlight the poignant realities of life in the projects of westside Atlanta while simultaneously making you nostalgic for the summers of your youth, and somehow theirs as well. The final third of the album is a bit scattered, but it features two massive, complex, and moving set-pieces that stretch the idea that hip hop isn’t all about rapping. “SpottieOttieDopalicious” is maybe the coolest song… ever? The buttery smooth and instantly recognizable horn licks, the suave crooning of Sleepy Brown, and especially the punctuation on the single line “Now who else wants to fuck with Hollywood Court?” are beyond transcendent to me. “Liberation” gets all star support from Erykah Badu, Cee Lo Green and Big Rube for an even more left-field jazz rumination on freeing yourself from mental shackles. Those two tracks are mind-blowingly inventive for the hip hop landscape of 1998, and illustrate how Outkast was never content unless they were pushing boundaries. Finally, the album closes on the guitar-heavy “Chonkyfire”, foreshadowing the sound they would explore with their subsequent release, Stankonia. 

There are days where Aquemini is my favorite rap album of all time (usually any day that I happen to be listening to it). Of the handful of albums that are in contention for that honor, it is probably the one I listen to the most, making sure to spin it through at least a couple of times each summer. It isn’t always easy to point to the peak of a brilliant artist’s recorded career, and I know that there are ATLiens and Stankonia advocates out there, but for me, this represents the perfect encapsulation of what Outkast were capable of. It couldn’t come with a higher recommendation from me.

* The other three faces on the mountain:  Wu Tang Clan, The Roots, & A Tribe Called Quest

** I take for granted sometimes that not everyone is as entrenched in online hip hop discourse. “3 Stacks” is a very common nickname for Andre 3000. A “stack” is slang for $1000, hence 3000 = 3 stacks. In no way do I think my use of this nickname lends me any sort of cultural cache, but I’ll take any opportunity to avoid saying some version of “Andre” two hundred times in the review. Big Boi is out of luck, unfortunately.

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2. Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star - Black Star

If we were to come up with a rubric to assess the various talents of emcees, we might come up with something like this: 

Lyricism - What are they rapping? Encompasses wordplay, double entendres, punchlines, metaphors and similes, but also encompasses the substance of their lyrics. You can get credit for being clever (Lil’ Wayne) or for having a point (Brother Ali), but you can’t get the highest marks unless you do both at the same time.

Flow - How are they rapping? Speed, dynamics, how sonorous it sounds to your ear, how effortless it sounds. The more complex the rhyme scheme the higher marks you get for flow execution. 

Presence - Charisma, gravitas, basically any intangible that isn’t accounted for in the other categories.

You could assess emcees on a 10-point scale for each category*, and that would serve as a basis for comparison, if nothing else. Let’s apply it to the two emcees we have just discussed. I would rate Big Boi like this: Lyricism - 8; Flow - 9; Presence - 8. For 3 Stacks: Lyricism - 10; Flow - 9; Presence - 8. If I allowed myself further stratification, I might have Andre slightly below Big Boi on flow and presence, but they are essentially in the same buckets. Now, as you might have predicted by this point, I’d like to use this rubric to discuss the two emcees that make up Black Star. I think it will help illustrate why the duo is so successful.

Talib Kweli: Lyricism - 10; Flow - 6; Presence - 5

Mos Def:** Lyricism - 9; Flow - 9; Presence - 9

First off, I know how this looks. The truth is, I like Kweli quite a bit, it’s just that comparing him to two top 10 all-timers and a top 25 all-timer has him coming up a bit short in certain categories. Where he spikes, and by extension where Black Star spikes, is clearly on lyricism. The partnership works so well because Mos is able to leaven that heady focus with a bit of swagger and joie de vivre. Mos has a melodic cadence, influenced by reggae and be-bop, and you can enjoy his verses even if you turn off the analytical part of your brain. He’s spitting bars, don’t get me wrong, but he simply sounds great regardless of what he is saying. Kweli, on the other hand, is so focused on his concepts and vocabulary that he can overstuff his rhymes at times. He isn’t willing to sacrifice the precise turn of phrase that best illustrates the idea he wants to get across, regardless of how it sounds when it's delivered. Fortunately, that reverence for lyrics is well-placed given how insightful the writing on Black Star is. They can be painterly and evocative or cutting and concise as they tackle societal ills and challenge cultural norms. They reserve the majority of their criticism, though, for the record industry and the artists that feed into the violent narratives of East vs West coast beef or criminal activity as the only means to elevate yourself above your station. “Children’s Story” finds Mos reframing Slick Rick’s classic track as a tale of a witless and immoral rapper finding his success, and ultimately his downfall, in an unethical music industry. On “K.O.S.”, Kweli raps “So many emcees focusing on black people extermination, we keep it balanced with that knowledge of self, determination.” and later “All my people, where y’all at? Cause y’all ain’t here, and your heroes are using your mind as a canvas to paint fear.” “Thieves in the Night” combines all of the album’s themes into an absolutely brilliant would-be-album closer (barring the obligatory posse cut, “Twice Inna Lifetime”). I would quote from that one, but I couldn’t possibly pick a single bar, so best to just go listen to it yourself. The amazing thing about Black Star is how much lyrical momentum the duo picks up over the course of the record, despite starting at a remarkably high level to begin with.

I joked in the intro about my misplaced sense of authority on hip hop authenticity. As I examine my thoughts on this album, however, it's actually become clear to me that Black Star had a huge hand in that. When I first heard this music, it felt so different from the rap music I was listening to. I loved Wu Tang and Biggie and Ice T and Geto Boys, and this was an entirely different animal. I never stopped loving those other acts, of course, but Black Star was so cerebral and ideological, the production was so warm and jazzy and soulful in such a different way than what I was used to, it immediately felt like a revolution bubbling up from the underground. As other popular acts chased glossy production and surface-level rhymes about guns and money, the ethos of Mos Def and Talib Kweli (as well as other artists like Common and the Roots, et al) began to feel like a rallying cry for hip hop as art with substance and consequence. I guess I’m trying to say that I was radicalized by Black Star, and for several years an act like Jay Z never had a chance with me, much less the No Limit Soldiers. I may have walked back on that stance somewhat over the years, but I’ll always treasure this album for its wisdom, its conviction, and its promise of what the artform can be if the artist cares enough. 

* This was inspired by a similar rubric applied to wrestlers that originated with Bret “the Hitman” Hart***. In my version, I also like the idea of applying a single eleven for each category, awarded to the very best of each. My “elevens”:  Lyricism - Black Thought; Flow - My heart says JID., and he may get there one day, but Eminem is the real answer for now; Presence - The Notorious B.I.G.

** Now Yasin Bey. For simplicity’s sake, since he referred to himself as Mos Def in this timeframe, I will do so in my review.

*** Remarkably, Bret’s rubric is not designed to give himself the highest score - Hulk Hogan, who he publicly hates, bested him by a single point in his own scoring system.

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3. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel

Jason Isbell has a lyric on his song “Children of Children” that I’ve always found curious and evocative:

“How could we expect to stay in love, when neither knew the meaning of the difference between sacred and profane?”

As I sit with Neutral Milk Hotel’s sophomore (and final*) studio album, that specific expression of contrast is one that keeps invading my thoughts. Before I unpack that idea, though, I should state that this is not a new album to me. I first encountered it in the early 2000s, after it became somewhat of an unexpected “viral” hit. In the internet’s infancy, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was quite a contentious topic in online music forums. Something about its presentation galvanized a portion of the music nerd set to proclaim it as the defining indie record. So convinced, and vocal, were this contingent of the album’s innate profundity that they spawned an inevitable backlash, and countless hours were spent debating its merits online. Even if you weren’t the target audience for this type of music, you were expected to have an opinion. I was not in the target audience, especially back then, but I performed my presumed duties and checked it out. At the time, I kind of sat on the fence, enjoying the music on its face, and a couple of tracks in particular, but failing to understand why this was the album to dominate the cultural conversation. I still don’t think I’m really in the target audience, but it has grown in my estimation over the past twenty-plus years.

Back to my original point - sacred and profane. This is an album that has the uncanny ability to sound sincerely beautiful, albeit in an off-kilter manner, while featuring lyrics that are jarring and unsettling. Take “Oh Comely”, probably my favorite track. It features lyrics like the following:  

“Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies

While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park”

“I know they buried her body with others

Her sister and mother and five hundred families”

“The movements were beautiful all in your ovaries

All of them milking with green fleshy flowers

While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines

Smelling of semen all under the garden 

Was all you were needing when you still believed in me”

It is also a deeply romantic expression of yearning that I find quite moving, despite my skin occasionally crawling at the provocative language. That dance occurs all over the album. NMH’s lead singer and creative catalyst, Jeff Magnum, is a lyricist that balances surrealistic flourishes with raw candor. When he describes sex, which he does with some frequency on this album, he tackles it from the perspective of the young and inexperienced but doesn’t shy away from the carnality of the endeavor. It can be jarring to take in, but it does come across as somehow innocent despite how graphic it might get. Mix in the fact that he was heavily inspired by reading Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, an inspiration that surfaces frequently in the lyrics, and it can be a perplexing task to try and parse out the meaning behind Magnum’s words. I don’t even try, honestly, because it functions so well in the abstract, as poetry that clearly means so much to its creator that it negates the fact that it can be opaque to the listener. Similar to the esoteric lyrics, the music itself does not provide much of a bridge to more traditional, mainstream rock. We are now used to acts like Arcade Fire and the Decemberists successfully incorporating instruments outside of guitar, bass and drums into their rock records, but back in 1998 I’m not sure who else was busting out the euphonium or singing saw, much less making them a prominent component of their sound. It’s the type of thing that could come off as superficially twee, or odd for the sake of being odd, but instead it deepens the disorienting beauty of the song cycle. That’s probably why it stirred up so much passion in the online music community when it came out - all of the ejaculate talk and Holocaust imagery and flugelhorn combine to make a fascinating puzzle that is meant to be poured over but not ultimately meant to be solved.

* So intense was the unexpected attention garnered by the album that Magnum had a bit of a breakdown and stopped making music, an early indicator of the internet’s proclivity for rapidly accelerating the rise-and-fall cycle of fame.

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4. Steal This Album  – The Coup

I have no idea what my second favorite hip hop song is. “Daytona 500” by Ghostface, Rae and Cappadonna? “100% Dundee” by the Roots? “They Reminisce Over You” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth? Maybe something more foundational, like Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause”? The longer I think about it, the more options pop into my head and the less sure I am of the answer. My favorite hip hop song, on the other hand, was a matter that was settled pretty much as soon as I heard it. “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ‘79 Granada Last Night” sounds almost like a novelty song from the title, but it is the farthest thing from a novelty. Pam the Funkstress, the Coup’s DJ, lays down a haunting and persistent funk groove over a bed of Gil Scot-Heron and Parliament samples (no obvious P-Funk hook, mind you, but a clip from “Swing Down, Sweet Chariot” from the seminal Oakland performance captured on Live: P-Funk Earth Tour). The group’s emcee, Boots Riley (L-7; F-7; P-8), spins a yarn about a young man picking up his father from prison, the titular pimp named Jesus. It is a remarkably cinematic song. Partly, that’s because it has characters who have dialogue, and flashbacks with twists, and suspense over how the central conflict will resolve. Also, though, because it manages to convey social commentary and wit and harrowing emotion in the type of balanced manner that is typically reserved for two-hour movies, not seven minute rap songs. Hearing it for the first time was one of those rare music moments that has been seared into my memory banks, and you should stop reading this right now and go play it for yourself if you have never heard it before.

Fortunately, the surrounding material on Steal This Album is almost as captivating as its centerpiece. It features track after track of incendiary Bay Area funk, with a political point of view that is slightly left of Rage Against the Machine. Like Zach de la Rocha, Boots has vitriol to spare, setting his sights on the repo man, his manager at McDonalds, the police and George Washington, among many others. His rhetoric does not seem performative, and you get the sense that he’d just as soon radicalize you as he would entertain you. “But Lucas,”  you might be asking, “I’m not convinced of the merits of violent Communist revolution, can I still enjoy this album?” The answer is very much “yes”. First, the music is so infectious, with tons of bottom-end and a perpetual bounce that will have you nodding your head in spite of yourself. Second, Riley is charismatic and very funny. His bars are full of wry expressions and expertly delivered punchlines. Case in point is “Cars and Shoes”, which is a hilarious ode to beaters and hoopties, and how they still beat hoofing it no matter how dilapidated they are. Ultimately, it's just such an expressive album from a unique and focused point of view, that it stands out even among the great rap albums of the nineties.

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5. The Miseducation of Lauren Hill – Lauren Hill

If you follow music criticism as closely as I do, a canon of universally acclaimed albums starts to form. Nothing as arbitrary and personal as musical taste is truly “universal”, of course, but there are undeniably certain works that are overwhelmingly considered as exceptional. I’d like to think that I’m not a conformist, but I also don’t see a lot of value in contrarianism for its own sake, so I tend to give credence to these broadly held opinions. I will absolutely listen to the culturally declared “album of the year”, regardless of whether it aligns with my tastes, and I return multiple times to the classics whose reputations persist year after year, even when they don’t click after the first several listens. As it stands, here are the top 3 critically-certified classics that I don’t particularly care for:

1. London Calling - The Clash

2. Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

3. To Pimp a Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar

Before you reach for your rotten vegetables (or unkind comments) to hurl in my direction, be aware that this list can change. Prior to the preparation for this post, a different album would have occupied one of these spots. The Miseducation of Lauren Hill was undeniably the culturally declared album of the year in 1998, a massive commercial success that also landed Hill a slew of Grammys. If anything, however, its reputation has only grown over time. It is a smartly balanced mix of hip hop and neo-soul, with just enough contemporary (90’s) R&B to secure that chart success. Hill gets to showcase her multi-threat bona fides by rapping and singing at a high level across the relatively lengthy record. I don’t think she necessarily deserves her placement on so many “Greatest emcees of all time” lists, likely a function of those lists being starved for quality female representation, but her rapping is terrific regardless. To me, though, it's her writing and arranging that truly shines, and likely the cause for the album’s sustained positive reputation. She tackles universal topics, like relationships, with relatable lyrics and catchy melodies (“Ex-Factor”, “Doo Wop (That Thing)”), but she also delves into highly personal topics in ways that are authentic and vulnerable. “To Zion” finds Hill expressing the push and pull of her personal and professional life, and the pressure she felt to terminate a pregnancy to focus on her burgeoning career. She decided to carry out the pregnancy instead, making the song a celebratory love letter to her young child, but that theme of navigating the music industry is one that she picks up throughout the album. “Lost Ones” is a diss track aimed at her former Fugees bandmate, Wyclef Jean, and a bold choice to open the album. By doing so, Hill simultaneously separates from her past and establishes herself as solo act, shows off that she was actually the best emcee* from the Fugees despite being cast in the “singer” role, and captures the hearts of self-avowed Wyclef haters like myself. The complementary nature of neo-soul and hip hop was still being explored in the late nineties, but it was Miseducation that first blended the two in such a balanced way. Instead of using samples, an essential element of hip hop, Hill and crew played interpolations of songs from artists as varied as the Wu Tang Clan, Bob Marley and the Doors, serving the same function without disrupting the soulful flow of live instrumentation. She takes time to deliver straight-forward rap bangers (“Final Hour”) alongside heartfelt duets with D’Angelo and Mary J. Blige, and seamlessly switches from singing to rapping on several tracks. It would be tempting to deride the album’s length as an indicator of bloat, except the last few tracks are just as vital as the first ones. 

If anything, I kind of feel like an idiot for letting this one slip past me for so many years. It is pretty much the perfect marriage of rap and soul, and only a couple of albums come to mind as achieving a similar level of quality along the same dimensions (Sometimes I Might Be Introvert - Little Simz; Be - Common). For the next album on my list, I can formulate a bit of a defense for overlooking it, but I really have no excuse for sleeping on Lauren. It is unlikely to ever unseat Aquemeni as my favorite album of 1998, but I wouldn’t be surprised to look back in the next few years and find that it slots in at #2 or #3. If you find you’ve been as foolish as me, go ahead and give this one a listen. It’s never too late to catch up to the rest of the world.

* It always feels a little weird to spell out the word “emcee”, although I find using “MC” seems slightly more awkward. I just listened to a podcast where Questlove and Open Mike Eagle declared that the word went out of fashion entirely around 2012, so maybe I should move on to “rapper” or whatever. I could go full douchebag and call them “rap singers” like that dumb teen in Hocus Pocus. I mean I get that Salem, Mass isn’t exactly Compton, but that movie came out in 1993 - even square news anchors knew enough to call them “rap artists” in a post-Vanilla Ice, post-MC Hammer, post-The Chronic world. I mean, his family just moved there from Los Angeles, he doesn't have access to fresher slang? Wait... what was I talking about again?

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6. XO – Elliott Smith

I am wary of the so-called “singer-songwriter”. I don’t mean The Weeknd or Remi Wolf or Rick James or Ronnie James Dio, all artists who both sing and write songs. I mean the type of artist that is so defined by the fact that they sing their own lyrics that it becomes their entire musical classification. Genre labels are imperfect at their best, but when the only description available is “singer-songwriter”, it can be hard to know what to expect from an album other than an aggregate Metacritic score in the 83-86 range. Which becomes part of my problem. I have been let down more often by highly celebrated “singer-songwriter” records than albums with any other descriptor. They can be great, of course - last year’s Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt deserves all of its praise, for example - but I find that I have a much lower tolerance for sleepy, autobiographical pseudo-folk music than the majority of critics out there. That has always sort of been the case, actually, which is why I haven’t given Elliott Smith a fair shake before. I must have listened to XO at some point in the past couple of decades, it’s big enough and well regarded enough, but I likely went into it assuming that it wasn’t for me and just waiting to have my presumptions validated. In the year 2025, however, that is no longer the case. XO does all the things you would expect from a “singer-songwriter” album, but also functions as indie rock with dreamy pop hooks that doesn’t rely solely on earnestly-sung, confessional lyrics to get by. The lyrics are intelligible in so far as they are about relationships, mostly gone bad, but they are not easily deciphered in their specifics. Smith deploys poetic writing, cut with wryness, that makes his songs intriguing and rewarding after multiple listens. The opener, “Sweet Adeline”, reminds me of a cross between Leonard Cohen and the Grateful Dead, albeit with much better singing. Elsewhere on the album, I pick up hints of Harry Nilsson and Billy Joel and Big Star. I don’t love all of those acts, but they each one know their way around a song that has pop appeal. The blend of that solid song-craft with the type of emotional investment that is typically emblematic of “singer-songwriters” is a cocktail that proves quite intoxicating. Yet another example of why it pays to occasionally revisit music that you once dismissed.

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7. In Carterian Fashion – James Carter

I’ve always considered myself a bit of a jazz traditionalist. What that really means, though, is that I am mostly enamored with the type of jazz I heard when I first discovered the artform: Late fifties and early sixties hard bop and modal jazz, to be precise. I enjoy work from before that era, Birth of the Cool and Lester Young and bebop for example, but 1957-1965 is really my sweet spot. I think the idea of equating that predilection to traditionalism is that the direction the music took immediately after that time period does not particularly appeal to me. If we extended that “classics I don’t care for” list I brought up earlier, it wouldn’t take long to run into Bitches Brew or The Shape of Jazz to Come. Lately I’ve come to reevaluate that “traditionalist” label somewhat, because there is a recent resurgence of modern jazz which is neither traditional in the way that I have applied the term nor avant garde in the ways that failed to resonate with me as I conducted my initial exploration of the music. Kamasi Washington, Nubya Garcia and Makaya McCraven are all artists I really enjoy, and they are forging their own styles that are largely divorced from the prevalent sounds of the past. I bring this up to say that I’m actually not really a jazz traditionalist, I just have preferences that differ from where jazz was headed when it largely faded from prominence in the late sixties and early seventies. I bring it up during this specific review, because In Carterian Fashion flashes elements of each of the styles that I’ve mentioned above, making this a great album to illustrate the bridge across the jazz of the past and the present day. “Skull Grabbin’”, for example, is pretty out there for me in ways that wouldn't sound out of place in an Ornette Coleman album from 1970. Songs like “Frisco’s Follies” or “Down to the River”, on the other hand, are more grounded and less abstract, and fit squarely into my preferred style. The contrast works for me in this instance because Carter brings such energy and nimbleness to the more experimental cuts that they undeniably sound terrific, and honestly, I don’t connect with his work emotionally as much as I do with some of my favorite jazz recordings, so the tracks that directly align with my personal tastes don't overwhelm the others. That may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but I find the balance to really help the flow of the album and keep me equally engaged throughout the entire setlist. "Lockjaw's Lament" straddles both styles in a very satisfying way, driven by Carter's zestful horn. Finally, the album-closing title track features elements of rock and funk in a way that is more modern than the seventies jazz-fusion movement which attempted the same things, foreshadowing the current era of forward thinking jazz. The variety of music on hand and the spirited saxophone from Carter make this a rare jazz highlight from the vast period in between the genre’s artistic peaks.

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8. This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours – Manic Street Preachers

British pop and rock has been ubiquitous in popular music across the past three quarters of a century or so. While rock and roll is most closely associated with America, that association is driven more by its consumption than its production. Once you get past the genesis of the artform in the fifties, the United Kingdom has probably delivered major rock acts at a rate of two to one compared to the states, and if you look at the statistics per capita, its even more overwhelming. What's interesting about it is that the recursive influence loop between America and the UK typically backgrounds the national origin of the band. The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Dire Straights, and many others typically sound just as American and sing about similar topics as Guns N' Roses, The Doors, or Tom Petty. They know where their bread is buttered, so the Beatles are more likely to cover "Kansas City" or Zeppelin to sing about "Going to California" than they are to reminisce over their youth in Liverpool or London. Every once and awhile, John Entwistle or Roger Deacon would sneak in some particularly British flavor into the Who or Queen, but largely the big British and American acts have been indistinguishable from each other. There are a handful of British acts, however, that simply exude an air of "Britishness". Oasis, The Stone Roses, Aztec Camera - impossible to mistake for American. It's less about an accent or choice of words, and more about the way the music sounds. Similar to the way Southern rock of the seventies is instantly identifiable as Southern rock, this particular brand of Brit-Rock carries similar sonic hallmarks, albeit ones that are not so easily described. Welsch act, Manic Street Preachers, falls into that category.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours is an inherently political record, at times incendiary. The way that an American act would approach this material is more likely to amp up the aggression and anger, or perhaps the darkness and nihilism. Manic Street Preachers instead present an earnest and hopeful album with a flair for the dramatic. "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" expresses a sentiment that remains unfortunately evergreen in terms of relevance, but does so with swelling instrumentation and a soaring chorus. "S.Y.M.M" (South Yorkshire Mass Murderer) critically examines an incident where police actions indirectly led to the death of 97 people in a crowd rush at a football match. It does contain some darker shades than other tracks on the album, and I find it very moving, but it is a far cry from Rage Against the Machine style vitriol. Social and political issues are not the only thing on offer here, though. There are personal songs about the grind of being a touring rock band ("You Stole the Sun from My Heart") and dealing with depression ("You're Tender and Your Tired"). In fact, depression and isolation are a recurring theme. My favorite track, "Black Dog on My Shoulder" is explicitly about the subject. The lyrics aren't what draw me to the tune, though, but rather the simple, propulsive guitar, the clever phrasing of singer James Bradfield, and the sophisticated movement of the music across it's five minutes of run time. I think that illustrates what makes TIMTTMY so successful. With subject matter and sincerity that could easily lead the album down some maudlin passageways, the Manic Street Preachers invest in deliberate and dynamic songcraft so that the music just sounds great in any context and you don't have to engage with the subject matter to enjoy your listening experience. As I mentioned above, it also scratches that itch when you are looking to indulge your anglophile tendencies.

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9. System of a Down – System of a Down

As it has done since its inception at the dawn of the seventies, heavy metal was undergoing an evolution of sorts at the end of the nineties. Nu-metal borrowed the groove-focus of early nineties acts like Pantera and Machine Head and applied elements from hip hop and electronic music to brew up a concoction that proved to be more digestible to a mainstream audience. In parallel, alternative metal acts were experimenting with time signatures and vocal approaches which proved to be more critically appreciated (while staying plenty commercially viable, too). System of a Down, at least on their self-titled debut, splits the difference of both approaches, while also capturing a punk-inspired/Bad Brains brand of aggression that differentiates them from their peers. If you listen to "Mind", you could easily picture Korn performing it, while a track like "Spiders" follows the Tool formula to a tee. Drifting further out from the contemporary 1998 metal scene, "DDevil" recalls the wackiness of certain early Faith No More or even a "metalized" They Might Be Giants. That isn't to say that System of a Down simply apes the styles of their contemporaries. The most obvious element that sets them apart is the singing of front man Serj Tankian. Tankian is a fearless vocalist, caterwauling and shouting and pseudo-rapping unpredictably all over the track list. The raw energy he brings is matched by the musicianship of his bandmates, and guitarist Daron Malakian particularly stands out to me as a performer who diverges from his peers in a similar way to Tom Morello or even Kim Thayil. Beyond the individual components, though, the band's debut stands apart from the pack in the way that it captures all of that variety in such a tight package. Most of the songs on the album are in the two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minute range, and they squeeze thirteen of them into forty minutes. Given that each tune has a ton going on rhythmically and vocally, including transitions and tempo changes, you really feel the affect of so much concentrated creativity. The group would go on to fully shed noticeable influences from the metal scene in subsequent releases, but their presence on System of a Down does not detract from the punchy, pungent impact you feel when you listen to it.

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10. Hello Nasty – Beastie Boys

I’ve been a Beastie Boys fan since the third grade. Their 1986 album, License to Ill, was a foundational album in my hip hop fandom, second only to Run DMC’s Raising Hell from earlier that year. By 1998, I was still listening to the Beastie Boys, but I wasn’t particularly interested in new Beastie Boys music. The craft of rhyming had come a long way since 1986, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to the Beasties. Musically, the NY-based trio were tremendously ambitious and experimental on Hello Nasty, as they typically were on all of their albums, but their lyrical style had pretty much matured as much as it was going to by 1989. That style also wasn’t particularly cutting edge even back then, so compared to the emerging flows of Outkast, Jay Z, and Black Star, the Boys sounded a little quaint in ‘98. I recall enjoying “Intergalactic” and the other singles from the record, but I had more exciting artists to pursue at the time. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I think that an album like Hello Nasty actually sounds better in 2025 than it did when it was released. A major part of that is that while the Beastie Boys stayed fairly static in their approach, that approach is still mostly unique in the annals of hip hop history. Surely they influenced some artists along the way (Jurassic Five, for example), but their trademark give-and-go rhyming technique sounds even more novel now than it did when they were releasing music. You can find Jigga and Outkast disciples all over the hip hop from the last couple of decades, but you kind of need to listen to the Beastie Boys if you want to hear the type of thing that they’re good at, and so I find myself very open to rediscovering their later-period output which I had mostly ignored when it came out. 

To be clear, I don’t think that Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA are bad, or even subpar emcees. They are sort of hard to rate individually, since their verses are so intertwined and rely on the collective energy that they bring.* They do their thing all over Hello Nasty, and I appreciate the vibrant, funky beats after their last couple of releases were drenched in fuzz and reverb. Production and song structure are truly what separate this album from the pack, and leave albums by DMX or Big Pun outside of the top ten. Several tracks are not hip hop at all, instead touching on genres like psychedelic pop, funk-rock, trip-hop and reggae. These excursions start popping up more and more frequently as the album plays, making it feel like a “Beastie Boys Radio” type of station from Pandora or Spotify, where it starts off as expected but drifts further and further afield the longer you listen, until the algorithm finds its way to music that is completely unrecognizable from the original prompt. With all of that creative and unexpected weirdness mixed in with the typical hip hop bangers, Hello Nasty really pops when you listen to it, even today. It turns out that the Beastie Boys were evolving, just through the influence of nineties contemporaries like Spiritualized and Portishead rather than Tupac and Nas.

* Fine, they probably average L - 5.3; F - 6.7; P - 8.3. 

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Honorable Mentions

Pop/Rock:  Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk - Jeff Buckley; Moon Safari - Air; Munki - The Jesus and Mary Chain; Mermaid Avenue - Billy Bragg & Wilco; Is This Desire? - PJ Harvey; Before These Crowded Streets - Dave Matthews Band; Deserter’s Songs - Mercury Rev; BBC Sessions - Jimi Hendrix; Mutations - Beck; The Philosopher’s Stone - Van Morrison; Walking into Clarksdale - Page & Plant

Hip Hop:  Capital Punishment - Big Pun; It’s Dark and Hell is Hot - DMX;  Bobby Digital in Stereo - RZA; Tical 2000: Judgement Day - Method Man; Soul Survivor - Pete Rock; 3rd Eye Vision - Hieroglyphics

Metal:  My Arms, Your Hearse - Opeth; The Bedlam in Goliath - The Mars Volta; The White - Agalloch; Twilight of the Thunder God - Amon Amarth; Obsolete - Fear Factory; The Elephant Riders - Clutch

Country: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road - Lucinda Williams; Teatro - Willie Nelson 

Funk: Manu Safari - Manu Dibango; Crystal Ball - Prince