Janet Jackson is an artist I've always wanted to do for this series, and since her 11th album Unbreakable is out this week, I stopped procrastinating. In some ways she's ideal for it, and in other ways she's not. She's one of the most impressively successful singles artists of all time, one of the people who really mastered the art of the singles campaign -- for instance, 2 of the only 7 albums to have spun off six top 5 hits were by Janet. Her brother Michael also made 2 of them, and of course he remains one of the few to ever travel in the same pop stratosphere.

We know that great women often only get to show us their greatness if they share a famous name with a brother or father or husband. And we know that that's an indictment of the world we live in, and not those women. We know there's a very strong case to be made for Janet's catalog being deeper, more satisfying and consistent, with more front-to-back enjoyable albums, than certain other people in her family, but we don't need to talk about that. Greatness is greatness.

Janet Jackson Deep Album Cuts (Spotify / Tidal):

1. Funky Big Band
2. What About
3. Lonely
4. He Doesn't Know I'm Alive
5. Empty
6. The 1 featuring Missy Elliott
7. When We Oooo
8. SloLove
9. Get It Out Me
10. The Knowledge
11. New Agenda featuring Chuck D
12. Livin' In A World (They Didn't Make)
13. Pretty Boy
14. You'll Never Find (A Love Like Mine)
15. You Can Be Mine
16. Velvet Rope featuring Vanessa-Mae
17. This Time

Track 13 from Janet Jackson (1982)
Track 14 from Dream Street (1984)
Tracks 4 and 15 from Control (1986)
Tracks 3, 10 and 12 from Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989)
Tracks 1, 11 and 17 from janet. (1993)
Tracks 2, 5 and 16 from The Velvet Rope (1997)
Track 7 from All For You (2001)
Track 8 from Damita Jo (2004)
Track 9 from 20 Y.O. (2006)
Track 6 from Discipline (2008)

Janet Jackson's 10 albums before Unbreakable can be cleanly divided into two halves -- the 5 multiplatinum blockbusters in which she reigned over the pop charts with #1 singles, and the rest. The first two albums got lost in the shuffle of all the Jacksons who had records on the shelves, with Jermaine and Rebbie outselling her at the time (Janet did a little better than La Toya, at least). And then, on the heels an ill-fated Super Bowl halftime performance in 2004, Janet's sales and airplay plummeted over the course of three back-to-back albums. It's only after a 7-year break that it feels like a good time to welcome her back, to appreciate the whole catalog, to maybe forget that goddamn halftime show.

It was fun to dive into those early albums that are but a footnote in Janet's career now. Janet Jackson is a bit of an Off The Wall wannabe, but the guileless joy of her voice was already fully formed at that point. Dream Street had tracks by Georgio Moroder, but the best parts, including "Pretty Boy," were produced by The Time guitarist Jesse Johnson, making him the first of 5 members of The Time to have produced Janet Jackson songs (Everyone knows about Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, but Jellybean Johnson produced "Black Cat" and Monte Moir produced "The Pleasure Principle"). Jesse Johnson played guitar on Rhythm Nation but never produced for her again.

Control is a wonderful album, but in some way it stands apart from the rest of her hit records. It's just 9 tracks, 7 of which were singles, much like Thriller (even one of the two Control deep cuts, "You Can Be Mine," has a similar title to the Thriller deep cut "Baby Be Mine"). The next 7 albums, however, follow a different format, with short interludes between nearly every song, ballooning the tracklists out to as many as 28 tracks. Those interludes are largely spoken, sometimes outright explaining what the song or the album is about instead of just letting the music speak for itself, and in some ways it's refreshing to free the deep cuts from the context of those skits. But the way she wove them into most of her albums also illustrates just how seriously she takes the art of the album, and how much she worked to give hers a certain personal touch and texture that other pop stars' albums lacked.

Velvet Rope is my favorite of her albums, and also the one that I think has been served well by the passage of time. It sold half of what its immediate predecessors sold, but she was such a giant star that it was still one of the biggest albums of the 1997. And it stands so far apart from anything anyone else was making on that scale in that year, and feels so prescient today, in an era of intensely personal, kinky, genre-bending R&B. You could drop "Empty" onto an album by a new artist today and people would go apeshit for it.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna

a) Lost River
Ryan Gosling has always seemed to me like one of those pretentious Hollywood hunks who wants to come off way smarter and artier than he does (or is), so I will cop to my schadenfreude that his directorial debut was panned as some fake deep David Lynch wannabe nonsense. That's pretty much what it is, with a lot of weird gorey moments and extreme color palettes and a story that never really coheres into anything worth following.

b) Still Alice
I've never been a huge fan of Julianne Moore, outside of some of her more comedic performances, so when this movie got Oscar love I kinda rolled my eyes like oh jeez here we go, another goddamn poignant movie. But OK, this was a goddamn poignant movie. Alzheimer's is devastating for anyone, but to watch it happen to a character whose life revolves around language, and how it effects their ability to communicate, that really got to me. I like how small and understated it was, just laid things out as they could and probably often do happen, never laid on the melodrama too thick or anything.

c) Into The Woods
My wife has seen the stage musical and said they did a good job with the movie, so I'll take her word for it. I like most of the cast and found it all pretty charming, but I never really know how I feel about musicals unless I see it multiple times and get a handle on the songs. It amused me that Lucy Punch played one of Cinderella's wicked stepsisters, since she also played a wicked stepsister in Ella Enchanted, and in a Cinderella TV movie and a Cinderella episode of a miniseries. What a specific and not entirely flattering career niche to have.

d) Annie
Will Gluck's first 2 movies, Fired Up! and Easy A, were the 2 funniest teen comedies of the past decade, and his third was a solid romcom. So it surprised me a little that he took a gig directing a reboot of a classic family movie. But while the funniest lines of his previous movies would've been too blue for Annie, they did have a light, upbeat tone that suits this material, so it works pretty well. I never had any particular affection for the first Annie movie or the songs but it seemed like they did a pretty good job of updating them.

e) Dear White People
I was pretty curious to see this movie, just because such an issue-heavy comedy has the potential for greatness, but also walks that tightrope of either being too much about the message to be funny, or sacrificing the message for cheap laughs. And I was really impressed at how well it managed that balancing act, might be the most audacious comedy about race since Blazing Saddles (which is high praise from me, especially considering that our comedies about race not too long ago were shit like White Girls and Malibu's Most Wanted). Sometimes I gasped at the fearlessness a little more than I laughed, but there were some good laughs in there too. What I really liked, though, was that they had so many characters representing different perspectives, but nobody got off easy, everyone had a good point in one scene but was a hypocrite in another, it really pushed you to consider different sides of the issue and not treat anything sacred.

f) Two Night Stand
This is one of those really mainstream-friendly romcoms that don't really get any critical buzz but also don't get a wide enough release to make any money -- basically the power pop bands of the film world. Maybe if they'd released it after Miles Teller got more famous off of Whiplash it could've done well, or if they just had more famous leads altogether, this movie would've done really well. But I liked it as is -- I like Analeigh Tipton more every time I see her in something, and Teller comes off as a conceited dickhead as usual, but in this case it kind works as part of the character.

g) The Oranges
Leighton Meester and Adam Brody just had a kid together, and I just watched the movie they made together a few years ago where she curves him to have an affair with his dad, played by Hugh Laurie. This whole movie came off very awkward and strained to me, like it wanted to be a dark comedy about a middle-aged guy cheating on his wife with his neighbors' young daughter, but everything is played so light, nobody really reacts to anything in a way that is at all realistic, but it also isn't very funny either.

h) Breaking Upwards
Zoe Lister-Jones has become one of my favorite unheralded people on TV thanks to her guest arc on "New Girl" and her starring roles on a procession of middling sitcoms she's been the best thing in, so I was curious to see this indie flick she co-wrote from a few years ago. It's a really funny movie, pretty low budget, but kind of took an interesting angle to the usual relationship comedy and ran with it in a weird, funny, extreme direction.

i) Trixie
Back around the turn of the century, when Emily Watson was in the middle of a run of highly awarded roles in prestige dramas, she did this odd little noir detective comedy, produced by Robert Altman and directed by a guy, Alan Rudolph, who I'd never heard of aside from his iffy Breakfast Of Champions adaptation. It's really good, I was pleasantly surprised, I feel like movies like this usually gain a cult following but as far as I can tell this hasn't.

j) Maximum Overdrive

1. Twenty One Pilots - "Tear In My Heart"
Mainstream alternative rock rarely makes adults shake their fists and go "kids these days" the way it once did, even to the degree that, say, My Chemical Romance inspired that kind of reaction a decade ago. Twenty One Pilots have the potential to be that kind of band, though -- their latest album was a surprise #1 on Billboard (after their previous album peaked at #48), and they maim most of their songs with rapping that's far worse than anything you've ever heard on a Linkin Park song (an A$AP Rocky duet was their big coming-out-party at this year's VMA's). "Tear In My Heart" is one of the few songs of theirs that I've heard that has no rapping, and it's a pretty fun little toy piano Ben Folds Five stomper with an abrupt tempo change for a catchy bridge, and a huge sky-opening-up EDM festival synth line on the chorus. But even watching the video brings up all sorts of "kids these days" feelings, with the singer (sometimes rapper) guy wearing weird makeup on his neck and arms that has a pretentious explanation. Here's the Spotify playlist of favorite 2015 singles that I add to every month.

2. Cam - "Burning House"
I come to contemporary mainstream country from a pop perspective, so I'm neutral about the idea of Top 40 interlopers making moves in Nashville. Sometimes it's really bad -- The Band Perry's new single produced by RedOne is a colossal disappointment. But sometimes it's really good -- "Burning House" is produced by Jeff Bhasker (of many later Kanye records and fun.'s "We Are Young"), and the biggest credit on Cam's songwriting resume is one of the few songs I found tolerable on Miley Cyrus's Bangerz. I wish I knew more about the roots of country to figure out why occasionally country ballads, even really mainstream ones like Blake Shelton's "Mine Would Be You," have verses in 7/8, it's interesting to hear unusual time signatures in that context.

3. Jill Scott - "Fool's Gold"
My profile of D.K. The Punisher, the Baltimore producer who did the beat for "Fool's Gold," was in this week's City Paper. It was really cool to find out someone from around here had a hand in this record, which is awesome and kind of a different sound for Jill Scott, and get the story behind how it came together.

4. Jazmine Sullivan - "Let It Burn"
Reality Show is one of the best R&B albums of the year, but it hasn't had any big radio hits like her first two albums, and of the great songs on the album I didn't really expect this one to creep up and be a moderate sleeper hit. But it does sound pretty great on the radio, glad it's gotten out there.

5. Panic! At The Disco - "Hallelujah"
I've always regarded PATD as Fall Out Boy's overly similar (but far less interesting) sidekicks, and the last time I heard from them, they took it to ridiculous extremes with a song that sounded almost exactly like "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light 'Em Up)." So this is a pleasant surprise, easily one of their best singles to date, with a big memorable hook over some drums and horns lifted from an old Chicago song.

6. Leona Lewis - "Thunder"
She was always bigger at home than in the U.S., but Leona Lewis isn't even successful in the U.K. anymore, I like this record, and the "Latch" knockoff song on her new album, she really has a lane and she excels at it, it's a shame she's so transatlantically irrelevant.

7. Rico Richie - "Poppin'"
This song already peaked without ever really getting that big, and I kinda feel bad for this Rico Richie dude. He wrote a smash that every established rapper wished they wrote, which meant that a ton of more established artists did remixes of it and grabbed some of its momentum for themselves, but it never got a really big co-sign. Maybe it would've done better if Rico Richie leased it to someone who needed a single like Ron Browz gave "Pop Champagne" to Jim Jones or something.

8. Rico Love - "Happy Birthday"
Turn The Lights On is a really great and fairly traditional and downtempo R&B record, and this song is far from the best one on it, but stands out as a single because it's so different from the others. Specifically, it sounds eerily like an early N.E.R.D. song, which is why it struck me as funny that even the video looks like a N.E.R.D. video. And that's besides Rico rapping like Ma$e like he does on every song. Maybe now that there's no money to be made on the original "Happy Birthday," this one will catch on.

9. Puff Daddy & The Family f/ Pharrell Williams - "Finna Get Loose"
Speaking of Neptunes and Bad Boy throwbacks, this song is just weird. Sean Combs is back to his old '90s name and hyping up No Way Out II, a sequel to his 1997 blockbuster, but the lead single is a Pharrell collaboration that reminds me of a circa 2003 Diddy/Neptunes record like "Show Me Your Soul" or something. I don't know if this record would be better per se if Puff shelled out money for a good ghostwriter, but it's entertaining just how half-assed the verses are, they practically sound like reference tracks, just grunting in a basic flow.

10. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis f/ Eric Nally, Melle Mel, Kool Moe D, and Grandmaster Caz - "Downtown"
"Thrift Shop" was a pretty stupid song and this feels like the "Gentleman" to its "Gangnam Style," hollowly attempted to replicate a phenomenon. And while it feels kind of trite and obvious to say a Macklemore song would be better without Macklemore on it, I really just can't stop thinking it: his verses are these stupid barely rhyming couplets about mopeds, but if you removed them, you'd have a good 3-minute barrage of "Uptown Funk"-style retro hooks. The three rap legends that show up to chant a few lines are a divisive choice, but what I really like about the song is mostly Eric Nally, previously known as the frontman of a band called Foxy Shazam that had a couple rock radio hits maybe 3 years ago. Macklemore's hits have all been carried by incongruous hooks by non-famous singers, but I enjoy that huge chunks of his big comeback single are dominated by this creepy mustachioed Freddie Mercury wannabe shrieking a schmaltzy showtune.

Worst Single of the Month: R. City f/ Adam Levine - "Locked Away"
These guys have been kicking around the industry, sometimes under the name Rock City or Planet VI, for the last 7 or 8 years -- they had one unpopular single for an album that was going to come out on Akon's label (they did release a mixtape called Put The Fuckin' Album Out -- it didn't work). The last few years, they've been increasingly successful as songwriters, mostly on really obnoxious songs like Miley Cyrus's "We Can't Stop," and were responsible for the fake Migos ad libs on Usher's "I Don't Mind" and the fake Future ad libs on Ciara's "I Bet." So I've been rooting against these hacks forever, and they finally got a big enough star to appear on one of their songs that they couldn't fail. I'm disgusted.

I wrote about Baltimore producer D.K. The Punisher, who recently worked on Jill Scott's hit "Fool's Gold," in this week's City Paper. He'll be hosting Llamadon's Pizza Portal at the Metro Gallery this Friday.

Next week, my new band Maris Vera will make its live debut at Lucky Day in Baltimore on Wednesday, September 30th (and yes, this is a completely different project from my other new band that played its first show last month). Maris Vera is a trio with Tim from Blood Horses and April from Mental School, and the bill also features DaikonDaikon, Harmoos, and my friends Turnt. The address for Lucky Day is 414 E. Lanvale St.

I wrote a piece for Complex about how Future became the hottest rapper in the game.

In the past decade, Rihanna has become one of the most successful singles artists of all time, the youngest artist with 13 #1s on the Hot 100. Rihanna and the brutally effective cottage industry that has sprung up around her to keep her recording chart-topping singles have taken an unusually long break since 2012's Unapologetic, and throughout 2015 she's released singles that kind of fall short of her usual commercial expectations. But it's hard not to imagine that her run is anywhere near over, and in fact it's kind of interesting to see her not just coming out of the gate with an obvious #1 and maybe tinkering with what a Rihanna song should be.

Over the summer I did a piece for The Fader about #Rihjects, the many songs produced by the Rihanna song factory that wound up being released by other artists. So I kind of think as this as a companion piece: songs that were probably also written with an eye on being Rihanna's next smash hit and had to settle for being album tracks. That's not to say that there aren't some very nice songs on Rihanna's album that don't sound like they were intended for radio, but for the most part even her deep cuts have that high level of gloss and hooks. As with Whitney Houston, though, it's hard to get too wound up playing armchair A&R and say anything "should" have been a single, since obviously they've done just fine.

Rihanna Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Do Ya Thing
2. Jump
3. Say It
4. Cold Case Love
5. Watch n' Learn
6. Nobody's Business featuring Chris Brown
7. Complicated
8. Drunk On Love
9. Stupid In Love
10. Fool In Love
11. Question Existing
12. Fading
13. Music Of The Sun
14. A Girl Like Me
15. Good Girl Gone Bad
16. Red Lipstick
17. Get It Over With
18. The Last Song
19. Skin

Track 13 from Music Of The Sun (2005)
Track 14 from A Girl Like Me (2006)
Tracks 3, 11 and 15 from Good Girl Gone Bad (2007)
Tracks 4, 9 and 18 from Rated R (2009)
Tracks 7, 12 and 19 from Loud (2010)
Tracks 1, 5, 8, 10 and 16 from Talk That Talk (2011)
Tracks 2, 6 and 17 from Unapologetic (2012)

Although Rihanna undeniably makes a great superstar, I've never been big on her megahits -- I count maybe a handful of her 13 #1s that I'd have a problem with never hearing again (and only a "Rude Boy" is a masterpiece to me). I've always liked a lot of her singles that never got too overexposed, though, like "You Da One" and "If It's Lovin' That You Want" and "Loveeeeeee Song." So digging into the albums for Rihanna songs that I'm not sick of has been fun.

Some of these albums are so hit-packed that there wasn't that much to choose from -- Loud had 7 singles, plus a remix of another hit, out of only 11 tracks. But Talk That Talk's deluxe edition has a wealth of great songs -- 3 of the 5 songs I used are bonus tracks, including the weird Metallica-interpolating "Red Lipstick." The early albums feel kind of chintzy and underdeveloped compared to how well formed her voice and persona are on later albums -- even Good Girl Gone Bad feels kind of transitional in retrospect. Rated R feels, understandably given the circumstances, like her darkest and most personal album, and "Cold Case Love" has always been pretty amazing to me, but I think it's kind of hit-and-miss compared to the ones since then. "Nobody's Business" is such an uncomfortable problematic song, and yet it's one of the best things that Rihanna or Chris Brown ever did, I'm kind of glad it wasn't released a single just so I didn't have to admit at the time how much of a jam it was.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran

I made a Fall-themed playlist for Complex Magazine with songs from Miguel, Future Islands, Donnie Trumpet, Sevyn Streeter, and more.

The City Paper's biggest issue of the year, the Best Of Baltimore issue, is out today, and as usual, it's a great celebration of all the things happening in the city. One thing of lesser importance that I also wanted to note: it is the last issue which will feature The Short List, a weekly column about upcoming concerts that had run in City Paper for decades under many bylines, including mine for the past 3 years.

I've had a lot of columns and recurring features in City Paper and other outlets over the years, and usually they run their course after a couple years and I don't really bother to point out when they come to an end, both because it's not a big deal and because I don't want to sound like I'm whining about an outlet or editor who I enjoy working with and made a perfectly reasonable decision about their budget or editorial direction. But in this case I thought I'd mention it, since The Short List has been in the paper for as long as I can remember reading it for the past two decades (as a 13-year-old who didn't realize how doomed he already was to become a music critic, I would cut reviews out of newspapers and magazines, and in 1995 I was saving Lee Gardner's City Paper pieces alongside Rolling Stone and Spin reviews). CP founder Russ Smith told me that The Short List didn't exist when he sold the paper in '87, so it ain't 30 years old, but it's at least 20 years old.

The Short List has mostly been the responsibility of the music editor over the years, but Anna Ditkoff had a really memorable tenure writing it, and has remained an inspiration to me for how a fairly nondescript concert directory can be funny and opinionated and even inspire hate mail. I don't know how people put it together before every venue had a frequently updated website, but even in the present day it's been a beast to assemble, and any day I had some free time I usually combed a couple venue websites adding shows to a giant messy word document. Writing 40 or 50 sentences a week about 40 or 50 shows is a little more like data entry than music criticism, but I always tried to sneak something intriguing or funny in for whoever was trying to figure out what to see that night.

Although there's a music section in the City Paper that continues to be edited, there hasn't been an individual whose only title was 'music editor' since Michael Byrne left in 2012, which is when I was brought in to write it for the time being. I had no idea how long it would last, and 3 years and 3 months is longer than I expected. Having a freelancer write The Short List was, I'm sure, cheaper than hiring another music editor, but not as cheap as discontinuing The Short List entirely. And I don't say that bitterly -- the people running the business have to run the business, and I'd rather they cut that than any number of other, more important things. I'll make my daycare money writing other things, for City Paper and elsewhere, that I frankly often wished I had more time to work on when I was sweating to meet the Short List deadline every week. So I'm good with this change, but I wanted to say a quick eulogy for The Short List, as the last of many who oversaw it over the last couple decades.

9/18/15 EDIT: This post has inspired an informative and entertaining Facebook thread with several former City Paper editors, including David Dudley, who confirmed originating The Short List in 1993 or 1994.

a) "The Carmichael Show"
Over the summer, NBC originally planned to air two new shows starring black comedians, "Mr. Robinson" and "The Carmichael Show," together as a block on Wednesday nights. Then, they decided to air 2 episodes of "Robinson" for 3 weeks, and then do the same for "Carmichael." And now, having seen both shows, I understand why. "Mr. Robinson," as I wrote last month, is a corny throwback sitcom about a schoolteacher that reminds me of something I would've seen in the '80s, complete with outdated jokes. "The Carmichael Show," by contrast, is an old-fashioned sitcom in a different way, with a family talking out serious issues "All In The Family"-style in front of a live studio audience. And it's really funny and really fearless within that comfortably familiar format. If NBC had aired these shows together, the "Robinson" episode where a wacky British rock star swings through town would've aired the same night that "Carmichael" dedicated an entire episode to Black Lives Matter protests. And yesterday, NBC cancelled "Robinson" and picked up "Carmichael" for a second season, so all's well that ends well.

b) "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" 
I was never as worried as a lot of people were about Colbert leaving his 'conservative persona' behind on the jump from Comedy Central to CBS -- as masterfully as he pulled it off for 10 years, he's strong enough as a host and comedian that he doesn't need to cling to it even in a format where it would have more issues. So far, I've liked the new show -- it looks weird seeing him stand up for a monologue, and I wonder if he'll eventually start doing it behind a desk like Seth Meyers did. But I think people have been a little harsh about the changes, he's off to a strong start, and the interviews have a strong dynamic with him being himself a little more. And it pissed me off so much that CBS had been filling the 11:30 timeslot with shit like "The Mentalist" since Letterman went off the air that I loved that inspiring a recurring gag in the first episode.

c) "Moonbeam City" 
Much like "Archer" on FX, this new show on Comedy Central feels like a transparent example of networks seeing all the cool genre parody shows on Adult Swim and wanting a piece of the action. And my biggest issue with these kinds of shows is that the other networks don't do 15-minute shows like Adult Swim, so you get something that might work in that format stretched out to a 30-minute sitcom format, where it doesn't quite work as well. This show is all "Miami Vice"-style neon cop noir, and maybe the best decision they made is to have Rob Lowe play the main character, since his voice carries so much '80s douchebag charisma with it. The pilot is funny here and there, but I find this kind of thing very difficult to muster any enthusiasm for.

d) "Public Morals" 
Edward Burns has been a TV-level talent for as long as he's been making movies. And it's funny that a fictional version of himself that Burns played on "Entourage" admitted this a decade before the real Burns finally did -- I'm even tempted to compare "Public Morals" to "Five Towns" as if it actually existed. He's not even great at TV, though, this retro crime show just feels like a low budget wannabe "Boardwalk Empire," without the money or effort to make the costumes or sets convincingly evoke the era. Michael Rapaport and Neal McDonough are particularly wasted. It's at least nice to see Lyndon Smith, who was good on "Parenthood," get another TV gig.

e) "Narcos" 
I'm starting to be actively annoyed at Netflix doing a data dump of a full season of its shows at once. I know 'binge watching' is all the rage, but I've never really cared to watch things that way. So I tried watching about one episode a week of this out of passive protest, but after about 4 episodes, I think I'm ready to give up anyway. The mix of subtitles and English dialogue/narration is balanced really well and is more watchable than I thought it would be, but I dunno, I'm not that interested. The second episode has more scenes with humping than without, if you're into prestige drama soft porn.

f) "Hand Of God" 
This is Amazon's newest show, and Amazon's track record aside from "Transparent" remains pretty bad. Like Netflix, they dump every episode of a show online at once, and like "Narcos," I'm giving up after a handful of episodes. This show is just emblematic of so many of the worst things about prestige dramas in 2015: a corrupt, powerful antihero (Ron Perlman as a judge) in a gratuitously dark situation (his son is in a coma because he shot himself after his wife was raped) with a confusing pyschological/supernatural twist (Perlman starts hearing commands from the voice of God) and a lot of stupid quirky flourishes to add character (Lance Bass singing in a pet store commercial, a priest fucking a lady on the keyboard of a piano). Maybe all of this could've added up to an interesting show, but it doesn't. And I'm annoyed, because the supporting cast includes Andre Royo, Garrett Dillahunt, and Alona Tal, all people who deserve way better.

g) "Difficult People"
This show started off strong and has just gotten better. As a sitcom, it's pretty unsentimental and mostly exists to set up ridiculously specific pop culture punchlines, but it's managed a good balance of letting Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner be obnoxious myopic people but also funny and easy to identify with. Sometimes the plot demands they say the most awful thing imaginable, and there was a backlash to one of those lines in the pilot, but I thought that was kind of dumb since the episode frames it as a terrible thing that the character experiences consequences for saying. The children's menu episode was my favorite, but the podcast episode was interesting just in how the show is critiquing how the actual comedy world works now, as opposed to some broad, slightly antiquated caricature of TV comedy like "30 Rock."

h) "Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll" 
This show started off okay, and has fallen off pretty quickly. I was entirely too generous about the first 3 episodes, but in fairness, those were the best 3 episodes. Since then, there's been some occasionally amusing music industry satire, but a lot of it is pretty tonedeaf and stupid. And really, some of the funniest parts have just been old guys being confused by terms like 'fleek' or 'normcore.' Mostly it's just a lazy show where the characters change from week to week to fit whatever the episode's stupid story is.

i) "Mr. Robot" 
The twist in the penultimate episode briefly grabbed my attention after a long, sleepy season, but it ultimately made a dumb show feel even dumber to me, especially with what happened in the finale. People are talking about this like one of the best new summer shows and I don't get it. Is this show for anarchist bike messenger Fawkes mask truthers? If it's making fun of them, it's not trying hard enough.

j) "The Jim Gaffigan Show" 
This show is pretty funny, although for some reason I don't buy Adam Goldberg as a standup comedian at all, makes sense why shows about comedy usually have standups playing standups.

k) "You're The Worst"
This was one of my favorite new shows last year, and I'm annoyed that FX shuffled it to FXX this year (which they didn't do with the more watched "Married"), but I'm just glad it's back. The season premiere wasn't huge on laughs but it's good to see where the story is going this year, with the dynamic between Edgar and Lindsay changing, they're kind of the 'secondary' characters but I don't think the show would work half as well without them.

l) "The Strain" 
I think the biggest step forward this show has taken in the second season is that they came up with a reason for Corey Stoll's character to "shave off" the ridiculous hairpiece they'd been making him wear. The vampire mom trying to come back and get her non-vampire son is a pretty delightfully creepy plot, too.

m) "Drunk History" 
The novelty may have worn off, but I still find this show entertaining as hell. I think it's generally funnier when women tell the stories (Jenny Slate and Jessica Meraz have been great this season), but that might be because it reminds me of how funny my wife is when she's drunk, I wish she could be on this show.

n) "Masters Of Sex"
I've predictably enjoyed the Josh Charles arc, having him and Lizzy Caplan act together is just dream casting for me. Interested to see where the Emily Kinney story goes, though.

o) "The Mindy Project"
Shows jumping from network to another used to be a really rare and awkward, protracted process, so I'm impressed with how quickly and seamlessly "The Mindy Project" went from FOX to Hulu. The new season premiered today, actually before it would've if it was still on FOX, which is nice since they were kind of picking up from a cliffhanger on the previous season. I was annoyed by the structure of the episode, which awkwardly cut back and forth between a dream sequence and a 'meanwhile, back in real life' B plot. But it's still funny as ever, I keep thinking about Mindy's fictional Jason Derulo jam, "Big Old Cheekies."

p) "Last Comic Standing" 
The guy who won this year, Clayton English, is pretty good, but honestly a lot of people were pretty good. And most of my favorite contestants (David Tveite, Taylor Tominlson, Sheng Wang, Andi Smith) got knocked out before the top 5, so the finale wasn't that exciting for me.

q) "Project Greenlight" 
The first three seasons of "Project Greenlight" ran 10-15 years ago, and it's kinda weird to see it back now. But I guess the rise in digital video and a lot of new platforms for independent film has made the playing field different and the show feels different. The premiere was interesting because you see all these glimpses of other finalists that you might want to root for, except you already know who wins and who will be the focal point of the show from the second episode onward. There was a scene where Matt Damon interrupts and talks over the one black producer on the project, Effie Brown, during a discussion of diversity, that's become the big flashpoint of discussion for the episode and kinda gets you pissed off at Damon, who you're used to being the smart likable one next to Affleck.

Duran Duran's 14th studio album, Paper Gods, is out today. So I thought I'd do a survey of their career. Or rather, as I often do for this series, I surveyed the part of their career in which they made hit singles, the first 7 of those 14 albums. A lot of times I've had at least some degree of familiarity with an act's catalog beyond their hits before working on these mixes, but in this case I really just jumped into the deep end. They have a handful of singles I love but are not a band I'd ever given a ton of thought, so it was interesting to just listen and try to figure out what I think of them.

Duran Duran Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Anyone Out There
2. To The Shore
3. Tel Aviv
4. New Religion
5. Lonely In Your Nightmare
6. Hold Back The Rain
7. Last Chance On The Stairway
8. I Take The Dice
9. The Seventh Stranger
10. Tiger Tiger
11. American Science
12. Hold Me
13. So Misled
14. Interlude One
15. Palomino
16. My Antarctica
17. First Impressions
18. Shotgun
19. None Of The Above

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Duran Duran (1981)
Tracks 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Rio (1982)
Tracks 8, 9 and 10 from Seven And The Ragged Tiger (1983)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Notorious (1986)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Big Thing (1988)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Liberty (1990)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Duran Duran (The Wedding Album) (1993)

Duran Duran occupy a unique little niche, kind of between worlds -- they were a pop band who wrote their own songs, they looked like models and inspired mass adulation and got respect for their musicianship, but never really got to the point where they were taken especially seriously by anyone. Their first couple albums made them a phenomenon, and then Seven And The Ragged Tiger was a weird coked up mess that didn't derail their career but certainly slowed it down, sort of the Be Here Now of its time. Since then they've had a pretty interesting career.

The collaborations with members of Chic in the Power Station side project and on Notorious may not have been totally unprecedented in the wake of Bowie's Let's Dance, but Duran Duran proved themselves to be at an intersection of punk, disco, and pop that nobody else quite occupied. Notorious might be their most consistently enjoyable album for my money, it's just full of great sounds and ideas. The hardest rocking song, "Hold Me," has this funky clavinet riff in the bridge.

It was fun to find surprising tangents in their catalog, like the dreamy instrumental "Tel Aviv" or the 54-second "Shotgun." One of the best songs on the band's self-titled debut, "To The Shore," was left off of U.S. pressings of the album to make room for the non-album single "Is There Something I Should Know?" in the wake of Rio's success. "First Impressions," a deep cut from the 1990 flop Liberty, was reinterpreted as the basis of one of the band's biggest hits, 1993's "Come Undone."

Simon Le Bon kind of reminds me of Derek Zoolander -- any attempt to be deep or worldly just makes him seem more vapid. Duran Duran is one of those bands, like Motley Crue or Kiss or The Killers, where the undeniable limitations of the frontman make you wonder what the band might've been like with someone smarter and/or more skilled at the mic, but at the same time that goofball is essential to the band's character as it is.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince

This week's Short List.

Kane Mayfield is leaving Baltimore for a while after his show at the Metro Gallery this weekend, and I premiered a new song from a CD he gave away at the show, "Dream Killers," on Noisey.

a) The Skeleton Twins
I find it easy to be cynical about comedic actors taking on dramatic projects; even when they're good, the movies often feel more like painstaking career moves than the right actor in the right role. This is one of those rare movies where it just feels natural and seamless, though -- two of the right actors in the right role, miraculously. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig's most manic comic performances never felt absent of a basic human vulnerability, though, so this movie doesn't ask you to bend over backwards to accept them in a completely new context. They're still really impressive performances, though. I feel like movies tend to depict depression in this humorless way, when it's so much more realistic to see Hader's character use humor as a defense mechanism. It all just felt so much more lived in and unforced than a lot of indie dramas of its kind do.

b) The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies
I'm a fan of Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy and enjoyed the first two Hobbit movies more than most, but it's pretty undeniable that they're wringing the source material dry by this point. The endless battle scenes of the third movie were my least favorite part of the other trilogy, so I dunno, I only put this on out of a sense of completism.

c) The Theory Of Everything
It's interesting to see a wave of movies about intellectual heroes whose accomplishments weren't anything that would translate easily to thrilling cinema like Stephen Hawking, David Foster Wallace, and Steve Jobs. But it's also pretty obvious that they wouldn't be considered biopic potential without the suffering and tragedy to romanticize, and ultimately these movies are probably not about their work very much at all, or at least this one isn't. Eddie Redmayne's performance is pretty impressive, Felicity Jones lights up the screen, and there are scenes that really drive home the gravity of Hawking's physical impairment, and how much it robbed him of experiences in parenthood and in life in general, but it ultimately felt like a facile Oscar movie.

d) Dumb And Dumber To
I love the original Dumb And Dumber enough that, in spite of everything, I felt a little optimism about this movie, that it would at least recapture some enjoyable shred of the original. But man, this started bad, with the opening scene that explained what they'd been up to for the last 20 years, and got worse from there. It'd probably sound ridiculous to imply that the original wasn't crude and over-the-top, but there's something about the worst gags in this one that made the first movie seem, I don't know, dignified in how carefully it walked that line?

e) Big Hero 6
I liked this but I dunno, maybe I need to see it more than once, it didn't really grab me the way I thought it would based on the word of mouth.

f) Ouija
Ouija boards have persisted through the generations, I think because it appeals to an adolescent tendency towards paranoia, letting your imagination get carried away with an ambiguous, interactive game that's always open to interpretation. That doesn't exactly provide a plot for a movie, but it's certainly a vibe that a horror flick could build on. This doesn't, though. It's just another movie with teen girls being terrorized by a ghost, it shows too much instead of building suspense, as board game adaptations go it's somewhere below Battleship.

g) The Equalizer
I'm fine with this trend of respected aging actors doing lowbrow tough guy action movies, the Liam Neeson ones have gotten old but Denzel probably has a few of these in him.

h) Tammy
Let's take a moment and just appreciate, for a moment, the almost unprecedented level of clout Melissa McCarthy has as a comedic actress in Hollywood right now. She's had a string of $100 million grossing movies now, and even Tammy, her indulgent vanity project co-written with and directed by her husband, made a cool $80 million. And honestly, this movie didn't seem like it would be good, but it's easily one of her best movies to date. She surrounds herself with funny veteran actresses (Susan Sarandon, Allison Janney, Kathy Bates), the story is fairly grounded and coherent even if it didn't lend itself to an exciting trailer, and the tone of the humor is a little less lowbrow than Identity Thief or whatever.

i) Godzilla
Has anyone calculated how much Godzilla was even in this? Felt like homeboy barely made a cameo. And while the instinct to open a monster movie with a lot of exposition about the human characters to give the climax some emotional impact is a good idea on paper, it just falls flat here, Cloverfield accomplished something like that much more successfully.

j) Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
The title character is pushed out of this movie almost as much as Godzilla. I hate that people try to adapt these short, simple kids' books (this one being a favorite of mine when I was younger, being the pessimistic little Alexander I was), and have to pad them out in all these weird ways to make it into a traditional 90-minute movie. I mean sure, if you make Steve Carell the dad, of course he's going to get a lot of screentime, but it feels like the movie is about every member of the family more than Alexander, besides just being a lousy unfunny movie on a more basic level.

k) The Other Woman
This movie feels like some kind of weird public beta test for two very famous women who aren't movie stars and want to ease into the business. Kate Upton's role doesn't ask much of her, but she manages to play a funny dingbat a little more successfully that Nicki Minaj does with her wisecracking assistant role, which she delivers in a more stilted, unnatural voice than almost any accent she's rapped in.

l) The Dead Girl
This movie has a sad cloud hanging over it, in the sense that Brittany Murphy played the titular dead girl, only about 3 years before her own untimely passing. It's an interesting, unique movie, though. It's shot like a gritty crime dramas, but each of the 5 segments, which follows a different female character (including some great actresses like Toni Collette and Rose Byrne). really deals with the emotional fallout of a death in a way that most gritty crime dramas only touch on fleetingly, if at all.

1. Teedra Moses - Cognac & Conversation
Teedra Moses released a great debut album, Complex Simplicity, in 2004 on the ill-fated TVT Records, and it never made much of a commercial splash (I heard the single, "Be Your Girl," on Baltimore radio a ton that summer, but it never seemed to take off anywhere else). Since then, there was a mixtape or EP here or there, and a short-lived deal with Maybach Music Group, but this is finally her proper second album, released independently, 11 years later. A couple Rick Ross features indicate that maybe a lot of this record was recorded while she was with MMG, but for the most part this album feels very much like Teedra continuing with the sound she started with, which often has the vibe of a late '70s or early '80s cosmopolitan R&B record, the slow jam album someone would've made just after their disco album, lots of jazzy chords and smooth vibes. There's also one amazing track, "Sound Off (Interlude)," that reminds me of 4Hero circa Two Pages. Check it out on my Spotify playlist of 2015 albums.

2. Mick Jenkins - Wave[s] EP
I only recently caught up on the album that Mick Jenkins caught a buzz for last year, The Water[s], before checking this out, and both are very good. He kind of strikes me as belonging to this newer class of rappers who might've been dismissed as backpackers in another era but found a way to modernize their sound and approach to their subject matter to the point that they're not hemmed into an old 'conscious' stereotype. His voice and delivery aren't as dynamic or immediate as a Kendrick or Chance The Rapper or Vince Staples, but I feel like he could put himself in that category. The production on this record is fantastic and there's a real lucid quality to what he's saying.

3. FKA twigs - M3LL155X EP
I liked the FKA twigs album a lot, although this very rude tweet still makes me laugh. I'm not sure why she's dropping an EP now when she's at a level where it seems like people would be ready for another album, but her music works for me in small doses, I'm not mad at getting a concise little record like this.

4. Maddie & Tae - Start Here
"Girl In A Country Song" is over a year old now, and topped the country radio charts 8 months ago, so it really seemed like the label dropped the ball and let their momentum stall by releasing an EP last year. All 4 songs from the EP are reprised on this 11-track album, which means it doesn't even feel entirely new, but I can't really complain, it's as good an album as I hoped for. "Waitin' On A Plane" is a great opening track, "After The Storm Blows Through" is a lovely acoustic harmony showcase, and they really just have to release "Shut Up And Fish" as a single.

5. Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion
As much handwringing as there is these days about "poptimism" ruining music criticism, the critical narrative still only allows for discussion of roughly one pop album a year (along with one country album, maybe two R&B albums, etc.). This is the one for 2015, and I guess it'll do, it has a few really good songs, my favorite being "Making The Most Of The Night" (which is mostly just Sia making the "on for tonight" part of "Chandelier" into the massive chorus it could've been). But I'm also weary of how transparently the album, and its boosters, have latched onto the Ariel Rechtshaid/Dev Hynes '80s feels that several other critical darlings indulged in before Jepsen became the latest Cyndi Lauper LARPer. I just regard praise for the album's strong points with suspicion, because it comes from people who also briefly tried to sell the nightmare that was "I Really Like You" as pop perfection, and I resent the album for asking me to sit through that song again. "Let's Get Lost" is a jam, though.

6. Mouse On Tha Track - No Commercials
Mouse kinda created his own lane as a rapper/producer in the years that Boosie was away. And although they reunited pretty memorably on "No Juice" last year, the difference between this and Touch Down 2 Cause Hell really illustrates that they've moved in opposite directions musically. Mouse isn't a total Mannie Fresh goofball, though, there's some great downtempo grooves and singsong choruses on here.

7. Dr. Dre - Compton
The three tracks with Kendrick, and a few other guest spots, bring this album to life. But for the most part, it's just a dreary exercise in trying to distinguish Dre's near unrecognizable voice from obscure new sidekicks like King Mez and Justus. Tying this album to Straight Outta Compton and ditching the whole Detox thing was a shrewd move, but the same old same old Aftermath sonics and the occasional punchline about, like, "Desperate Housewives," makes me wonder how much of this album was sitting on a hard drive for 5-10 years. It mostly makes me grateful at how hands-off Dre has been with Kendrick's albums. "Animals" is a great song, at least.

8. Lil B & Chance The Rapper - Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape)
Chance is one of the few rappers working today that I'd consider anything they do a must-hear, so it figures that he would make a record with the cult hero I've always found to be a tedious waste of time as an actual recording artist, beyond his cutesy-poo social media presence. This is actually fun to hear, though, because B is more tolerable with a foil to contrast with, and for once you actually get to hear a hugely talented MC do based freestyles and explore the possibilities of the format that are only vaguely implied when B half-asses his way through improvised verses.

9. The Weeknd - Beauty Behind The Madness
For me, The Weeknd is one of the rare occasions where someone selling out for pop crossover has totally improved their music -- "Love Me Harder" and "Can't Feel My Face" are so much more enjoyable than any of the stupid brooding mixtape stuff if you ask me. I hoped maybe this album would be a full scale pop makeover, but there's only one new Max Martin track, and "In The Night" -- which according to NYT's Weeknd profile prompted a publisher to scream "it's fucking 'Billie Jean!'" -- is kinda underwhelming. There's a lot on here that sounds like the same old same old Weeknd, which will make some people happy, but not me. I do like some of the odder production flourishes like the squealing talkbox solo on the acoustic ballad "Shameless" and the weird jazzy backing on "Losers." I'm kind of on the fence about "Tell Your Friends," though, it's like an awkward imitation of R. Kelly's talk-singing monologues.

10. Talib Kweli - Fuck The Money
I'm a card-carrying Kweli stan who regards Train Of Thought as a classic and found a lot to like about even later albums like Gutter Rainbows. This album is harder to defend, though -- he flips the chorus to "Riot" by 2 Chainz to make it conscious, does a song called "Leslie Nope," tries to get cinephile cred with a David Lynch reference and confuses him with David Cronenberg, and says "we on that dirty sexy money like Blair Underwood." The track produced by Alchemist is cool, though.

Worst Album of the Month: Cal Chuchesta - The New CALassic
As you probably know, YouTube is full of video bloggers (or 'vloggers'), and as a result some of the most well known people reviewing music today are album review vloggers. As you might've guessed, someone like me, whose music criticism is limited to an audience who has the patience to read a few paragraphs, doesn't really think highly of vlogger critics, among whom the most popular is probably Anthony Fantano of theneedledrop. I find Fantano's videos unwatchable less for his opinions than for his desperately obvious aspirations of comedy stardom and uncomfortable improv comedy troupe-level 'characters,' including Cal Chuchesta, a hacky Ned Flanders/Jerry Lundegaard "square midwestern guy" character. He has started rapping in this character, and made an entire album of the garbage, rapping horrible song parodies like "Hot Dinner" (Bobby Shmurda's "Hot N****," but with food references instead of the N-word! my sides!) alongside some truly grim original tracks. And this guy has such a fanbase that this fucking thing got hundreds of thousands of plays on Audiomack, He breaks the fourth wall at the end to kind of apologize for this stupid vanity project, but fuck that, he doesn't get to have his cake and eat it too.

This week's Short List.