It's been a few weeks since that weird day when we all heard that Bushwick Bill had passed away, then got some false hope that he was still alive, and then got the final confirmation that he was gone. And I've been meaning to do a post to memorialize one of the greatest southern rap groups of all time, and highlight some of his unique contributions to their catalog.

The Geto Boys deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Assassins
2. No Sell Out
3. Gangsta Of Love
4. Scarface
5. Mind Of A Lunatic
6. Size Ain't Shit
7. Fuck Em
8. We Can't Be Stopped
9. Homie Don't Play That
10. Chuckie
11. I'm Not A Gentleman
12. Trophy
13. Fuck A War
14. G.E.T.O.
15. Raise Up
16. Still
17. I Just Wanna Die
18. Livin' 4 The Moment
19. Leanin' On You

Track 1 from Making Trouble (1988)
Tracks 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Grip It! On That Other Level (1989)
Tracks 4, 5, 6 and 7 from The Geto Boys (1990)
Tracks 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 from We Can't Be Stopped (1991)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Till Death Do Us Part (1993)
Tracks 16 and 17 from The Resurrection (1996)
Track 18 from Da Good Da Bad & Da Ugly (1998)
Track 19 from The Foundation (2005)

The first album Making Trouble was essentially made by a completely different group than the most famous lineup of the Geto Boys. DJ Ready Red was in the group then, as was Bushwick Bill (then known as Little Billy), who only made a brief spoken appearance on the outro "The Problem." But the whole album is rapped by Sire Jukebox and Prince Johnny C, who were never heard from again (and there were some other dudes, Raheem and Sir Rap-A-Lot, on the singles before that album). Making Trouble sounds more like Run DMC than what we think of as the Geto Boys' sound, but there was still some of the blueprint there, including over-the-top violent lyrics and a ton of samples of Al Pacino in Scarface that would eventually find a more famous home in the song "Scarface" that would  famously lead Brad Jordan to change his MC name from Akshen to Scarface. And the original "Assassins," later re-recorded by the 1990 lineup, has been called the first horrorcore rap song by Violent J of Insane Clown Posse.

For a long time, I just knew We Can't Be Stopped and Till Death Do Us Part and figured that was about as much of the Geto Boys discography as I needed to hear. But then I read one of the best hip hop books in the 33 1/3 series, Geto Boys by Rolf Potts, and came around to the greatness of the group's self-titled album and appreciated its place in history as a watershed moment in both the growth of southern hip hop and the early '90s battles over censorship and extreme content on hip hop albums. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in the Geto Boys.

Grip It! On That Other Level and Geto Boys are basically the same album, first issued independently by Rap-A-Lot and then remixed by Rick Rubin for a wider release on his Def American label. There are two songs that are only on the former (including "No Sell Out") and two songs that are only on the latter (including "Fuck Em"), but the other 10 songs are the same. "Gangster of Love" was remixed for the later album because of sample clearance, I used the original version with the Steve Miller sample, but the other version with the Lynyrd Skynyrd sample is also great.

The lineup shifted here and there on later albums, Willie D wasn't in the group for Till Death Do Us Part, which had Big Mike as the 3rd MC, and Bushwick wasn't there for Da Good Da Bad & Da Ugly (kind of interesting that the guy with by far the biggest solo career, Scarface, is the only one who never left to focus on his solo career, even after his albums started outselling the group's albums). There's good stuff on the later albums, though, The Resurrection has some very west coast-influenced tracks including "Still," which was of course featured in Office Space along with the more famous single "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta."

I'll probably do a Scarface deep cuts playlist at some point, he's got one of the greatest discographies in hip hop history. His work for Geto Boys is often just as good, obviously "Mind Playin' Tricks On Me" is a masterpiece, but there's a bigger focus on shock value and violence, even after Face's solo records took a turn toward more contemplative, emotionally nuanced lyrics. Bushwick Bill wasn't much of a writer and Willie D and Scarface wrote a lot of his lyrics, but Bushwick was a really smart, interesting guy and I feel like they gave him a lot of the group's best verses. There's something about his terse, plainspoken delivery that really gives gravitas to what he says, obviously "Size Ain't Shit" is kind of his signature song but then you get some really revealing verses on songs like "I Just Wanna Die," which touches on the suicide attempt that resulted in the infamous We Can't Be Stopped cover.

Spin put together a list of the best alternative rock songs of 1999, and I voted on what made the list and wrote blurbs about Limp Bizkit, Our Lady Peace, Godsmack, Chris Cornell, and Kid Rock.

Jeff Lynne's ELO is playing in Minnesota tonight, so I updated by Electric Light Orchestra deep album cuts playlist for City Pages.

Woodfir's next show is at Reverb in Baltimore on August 2nd with Red This Ever, Maryjo Mattea, and Shea. We finally have merch, there will be Woodfir shirts at the show!

a) "The Loudest Voice"
I haven't seen the Christian Bale as Dick Cheney movie yet, but it seems about as pointless as this miniseries where Russell Crowe plays Roger Ailes. Setting aside that it's not that impressive for a 3 star asshole like Crowe to put on about 10 pounds and play a 5 star asshole, it's just not nuanced or revelatory enough to be interesting -- if I had to write a script about Ailes with no time to research, it would be a lot like this, which is to say it's exactly what you'd expect with a surface level understanding of his life and Fox News. Maybe that means the show is lazy or poorly written, or just that the truth is depressingly obvious and self-evident, but either way it makes me wonder if they shouldn't have bothered.

b) "Years And Years"
"Years And Years" is a really unique show, I've never seen anything quite like it. On one hand, it's kind of a standard family drama tracing a British family through different eras of their lives. On the other hand, the story starts in 2019 and moves several years into the future, setting the Lyon family saga against a backdrop of political and economic collapse to come, with Emma Thompson as the wealthy businesswoman who eventually becomes Prime Minister after stumbling into a political career by blurting out offensive things on television. That character plays an interesting role in the show, because it's not about her or her inner life -- you only see Thompson as she appears in public or on TV, from the perspective of the Lyonses. And she's not exactly a Trump joke -- in fact the most terrifying thing about the show as it speeds through the years is you see Trump get re-elected, nuke a Chinese territory, and then help Mike Pence get elected as the next POTUS. It all plays out just plausibly enough to be really stressful to watch. I don't know if Thompson's character is eventually going to save the world or if she's as awful as she seems, I feel like I won't be able to say whether I loved this show or hated it until I see how it ends.

c) "The Rook"
This Starz series opens with a woman waking up with no memories and surrounded by dead bodies, and gradually finding out she's a British spy with telekinetic powers. Not super original as far as sci-fi goes, but a pretty good premise to start with and some interesting little concepts like 4 bodies sharing the same mind (played by 3 actors, one of them portraying twins). It's been a little slow going and humorless so far, though, at the end of the third episode my wife declared "I really want to like this show, but it's kind of boring."

d) "Florida Girls"
At this point making fun of Florida is a national pastime that's eclipsed making fun of New Jersey, so I was wary that "Florida Girls" would just be one big obvious joke about trashy Floridians. But the creator of the show is a woman from Florida, and while the show can be broad at times, it's also charming and the characters are grounded in some level of self-awareness, they're not total caricatures. It kind of feels like the show "Claws" probably would've been when it was developed as a half hour comedy, before it became an hourlong show and they ramped up the crime drama angle.

e) "What Just Happened??! with Fred Savage"
This show is a satire of "Talking Dead"-type recap talk shows that now often air after popular dramas, and host Fred Savage's show pretends to follow an imaginary hit FOX sci-fi drama called "The Flare." So "What Just Happened??!" opens each week with the final scene from an episode of "The Flare," a pitch perfect satire of big pompous network drama cliffhanger endings (in that respect, it reminds me of Savage's last FOX show, "The Grinder," which always opened with a scene from the fake legal drama show-within-the-show). They do some pretty amusing stuff with the concept, including making Savage a huge fan of the books "The Flare" is based on and being unable to mask his jealousy of the actor who got to star in the show. It's such an odd specific thing to satirize, though, it's kind of a concept that would probably go over better on Adult Swim, I can't see it lasting on FOX beyond this summer, but I enjoy it.

f) "The Disappearance"
This 6-episode miniseries has had a very slow international rollout, airing first in Canada, where it was produced, in 2017 and then in the UK in 2018, and finally now in the US in 2019. It's pretty stressful to watch a show about the disappearance of a little boy about the same age as my son, though, I don't know if I'll watch more than one episode.

g) "Frankie Drake Mysteries"
This Canadian series is about the Drake Private Detectives agency of Toronto, which amazingly has nothing to do with Aubrey "Drake" Graham. It's a pretty charming, cleverly plotted show, though, I like it.

h) "Grand Hotel"
"Grand Hotel" is based on "Gran Hotel," which takes place in Spain in 1906, and the new show transposes the story to present day Miami Beach. It's kind of a self-consciously trashy soap opera that doesn't take itself too seriously, fairly well made for the kind of show it is but I dunno if it's my cup of tea to watch regularly.

i) "Family Reunion"
One of Netflix's very old-fashioned live studio audience sitcoms, about a Seattle family who goes to a family reunion and Georgia and decides to stay. So, a lot of cliched notherners-in-the-south culture clash humor, not very funny.

j) "The Weekly"
Each episode of this show has a camera crew shadowing New York Times producers as they work on a major story. It's interesting to see how these stories come together, months after they've been published, just getting a peak behind the curtain, even with my experience in journalism I find it daunting to contemplate what goes into a 5,000-word NYT feature breaking a major story. The first episode with the school that was falsifying student records to help them get accepted to good colleges was bananas, I couldn't believe that shit.

k) "Shangri-La"
Rick Rubin has undeniably been a major force in music and has produced some great records. But over the years it's become kind of a running joke that he's this overpaid guru figure who big stars hire to sit on a couch and dispense faux-philosophical wisdom while someone else actually works on arranging and recording songs. There's a lot of different people hanging out at Rubin's studio in this show, it's unclear if he's actually working on all of their albums or if they just kind of staged conversations with them for the TV show, but there's still some interesting moments, like when David Lynch very forcefully says "I love ZZ Top, I love them." At one point Rubin basically says that his dream scenario is if he never meets or talks to an artist but somehow helps them make their best album, which is a hilarious thing for him to say that plays into all the couch jokes.

l) "Bring The Funny"
It's not a bad idea for NBC to try out a comedy reality competition show for comedy that's not strictly standup like "Last Comic Standing," but this show feels a little more bland and family-friendly, and while there were one or two sketch groups that I liked, for the most part it just felt like there was a much smaller amount of performers I found funny.

m) "Lone Star Justice"
An Investigation Discovery series about violent crime investigations in east Texas, I gave it a try but all these cops that the show tries to make look cool just seem terrible.

n) "Marrying Millions"
I kind of expected this to be a totally tawdry reality show, but they follow 6 relationships between someone who's a millionaire and someone who isn't and kind of observe all the good and bad that goes with that and whether people kind of accuse them of gold digging or expect them to be with someone in their own tax bracket, it's kind of an interesting empathetic show about a charged issue.

o) "LEGO City Adventures"
My kids and I love a lot of LEGO movies and this show is more or less in keeping with the humor of those but it's kinda bland and unmemorable by comparison, didn't hold our interest.

p) "Victor & Valentino"
Probably the best new Cartoon Network series of the last year or two, both of my kids love it, really enjoy seeing a really funny silly kids' show that's set against the backdrop of of Mexican folk tales.

q) "Pose"
I'm only a couple episodes into the new season but I like seeing the story move forward into the '90s, post-"Vogue" and all that, since that was something you kinda knew would be on the way during the first season. It feels like they're really overtly letting Billy Porter be the heart of the show more, now, too, which I think works.

r) "Sweetbitter"
I think this show's first season last year was a bit underrated, and I'm glad it's back, the first couple new episodes have been really good. With shows where the protagonist is the wide-eyed young rookie at a new job in the big city, I'm interested to see if the writers kind of try to suspend them in that role or allow for some character development, and I feel like they're letting Tess grow and change a bit while she's still surrounded by these characters that have more experience and history with each other.

s) "Grown-ish"
This show is alright, definitely better than it could've been, but it feels like it's trying too hard sometimes to be the voice of the youth and the feuding between the characters and love triangles is getting old. Don't know if the next spinoff "Mixed-ish" will be any good, I'm waiting on them to give "Old-ish" to Lawrence Fishburne.

t) "Harlots"
I just finally finished watching the second season a few weeks ago so the third season came right on time. I'm curious how long they're going to keep Samantha Morton offscreen and out of the action, though, it's already gone on longer than I expected.

u) "Big Little Lies"
At this point the stories circulating around the production troubles behind the second season of "Big Little Lies" are kind of getting more attention than the show itself. I think it's kind of funny that people started to buzz about something being amiss because the episodes have been shorter, though, I was ready to just be happy that a big deal cable show wasn't so self-important that it wanted to constantly make longer and longer episodes and was going in the opposite direction. It definitely seems like they should've just waited for Jean-Marc Vallee to be available to direct, though, he really brought a distinctive texture to the first season. I've liked the new episodes I've seen well enough, though. Meryl Streep obviously isn't going to join the cast and not steal the spotlight pretty often, but Laura Dern has really been the MVP lately as far as I'm concerned.

v) "Jessica Jones"
Haven't gotten too far into the final season, yet, but I'm still determined to at the very least finish this and "Daredevil" out of all of Netflix's now-canceled Marvel shows. I like the third season so far, the way they've kind of scaled back and focused more on Jessica solving cases.

w) "Minecraft: Story Mode"
This is like an interactive game made a few years ago with an overqualified voice cast including Patton Oswalt and Martha Plimpton that my Minecraft-obsessed son started watching on YouTube last year. And recently I was pleased to find that Netflix now has it available, with interactive buttons so you can actually play the game on Netflix just like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, so it's cool that they're even using that technology for existing games now.

x) "iZombie"
With "iZombie" in its 5th and final season now, it's kind of wild to think about how far the show has gone, like at one point it was about someone who was secretly a zombie hiding it from the world, and now it's about Seattle becoming a zombie city walled off from the rest of the world. But even amidst all of that, the silly episodic format of Liv eating brains and taking on the personalities of the victims has continued and gotten even broader and sillier. It can be a lot sometimes, but I still really enjoy this show.

y) "Drunk History"
I like that they've been doing short little mini-seasons every few months lately, a little of this show goes a long way. One of the craziest things about "Drunk History" is sometimes I look at the casting decisions and wish it was a full-on serious movie. Like, Tessa Thompson playing Eartha Kitt, that was perfect, I'd totally see that movie.

z) "Black Mirror"
I've never been big on "Black Mirror," but it's hard to walk away from the most popular anthology series on television when every new season brings a hotly discussed premise or two that piques my interest enough to check it out. The three latest episodes aren't really worth recommending, though -- "Striking Vipers" isn't sure whether it wants to be a love story or a gay panic joke and tries to be both, and the episode where Miley Cyrus plays a pop star whose big hit is a weird alternate universe version of "Head Like A Hole" by Nine Inch Nails is just a total stupid wash. Even the curiosity factor of whether she had other songs that were also warped NIN tunes didn't pan out, there weren't others as I'd hoped.

This week I went down to D.C. and had a conversation with Youcef Menasria and Alex Lee for their podcast From The English Basement. We had coffee and talked about the Baltimore music scene, Tom Hanks, "Old Town Road," Area 51, daughters, dogs, you know, no big whoop.

As the 2010s come to a close, I've been trying to do some deep cuts playlists that reflect what artists I think really helped define this decade's popular music and consistently delivered. And Miguel Pimentel is very near the top of that list, maybe the top or second only to Beyonce in R&B, easily one of the best vocalists of his generation, but also a talented songwriter with great taste in production, collaborators, and influences. Few people have made albums better than Kaleidoscope Dream this decade, but more than that, few artists' 4th best album of the 2010s is on par with Wildheart.

Miguel deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Girl With The Tattoo Enter.lewd
2. The Thrill
3. Pineapple Skies
4. What's Normal Anyway
5. Use Me
6. Teach Me
7. Cadillac
8. NWA f/ Kurupt
9. Python
10. Caramelo Duro (Spanish Version) f/ Kali Uchis
11. Hard Way
12. Shockandawe
13. R.A.N.
14. Anointed
15. Strawberry Amazing
16. Damned
17. Wolf f/ Quin
18. Hero
19. Arch & Point
20. Pussy Is Mine
21. This Is Not A Game w/ The Chemical Brothers
22. Leaves

Track 15 from Mischief: The Mixtape (2008)
Tracks 1, 6, 11 and 18 from All I Want Is You (2010)
Tracks 2, 5, 19 and 20 from Kaleidoscope Dream (2012)
Track 21 from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 1 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2014)
Tracks 4, 8, 16 and 22 from Wildheart (2015)
Tracks 7 from The Get Down: Original Soundtrack from the Netflix Original Series (2016)
Track 12 from the "Shockandawe" single (2017)
Tracks 3, 14 and 17 from War & Leisure (2017)
Track 13 from SuperFly (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018)
Track 9 from the "Python" single (2018)
Track 10 from Te Lo Dije EP (2019)

Miguel has released a lot of EPs and one-off singles in between albums, most notably 2012's Art Dealer Chic. It's really frustrating to me that the Art Dealer Chic songs that didn't end up on Kaleidoscope Dream as well aren't on streaming services, I'd love to include "...ALL" or the early version of "Candles In The Sun" on here. But streaming services do have "Strawberry Amazing," one of his early mixtape tracks from the late 2000's, and I threw in some of his great soundtrack work, and a track from the recent EP of Spanish language versions of songs from War & Leisure.

Miguel famously kicked around the industry for a long time before becoming a star. He auditioned for the hilariously named group Fatty Koo, as seen in their hilariously named reality show "Blowin' Up!: Fatty Koo," in 2004. And in the late 2000s sang hooks for blog rap stars like Blu and Asher Roth and signed with an indie label. Recording an unreleased album for that label, which subsequently sued him when he left and signed to a major label, really slowed Miguel's career down for years, and yet he still seemed to arrive right on time. By the time "Sure Thing" was a huge radio hit in 2011, it had been almost 4 years since the same song helped him get a manager and a deal with Jive Records. Much was made of lumping Miguel in with other less traditional new R&B stars like Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, but Miguel had already found his sound and his approach years before that, it was more like everybody had caught up to him.

I'm not sure when Miguel started playing guitar, but I've been impressed with how consistently guitar has featured in his music, whether he's the one playing it or not, dating back to the "Strawberry Amazing" era. He may not have the chops of the biggest inspiration for his rock/R&B fusions, Prince, but he has an interesting propensity for muddier, more distorted tones. Guitar is absent, or presence in lighter, more atmospheric ways, on a lot of his biggest hits, but it's pretty prominent on his albums, and often on my favorite songs. I ended up putting a lot of the same songs on both this and the Six-String Soul: Miguel's Guitar Music playlist I made a couple years back.

1. Khalid f/ Disclosure - "Talk" 
Khalid started his career on R&B radio with "Location" but has pretty much lived on pop radio ever since, so I was curious if his second album would spin off any R&B radio hits. And I really didn't think the one to do that would be the song with British electronic duo Disclosure, whose brief moment of R&B crossover was 5 years ago. It's a good song, though, I can see why it travels across radio formats so well. Some rap stations play the remix with Yo Gotti and Megan Thee Stallion, which isn't bad but feels kind of unnecessary and not a perfect match for the track. Here's my favorite 2019 singles playlist I update with songs ever month. 

2. Billie Eilish - "Bad Guy" 
For most of the past few weeks the top 3 songs on the Hot 100 have been by Lil Nas X, Khalid, and Billie Eilish, and the average age between them is 19. So it really feels like we're in a moment of generational change in pop music, and the youngest of them, Billie Eilish, is probably the first musician a whole 20 years younger than me who I've really enjoyed stuff by. And I didn't really think much of her album when it came out, it's taken time for her whole odd sound to grow on me. "Bad Guy" in particular is a song that sounds better to me the bigger it gets, it felt a little broad in the context of her album but on the radio it sticks out and sounds uncompromising, the way she did something kind of playful and uptempo but still in her strange dry claustrophobic sound. She grew up idolizing Justin Bieber and was understandably excited to have him on the remix, but he sounds pretty ridiculous, it's a perfect illustration of what a change of pace Eilish is from the teen pop stars that preceded her.

3. DaBaby - "Suge"  
DaBaby's unapologetically silly videos have earned some comparisons to the kind of court jester rap stars like Busta Rhymes and Ludacris that used to be more common, which does help explain a little bit just how DaBaby stands out from his contemporaries. But that's not entirely it, I think, it is interesting that his big hit is kind of lampooning the classic Suge Knight archetype of a hip hop tough guy kingpin, but DaBaby also has a pretty well earned tough guy rep. But mostly it's just about how relentless his flow is and how swift and clever his punchlines and funny little asides are.

4. The 1975 - "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)"
I'm glad that The 1975 are doing back-to-back albums in quick succession and am excited to hear the next one. But I'm kind of glad they've pumped the breaks on releasing the next record's lead single (which at one point was going to come out in May but hasn't yet). A Brief Inquiry had several good singles and it's good that there's some breathing room for another one to get a run on alt-rock radio (although I fucking love "Sincerity Is Scary" and that one I'm sure will never get radio play). 

5. Panic! At The Disco - "Hey Look Ma, I Made It"  
I never particularly liked Panic! At The Disco in the early days, and with Brendon Urie's recent insufferable ubiquity with "High Hopes" and "ME!" I definitely didn't expect to like their next single. But this is really good, lot of interesting layers to the track and a lot of different vocal melodies coming one after another. 

6. Jacquees f/ Lil Baby - "Your Peace"
I think the perception of Jacquees that was cemented last year is probably not gonna change much with this upcoming new album, but I'm still looking forward to it. This track really has kind of a early 2000s vibe without sampling or interpolating a hit from that era, which I think is to his credit, he kind of needs to get away from samples and remixes for a bit and prove that he makes good songs on his own. 

7. Katy Perry - "Never Really Over"
I was calling Katy Perry her generation's Paula Abdul years before she became an "American Idol" judge, so I really feel vindicated now, especially with her latest single peaking on the charts right around where Abdul's most notable flop "Vibeology" did. All that said, "Never Really Over" is a pretty good song and I wish someone with a better voice sang it. 

8. Mason Ramsey - "Twang" 
12-year-old Mason Ramsey has navigated fame fairly well since going viral with a video of him singing in a Walmart last year, releasing a string of singles and, last week, appearing on a remix of "Old Town Road." But "Twang" is the first song of his that really impressed me and made me kind of root for him to get some country radio airplay, it's just a really great catchy track that takes advantage of that twangy yodel that made him famous to begin with. 

9. Robin Thicke - "That's What Love Can Do"  
I'm moderately annoyed that this sweetly romantic track has a title very close to one of my all-time favorite songs, War's haunting epic "That's What Love Will Do." But otherwise, I'm happy to hear Thicke back in his groove, doing what he does best after years out of the spotlight, this has kind of a Stylistics vibe to it. 

10. Monica - "Commitment"
A really strong midtempo record right in Monica's comfort zone, always loved her voice and am happy to hear her still as consistent as anyone from her generation of R&B stars. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Lizzo - "Truth Hurts"
I wasn't wild about Cuz I Love You when it was released but it seemed clear that she was going to have a big pop hit this year and a lot of the songs on there seemed like they'd be fine as radio singles. But the same day in April that the album was released, Netflix released a rom com, Someone Great, that prominently featured a 2017 song, "Truth Hurts," that subsequently blew up bigger than anything on the album and was quickly added to a deluxe edition of it. And I find this song really, really irritating, way more than anything that was on the original album. 

a) Toy Story 4
The Toy Story movies are the best Pixar movies that I've never really felt much personal attachment to. I'm pretty sure I've seen all of the 3 previous movies, but usually in bits and pieces, never in the theater. But my son wanted to see this and I really enjoyed it, way more than Toy Story 3 at least. It feels like at this point they've really just taken the simple premise of toys coming alive when people aren't around to so many logical endpoints, even just in this movie, incorporating kid-made toys like Forky (easily one of the most entertaining aspects of the move), carnival prizes, and old toys in an antique shop. By the end of the movie some of the plot machinations felt really drawn out and unnecessary (around the point the toys started driving the RV), but the ending was a moving I guess conclusion of Woody's story, I got a little misty even though, as I said, I never really got to into these movies.

b) Always Be My Maybe
As rom coms continue to become more rare and sporadic at the box office, they become a larger share of the breakout hits on Netflix, and this is definitely one of the more enjoyable ones they've had. The story beats it hits are pretty predictable but it's still fun to watch unfold, with a few big laughs. As with Toy Story 4, the second half was livened up by a supporting role by Keanu Reeves, who I'm always happy to see doing more comedy even in his action hero career resurgence, my hopes are high for Bill & Ted 3.

c) Bohemian Rhapsody
I fucking love Queen and have at best a complicated relationship with music biopics, so I put this on with a lot of trepidation. And sure enough, I found a lot about the movie to be irritated by just in terms of pedantic factual stuff -- for no real reason they performed "Fat Bottomed Girls" about 4 years before it existed in reality and recorded "We Will Rock You" about 4 years after it was released in reality. They hadn't performed "in years" before Live Aid when in reality they wrapped a major tour 2 months earlier. But most heartbreaking of all, Freddie Mercury's bandmates decided that the band's last two albums, his decision to put all his remaining strength into building tragically poignant songs like "The Show Must Go On," somehow that just didn't have a place in the narrative. Also, it's weird that Queen and Elton John had the same manager but he's portrayed by 2 different "Game of Thrones" actors in their respective biopics that were both essentially helmed by the same director. All that said, Rami Malek's performance is very good if imperfect in a lot of ways, and there are a number of sequences I really enjoyed (particularly Brian May talking into his guitar pickup to argue with the rest of the band in the control room while recording "Bohemian Rhapsody").

d) The Possession of Hannah Grace
This movie had a pretty good creepy premise about a morgue worker finding out one of the bodies is possessed, and the story unfurled with some really tense scenes. But by the time the story reached its climax and all the crazy stuff was happening, it kinda felt like there was no tension left and I was just watching it play out to its conclusion.

e) Blockers
It's interesting to see a somewhat woke contemporary teen sex comedy about a really cliched regressive premise like parents desperate to stop their daughters from losing their virginity. Like, you get characters making pretty convincing criticisms of that mindset, but it's still the whole concept of the movie and it's played for laughs and normalized, at best it's a draw. That said, it was pretty good, the whole cast was pretty charming, both the parents and the teens. It's weird to realize that John Cena being in a comedy will totally increase the likelihood of me wanting to see it, but he really is funny.

I wrote about Brad Paisley's discography and updated my deep album cuts playlist for City Pages.

Chance The Rapper is releasing his "first" "album" this month, which of course in contemporary hip hop terms means that he's already made several full-length records of original songs that have been classified as mixtapes. But I was pleasantly surprised when he made his first 2 mixtapes, 10 Day and Acid Rap, available on subscription streaming services (and on vinyl) after years of being available mainly on gray area mixtape sites like DatPiff.com. I never thought I'd be able to easily drop most of these songs into a playlist, so it was fun to finally be able to do that.

Chance The Rapper deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Paranoia featuring Nosaj Thing
2. Mixtape featuring Young Thug and Lil Yachty
3. 14,400 Minutes
4. Good Ass Intro featuring BJ The Chicago Kid and Lili K
5. Familiar with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, King Louie and Quavo
6. 65th & Ingleside
7. Finish Line / Drown featuring T-Pain, Kirk Franklin, Eryn Allen Kane and Noname
8. Cocoa Butter Kisses featuring Vic Mensa and Twista
9. Windows featuring Alex Wiley and Akenya
10. Windows with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, BJ The Chicago Kid and Raury
11. The Man Who Has Everything
12. Juke Juke
13. Smoke Break featuring Future
14. Pusha Man
15. Wanna Be Cool with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, Jeremih, Big Sean and Kyle
16. Blessings featuring Jamila Woods
17. Prom Night
18. Rememory with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, Erykah Badu and Ady Suleiman
19. Juke Joint featuring Justin Bieber and Towkio
20. Lost featuring Noname

Tracks 3, 9, 12 and 17 from 10 Day (2012)
Tracks 1, 4, 8, 14 and 20 from Acid Rap (2013)
Tracks 5, 10, 15 and 18 from Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment's Surf (2015)
Tracks 2, 7, 13 and 19 from Coloring Book (2016)
Track 6 from the "65th & Ingleside" single (2018)
Track 11 from the "The Man Who Has Everything" single (2018)

It's been over 3 years since Chance's last full-length project, and I can't help but wonder if the next record's reception will suffer for that. I was impressed with how well he stayed in the public eye in the 3 years between Acid Rap and Coloring Book, with a lot of great features and a major role on his Social Experiment bandmate Nico Segal's album Surf (under the alias Donnie Trumpet that he, understandably, didn't feel right about continuing to use after the 2016 election). Lately it feels like Chance is just this overexposed pop culture guy that people are rooting against, whether because of his Super Bowl ad with the Backstreet Boys or that regrettable sequence events that led to the actual Donald Trump thanking Chance on Twitter. 

The most significant music Chance released in the last few years was the 6 singles he released in 2018, 4 at once in July and then 2 more in November. And I think that was probably the worst way for him to put that music out, the songs were excellent but probably would've gone over better as an EP. The biggest of them, "I Might Need Security," didn't make all that much noise, and I wanted to spotlight a couple of the other ones, "65th & Ingleside" is one of my favorite songs he's ever done and I'm assuming none of that stuff will be on the album.

His influences have always been right on his sleeve, but Chance has really created his own sound, to the point that all the dozens of guests on this playlist largely feel like they're on his sonic turf. And I think he kind of subtly shifted the nature of rap stardom in cool ways. There have been a lot of semantic arguments about Chance -- whether he's a "Christian rapper" or just a rapper who's Christian, whether his releases were "albums" or "mixtapes," whether he's truly an "independent" artist. Yes, releasing a record exclusively through Apple Music is not the most indie thing in the world, but Chance doing one-off deals that are beneficial to him is still a huge step up from guys with similar huge mixtape buzz getting locked into 7 album deals with major labels.

I hope Chance's new stuff is great and kind of turns around the current mood about him, I think re-releasing the old stuff was smart to remind people of how they felt the first time they heard Acid Rap. I shouldn't say first time -- it took me a couple months for it to really grow on me, I found some of Chance's odd vocal tics kind of annoying, but after a while I started to really like how he combined the impish adolescence with spirituality and writerly erudition.

But yeah, Acid Rap really holds up for me, probably a top 3 mixtape of this decade. One thing I really like about the new release of it is that it finally separates "Pusha Man" and "Paranoia" into 2 separate tracks where they once ran together. "Paranoia" is still a really powerful song, maybe the best thing he's ever made, it was always awkward that it was basically a hidden track on another song, and it felt good to let it stand on its own as the opening track here.

I expanded my Ariana Grande deep cuts playlist and wrote about her discography for City Pages.

My band Western Blot is playing a show at Reverb in Baltimore on Friday, July 12th with The Kelly Locklear Band, Kevin Driscoll, and the Cosmic Cowpokes. I released the album Materialistic in March and I'm excited to play some more songs from it that we haven't performed in public yet.

Yesterday I wrote about The Raconteurs' 3rd album Help Us Stranger and mused about how it's been interesting to watch perennial cult hero Brendan Benson become the co-frontman of a band with the far more famous Jack White. They just got their first #1 album, and it'd be hard to imagine Benson ever getting one of those as a solo artist, so this may be the height of his visibility. And even without a history of big chart hits, he has kind of become a well liked singles artist, with a string of songs like "Metarie" and "Tiny Spark" and "What I'm Looking For" and "Cold Hands (Warm Heart)" and "A Whole Lot Better" that have become pretty recognizable, whether from college radio play or from appearing in TV ads. So I thought it'd be fun to do a little tour through his albums.

Brendan Benson deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. I'm Blessed
2. Me Just Purely
3. Bird's Eye View
4. Sittin' Pretty
5. Emma J
6. I'm Easy
7. Life In The D
8. Eventually
9. Pleasure Seeker
10. Just Like Me
11. Let Me Roll It
12. Alternative To Love
13. Flesh And Bone
14. Get It Together
15. The Pledge
16. Gonowhere
17. Poised And Ready
18. Misery
19. What Kind Of World
20. The Light Of Day
21. It's Your Choice
22. Diamond
23. Half A Boy (And Half A Man)

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 from One Mississippi (1996)
Tracks 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 from Lapalco (2002)
Track 11 from the Metarie EP (2003)
Tracks 12, 13, 14 and 15 from The Alternative To Love (2005)
Tracks 16, 17 and 18 from My Old, Familiar Friend (2009)
Tracks 19 and 20 from What Kind Of World (2012)
Tracks 21 and 22 from You Were Right (2013)
Track 23 from the "Half A Boy (And Half A Man)" single (2017)

Brendan Benson has had an odd career arc shared by some other journeyman bands like Spoon that started out in the waning days of the '90s alt-rock gold rush: an unsuccessful major label album early in his career, followed by a steady climb back towards finding a larger audience. I remember seeing positive reviews for Benson's sole Virgin Records release, 1996's One Mississippi, back when it was released, and hearing positive buzz from fans of Benson's co-writer Jason Falkner and his own short-lived power pop cult band Jellyfish. But the single "Crosseyed" kind of turned me off, so I made no effort to check out One Mississippi until it went out of print a few years later. Jeff Reguilon gave me a copy, and I was bowled over by the one-two punch of "Bird's Eye View" and "Sittin' Pretty" (I still don't like "Crosseyed" much).

Lapalco doesn't quite have the same livewire energy of One Mississippi, but it's a great album in its own right and I'm fine with it being regarded by many as his best. The Metarie EP also featured some nice reworks of songs from that album, as well as a less obvious McCartney salute in the form of a great cover of the Band On The Run deep cut "Let Me Roll It." The Alternative To Love probably has the biggest, most polished sound of any of his albums, it's really fun to hear Tchad Blake pull out all his bells and whistles for those songs or give Benson a perfect "Be My Baby" wall of sound for "The Pledge."

I sometimes gripe when Brendan Benson releases a new album that he's suffering from diminishing returns, but revisiting his last few albums, I don't think he ever really lost his knack for a hook, there's killer tunes all over them. I think it's more that he's got such a comfort zone that I'm never really surprised by anything on his records, everything sounds like it could've been written for one of his first couple albums. But I really enjoyed hearing a couple of other power pop heroes of mine, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of The Posies, play all over What Kind Of Love and You Were Right. I saw Benson's tour with the Posies in support of the former album and it was a great show, with Auer and Stringfellow in Benson's backing band and lending their killer harmonies to his songs. Benson hasn't released a solo album since 2013, but when I was going through his music on Spotify, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he released a great one-off single "Half A Boy (And Half A Man)," in 2017.

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
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Motley Crue
Vol. 50: The Who
Vol. 51: Coldplay
Vol. 52: Alicia Keys
Vol. 53: Stone Temple Pilots
Vol. 54: David Bowie
Vol. 55: The Eagles
Vol. 56: The Beatles
Vol. 57: Beyonce
Vol. 58: Beanie Sigel
Vol. 59: A Tribe Called Quest
Vol. 60: Cheap Trick
Vol. 61: Guns N' Roses
Vol. 62: The Posies
Vol. 63: The Time
Vol. 64: Gucci Mane
Vol. 65: Violent Femmes
Vol. 66: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Vol. 67: Maxwell
Vol. 68: Parliament-Funkadelic
Vol. 69: Chevelle
Vol. 70: Ray Parker Jr. and Raydio
Vol. 71: Fantasia
Vol. 72: Heart
Vol. 73: Pitbull
Vol. 74: Nas
Vol. 75: Monica
Vol. 76: The Cars
Vol. 77: 112
Vol. 78: 2Pac
Vol. 79: Nelly
Vol. 80: Meat Loaf
Vol. 81: AC/DC
Vol. 82: Bruce Springsteen
Vol. 83: Pearl Jam
Vol. 84: Green Day
Vol. 85: George Michael and Wham!
Vol. 86: New Edition
Vol. 87: Chuck Berry
Vol. 88: Electric Light Orchestra
Vol. 89: Chic
Vol. 90: Journey
Vol. 91: Yes
Vol. 92: Soundgarden
Vol. 93: The Allman Brothers Band
Vol. 94: Mobb Deep
Vol. 95: Linkin Park
Vol. 96: Shania Twain
Vol. 97: Squeeze
Vol. 98: Taylor Swift
Vol. 99: INXS
Vol. 100: Stevie Wonder
Vol. 101: The Cranberries
Vol. 102: Def Leppard
Vol. 103: Bon Jovi
Vol. 104: Dire Straits
Vol. 105: The Police
Vol. 106: Sloan
Vol. 107: Peter Gabriel
Vol. 108: Led Zeppelin
Vol. 109: Dave Matthews Band
Vol. 110: Nine Inch Nails
Vol. 111: Talking Heads
Vol. 112: Smashing Pumpkins
Vol. 113: System Of A Down
Vol. 114: Aretha Franklin
Vol. 115: Michael Jackson
Vol. 116: Alice In Chains
Vol. 117: Paul Simon
Vol. 118: Lil Wayne
Vol. 119: Nirvana
Vol. 120: Kix
Vol. 121: Phil Collins
Vol. 122: Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Vol. 123: Sonic Youth
Vol. 124: Bob Seger
Vol. 125: Radiohead
Vol. 126: Eric Church
Vol. 127: Neil Young
Vol. 128: Future
Vol. 129: Say Anything
Vol. 130: Maroon 5
Vol. 131: Kiss
Vol. 132: Dinosaur Jr.
Vol. 133: Stevie Nicks
Vol. 134: Talk Talk
Vol. 135: Ariana Grande
Vol. 136: Roxy Music
Vol. 137: The Cure
Vol. 138: 2 Chainz
Vol. 139: Kelis
Vol. 140: Ben Folds Five
Vol. 141: DJ Khaled
Vol. 142: Little Feat

1. Eleni Mandell - Wake Up Again
L.A.-based singer/songwriter Eleni Mandell has been making great records in relative obscurity for over 20 years, winning enough respect from her peers that Jackson Browne, Van Dyke Parks, and others covered her songs for 2017's compilation Unsung Heroes: The Songs of Eleni Mandell. And her 11th solo album may be her best yet, or at least her most intriguing and ambitious. Teaching songwriting classes led Mandell to teaching songwriting in two women's prisons, and doing that led to her writing an album full of character sketches about the people she'd met there and the things she'd seen. Eleni Mandell has always specialized in songs that feel like small subtle vignettes, times when she seems to just let her mind wander and focus on the emotion of a moment. On Wake Up Again, the emotion is mostly empathy as she puts herself into the shoes of women who were driven to violence or murder, left to spend decades in prison and not raise their own children, with gentle backing from her longtime band (including Geraldine Fibbers drummer Kevin Fitzgerald) that helps foreground these devastating story songs. Here's the 2019 albums playlist that I put all the records I listen to in, an easy place to find most of these albums.

2. Mannequin Pussy - Patience
The Philly band Mannequin Pussy's third album is their first to run more than 20 minutes (but still, only 25 minutes), and their first for Epitaph Records. It's not exactly stadium rock but I tend to like when punk bands get a slightly bigger recording budget and maybe a little more hook-driven. I love the way "Patience" careens right into the midtempo "Drunk II," a great one-two punch to kick off the album.

3. Prince - Originals
I have a lot of mixed emotions about Prince being gone and his estate assembling posthumous releases. On one hand, he left a lot of great stuff bootlegged and/or entirely unheard that would never come out on his watch, and I feel weird about a random assortment of family members and industry people and Jay-Z sorting through his vaults and putting out yearly albums. On the other hand, it's his own damn fault that he refused to make any plans for the inevitability of death, so it's up to the living now. And Originals is a pretty brilliant way to package together unheard Prince versions of the songs he let other artists record, it's such a kick to hear Prince sing "Sex Shooter" (kind of more appropriate for a man to sing anyway, I guess) or "Gigolos Get Lonely Too." I especially love "Wouldn't You Love To Love Me?" which was released by Prince's obscure protege Taja Sevelle after Michael Jackson rejected it for Bad. You could call these 'demos,' but many of these are just the same track with a different vocalist, and only a couple don't sound polished and ready to go on one of his albums before he decided to give it away. That said, I do find it bittersweet to get this album when, as I wrote in my Unstreamables column, the original albums by The Family, Jill Jones, Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Mazarati and other Paisley Park artists are largely out of print and hard to find, and it'd be nice to get all those albums Prince wrote and produced back in circulation too.

4. Beauty Pill - Sorry You're Here
Chad Clark and Beauty Pill were engaged in a number of different projects in the 11 years between their first album and their 2015 masterpiece Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, mostly notably scoring the stage play "suicide.chat.room" in 2010. The band's proper 3rd album is on the way, but in the meantime Clark decided to finally release that play's soundtrack, almost a decade later, as Sorry You're Here. I kind of always assumed the score incorporated some of the works in progress for the 2015 album, but while it's sonically very much in the same space, it's its own distinct set of music, a 38-minute album of mostly instrumentals with a handful of vocal tracks, including covers of the great Paul Simon deep album cut "Some Folks' Lives Roll Easy" and the amazing underrated David Bowie single "Jump They Say." Having not seen the play, I guess tonally I have some idea of the uniting idea or mood of this record, but it's mostly just enjoyable from an aural standpoint. It's really a feast for the ears, so many strange and novel textures but with a certain percussive physicality rather than the kind of inert feeling I associate with a lot of 'headphone music.'

5. GoldLink - Diaspora
I still love "Crew" so much that I kind of stupidly want GoldLink to try to make that happen again and do some more smooth midtempo songs and maybe some Shy Glizzy and Brent Faiyaz features. But I respect that he's perfecting this really omnivorous, danceable sound and has a lot of Nigerian/British/etc. features on here, it's a really smooth and summery album with beautiful production that goes well with GoldLink's calm, cool delivery.

6. The Raconteurs - Help Us Stranger
For a long time, I felt that Brendan Benson was underrated and Jack White was overrated, so I've had to reconcile that with the fact that they work well together in The Raconteurs, and they've become a good vehicle for Benson's songs, particularly since it's been more than 5 years since his last solo album. And hey, obviously White is pretty talented, too, despite whatever ways he's kind of annoying, hearing some cool White guitar solos on Benson songs like "Live A Lie" and "Only Child" is a pretty ideal combination.

7. Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars
Bruce Springsteen has come to represent some kind of rock'n'roll ideal of aging gracefully, still looking good and putting on great shows and respectable late period albums and engrossing, well crafted retrospective projects like Springsteen On Broadway. But I have pretty mixed feelings about his studio albums of the last 25 years, which mostly alternate between putting a modern rock sheen on the E Street Band or updating the acoustic minimalism of Nebraska. So Western Stars is exciting to me just for not settling comfortably into either of those categories, putting Jon Brion keys and sweeping string arrangements and steel guitars and other lush bells and whistles over a contemplative set of songs that's more varied and colorful than the Tom Joad/Devils & Dust side of his catalog. I hope he doesn't try to do this kind of record again, just because it's nice to have something this singular from the later years of his discography.

8. X Ambassadors - Orion
The first X Ambassadors album grew on me a lot over the last 3 years of my wife frequently playing it around the house, Sam Harris has a really impressive voice and they definitely deserve more than to be Imagine Dragons' less famous labelmates. They released a lot of singles in between albums, and my favorite of those, "Ahead of Myself," didn't make it onto Orion, but it's still a strong record that strings together songs written with Malay, Ricky Reed, Emily Warren and others to kind of fill in that currently fertile interzone between mainstream alt-rock and Top 40 pop, so far "Rule" and "Wasteland" are my favorite tracks.

9. Willie Nelson - Ride Me Back Home
Willie Nelson has never been someone who builds up any one album to be a masterpiece event record -- he still cranks out an album or two a year, just as he has since the early '60s. But at the age of 86, it feels like he's been making every album like it could be his last -- songs like "Come On Time" and "One More Song To Write" would make Ride Me Back Home a poignant farewell album, just as last year's Last Man Standing would have been, but I hope he's got plenty more in him. I'm glad Mickey Raphael is still playing on his albums all these decades later, in my mind his harmonica is like Willie's second voice. His son Lukas Nelson, who makes a guest appearance here, also released a pretty good album in June.

10. Lil Nas X - 7 EP
Now that "Old Town Road" has become a pop rap smash enjoyed by young and old alike, and people mostly hang on the idea of it being an unfairly persecuted country song out of fealty to the narrative from April 2019, I kind of look at it as the "Timber" by Pitbull of its time. And I think Lil Nas X taking the Top 40 rapper mantle from Pitbull and Flo Rida is probably the best path for him from here on out, and 7 bears that out. "Kick It" is a solid rap song with a cool sax loop that feels like he could hang with a lot of the Soundcloud dudes if he'd taken a more traditional career path, but for the most part I like that he's leaned into more melodic flows over tracks with big undigested chunks of country and dance and rock music dropped into them, I'd be cool with "Rodeo" or "C7osure (You Like)" or "Panini" doing numbers as a follow-up hit.

The Worst Album of the Month: Hollywood Vampires - Rise
While I do understand that music was Johnny Depp's first love and I believe that he would just be somewhere out there playing guitar if he'd never starred in a blockbuster movie, I doubt that rock legends like Alice Cooper and Joe Perry would be jamming with him if that was the case. The covers of David Bowie and Jim Carroll and Johnny Thunders are uninspired, and the originals are far worse. I always say that Joe Perry is a more interesting guitarist than he gets credit for and often makes even the least distinguished Aerosmith songs worth listening to, but he doesn't even do much to salvage this. And it's pretty damn morbid that Alice Cooper took the name of the band from his '70s drinking club with long gone self-destructive entertainers like Keith Moon and John Belushi. I feel bad for John Waters that he got roped into making a brief cameo on this album.