Deep Album Cuts Vol. 193: Fabolous

Friday, June 26, 2020








Fabolous is going against Jadakiss on a Verzuz battle on Instagram on Monday, I looked back at Jadakiss's catalog yesterday so now I'm gonna get into Fab's. 

Fabolous deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Right Now & Later On
2. If They Want It
3. One Day
4. Ma' Be Easy
5. Sickalicious (featuring Missy Elliott)
6. Damn
7. My Life (featuring Mary J. Blige)
8. Now Ride
9. Po Po (featuring Nate Dogg and Paul Cain)
10. Holla At Somebody Real (featuring Lil Mo)
11. Gangsta
12. This Is Family (featuring Ransom, Freck Billionaire, Red Cafe, Joe Budden and Paul Cain)
13. Real Playa Like (featuring Lloyd)
14. Brooklyn (featuring Jay-Z and Uncle Murda)
15. Lullaby
16. Body Bag Remix (featuring Cam'ron and Vado)
17. We Good (featuring Rich Homie Quan)
18. Theme Music (with Jadakiss and Swizz Beatz)
19. Time (featuring Roddy Ricch)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Ghetto Fabolous (2001)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from Street Dreams (2003)
Track 8 from More Street Dreams, Pt. 2: The Mixtape (2003)
Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from Real Talk (2004)
Tracks 12, 13 and 14 from From Nothin' To Somethin' (2007)
Track 15 from Loso's Way (2009)
Track 16 from There Is No Competition 2: The Grieving Music EP (2010)
Track 17 from The Young OG Project (2014)
Track 18 from Friday On Elm Street with Jadakiss (2017)
Track 19 from Summertime Shootout 3: Coldest Summer Ever (2019)

I've always liked Fab's punchlines and thought he's been a little underestimated, particularly his early stuff. So I appreciated Ghetto Faboulous recently getting featured in Pitchfork's Sunday review, with Al Pierre giving Fab's early career a serious and detailed look without overrating his solid but not classic debut. It's a hit-and-miss album with some dated production -- even the Just Blaze track, "Ma' Be Easy," is a keyboard beat that sounds nothing like his work on The Blueprint, released the same day. 

Like Jadakiss, Fabolous released his first solo album in 2001, had a couple platinum releases, and then remained ever present with singles and features. Fab was definitely a bigger crossover star at his peak, but listening to their catalogs back to back definitely confirmed that Jada has the better catalog. And Fabolous has been in the news in recent years for some ugly domestic violence stuff, so I'm definitely rooting for Jada in the Verzuz competition. 

I always really dug the Timbaland track that got tagged at the end of the "Young'n" video, "Right Now & Later On." Likewise, "Damn" always sounded good in the "Can't Let You Go" video. I was always disappointed by Real Talk because "Breathe" set my expectations for the album higher, but a few tracks have aged well. One thing I liked about Fabolous's early albums is that the CD booklet had a lyric sheet, there's never really been a lot of hip hop albums that come with a lyric sheet, it was kind of refreshing and showed how much he cared about his bars. 

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 192: Jadakiss

Thursday, June 25, 2020







Jadakiss and Fabolous are doing a Verzuz song battle on Instagram, and both are the exact kind of artist I like to highlight in this series: talented, popular and respected, but considered better at singles (and/or guest appearances) than albums. So I thought I'd cover one or maybe both of 'em before the battle. 

Jadakiss deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Feel Me
2. It's Time I See You (featuring The LOX, Drag-On, Eve, and Infa-Red & Cross)
3. Fuckin' Or What?
4. Un-Hunh! (featuring DMX)
5. Jada's Got A Gun
6. None Of Y'all Betta (featuring The LOX)
7. By Your Side 
8. Gettin' It In (featuring Kanye West)
9. Still Feel Me
10. Kiss Of Death (featuring Styles P)
11. Air It Out
12. Cartel Gathering (featuring Ghostface Killah and Raekwon)
13. Things I've Been Through
14. One More Step (featuring Styles P)
15. Pain & Torture
16. Toast To That (featuring Fred The Godson)
17. You Don't Eat (featuring Diddy)
18. Rain (featuring Nas)
19. Soul Food (with Fabolous)
20. Angels Getting Pedicured (featuring 2 Chainz)
21. Pearly Gates

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Kiss Tha Game Goodbye (2001)
Tracks 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 from Kiss Of Death (2004)
Tracks 12, 13, 14 and 15 from The Last Kiss (2009)
Track 16 from I Love You (A Dedication To My Fans) (2011)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Top 5 Dead Or Alive (2015)
Track 19 from Friday On Elm Street with Fabolous (2017)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Ignatius (2020)

I feel like I was kind of late to respect Jadakiss. I didn't have a radio, a TV, or a car the whole summer of 2001 and I feel like I completely missed the fact that the guy from The Lox released a solo album. And it really took a while for Jada to grow on me on features and posse cuts, but by Kiss Of Death I was more of a fan and picked that one up. Obviously that one had some big singles, and "By Your Side" also got a lot of buzz off the little excerpt in the "U Make Me Wanna" video. 

In retrospect, I think Kiss Tha Game Goodbye is Jada's best album, it's overlong and sometimes the production is a little generic, but for the most part it's aged really well, lot of jams on there. The beat on the DMX feature is crazy. Kiss Of Death is really good too, but it's also got some stupid songs like the one where Pharrell sings "you gon' stink up the room with that big ol' ass" (Pharrell also says "c'mon with the lump in your pants" on The Last Kiss). "We Gonna Make It" is obviously Jada's greatest single so I wanted to highlight Alchemist's other more low key but still great productions "Feel Me" and "Still Feel Me." 

I thought about including The Lox albums since there are only 3 of them, but I decided to keep it all separate. Maybe I'll do a playlist of Lox and D-Block group projects someday. I definitely wanna do a Styles P solo playlist at some point, he's not as pure a talent or as big a star as Jada but as an album artist he's more consistent. But even without dropping albums really frequently, Jada has amassed a better discography than I think he gets credit for, most of these albums are solid, I really liked this year's Ignatius. Obviously it'd be great if his mixtapes were on streaming services, I'd love to include stuff from The Champ Is Here

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 191: Lynyrd Skynyrd

Wednesday, June 24, 2020







The biopic Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash is out next week, so I thought I'd take a look back at the band's classic era, up through the 1977 plane crash that took the lives of frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backup singer Cassie Gaines, among others. 

Lynyrd Skynyrd deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Poison Whiskey
2. Things Goin' On
3. I Ain't The One
4. Workin' For MCA
5. The Ballad Of Curtis Loew
6. Swamp Music
7. The Needle And The Spoon
8. Am I Losin'
9. Railroad Song
10. Whiskey Rock-A-Roller
11. (I Got The) Same Old Blues
12. Every Mother's Son
13. All I Can Do Is Write About It
14. Travelin' Man (live)
15. Ain't No Good Life
16. I Never Dreamed
17. Honkey Tonk Night Time Man
18. One More Time

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Lynyrd Skynyrd (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) (1973)
Tracks 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Second Helping (1974)
Tracks 8, 9 and 10 from Nuthin' Fancy (1975)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Gimme Back My Bullets (1976)
Track 14 from One More From The Road (1976)
Tracks 15, 16, 17 and 18 from Street Survivors (1977)

Lynyrd Skynyrd are one of those bands that, for anyone who grew up in the vicinity of a blaring classic rock station, might seem so ubiquitous they don't really warrant much thought beyond the 10 or so songs you've heard a thousand times. They might not earn as much scorn as The Doors or The Eagles do from some circles, but "Free Bird" is as much a meme as a song at this point, the reunited version of the band that recorded and toured since the '80s didn't do their legacy any favors. Like Tom Petty and others, they did discontinue their use of Confederate flag imagery for a time in 2012, but then went right back to using it. The Watergate/George Wallace verse of "Sweet Home Alabama" hasn't aged well either. 

That said, there's some really good Skynyrd songs that never got overplayed. I've always been partial to stuff like "Simple Man" and "Tuesday's Gone" over their rockers, so I really like "Am I Losin'." But "Workin' For MCA" kicks ass and is the rare celebratory ode to the artist's record label that predates hip hop. I've been really into "Every Mother's Son" ever since I heard J. Mascis's cover on Martin + Me. "All I Can Do Is Write About It" is, I think, a more moving and convincing celebration of the south than "Sweet Home Alabama." "(I Got The) Same Old Blues" is another J.J. Cale cover following the more famous Skynyrd hit "Call Me The Breeze," and features a mean clavinet riff from Billy Powell. "Honky Tonk Night Time Man" is an excellent Merle Haggard cover. 

"The Ballad of Curtis Loew" is the band's most famous deep cut, the one that's in their top streaming songs alongside the hits. A couple years after the band's first best-of compilation Gold & Platinum was released, 1982's Best of the Rest collected deep cuts including "Workin' For MCA" and "I Never Dreamed." And "Swamp Music" and "I Ain't The One" appeared on the highest selling release by the band, 1989's quintuple platinum compilation Skynyrd's Innyrds

One thing that really makes me sad about the Lynyrd Skynyrd tragedy is that Steve Gaines had only joined the band less than 2 years earlier and only played on One More From The Road and Street Survivors. He contributed significantly to the band's last studio album, writing or co-writing 4 songs and singing lead on "Ain't No Good Life" and the single "You Got That Right." One imagines that if not for the crash, Gaines would have been a big part of the band's future. One More From The Road's only new original, "Travelin' Man," is also a really excellent tune, the only one co-written by bassist Leon Wilkeson from the band's original run, and features one of my favorite performances by drummer Artimus Pyle. 

Movie Diary

Tuesday, June 23, 2020






I enjoyed writing about late period Spike Lee recently, and while Da 5 Bloods isn't as good as BlacKkKlansman, I think he's still on a roll, it was pretty excellent. Obviously it's hard not to compare Spike's Vietnam movie to his WWII movie Miracle At St. Anna, and while it has a similar mix of tones, it is superior in most respects. I particularly liked the audacious decision to have the same actors in the modern day scenes and as old men in the '70s war flashbacks, instead of using different actors or that de-aging CGI in The Irishman that looked like crap (Laz Alonso's old man makeup in Miracle was also laughably bad). Delroy Lindo's performance is amazing, the kind of thing that makes you realize his tremendous screen presence has been largely underused in supporting roles for most of his career, and I was surprised by how much action there was in the second half of the movie and how it kept me on the edge of my seat. 

Looper was the first Rian Johnson movie where I thought he really lived up to his potential, and I've been anxiously waiting a good 7 years to see his next original non-Star Wars feature to see what he'd come up with next. And Knives Out did not disappoint, in a way it's closer stylistically to his flawed first 2 movies but much better and more creative (while still having fun with the tropes that come with a murder mystery about the death of a murder mystery novelist). It's funny to think that Johnson and Daniel Craig went into this happy to do a standalone movie outside the franchise world of Bond and Star Wars, and now they're doing another movie with Craig playing Benoit Blanc, but I'm fine with that, it's a great character. 

This, the low-grossing directorial debut from Iron Man 3 and Hobbs & Shaw, was a nice little surprise, a fun and original and unpredictable and violent action movie with a great cast (Sterling K. Brown, Jodie Foster, Brian Tyree Henry, Jenny Slate, Dave Bautista, etc.). It takes place about 10 years in the future, in a Los Angeles torn apart by riots over water privatization, which is a good plausible dystopia with some cool-looking but plausible near-future tech innovations, but the whole thing still had a stylized sci-fi aesthetic. If this had made as much money as Knives Out I think there'd be some mileage in spinoff movies about Sofia Boutella's assassin character Nice. 

Like most people, I have nothing but fond feelings about Mr. Rogers and almost nothing but fond feelings about Tom Hanks, and found Hanks's performance as Rogers sweet and comforting. But as someone who's interviewed entertainers for magazine profiles, I don't really like the idea of a journalist who's done that turning around and making their brief time with a celebrity into a movie about them, particularly after the subject of the movie has died (I never see did see that David Foster Wallace movie that did the same thing). You come away from the movie with the sense that Fred Rogers was the lovely person you always hoped he was, but I don't think you really get much beyond that, and while the movie was well made, some of the storytelling devices irritated me. 

This looked like another sad astronaut movie, but I wanted to go into it optimistically that it might be a little less sullen than Interstellar, and it was more sullen. There are a few action sequences that are really thrilling (even moreso because they took place in space and realistically had very little sound), but then it would go back to the dull slow moving story that didn't totally make sense. I love Ruth Negga and found it frustrating that she got to play the female lead in a Brad Pitt blockbuster but her role was basically a glorified cameo. And I felt even worse for Liv Tyler, who plays basically the same character she played in Armageddon, except even more vaguely characterized and anonymous. Sad Bastard also has one of the worst endings of any movie I've ever seen, with a character saying "I will live and love" to the camera right before the credits roll. 

When I was writing my recent pieces about Dylan and listening to a ton of his music, I also rewatched No Direction Home and put on Scorsese's other more recent Dylan doc that I hadn't seen. It captures an interesting moment when Dylan had enjoyed a major comeback with Blood On The Tracks and for once seemed okay with indulging in nostalgia for his past: releasing The Basement Tapes and mounting a tour that featured people like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsberg. But it's 1975 so you see Patti Smith hanging out with Bob Dylan when they'd just met, and get a sense of what's going on at that moment. One really cool thing was finding out that Joni Mitchell's "Coyote" was inspired by her experience playing some dates on the tour and seeing her jam on the song backstage with Dylan, and there are a lot of good onstage performances, I love when Scorsese cuts together two very difference arrangements of "Simple Twist of Fate" from different nights. 

My son watched this movie today, because there are only two times of year for 5-year-olds: Christmas, and "I wish it was Christmas." Kurt Russell plays Santa Claus and it kind of takes the old idea of kids staying up to see Santa to an extreme and has them stow away in his sleigh and go on an adventure, it's cute. 

h) Nezha
This was a big computer animated hit family movie in China, about a mythological demon child who has been cursed to be killed in three years -- it's a charming and funny movie, but you really get a sense of the different culture over there that this is their Toy Story or whatever. 

My kid has been really into "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" lately, so we watched the spinoff movie too, which is kind of 'bigger' and has more music but has pretty much the same charm as the series. It's funny to think that just a few years ago there was this big weird culture war over dudes liking "My Little Pony," feels so distant and quaint now. 

j) Turbo
I kind of forgot there was an animated movie about snails racing in the Indianapolis 500 until my son found it on Netflix, but it's pretty entertaining, great voice work from Paul Giamatti and Samuel L. Jackson. 

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 190: Tony! Toni! Tone!

Monday, June 22, 2020
























I've always wanted to cover both Tony! Toni! Tone! and Raphael Saadiq's solo career in this series, but I wasn't sure which to do first, or if I could squeeze them into the same playlist, since they each have only 4 and 5 albums, respectively. But I decided to just start with the group's catalog and get to Saadiq later. 

Tony! Toni! Tone! deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Love Struck
2. Not Gonna Cry For You
3. Who's Lovin' You
4. Sky's The Limit
5. Oakland Stroke featuring Vanessa Williams
6. All My Love
7. Me And You
8. What Goes Around Comes Around featuring General Grant
9. I Couldn't Keep It To Myself
10. Tell Me Mama
11. Castleers
12. Waiting For You
13. Weather 42
14. Lovin' You (Interlude)
15. Lovin' You
16. Annie May
17. Let Me Know

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Who? (1988)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from The Revival (1990)
Track 7 from Boyz N The Hood (Music From The Motion Picture) (1991)
Tracks 8, 9, 10 and 11 from Sons Of Soul (1993)
Track 12 from Poetic Justice: Music From The Motion Picture (1993)
Track 13 from Mi Vida Loca (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1994)
Tracks 14, 15, 16 and 17 from House Of Music (1996)

I included 3 of their contributions to soundtracks, "Me And You" was released as a single but it never charted or had a video. I think "Waiting For You" is about as good as any of the songs on their albums, so is "Just Like My Papa" from the Jason's Lyric soundtrack but that unfortunately isn't on streaming services. Come to think of it, Saadiq's great early solo singles were for Higher Learning and "The PJs," he and Tony! Toni! Tone! were really reliable when it came to soundtracks. 

"Oakland Stroke" wasn't a single in the U.S. (Vanessa Williams wasn't a really big star yet at that point) and isn't on their greatest hits compilations but, oddly, it was their third-biggest hit in the UK. It's funny to think that  Tony! Toni! Tone! was labeled as a 'retro' act from the very beginning, because all the beats and synths on those first couple albums sound as timestamped to me now as any other R&B from the late '80s and early '90s, a lot of these could have been Bobby Brown songs. 

Over the course of their four albums, I feel like they just kept getting better and better. I like the early stuff too, but I feel like they grew into a more laid back sound with more live instrumentation, and Sons Of Soul was recorded in Trinidad and has a great Caribbean flourishes, including two guest spots from Trinidadian artist General Grant. I'd also recommend checking out the album version of "Anniversary" on that record, I had no idea that the single was edited down from this 9-minute epic. 

Friday, June 19, 2020








I made a list of the 10 best punk and alternative Bob Dylan covers for Spin

Thursday, June 18, 2020






I guested on the Rap Rankings podcast this week, I show up at the 66-minute mark on the episode about UGK's Ridin' Dirty to talk about "Pinky Ring" and my favorite things about the album for about 40 minutes. 

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 189: John Legend

Wednesday, June 17, 2020








This Friday, John Legend is releasing his 6th proper album Bigger Love and also doing a Verzuz song battle on Instagram with Alicia Keys. I'm sure he'll be leaning on his hits for that, but he's got a pretty nice catalog of albums at this point that I wanted to dig into a little bit. 

John Legend deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Live It Up featuring Miri Ben-Ari
2. Alright
3. Prelude
4. Let's Get Lifted
5. I Can Change featuring Snoop Dogg
6. Show Me
7. Again
8. Slow Dance
9. I Love, You Love
10. Quickly featuring Brandy
11. Take Me Away
12. Wholy Holy with The Roots
13. I Can't Write Left Handed with The Roots
14. Tomorrow
15. The Beginning...
16. Overload featuring Miguel
17. Right By You (For Luna)
18. No Place Like Home

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 from Get Lifted (2004)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Once Again (2006)
Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from Evolver (2008)
Tracks 12 and 13 from Wake Up! with The Roots (2010)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Love In The Future (2013)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Darkness And Light (2016)
Track 18 from A Legendary Christmas (2018)

I remember hearing John Legend's voice for the first time on Kanye West's Get Well Soon mixtape, and Kanye's next mixtape I'm Good featured what would become Legend's first solo hit, "Used To Love U," and it was cool to see how fast his career took off with Get Lifted. But Once Again was the album that really showed me John Legend's range, it really felt to me like where a lot of neo-soul artists kind of stick to a narrow canon of classic R&B, Legend makes music more in the spirit of '70s R&B where there was a lot of nods to rock and singer-songwriter pop in the writing and song selection and instrumentation. 

On "Show Me," co-written by Raphael Saadiq, which got a video but wasn't really a hit single or anything, Legend does an incredible job of paying homage to Jeff Buckley with his vocal performance, and "Slow Dance" has a gorgeous Jimi Hendrix guitar sample. The next album, Evolver, had a more modern sound, but even that album made great use of a Dire Straits sample on "I Love, You Love." I saw him live in Baltimore when he toured for Evolver with Saadiq and he did a cool medley of that song with a couple Prince songs. 

I didn't check out Wake Up! back when it was released almost a decade ago, but that album holds up pretty well, as a collection of protest songs and socially conscious soul from the '60s and '70s that continues to feel relevant in our lifetime. The epic 11-minute update of "I Can't Write Left Handed," a song Bill Withers wrote at the end of the Vietnam War, is especially impressive. 

On his last couple albums, Legend continued to broaden the range of musicians that guest on or co-write songs with him in some interesting directions. Love In The Future features collaborations with Joe Jonas, Dan Wilson of Semisonic, and Kimbra. Hit-Boy and Kanye chop a sample of "Winter Song" by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson on "The Beginning..." and Q-Tip chops a sample of Dr. John on "Tomorrow." And Darkness And Light features collaborations with Will Oldham, Matt Sweeney of Chavez, and Mike Hadreas a.k.a. Perfume Genius. 

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
Vol. 143: Brendan Benson
Vol. 144: Chance The Rapper
Vol. 145: Miguel
Vol. 146: The Geto Boys
Vol. 147: Meek Mill
Vol. 148: Tool
Vol. 149: Jeezy
Vol. 150: Lady Gaga
Vol. 151: Eddie Money
Vol. 152: LL Cool J
Vol. 153: Cream
Vol. 154: Pavement
Vol. 155: Miranda Lambert
Vol. 156: Gang Starr
Vol. 157: Little Big Town
Vol. 158: Thin Lizzy
Vol. 159: Pat Benatar
Vol. 160: Depeche Mode
Vol. 161: Rush
Vol. 162: Three 6 Mafia
Vol. 163: Jennifer Lopez
Vol. 164: Rage Against The Machine
Vol. 165: Huey Lewis and the News
Vol. 166: Dru Hill
Vol. 167: The Strokes
Vol. 168: The Notorious B.I.G.
Vol. 169: Sparklehorse
Vol. 170: Kendrick Lamar
Vol. 171: Mazzy Star
Vol. 172: Erykah Badu
Vol. 173: The Smiths
Vol. 174: Kenny Rogers & The First Edition
Vol. 175: Fountains Of Wayne
Vol. 176: Joe Diffie
Vol. 177: Morphine
Vol. 178: Dr. Dre
Vol. 179: The Rolling Stones
Vol. 180: Superchunk
Vol. 181: The Replacements

Monthly Report: June 2020 Singles

Monday, June 15, 2020






1. Travis Denning - "After A Few"
Travis Denning has written songs for Jason Aldean and Justin Moore, and I thought his first major label single "David Ashley Parker From Powder Springs" deserved to be a much bigger hit than it was a couple years ago. So I was rooting for "After A Few" to become his breakthrough, and it finally hit #1 on its 65th week on the country charts. His recent EP is good, hopefully he's got a full-length on the way now. Here's the 2020 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

2. The HU - "Wolf Totem" 
I don't know if The HU's name sounds like 'The Who,' but if it does, that's a pretty good bit. This Mongolian metal band tjat combines traditional bowed instruments and throat singing with huge hard rock riffs is pretty badass. "Wolf Totem" is getting played on rock radio with a remix featuring Papa Roach's Jacoby Shaddix adding lyrics in English, and I prefer the original, but either way I think it would be cool if these guys became huge in America.

3. Harry Styles - "Watermelon Sugar"
When Fine Line as released 6 months ago, the Top 40 format was going through an especially ballad-heavy patch, and I pessimistically predicted that Harry Styles wouldn't finally get a big U.S. radio hit unless he released "Falling" as a single. So I was pretty pleased that "Adore You" blew up and one of the other funky uptempo songs leaped ahead of "Falling" as its radio follow-up, good summer single. 

4. JackBoys f/ Young Thug - "Out West" 
Travis Scott and Young Thug have so many songs together where I just kind of tolerate Travis's presence, but this is a pretty ideal one because it's basically a Thug song with a 40-second Travis cameo. It's weird that this song came out on a project that was meant to promote the roster of Travis Scott's label, but fine by me I guess. 

5. Roddy Ricch f/ Mustard - "High Fashion"
Roddy Ricch and Mustard had such perfect chemistry on "Ballin'" that I was a little disappointed that Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial only had one Mustard track. But "High Fashion" is great, too, leans into that sparkling R&B piano sound even more, makes for a good contrast to follow up "The Box." And Roddy's Young Thug influence has probably never been more obvious than it is on "High Fashion," it's almost like his "Lifestyle." 

6. Migos f/ YoungBoy Never Broke Again - "Need It" 
I always liked Hi-Tek's beats for 50 Cent's The Massacre, it's cool to hear a deep cut like "Get In My Car" get sampled on a current hit, particularly by someone I wouldn't expect like Migos and YoungBoy. I love the part where Quavo and Takeoff share a verse and go back and forth, I wish they did that more often. 

7. Toni Braxton - "Do It" 
Babyface's recent Verzuz battle with Teddy Riley got people nostalgic for Toni and Babyface's old hits, but they've still got great chemistry, that Love, Marriage & Divorce album was great and I was glad to see that Face wrote her new solo single too. 

8. Ellie Goulding - "Power" 
Ellie Goulding's last couple singles were midtempo records with guest rappers so I kind of figured her next album was going in a different direction. But maybe Dua Lipa's success has reassured Goulding that the EDM anthems can still do well, because her excellent new single interpolates "Be The One," one of my favorite songs from Dua's first album. 

9. Foxes - "Love Not Loving You" 
The first couple Foxes albums had some excellent UK dance pop that never did as well in America as Ellie Goulding or Dua Lipa. But I'm glad that she's still releasing stuff, her new indie single has a nice funky bass-driven sound. 

10. Luke Combs f/ Eric Church - "Does To Me" 
Luke "Puffy" Combs keeps the the hits coming, his 8th consecutive #1 single on country radio. He and Eric Church are good at wistful longing for days gone by, so this was a good song for them to collaborate on. 

The Worst Single Of The Month: StaySolidRocky - "Party Girl"
These days the Hot 100 is peppered with songs that got popular on TikTok by previously unknown artists with goofy names like beabadobee, BENEE, and surf mesa. Richmond, Virginia rapper StaySolidRocky is one of those acts, and "Party Girl" is probably the worst of those songs, just a total piece of crap that has no right to share a title with one of my favorite Elvis Costello deep cuts. 

Saturday, June 13, 2020






















I did a deep dive on 1990 for Spin and wrote about 30 albums turning 30 this year that might not get a lot of anniversary coverage on their own, with a playlist of songs from those albums. 

TV Diary

Friday, June 12, 2020















a) "Space Force" 
"Space Force" has gotten pretty negative reviews, and I would say some of the criticism is warranted, but it's better than it's getting credit for. Most of the time, it's a pretty solid "Silicon Valley"-style modern tech farce, with some detours into the ruthless gallows humor satire of "Avenue 5." But it's a strange fit to have Steve Carell return to series television just to suppress his Tom Hanksian everyman charm and play the dumb and arrogant fictional head of a real military branch just created by Donald Trump. And it's a little weird to watch a show about the near future that's just fuzzily in our reality -- they never specify who the president is but he tweets a lot, the Space Office got its funding from the shuttered USPS, and there are a lot of ciphers for current public figures -- I thought the fake Elizabeth Holmes was pretty funny, the fake AOC (with the initials 'AYC') less so. And a lot of the B plots with Carell's family aren't very interesting, although the mystery of why is wife is in prison is intriguing. But John Malkovich is reliably great, I've enjoyed the show more often than not. 

b) "Quiz"
I feel like "Quiz" was not the best name for this miniseries about people cheating on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" considering that Quiz Show was the name of a very famous film about a different game show conspiracy. In any event, this is a pretty enjoyable series with Tom from "Succession" and "Fleabag"'s sister as the cheaters. I like that they also set the scene with the creation of the show too, so you kind of get to see the origins and get to know the people working on the show before they have to deal with this huge clusterfuck. 

c) "Snowpiercer"
I loved Snowpiercer, but one of the things that made it gripping was the claustrophobic feeling of being permanently confined to narrow train cars, which is not necessarily an appealing prospect for multiple seasons of a television adaptation. And the series just doesn't have Bong Joon-ho's visual flair or the movie's sort of Terry Gilliam sense of absurdity. It's not bad and is using the space of the series for some decent world-building, but it's definitely a little disappointing. 

d) "Hightown"
After "Veronica Mars" and "Terriers," I'm a sucker for neo noir shows about the seedy underbelly of a sunny coastal town, and "Hightown" captures that vibe pretty well against the backdrop of Provincetown, Massachusetts (amusingly, Starz was going to call this show "P-Town" but then changed it after another upcoming show changed its title from "Pussy Valley" to "P-Valley"). In some ways "Hightown" is kind of a cliche show about a hard drinking, womanizing cop trying to get their life together and crack a big case, with the twist that the cop is a woman, but Monica Raymund pulls off the role well. I really enjoy the theme song, the punkier original version of The Go-Go's' "Vacation" by Kathy Valentine's earlier band The Textones.  

e) "Grant"  
History Channel does do some purely scripted dramas now, which is what I thought this miniseries about Ulysses Grant would be. But it's one of those weird docudrama hybrids where you've got scenes of Justin Salinger playing Grant interspersed with informational talking head stuff. It's interesting, though, Grant's presidency definitely gets a little glossed over in the history books so I learned some stuff I didn't know. 

f) "Barkskins" 
Another historical epic, this one about French and English colonists battling over North American territory in the 1600s. I enjoy a good David Thewlis performance and he really gets to chew the scenery here, but overall I've found it a little slow, and Matthew Lillard is a bit out of his depth. 

g) "Council Of Dads"
The name of "Coincil Of Dads" made me chuckle when I first heard it, and I kind of expected this to be a tediously wholesome network drama I would roll my eyes at like "God Friended Me." I also thought it was funny that Tom Everett Scott plays a dad on the show while he's playing a dad on two other current series, "I'm Sorry" and "The Healing Powers of Dude." But it's a really well made and sometimes moving show that's grown on me pretty quickly. Scott's character dies of cancer in the first episode, and the series is really about the friends who he asks to help take care of his family after he's gone, including Michael O'Neill, who's guarded but lovable in the same way he was on "The West Wing." I also really like the Savannah, Georgia setting, it seems like a really gorgeous city. This has kind of become my go-to heartstring-tugging NBC show like "Parenthood" used to be. 

h) "I Know This Much Is True" 
Mark Ruffalo is a talented actor who's endured a lot of difficulty and tragedy in his life that seems to come through sometimes in his performances. But "I Know This Much Is True," in which Ruffalo plays two twin brothers, one of them a paranoid schizophrenic and one of them suffering a series of crushing setbacks, borders on maudlin. At a certain point it feels like the story, from the novel of the same name by Wally Lamb, is just sadistically piling misery onto the characters. The series opens with a horrific scene of a character sawing their own hand off, but with each successive episode it really becomes difficult to watch. There are good supporting performances by John Pocaccino and Juliette Lewis, but they're kind of fleeting moments amidst hours of the two Ruffalos going through one painful ordeal after another. 

George Romero and Stephen King's 1982 horror anthology movie Creepshow was styled as an homage to '50s horror comics like Tales From The Crypt. And in a weird circular way, the "Creepshow" TV series now feels like it can't help but face comparisons to the "Tales From The Crypt" anthology series from the '90s. But I've enjoyed this series, like most anthologies it's hit and miss but there's a decent variety of different styles of horror, some stories more predictable than others. The first episode had a King story, but the second half of the episode was by far our favorite segment so far, the one about a dollhouse called "The House and the Head," just elegantly simple and intensely creepy. 

A South African show on Netflix, kind of a dark teen mystery about a teenage girl who thinks she may have found her long lost kidnapped sister. Don't know where the story's going but it's interesting so far. 

Another South African show, this one a crime drama on Cinemax, with mostly white lead characters. Really found the first episode hard to pay attention to, a lot was going on but I just didn't care. 

l) "Curon" 
A supernatural Italian show on Netflix, has some some good spooky atmosphere and moody lighting but I don't really know what's going on enough to want to solve the mystery. 

So often American TV adapts foreign properties and sets the story here that it's interesting to see it go in the opposite direction with "The Woods," a Polish series that adapts an American crime novel and moves the story to Poland. It seems to work, at least from the first episode, I like the way the story jumps between the '90s and the present day, but I was amused when a brawl broke out while teens were dancing to "Two Princes" by the Spin Doctors. 

A Mexican show on Netflix, kind of goes in interesting places with smartphones and hacking and the terrible things high schoolers can do each other now. 

I really enjoyed the first season of this CW show, haven't watched a lot of the second season yet but so far it's good. They did a decent job of resolving the first season's mystery and immediately setting a tense new storyline in motion. I kinda wonder if the show has lost some of its earlier comedic edge since the Michael Showalter-directed pilot, though, I think it works better when there's some levity. 

p) "Ramy
This show grew on me over the course of the first season and the second season was just fantastic, one of the best shows of 2020 for sure. There are so many comedies out now that are tinged with drama and cycle through a ton of hot button issues and cultural taboos in almost every episode, but "Ramy" is one where it feels relatively organic and I always laugh out loud a few times in between the intense envelope-pushing moments. Every time one of the episodes left Ramy off-camera and zoomed in the lives of other characters, I'd start out skeptical and then love it, even the Uncle Naseem episode. I kind of expected Mahershala Ali to have a quick little cameo but he's a major part of half the episodes and really brings it. 

A year ago, Bravo aired "Dirty John," a true crime miniseries about a con man known as Dirty John. Then Bravo decided to turn it into an anthology series with a second season about another terrible person who was neither dirty nor a John, which feels like an awkwardly strained bit of branding. They also didn't retain the same people behind the camera from the first season, and there's no big charismatic performance like Eric Bana -- Amanda Peet and Christian Slater are okay, I guess, but they don't really bring the kind of screen presence to liven this up and make it feel like more than a Lifetime movie. 

I've never been big on this show -- the Issa talking in the mirror stuff just makes me cringe, it's not funny -- but they've been in a good groove lately, might be the best season to date. I enjoyed Yvonne Orji's HBO standup special, but it kind of underlined a recent weakness of the show, that one of the funniest performers in the cast has kind of turned into this unsympathetic character who rarely has comedic scenes anymore. 

Just before season 5 started, Complex published my piece about music in "Billions." And I have not been disappointed by the new episodes being loaded up with references to Dave Mustaine, Manfred Mann, and Keith Moon, and the great use of The Band's "When I Paint My Masterpiece" at the end of one episode. I'm really bummed that they weren't able to finish shooting this season before the COVID-19 lockdown and episode 7 will be the last one they air for a while, because it's been really good so far, enjoying seeing how all these storylines are slowly converging and they've expanded the cast with some good recurring roles (Julianna Margulies, Corey Stoll, Eva Victor, Domenick Lombardozzi).

"Labor Of Love" is a completely generic "Bachelor"-style reality show with the weird and uncomfortable added twist that the bachelorette (or suitress, as they'd say on "UnReal") wants to start a family immediately so she's auditioning someone to have a kid with as soon as possible. Kristy seems likeable enough but a lot of the guys are gross (one of them is from Maryland, goes by 'Budge,' and refers to himself in the third person). I feel sad that Kristin Davis is hosting this instead of still acting, she's still really cute, maybe Kristy and Kristin will run off together. 

A few weeks into the COVID-19 lockdown, Amazon Prime rolled out this reality show where they profile emergency workers and other people who have been doing noble or difficult things during the pandemic, and celebrity hosts like Alicia Keys or Kevin Hart facetime with them and surprise them with some thoughtful gift or something. It's all very wholesome and inspirational, but definitely soured by the fact that Amazon has absolutely not been doing the right thing in a lot of ways throughout this whole ordeal. 

v) "Lenox Hill"
Another docuseries about people doing noble and important work. But it was filmed in a NYC hospital back in 2019, so even when people are doing difficult surgeries and stuff, it has this weird undertone of feeling like a glimpse back at a place that probably looks very very different right now. 

This is a reality show about a woman in Maine who has a business creating art out of moose poop. It's very self-consciously quirky and silly but she and her family are charming, seem like nice folks. 

Have enjoyed the last few episodes, not a lot of starpower in the guests but there's been a lot of quality in the song submissions. Florida Georgia Line in particular got pretty much all good songs to choose from, and chose the best song (but then buried in the middle of an EP of lesser songs, which annoyed me). Bebe Rexha got some good ones and they made an interesting decision to merge together 2 of the songs into one, which my astute wife actually suggested before they did it. When this season is over I might have to comb through all the dozens of the songs featured on the show and find the keepers. 

For the first few minutes that my kid watched this cartoon about a little girl and her robot friend, I was really confused and thought it was a Monsters, Inc. spinoff because the girl looks like a slightly older version of Boo, the toddler who befriends Sulley in the movie. But it's not that at all, Remy is the girl and Boo is the weird little ghost monster-looking robot. 

A cute show about a bushbaby and his lemur and squirrel friends, my 5-year-old watched this nonstop for a while until I got sick of it and I think maybe he did too because went to watching another lemur-themed show, the Madagascar spinoff "All Hail King Julien." 

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 188: Bob Dylan

Tuesday, June 09, 2020


















Next week Bob Dylan is releasing Rough And Rowdy Ways, his first album of original songs in nearly 8 years. I'd wanted to include him in this series for a long time, and was thinking of saving it for the big 200th installment. But with the album on the way, I've spent a lot of my quarantine time familiarizing myself with some of Dylan's albums that I hadn't heard in full before.

Bob Dylan deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Song To Woody
2. A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
3. Masters Of War
4. The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll
5. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met)
6. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
7. Ballad Of A Thin Man
8. Visions Of Johanna
9. Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)
10. Dear Landlord
11. Girl From The North Country with Johnny Cash
12. In Search Of Little Sadie
13. The Man In Me
14. River Theme
15. Mary Ann
16. Going, Going, Gone
17. Simple Twist Of Fate
18. Shelter From The Storm
19. Million Dollar Bash
20. One More Cup Of Coffee

Track 1 from Bob Dylan (1962)
Tracks 2 and 3 from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)
Track 4 from The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964)
Track 5 from Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)
Track 6 from Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Track 7 from Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Track 10 from John Wesley Harding (1967)
Track 11 from Nashville Skyline (1969)
Track 12 from Self Portrait (1970)
Track 13 from New Morning (1970)
Track 14 from Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973)
Track 15 from Dylan (1973)
Track 16 from Planet Waves (1974)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Blood On The Tracks (1975)
Track 19 from The Basement Tapes (1975)
Track 20 from Desire (1976)

Obviously, Dylan has been making albums for almost 60 years, and I decided to just focus on the really rich first 14 years or so when most of his unimpeachable classics were made. But as usual my self-imposed 80-minute cap makes for tough choices, especially when I was picking one or two songs apiece from iconic albums that contained several songs that are pretty famous even without being released as a charting single by Dylan or anyone else. But hey, we're talking about arguably the most celebrated songbook in popular music, I'm not covering it comprehensively. So I didn't make room for 11-minute epics like "Desolation Row" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," but I got in some 6 and 7-minute tracks. And by the way, I'm amused that he seemed to stop at 11 minutes a few times, and finally blew past it in recent years with the 13-minute "Tempest" and then the 16-minute "Murder Most Foul." 

Even though I grew up steeped in a lot of '60s and '70s music via my parents, Bob Dylan was one of those artists I didn't hear a whole lot beyond the obvious stuff -- the only memory of any Dylan CD we had around the house was that first Greatest Hits comp from 1967. I was 21 when I fell in love with "Simple Twist Of Fate," and checked out Blood On The Tracks within a year or two of that and over the years it's really become a major favorite. 

"Shelter On The Storm" has always been a particular favorite, I kind of rolled my eyes when it recently gained notice as sort of a COVID-19 anthem (featured in a quarantine-themed Zillow ad and performed by Chris Martin of Coldplay on one of SNL's "Saturday Night Live at Home" specials). I think one of my favorite bass performances of all time is Tony Brown on the half of Blood On The Tracks drawn from Dylan's first New York sessions for the album, just gorgeous stuff -- I was surprised and disappointed to see that Tony Brown appeared on no other Dylan and albums and only a handful of other artists' albums, and retired from the music industry less then a decade later. 

But I found it daunting to get into an artist's 15th album and know that there were so many other essential albums before that, and that Blood On The Tracks was kind of a different, more personal album than his earlier protest songs, so I'd been kind of slow to check out the '60s stuff. But I've really enjoyed diving deep into it this year. Dylan's early career is often split into before and after one event: his 1966 motorcycle crash. Up to that point, he'd recorded 7 albums in 5 years that displayed an incredible growth and development, from the self-titled debut of traditional folk songs and 2 originals to the sprawling full band double album Blonde On Blonde. So the first 9 tracks on this mix chart that astonishing early period, including some songs like "Visions Of Johanna" and "Ballad Of A Thin Man" that were never chart hits for anybody but still pretty damn famous as album cuts. 

The 2005 Scorsese doc No Direction Home gets over 1/4 into its 3 hour runtime detailing Bob Dylan's early performing career before any mention of him writing a song, and that song is "Song To Woody," one of those 2 originals on his debut, written after he'd already met his idol Woody Guthrie. "I felt like I had to write that song. I did not consider myself a songwriter at all, but I needed to write that and sing it," Dylan says in the film. It's amazing to me that he'd say that about a period of time maybe a year before incredible songs like "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Masters of War" started pouring out of him and wouldn't stop for years. It's also kind of remarkable and surprising that a beloved writer whose singing voice has its share of detractors was signed pretty much purely as a performer at first.  

One early Dylan song I was not previously familiar with was "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a song about a black woman who was murdered by a white man in Baltimore in February 1963. Her killer was convicted and given a light sentence in August, Dylan read about it and recorded his song in October, and released the song the following January. That's nothing compared to how quickly artists react to injustice in the news, when George Floyd was getting mentioned in songs within a week or two of his death, but it's still interesting to think about how relatively quickly Dylan was incorporating current events into his records. 

The decade after the motorycle crash is disjointed and confusing, peppered with classics but also a lot of confusing decisions. Bob Dylan spent most of 1967 holed up in Woodstock with members of The Band, making home recordings that were primarily shopped to other artists by Dylan's songwriting publisher, then heavily bootlegged, and eventually released 8 years later as The Basement Tapes. At the end of '67, Dylan went to Nashville and made John Wesley Harding with a completely different set of musicians, stripping his sound back to an acoustic guitar, bass and drums -- Nashville session vet Kenneth A. Buttrey's drumming on that album is another performance I adore, such a tight and propulsive sound he has on there. Great as that album is, though, it's slightly baffling that Dylan had this amazing chemistry with The Band and went on huge, historic tours with them as his backing band, but then shelved all the work he'd done with them and went in a different direction. 

Dylan sang in a markedly different style on the warmly received Nashville Skyline and the disastrously received double album Self Portrait. I don't particularly like either -- I think Nashville Skyline is the worst album that's regularly voted to be a top 10 Dylan album, I have little use for it aside from the famous Johnny Cash duet of "Girl From The North Country," a song he'd first recorded on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. But I was kind of amused at how innocuous Self Portrait seems now for an album that regularly appears on lists of the worst albums by great artists, and struck some as such an act of betrayal or self-sabotage that it signified the end of the '60s as much as the breakup of The Beatles. 

Out of that weird period, you get one truly great album, New Morning (featuring "The Man In Me," which I first heard in a whimsical scene The Big Lebowski, but listening to it now it strikes me as a really profound and touching song). Outside that, the early '70s is rife with frustrating minor works like label-assembled outtakes collection Dylan and the Peckinpah soundtrack Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, which featured Dylan's biggest hit of the decade, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," and little else of note. 

In '74, Dylan finally made his only proper studio album backed by The Band, Planet Waves, and embarked on a tour with them that produced the live album Before The FloodPlanet Waves is pretty damn good but I still feel like it's a great lost opportunity of rock history that we don't have as many Dylan/Band albums as there are Neil Young/Crazy Horse albums. In '75, a few months after Blood On The Tracks, their 1967 collaborations were finally released as The Basement Tapes, and has become itself one of Dylan's most revered records. It's obviously got great songs and a unique, engrossing sound and atmosphere, but I have to admit I don't rate it as highly as a lot of people do. Levon Helm wasn't in Woodstock with them until the end of the sessions and only appears on some of the album, and a lot of what I love about The Band is Helm's drumming and singing. 

I wasn't sure whether to stop the playlist at Blood or Basement or somewhere later, and then "One More Cup Of Coffee" from Desire jumped out at me as a nice place to end. I like Scarlet Rivera's violin on Desire -- the story goes that Dylan saw a woman with a violin case crossing the street in NYC and asked her to come to the studio and play on a few songs, and she wound up being a major part of the sound of one of Bob Dylan's highest selling albums. But of course, stopping there leaves about 4 decades of further ups and downs in his catalog, a lot of which I still have ahead of me to explore. 

Movie Diary

Thursday, June 04, 2020

















a) The Lovebirds
I'm not saying this is as good as the new school classic Game Night but it definitely mined the same "rom com characters dropped into an action movie" territory well. I thought it was overall better than the previous Nanjiani/Showalter movie, The Big Sick, and the funniest Issa Rae performance I've seen to date. Not especially memorable but good for an afternoon's distraction. 

b) Uncut Gems
There's a certain kind of A24 movie that people get kind of insufferable about, but I will say, this is a much better movie than Spring Breakers, I don't want to dismiss it like that. That said, the flourishes that made it not just a straight up crime thriller, like the overbearing score and the psychedelic microscopic zoom-in shots, didn't really add much to it for me. It all just felt like window dressing on a simple story of a kind of pathetic, self-destructive character who's made life worse for everybody around him circling the drain for 2 hours. Adam Sandler's performance was fine, maybe other people root for Howard Ratner more because they have happy associations with Sandler's face and voice, but I just heard him yelling the same way Happy Gilmore yelled at Bob Barker or whatever and felt no particular fondness for this shitheel of a protagonist. 

c) Rocketman
Bohemian Rhapsody made more money and got more awards. But Rocketman is a far better movie, despite Dexter Fletcher essentially directing both (although John Reid, who managed both Elton John and Queen is, oddly, played by two different "Game Of Thrones" actors in each respective movie). Both movies played fast and loose with the facts and the chronology of the artists' catalogs, but Rocketman's more fanciful heightened reality excuses it more -- although I was irritated by them shoehorning John Lennon into the origin of Elton John's stage name, and someone saying "this is the best thing I've heard since Let It Be" before signing Elton to release his first album, which predated Let It Be). And while a few sequences made me roll my eyes, the bolder and somewhat more cartoonish approach paid off, it really felt like the movie was a celebration of Elton and Bernie's songs that captured the spirit of their records better than most music biopics (and made room for less overexposed tracks like "Amoreena" and "Take Me To The Pilot"). I never thought any movie star would have enough physical resemblance to play Elton John convincingly (Tom Hardy, laughably, was at one point attached to star in this), but Taron Egerton looked the part and sang in Elton's distinctive style pretty impressively too. 

d) Zombieland: Double Tap
The original Zombieland kind of felt like a mainstream tipping point for horror comedy and zombie movie satire that became really oversaturated with diminishing returns in the following years, and I always say that a decade is way too long to wait to make a sequel for a comedy. But I never really stopped enjoying the original whenever it popped up on cable, and this is a solid sequel, I will watch Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone play stock Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone characters anytime and if they're shooting zombies at the same time, all the better. Zoey Deutch was really funny, too, the new additions to the cast were all pretty welcome. 

e) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
For the first hour or so this was about what I expected, a charming little British movie from the director of Four Weddings And A Funeral about a group of book lovers who bond together on a small British island occupied by Germans during WWII. But the second half of the movie is all about how one of them fell in love with a Nazi captain and how he was one of the good Nazis and all the people who were opposed to their star-crossed romance are the bad guys in the story, I really have no patience for that bullshit. 

f) Monster House
My 5-year-old loves this movie and has watched it so many times, even though it really is pretty creepy for a kid's movie, it kinda gives me hope that he's gonna watch a lot of horror movies with me when he's a teenager. Not a bad movie, Dan Harmon co-wrote the screenplay years before creating "Community," but I really do dislike the aesthetic of the animation. 

g) Rock-A-Doodle
I grew up in the era of Don Bluth's weird movies competing with Disney features and I have vivid if not always fond memories of them, but I somehow have no memory of this one, which my son found on Netflix, where Glen Campbell voices a rooster who dresses and sings like Elvis Presley and a human boy is transformed into a kitten. A lot of these Bluth movies just feel like a childhood fever dream to me so it kind of makes sense somehow for this one to just kind of seemingly surface out of the fog of the past.