Deep Album Cuts Vol. 203: T. Rex

Monday, August 31, 2020







T. Rex was selected for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year -- in a normal year, the induction ceremony would've taken place back in May, but after numerous COVID-19 delays they wound up with a simple HBO special that will air on November 7th. And on September 4th, BMG will release AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T. Rex, a double album featuring artists like U2, Joan Jett, and Kesha covering the band's songs. 

T. Rex deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Beltane Walk
2. Diamond Meadows
3. Jewel
4. Rip Off
5. Cosmic Dancer
6. Planet Queen
7. Life's A Gas
8. Mambo Sun
9. Buick McCane
10. Rock On
11. Chariot Choogle
12. Main Man
13. Ballrooms Of Mars
14. Country Honey
15. The Street & Babe Shadow
16. Shock Rock 
17. Born To Boogie
18. Venus Loon
19. Interstellar Soul
20. The Leopards Featuring Gardenia & The Mighty Slug
21. Solid Baby
22. Golden Belt
23. Dawn Storm
24. Jupiter Liar
25. Teen Riot Structure
26. I'm A Fool For You Girl

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from T. Rex (1970)
Tracks 4, 5, 5, 7 and 8 from Electric Warrior (1971)
Tracks 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 from The Slider (1972)
Tracks 14, 15, 16 and 17 from Tanx (1973)
Tracks 18, 19 and 20 from Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow - A Creamed Cage In August (1974)
Tracks 21 and 22 from Bolan's Zip Gun (1975)
Tracks 23 and 24 from Futuristic Dragon (1976)
Tracks 25 and 26 from Dandy In The Underworld (1977)

On AngelHeaded Hipster, "Cosmic Dancer" is covered by Nick Cave, "Life's A Gas" is covered by Lucinda Williams, "Dawn Storm" is covered by BORNS, "Beltane Walk" is covered by Gaby Moreno, "Diamond Meadows" is covered by John Cameron Mitchell, "Ballrooms of Mars" is covered by Emily Haines, "Main Man" is covered by Father John Misty, "Rock On" is covered by Perry Farrell, "The Street & Babe Shadow" is covered by Elysian Fields, "The Leopards Featuring Gardenia & The Mighty Slug" is covered by Gavin Friday, "Planet Queen" is covered by Todd Rundgren, and "Mambo Sun" is covered by Sean Lennon. And "Buick McCane" was one of the first T. Rex songs I had any exposure to, via the medley with Soundgarden's "Big Dumb Sex" that appeared on the Guns N' Roses covers album "The Spaghetti Incident?"

A few months ago, I was reading a couple books, David Hepworth's 1971 - Never A Dull Moment and Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, that both touched on T. Rex from the perspective of young British music fans in the band's heyday. And it struck me that both books kind of spoke about T. Rex as being kind of a faddish lightweight pop act -- Hepworth in particular contrasts Bolan with Rod Stewart, who upstaged T. Rex at a festival in '71. That surprised me a little since, a half century later, the average musician or music fan is more likely to peg Bolan as a cool influential legend than Stewart. But I suppose that's inevitable when one guy dies young and the other gets old and starts making albums crooning standards. And I'm in America, where only one of T. Rex's dozen big UK hits grazed the top 10, and I grew up more familiar with The Power Station's cover of "Bang A Gong (Get It On)" than the original.

A lot of bands changed names and sounds before finding success, but Marc Bolan's group had one of the coolest and most dramatic transformations -- for four albums, Tyrannosaurus Rex was a folky hippie duo that made songs about wizards and unicorns with acoustic guitars and hand drums, and then they became T. Rex, the glam rock band that made songs about cars and sex with a scuzzy electric guitar tone. But that transition was more gradual than you might expect -- the first couple albums as T. Rex still have a lot of bongos. As much as Electric Warrior looms large as the band's defining record, especially in America, where it contains their only hit, I have to say I much prefer the next two albums, The Slider and Tanx, where they rocked a little harder more consistently. 

One of the things I'm always fascinated by is high-charting albums from an act's commercial peak that had no hit singles, or no singles whatsoever, which seemed especially common in the UK in the '60s and '70s, when a lot of the biggest songs were standalone singles. Tanx is one of T. Rex's best and most accessible albums, but no songs from it were singles. Instead, four non-LP singles ("20th Century Boy," "Children of the Revolution," "Solid Gold Easy Action" and "The Groover") went top 5 in the UK less than 6 months before or after Tanx. But don't overlook Tanx, it's aces from front to back. 

The follow-up to Tanx was the album where T. Rex's commercial profile started to drop off. Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow was the only album billed as 'Marc Bolan & T. Rex' and represented a more soulful sound that heavily featured 3 backing singers and B.J. Cole's steel guitar. One of the singers, Gloria Jones, was a former Motown songwriter best known for singing the original recording of "Tainted Love," who'd later have a son by Bolan, and was in the car crash with him the night he died. 

Zinc Alloy got terrible reviews and marked a chart downturn that T. Rex hadn't fully recovered from by the time of Bolan's death. But I think it's one of the band's better albums -- maybe not as good as Young Americans, but I don't know why the same audience that turned on Bolan's soul experiment so fully embraced Bowie's a year later. And that "bullshit! bullshit!" chant on "Interstellar Soul," c'mon, that's catchy. The last couple albums have their moments, too, and Futuristic Dragon was a bit of a turn back to the fantasy themes of the early records, with a cover drawn by George Underwood, who did the cover of the first Tyrannosaurus Rex album. 

12:05 AM

Friday, August 28, 2020




I wrote about the 25 best soundtrack albums of the 1990s for Spin. 

12:52 PM

TV Diary

Thursday, August 27, 2020





a) "Lovecraft Country" 
I've liked Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett in everything I've seen them in up to this point and rooted for them, so it's cool to see them headline a big HBO show together. My wife has been pointing out the ways the series diverts from the Lovecraft Country book, which is apparently more of an anthology thing, and I guess in a way it's harder to keep the monsters-symbolizing-racism device metaphorical when you're putting it on the screen, but I'm interested in how they're navigating that balancing act. 

b) "Teenage Bounty Hunters" 
I'm really enjoying this Netflix show created by Kathleen Jordan, who was a writer on last year's short-lived and underrated "American Princess." The first episode swings very broadly into the premise of two very religious sisters who attend a Christian high school (Anjelica Bette Fellini and Maddie Phillips, both giving great comic performances) falling into working for a bounty hunter (Kadeem Hardison, who I didn't recognize all these decades after "A Different World"). But with each episode the characters become a little more 3-dimensional and the knowing silliness of the show becomes a little more lived-in and natural, it's hilarious but it's also got a lot of heart and kind of grapples with how hard it is for kids to go through puberty in a community that preaches abstinence. It's probably for the best that they dropped the first word from the original title, but on the other hand, 'Slutty Teenage Bounty Hunters' has the name number of syllables as 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.' 

c) "P-Valley"
The rare scripted shows that take place in the deep south are often set in major cities, so I'm happy to see a premium cable drama like the Mississippi-based "P-Valley." The writing sometimes leaves a little to be desired -- "guess they don't call it the dirty south for nothin'" is an actual line of dialogue on this show -- but there are some great performances from Nicco Annan and and Brandee Evans, among others. 

d) "We Hunt Together" 
The title of "We Hunt Together" has a clever/stupid meaning because the show is about a British couple on a Mickey and Mallory-style killing spree, and a man and woman on the police force who are trying to catch them. It works, though, there's an interesting dynamic between the tense, creepy gore of the killers' storyline and the kind of droll odd couple comedy of the investigators' storyline. 

e) "Love In The Time Of Corona"
I rolled my eyes pretty hard at the existence of this show, and especially the title. But it's not a bad idea for Freeform to do a little rom com miniseries about dating and relationships during quarantine, and the execution is charming enough. It can be a little of a drag when people are talking about COVID-19 and how it's disrupted daily life in pretty much every scene, but that's only because it's so close to real life, particularly when all this started. And apparently Andie MacDowell has another daughter who's also absolutely stunning. 

f) "Hitmen" 
Peacock's scripted programming continues to be almost entirely shows produced in other countries, mostly the UK, including this comedy about two British women who are contract killers. Predictably, all the humor is derived from the contrast between their nasty violent work and their mundane workaday attitude about it, and the way they bicker with the people they're about to execute. It's funny at times, but feels a little like a one trick pony.  

g) "Five Bedrooms" 
This Peacock import from Australia is about five people seated at the 'singles table' at a wedding who decide to invest in a house together and live together. It's kind of a sweet, empathetic, character-driven dramedy like American network TV occasionally does well, but I've never seen a show like this from Australia. 

Another British comedy recently picked up by an American network, in this case The CW. It reminds me a lot of "Spaced," the way the characters' lives are set against their obsession with a video game and the humor is a little mean and a little at their expense, but it's still a fun show with a likable cast. 

i) "Tell Me A Story" 
One of the upsides of the oncoming scarcity of TV programming after months pandemic lockdown is that it seems to have increased the trend of networks picking up web series and shows from subscription streaming services. For instance, The CW has begun airing "Tell Me A Story," which ran for 2 seasons on CBS All Access. It kind of feels like a more grounded version of "Once Upon A Time," where the stories all parallel classic fairy tales, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes kind of heavyhandedly (for instance, you know that 3 thieves are the 3 little pigs because they pull a heist in pig masks). 

SyFy has also been picking up web series, and their acquisition of DC Universe's "Harley Quinn" has been one of my favorite things on TV this year. "Dallas & Robo," featuring the voices of John Cena and Kat Dennings, is just okay, kind of feels like "Futurama" software running on "Archer" hardware. 

k) "Hoops" 
Another new animated sitcom that's on Netflix, with Jake Johnson as a high school basketball coach. It kinda feels like they're fitting as many curse words as they can into every scene, it's funny now and again but it's just trying so hard to be naughty and irreverent, almost on a "South Park" level. 

Despite the title, this is actually one of the less obnoxiously edgy new shows I've seen on Adult Swim, don't love it but it has potential.  

I enjoy watching stuff like this German sci-fi show on Netflix with my wife because she knows all about the subject, and every few minutes she gripes about the various violations in lab etiquette or bioethics. I'm impressed by the direction, though, there's been some vivid colors and imaginative camera angles. 

Other than being made in Colombia and watching it with subtitles, "The Great Heist" feels like every other heist story I've ever watched in a movie or TV show. And it totally rules as usual, I love watching the crew come with all the different specialists come together and plan out the big job. 

This South Korean show on Netflix is a pretty charming rom com about a woman trying to choose between four suitors. But the episode lengths of Asian shows really exhaust me, I never want to put a show on if I know it's gonna be like 70 minutes or more. 

At this point, I just assume the pandemic has disrupted every show's production schedule and am pleasantly surprised anytime it turns out a show got its next season done before the lockdown, and I feel especially bad for shows on their way out that had to delay finishing their final season. So I was pretty happy that "Corporate" returned for its third and final season, even if it was only 6 episodes, this show has grown on me more and more since it began. And I feel like they're going out at the top of their game, their satirical voice has gotten so sharp and every episode is so tightly written, every scene and every line of dialogue keyed into building the heightened reality of that particular episode's premise. The season premiere, where the company launches a streaming service and tries to redo the disappointing finale of a popular show, was especially funny and timely. 

These days, if I miss a show's first season, I usually kinda give up on the thought of ever catching up on it. But now and again it's fun to go back and start a show once it's been on for a few seasons, and "Wynonna Earp" seemed to have such a fervent cult fanbase that I was curious about it, and Melanie Scrofano was really funny in Ready Or Not. We're only about halfway through its run, but I feel like it's gotten progressively better as it goes, the cast chemistry gelling and slightly more money going into the special effects. 

This is a pretty well made docuseries, I love seeing this detailed breakdown of how Master P built the empire, year by year. When I was a teenager No Limit seemed to come out of nowhere suddenly ubiquitous, but they laid so much groundwork before that, I like seeing what those steps were. 

The Ruff Ryders miniseries that BET started running right on the heels of the No Limit one might be even better, it's just so dramatic and, again, they were working for so long to set DMX up for that huge explosion he had in '98, and they have these amazing stories about him just walking around Yonkers with his dog robbing people and occasionally getting involved in rap battles. 

I enjoyed "SyFy Wire's The Great Debate," but their other new show is a little more of a generic late night show with a sci-fi nerd twist. Some of the bits with the puppet co-host are funny, though, and it was cool that the first episode featured a segment with Grant Imahara from "Myth Busters" that he taped before his death. 

It's still strange to me that Ozzy Osbourne and his family are all reality TV royalty and seemingly at any given moment one or more of them has a show on the air. This one is a simple little quarantine era show where Jack shows viral videos of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena to Ozzy and Sharon and asks them what they believe is real (Kelly was, I guess, busy taping "Celebrity Call Center"?). It's a silly show, but considering that Ozzy has Parkinson's and Jack has MS, it's kind of nice to just see them together, doing okay and enjoying each other's company. 

I'm kind of baffled by the 'unboxing' YouTube trend so I was morbidly curious if this A&E show was just a TV version of that, but it's more of a "Storage Wars" knockoff about people who buy and sell liquidated merchandise. 

Another silly new A&E show, hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, where people get their memorabilia appraised. But since it was done in quarantine, everyone's video conferencing from home, and the experts aren't in the same room with the objects, so they're kind of just guessing at their appraisals and nothing gets sold, so the whole show is kind of done with an inconsequential shrug. 

I kind of like this Canadian show where chefs have to create a great meal with nothing but the contents of a given family's refrigerator, it's kind of just a flashy TV version of what normal people do all the time. 

A cute live action kid's show where a pregnant lady does science experiments with kids like Mr. Wizard. My 5-year-old who loves doing Kiwi Crate experiments and sometimes talks about becoming a scientist like his mom has really enjoyed it. 

Another new Netflix show that my 5-year-old likes. It's similar to Minions or "Rabbids Invasion" in that it's a bunch of obnoxious little identical creatures causing mischief and talking to each other in an indecipherable babble, but it's actually more annoying than either of those. 

10:06 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 202: The 1975

Monday, August 24, 2020






















The 1975 released their 4th full-length, Notes On A Conditional Form, back in May, so I've sat with it long enough now that I wanted to pick my favorite tracks and put it in perspective with their catalog as a whole. 

The 1975 deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. This Must Be My Dream
2. Pressure
3. Then Because She Goes
4. Be My Mistake
5. So Far (It's Alright)
6. I Think There's Something You Should Know
7. She Way Out
8. Loving Someone
9. Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)
10. Mine
11. Head.Cars.Bending
12. The Ballad Of Me And My Brain
13. Facedown
14. Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied
15. I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)
16. M.O.N.E.Y.
17. Undo
18. I Couldn't Be More In Love
19. Heart Out (live)
20. The 1975
21. If I Believe You

Track 13 from Facedown EP (2012)
Track 17 from Sex EP (2012)
Track 11 from Music For Cars EP (2013)
Track 5 from IV EP (2013)
Tracks 2, 7, 16 and 20 from The 1975 (2013)
Tracks 1, 8, 12 and 21 from I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it (2016)
Track 19 from DH00278 (Live From The O2, London.16.12.16) (2017)
Tracks 4, 10, 15 and 18 from A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018)
Tracks 3, 6, 9 and 14 from Notes On A Conditional Form (2020)

While I was making this I decided to do something silly and make another playlist of 1975 (as in the year) deep cuts, with a track from each previous playlist in this series that covered an album from 1975. It's pretty much wall-to-wall great songs. 

The divide between singles and album material is sharper for The 1975 than it is for almost any other band I can think of. That's because there's so much moody Brian Eno-inspired ambient chillout material on their albums, as well as acoustic tracks and languorous ballads and glitchy beat experiments, that they'd never release as a single, and because they're a big name band who releases many, many singles from each album. 

Even the quartet of EPs that preceded their first album mainly served to establish that dynamic, each one backing a big attention-grabbing single with some more textural downtempo material. And a lot of that stuff never appeared on the albums, so I wanted to include them, and the live album, alongside the proper LPs. I had to, of course, include the song "The 1975," which has opened each of their 4 albums -- the first one is kind of the definitive one, the next couple are minor variations with the same basic lyrics, and the latest one on Notes expands to a longer monologue by Greta Thunberg, which feels like something Don Henley would've done first if he was still making solo albums. 

So this playlist, much more than usual, is kind of a look at the band that you wouldn't get from their charting songs, rather than an alternate 'greatest hits' of equally catchy uptempo tracks that could've been released as singles but weren't, although "This Must Be My Dream" certainly could have been a single, and "Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)" and "Be My Mistake" have done well on streaming services. And I fudged things a little -- "Loving Someone" and "Heart Out" were released as singles towards the end of their respective album cycles but didn't really chart anywhere, so they felt like fair game. 

10:21 AM

Movie Diary

Wednesday, August 19, 2020





a) Project Power
This isn't a fiasco like Bright or anything but this feels like another example of Netflix trying to kickstart an ambitious sci-fi franchise and failing. The idea of a street drug that gives people superpowers for 5 minutes is a little goofy, especially because it's always exactly 5 minutes and a lot of the movie revolves around people wearing stopwatches to time it and the powers stopping on a dime at a moment that's crucial to the plot. But, everybody has different powers and you never know what they'll have, so it's a little fun like an X-Men movie in that respect. 

b) Sorry To Bother You
I had a feeling that it would be better to go into this movie cold. And I'm glad I managed to read or overhear very little about the plot in the last 2 years before I finally got around to watching it, because that 3rd act twist definitely lands better because I didn't see it coming. I like that it didn't take itself too seriously even as the points that the increasingly absurd and audacious satire was making were pretty dark, I don't know if it held together 100% but I really enjoyed it. 

c) Ford v Ferrari
I really rolled my eyes at Ford v Ferrari's run as an Oscar movie. But it turned out to be pretty enjoyable, it's funny to realize just how rarely I've actually heard Christian Bale speak in a British accent in a movie. In these kinds of historical movies about skilled men doing important things, wives and girlfriends tend to be kind of perfunctory female leads, but Bale's scenes with Caitriona Balfe were really the best part of the movie, especially the scene in the car. She brought a really visceral anger to that role, which, given how the story ends, is pretty justified. 

d) We Summon The Darkness
This horror movie is set at a metal concert in 1988 and is set against the backdrop of Christian moral panic about heavy metal suicides and Satanic death cults. But there's a pretty great little twist a half hour in that kind of flips around the premise from what it seems to be. It plays out a little predictably from there, but there's some good bloody action and it ends up being character-driven and engaging. 

e) Charlie's Angels
I put this on in the background while I was working on music, which is probably about as much attention as it warrants, although it felt like they got a little closer to a functional lighthearted action comedy than I expected given that Kristen "Party All the Time" Stewart is the only marquee name in the trio. Naomi Scott is really cute in this movie and showed some decent comedy chops 

f) Animal Crackers
This animated movie came out in China 2 years ago and quietly came out here on Netflix after a U.S. theatrical release fell through. I don't really like the animation style of the movie, but the voice cast (Danny DeVito, Ian McKellan, Patrick Warburton, Emily Blunt, Wallace Shawn, among others) keeps it pretty entertaining. 

3:11 PM

Monthly Report: August 2020 Singles

Tuesday, August 18, 2020






1. Chloe x Halle - "Do It" 
A lot of Scott Storch beats from his hitmaking heyday have aged poorly, and when he started to return to the music industry a few years ago, I remember people would make fun of these videos where he was jamming on tracks that sounded like they should be on a 2004 video game soundtrack. But he's been quietly notching some really good, current-sounding beats here and there the last couple years (I especially liked T.I.'s "Wraith"). And now Storch has helped Chloe and Halle fashion their weird art pop into something that fits in on R&B radio, with the help of frequent Ariana Grande co-writer Victoria Monet. I've been amused to see this song kind of cross paths over the past few weeks with another "Do It," by Toni Braxton, on the R&B airplay charts. Here's the 2020 singles playlist I add songs to every month. 

2. Billie Eilish - "My Future" 
I really love hearing this song, but nothing will top the first listen, when it opened as this placid ballad and I sat there wondering whether the whole song would sound like that like "When The Party's Over" or whether there'd be some dramatic 'drop.' And then this gorgeous, kind of unexpected groove comes gliding in, and man, it just bowled me over, just in how much it didn't care about bowling me over. 

3. Lil Baby - "Emotionally Scarred"
Lil Baby has so many hits out right now, one on top of another, he's really in that breakthrough moment that only happens for a rapper every few years, "We Paid" seems to be a favorite with a lot of people but I think this and "Bigger Picture" are much better songs personally. Plus it always reminds me of that livestream he made when the song was new that's become kind of a meme because he's emphatically over-explaining lyrics that aren't hard to understand ("two hundred each occasion! each occasion two hundred!"). 

4. Cardi B f/ Megan Thee Stallion - "WAP" 
I really enjoyed writing my Vulture piece about Al "T" McLaran, the "Whores in This House" voice sampled on "WAP" and there's been a lot of great response to the article, I hope Al gets a big payday out of this song. But it's funny, after the song dropped and I heard the sample, knowing I had an interview on my archives with McLaran, I spent the first 36 hours that "WAP" was out thinking about and listening to the song constantly, reaching out to McLaran and doing a new interview and writing the article and pitching it to Dee Lockett at Vulture. So I didn't really stop and enjoy the song or even think about whether I really enjoyed it until that was all over. But it's good, not my favorite by Cardi or Megan, but Meg's verses are killer and I'm generally big fan of raunchy rap. 

5. 2 Chainz f/ Lil Wayne - "Money Maker"
I'm glad that 2 Chainz used his moment in the spotlight in the Verzuz with Rick Ross as an opportunity to drop a new single and announce an album, this song is great. It features a sample of "Piece of My Love," a Guy album track that's become really heavily sampled over the years, on Big Sean's hit "Play No Games" as well as songs by 2Pac, Mariah Carey, Jay Rock, and others, but "Money Maker" puts a fresh twist on it with an HBCU marching band playing the melody with these cool glitchy noises here and there. 

6. Pink Sweat$ - "17"
I'm kind of surprised this song hasn't been bigger than it is, it's such a perfect couple's first dance at weddings kind of song that usually goes multi-platinum. I think Pink Sweat$ is gonna be big whether it's this song or another, I hear a lot of potential in his recent EP. 

7. Cyn - "Drinks"
Another recent minor pop radio hit that I thought should've been bigger, it's got this dry staccato chorus but then the verses take so many catchy melodic twists and turns that make it stick with me.  

8. Rezz & Grabbitz - "Someone Else" 
I was surprised to look up Rezz and Grabbitz and see that they're both DJ/producers in the EDM world, because "Someone Else" is one of the better brooding rock songs that's been on alternative radio lately, reminds me of something a band like Highly Suspect would write. 

9. Beyonce - "Black Parade" 
I feel like Beyonce really took a lot of creative liberty with her My Chemical Romance cover, but I like it. 

10. Yella Beezy f/ Young Thug -"Headlocc"
As I said a few months ago, one of my favorite strains of southern rap production is simple left-hand-on-the-keyboard piano riffs, and Moneybagg Yo's "1 2 3" is one of the best in recent memory, I feel like "Headlocc" was maybe made to emulate its success a little. It was released in the early weeks of the pandemic, and I really like the slightly lo-fi sound of the Young Thug verse, which sounds like it was recorded at home, same thing with the Trina verse on the "Bitch From Da Souf" remix. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Powfu f/ Beabadoobee - "Death Bed"
I don't think anything will top StaySolidRocky as my least favorite song by an unknown launched onto the Hot 100 by TikTok this year, but this one is pretty cloying and irritating to me in its own right. Also why do these TikTok artists always have the goofiest names? 

11:44 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 201: Solange

Monday, August 17, 2020







Last week I reached the 200th installment in the Deep Album Cuts series. And having reached that milestone, I also wanted to pay respect to the person who inspired the name of this column and its first playlist in 2013, Solange Knowles, who tweeted about the importance of knowing Brandy deep album cuts. At the time, Solange only had two full-length albums, but now that she has four and has emerged as a significant artist in her own right, I wanted to look back at her catalog. 

Solange deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Ain't No Way
2. Get Together
3. This Could Be Love
4. Would've Been The One
5. Cosmic Journey featuring Bilal
6. 6 O'Clock Blues
7. Don't Let Me Down
8. Some Things Never Seem To Fucking Work
9. Bad Girls (Verdine Version)
10. Cash In
11. Junie
12. F.U.B.U. featuring The-Dream and BJ The Chicago Kid
13. Borderline (An Ode To Self Care) featuring Q-Tip
14. Don't Wish Me Well
15. Scales featuring Kelela
16. Things I Imagined
17. Down With The Clique featuring Tyler, The Creator
18. Way To The Show featuring Cassie
19. Stay Flo
20. Dreams featuring Devin The Dude

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Solo Star (2002)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams (2008)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from the True EP (2012)
Track 10 from Saint Heron (2013)
Tracks 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 from A Seat At The Table (2016)
Tracks 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 from When I Get Home (2019)

Solange's career arc reminds me a bit of Janet Jackson's -- being in a famous family and the little sister of a superstar gave them both the opportunity and freedom to make music at a major label level and study under great producers and songwriters, before really finding their sound with a chart-topping third album. Obviously Janet became a pop star on the same scale as Michael while Solange has charted her own course that feels like she's not trying to be as much a virtuoso superstar like Beyonce, but still, there are parallels. And much as I think Janet's pre-Control albums are kind of underrated, I found stuff to enjoy on Solange's first two albums that feel a little overlooked now. 

Solange was 16 when she released her first album and Destiny's Child were at the height of their success and her big sister was about to become a huge artist in her own right. So Solo Star is stacked with big name talent -- beats by Timbaland (the Static Major-penned "Try Again" soundalike "Get Together") and Neptunes and Rockwilder. Unfortunately, the versions of Solange's first 2 albums that are currently on streaming services are not the original major label releases but reissues from a few years later by Music World Music Inc., a company owned by Matthew Knowles. Those reissues change around the running order and cover art, add some tracks and drop others, including both songs on Solo Star that were co-written and co-produced by Beyonce. 

Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams has some real gems, particularly "Would've Been The One," which was co-written by Baltimore native Makeba Riddick, and that wild 6-minute song with Bilal. The single "T.O.N.Y." might still be my favorite Solange song. True was kind of a turning point where people took Solange more seriously, but I don't really like Dev Hynes's sound that much, his stuff is so blandly retro. The kissing scene at Jimmy John's in "Some Things Never Seem To Fucking Work" is pretty amusing, though. And Verdine White from Earth, Wind & Fire plays some gorgeous bass on "Bad Girls." 

I think A Seat At The Table is definitely her best album, though. It took some time to grow on me, but it sounds better now, revisiting it after "Cranes In the Sky" has really stood up as one of the best R&B singles of the last few years. It surprised me Solange basically didn't release a single from When I Get Home. The surprise release was of course nothing new, and she did shoot a few videos for the album, but nothing really emerged as a radio song on the level of "Cranes." "Things I Imagined" kind of became the most quoted song on the album, but it was more of an intro than a full song. I also really dug "Cash In" from her Saint Heron label compilation, I hadn't heard that one before I started putting together this playlist. 

9:56 AM

Tuesday, August 11, 2020




I spoke to Al "T" McLaran, whose voice was sampled on the huge new Cardi B single "WAP," and got the whole story behind his work on the classic Frank Ski track "Whores in This House," for Vulture. 

(photo by Werner Berger)

9:32 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 200: Jimi Hendrix

Monday, August 10, 2020






This column has been one of my favorite things I've done on this site over the years, but it's crazy that I got to 200 installments, and still have so many artists on my wishlist that I can easily imagine passing 300 and beyond that. Narrowcast had its 15th anniversary last year, and in June the blog passed the 1 million views mark (or maybe that happened a long time ago, it's hard to tell if Blogger's current traffic stats go all the way back to 2004). The site's 3000th post is also on the horizon, will probably happen in September. I've written for a lot of places for money and larger audiences over the last 15 years. But I like having this place as my home base to write about whatever I want without thinking about who's the audience or how to monetize it. And it's always felt really good to have this outlet, especially lately when there's not much I can do but hang out at home and listen to music and write. Big thanks to anyone reading this and anyone who's ever taken a look at the site over the years. 

Since the 100th deep album cuts playlist was Stevie Wonder, I wanted #200 to be someone special too, and Jimi Hendrix has been one of my favorite musicians for about as long as I've cared about music. September 18th will be the 50th anniversary of Jimi's death -- obviously he released a relatively small amount of music in his lifetime, and his posthumous discography has been a bit odd and scattered. So I wanted to do a mix of less heralded gems from the Jimi Hendrix Experience albums while also trying to find the best of the posthumous records. 

Jimi Hendrix deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Are You Experienced?
2. May This Be Love
3. I Don't Live Today
4. Third Stone From The Sun
5. Spanish Castle Magic
6. If 6 Was 9
7. Little Miss Lover
8. Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)
9. 1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
10. Gypsy Eyes
11. Machine Gun (live)
12. Night Bird Flying
13. Drifting
14. In From The Storm
15. Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced (1967)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Axis: Bold As Love (1967)
Tracks 8, 9 and 10 from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Electric Ladyland (1968)
Track 11 from Band Of Gypsys (1970)
Tracks 12 and 13 from The Cry Of Love (1971)
Tracks 14 and 15 from First Rays Of The New Rising Sun (1997)

As far as I'm concerned, the Jimi Hendrix Experience's only 3 albums are as good as just about anybody's 3 best albums, those records are simply an enormous achievement. And each of them has been my favorite at different points -- Electric Ladyland was an early standard bearer for what a rock artist could do with the sprawl of a double LP studio album, and Are You Experienced is just remarkably packed with titanic, immortal classic rock standards. Axis: Bold As Love is kind of the awkward middle child of the trio -- none of its songs have really entered permanent classic rock rotation like the hits from the other 2 albums, but it being less overplayed means it's still kind of a fresh listen to me. "Spanish Castle Magic" just kicks so much ass, I'm obsessed with it. 

Jimi is my favorite guitarist, but Mitch Mitchell is also one of my favorite guitarists, I think he doesn't get mentioned enough alongside Bonham and Moon and Baker as one of the really inventive powerhouse drummers that helped push rock into louder and wilder areas in the late '60s. There's a great story in Elvis Costello's book Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink about his drummer Pete Thomas (another of my personal favorites) as a teenager idolizing Mitchell, who lived in his hometown, and hanging out outside Mitchell's house until he was invited in. 

"Little Miss Lover" provided the breakbeat for A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario," and "Are You Experienced" was sampled on no less than 3 classic hip hop songs: Pharcyde's "Passin' Me By" and Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill A Man," and Beastie Boys' "B-Boy Bouillabaisse"(it's also one of 3 Hendrix samples on "Jimmy James"). And of course, "Third Stone From The Sun" was interpolated on Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy." 

There's a fairly little music by Hendrix from before the formation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966. In the mid-'60s, Jimi played guitar with the Isley Brothers, and then was in Little Richard's backing band. There are only a couple of known studio tracks of them playing together, and I included one, "Dancing All Around The World," on my Little Richard deep album cuts playlist a few months ago. 

Hendrix made a lot of music in the nearly two years between the release of Electric Ladyland and his death, most of which came out posthumously. And it seemed to be a really interesting period that he never got to see through to fruition. Hendrix wanted to expand the Experience to a larger ensemble, which Noel Redding wasn't into and quit. The larger Gypsy Sun And Rainbows band played Woodstock, and then evolved into a new trio, Band Of Gypsys with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. The last album Hendrix completed and approved for release in his lifetime was the Band Of Gypsys live album, released to fulfill a contractual dispute and buy him some time as he worked on the next studio album. It featured all new songs, including an epic 12-minute version of "Machine Gun." 

After Hendrix's death, his collaborators and producers sorted through all the unreleased recordings for his uncompleted 4th album, which was planned as a double album. But they kind of split up the unreleased songs across several albums, two in 1971 and one in 1972, then several more over the next few decades. The way I first heard a lot of Hendrix posthumous songs was when Voodoo Soup was released in 1995 -- I liked that record, but it and other albums overseen by Alan Douglas drew criticism for having overdubbed instruments from musicians who weren't in the studio with Hendrix. So when the Hendrix family regained control of the catalog, they released more highly regarded attempts to construct Jimi's 4th album like 1997's First Rays of the New Rising Sun. There's also a whole lo-fi solo demo Jimi made in early 1970 for an album called Black Gold that has yet to come out other than one track, I really hope that surfaces someday. 

It's kind of sad to me that Jimi left behind so much unreleased music that he's kind of had a much more muddled posthumous output that hasn't endured in the same way as some other stars who died young in that era. Janis Joplin, who died 2 weeks after Jimi, had a posthumous #1 album and #1 single a few months later. By comparison, Jimi has had dozens of posthumous albums, including a few that were top 5 on Billboard. But only a couple of his post-1970 singles charted on the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and never became part of his canon of classic rock staples, much less major hits on the scale of "Me and Bobby McGee" or "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay." 

I love some of those posthumous Jimi songs, though, especially "Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)." I first heard it via the cover on the 1993 Stone Free tribute album (by every member of Temple Of The Dog except...uh, Stone). And that rules and is in some ways more polished than any of the Hendrix recordings of the song, but I think I picked the best of the ones available and it's pretty awesome. And "Drifting" is gorgeous. Of all the musicians that died young, Hendrix is the one I think about the most in terms of what he could've made, just imagining what the '70s would have been like with him experimenting even more freely thoughout the decade. 

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

9:31 AM

Monthly Report: July 2020 Albums

Friday, August 07, 2020






1. Madeline Kenney - Sucker's Lunch
Wye Oak co-produced Oakland-based singer-songwriter Madeline Kenney's third album Sucker's Lunch, and are sort of her backing band for the whole album, following Kenney's Jenn Wasner-produced 2018 album Perfect Shapes. And it's just a beautiful record, rich with vocal harmonies and densely layered guitar but also  great use use of saxophone on "Sucker" and "Sugar Sweat" and marimba on "Double Hearted." Here's my 2020 albums playlist with most of the albums I've listened to this year in it. 

2. Wye Oak - No Horizon EP
Last Friday was a big day for Wye Oak fans, because both Sucker's Lunch and the band's own new EP were released. My Neighbor / My Creator is one of my favorite Wye Oak releases despite being just a 20-minute EP, and No Horizon follows in that tradition well. The drum pattern and the guitar tone on "AEIOU" alone remind me why this has been one of my favorite bands in the world for a dozen years, they just have such a great ear for arranging and piling sounds on top of each other. I was a little skeptical about the Brooklyn Youth Chorus collaborations on here working but they use their voices as a textural instrument in a way that totally fits into the Wye Oak sound, particularly on "Spitting Image." The two songs they released earlier in the year were really good, too, I'm enjoying this regular trickle of new material. 

3. Flo Milli - Ho, Why Is You Here? 
I heard Flo Milli for the first time, like a lot of people, in 'fancam' TikToks and videos on Twitter, 30-second montages of different celebrities and public figures, often set to this previously unknown teenager rapping boasts like "I like cash and my hair to my ass" in a bored, taunting high school movie villain voice over a bleary beat from an early Playboi Carti song. "Beef FloMix" is on Flo Milli's major label debut, and most of the songs on the album have the same appeal (I particularly like "Send The Addy" and "19"), I feel like she's become this niche social media favorite based on the fancams, but she's got real talent and star quality, would love to see this album take off on a more mainstream tip and put her on the level of, say, City Girls. 

4. Willie Nelson - First Rose of Spring
After listening to dozens of Willie Nelson albums this year for my deep cuts playlist, I was excited to settle in with this, his 70th solo studio album. A guy that's sounded like a wizened old sage since before I was born is 87 now, and his voice shows its age a little more with each new album. He's lost a little warmth and fullness, but a song like "Stealing Home" gets a little extra poignancy out of the sound of his withering instrument, and he still plays Trigger beautifully, and longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael sounds great on "Our Song." First Rose of Spring only has a couple of new Willie Nelson/Buddy Cannon compositions, fewer than Nelson's last 4 albums of new material that Cannon produced, but "Blue Star" and "Love Just Laughed" are lovely, as are the tracks penned by Chris Stapleton and Toby Keith

5. Lori McKenna - The Balladeer
Lori McKenna's written great songs for Little Big Town and Carrie Underwood and Lady Gaga, but her solo albums have a different kind of intimacy and texture from hearing her songs in her own voice. The Balladeer might be even better than 2018's The Tree, and it's hard to imagine any of her collaborators singing a story song like "Marie" quite as well as her. 

6. Rufus Wainwright - Unfollow The Rules
Rufus Wainwright's first proper 'pop' album of new songs in 8 years isn't as immediate as 2012's Out of the Game, but it's growing on me. There's a nice mix of beautiful songs like "Alone Time" and odder moments of whimsy like "This One's For The Ladies (THAT LUNGE!)" and "You Ain't Big." 

7. Infinity Knives x Brian Ennals - Rhino XXL
I interviewed Brian Ennals for the Baltimore City Paper when he was just getting started as a solo artist back in 2012, and it's been cool to see him branch out and try different things with different collaborators since then, including some memorable guest spots on last year's Infinity Knives album Dear, Sudan. So it's cool to hear them do a whole album together, with guest spots from people like Pale Spring and Kotic Couture. The sound is very avant garde at times and Ennals injects a lot of social commentary into his lyrics, but it's done with this playful air of mischievous satire that's still really entertaining. "The Willower" is my favorite track, so many quotables. Check it out on Bandcamp (it's Bandcamp Friday today, by the way!). 

8. Taylor Swift - Folklore
I've long hoped for Taylor Swift to do some kind of 'stripped down' or 'back to basics' kind of album, less out of any desire for ugh 'authenticity' or nostalgia for her early work than the fact that her last 4 big bombastic synth pop albums have featured some of the worst songs I've ever heard, in addition to some very good ones. And I suspect she might never have made one if not for the pandemic, although even as an intimate home recorded quarantine album Folklore is kind of big and maximalist and lush, and way longer than it needs to be like all of her albums. I think the big #1 single "Cardigan" is one of the weaker songs, but I think "The 1" is one of the best things she's ever written, and I really like "Invisible String" and "Peace" too. I don't think anyone would call this Taylor's 'indie' album if they didn't know who else worked on it, but I'm fine with her making a Sara Bareilles-style adult contemporary album, since the way a lot of people feel about Taylor Swift is how I feel about Sara Bareilles. 

9. Pretenders - Hate For Sale
I've enjoyed the last few Pretenders albums that sounded like Chrissie Hynde just kind of doing whatever she wanted to do under the Pretenders name without too much concern for what's expected of the band. But Hate For Sale is very close to the platonic ideal of what a Pretenders album should sound like 40 years into the band's career, a brisk half hour of mostly jangly uptempo rockers. "Junkie Walk" was a huge downer the first time I heard the album, though, 7 great songs in a row and then the mean-spirited gallows humor of a song with the chorus "every junkie has to die" just sounds a little fucked up coming from a band that lost 2 founding members to drug addiction. There's also a weird line about what "feminists claim" about there being no differences between women and men on the closing track "Crying In Public." 

10. Jarv Is - Beyond The Pale
I really adore Pulp's major label albums and Jarvis Cocker's 2 solo albums, really he's only risen in my esteem as one of the best songwriters alive in the years since he last released something. So I was really looking forward to the debut from Cocker's new band Jarv Is, and to be honest I have been slow to get into it. There's some unsurprisingly great, clever, thought provoking lyrics, but the sound of the album, partially recorded live, is a little lacking in energy, and the running order puts my least favorite 2 tracks up front, so I've been listening to it on shuffle and finding it easier to enjoy that way. "Sometimes I Am Pharoah" and "Am I Missing Something" are really good, though, I hope Jarv Is remains an active band instead of becoming a one-off like Cocker's other post-Pulp records. 

The Worst Album of the Month: Oliver Tree - Ugly Is Beautiful
Oliver Tree performs in a uniform that looks like a grown man playing a child in an Adult Swim series set in in the 1980s: unflattering bowl cut, gap teeth, red sunglasses, baggy jeans, and always the same hideous windbreaker. I was moderately confused by his whole schtick, and the contrast between the way he looks and the generic earnest alt-rock of his two radio hits, "Hurt" and "Let Me Down," enough that I was kind of curious to listen to his album and maybe figure out his whole deal. But I don't think there's really anything there, just some bland angsty songs and really obnoxious singing in what sometimes sounds like Tom DeLonge (he recorded a version of "Let Me Down" with Blink-182, so don't be shocked if he becomes part of their next Sublime With Rome-style lineup change). He also raps on a couple songs, which is really bad. I will single out the closing track "I'm Gone" as by far the best song on the album, though. 

12:35 PM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 199: Rick Ross

Wednesday, August 05, 2020







On Thursday, Rick Ross will face 2 Chainz on a Verzuz battle on Instagram. And I'm very partisan here, I'm a much bigger fan of 2 Chainz, but I'll admit he's the underdog here, Rick Ross has a pretty big run of hits to choose from. And I've always kind of preferred some of Ross's less overexposed tracks to his singles. 

Rick Ross deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. White House
2. Blow (featuring Dre)
3. We Shinin'
4. Maybach Music (featuring Jay-Z)
5. Luxury Tax (featuring Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy and Trick Daddy)
6. Face (featuring Trina)
7. Gunplay (featuring Gunplay)
8. Murder Mami (featuring Foxy Brown)
9. I'm Not A Star
10. MC Hammer (featuring Gucci Mane)
11. No. 1 (featuring Trey Songz and Diddy)
12. Maybach Music III (featuring T.I., Jadakiss and Erykah Badu)
13. Sixteen (featuring Andre 3000)
14. Amsterdam
15. Supreme
16. Trap Luv (featuring Yo Gotti)
17. One Of Us (featuring Nas)
18. Lamborghini Doors (featuring Meek Mill and Anthony Hamilton)
19. Turnpike Ike

Tracks 1 and 2 from Port Of Miami (2006)
Tracks 3, 4 and 5 from Trilla (2008)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Deeper Than Rap (2009)
Tracks 9, 10, 11 and 12 from Teflon Don (2010)
Tracks 13 and 14 from God Forgives, I Don't (2012)
Track 15 from Mastermind (2014)
Track 16 from Hood Billionaire (2014)
Track 17 from Black Market (2015)
Track 18 from Rather You Than Me (2017)
Track 19 from Port Of Miami 2 (2019)

I remember being a big detractor of Rick Ross in his early years -- in fact arguing about Rick Ross online in the late 2000s is what got me in the Oxford English Dictionary! He's definitely improved a lot since Port Of Miami, but I still think "Blow" is one of my favorite Ross songs, it got a few radio spins at the time but I was disappointed when "Push It" got chosen as the next single instead. I felt the same way about "I'm Not A Star," which wasn't a hit until it was remixed as Lil Wayne's "John," and "MC Hammer," the other Lex Luger track on Teflon Don that got overshadowed by "B.M.F." 

I feel like rap fans slightly younger than me have come to overrate Rick Ross's discography -- the other day someone on Twitter said he has a better catalog than Nas, which, come on, no -- but it's undeniable that he has a good ear for beats. He's gotten top shelf beats from J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League ("Luxury Tax," "Sixteen," and every "Maybach Music"), Bink! ("We Shinin'"), Drumma Boy ("Face"), DJ Toomp ("White House"), Danja ("No. 1"), Cardiak ("Amsterdam"), Scott Storch ("Supreme"), Cool & Dre ("Blow"), and Jake One ("Turnpike Ike"). 

While I sometimes find the constant red carpet parade of big name features (Jay-Z on 6 of his first 7 albums) kind of boring, Rick Ross does strike me as a real music lover who can stretch out and make good songs with less expected collaborators like Andre 3000 and Erykah Badu. And there are certain guys that Ross consistently makes good songs with like Meek Mill and Gunplay, particularly the classic song title "Gunplay" featuring Gunplay. My favorite album Ross had a heavy hand in was probably all the verses he wrote on Diddy-Dirty Money's Last Train To Paris, so I like "No. 1" with Diddy, which sounds like it could have been on that album. 

12:38 PM

TV Diary

Tuesday, August 04, 2020







a) "Brave New World" 
I was amused that NBC's tagline for its new streaming service Peacock is "great entertainment is finally free," considering that NBC has been broadcasting free of charge for like 80 years before subscription streaming became the trendy new thing. But since Peacock is free with my cable plan, unlike Disney+ or Apple+ or CBS All Access, I've been watching their their initial slate of scripted shows, all of which are UK-based shows co-produced with British networks. I've never read Brave New World, but my wife has, so she was at least able to give me an idea of where they stuck to the source material and where they took liberties. It's interesting to see an adaptation of one of the earlier dystopian novels and how different it is from modern visions of dystopias -- I think the show kind of struggles to make Aldous Huxley's belief that a future where everyone's polygamous and on mood-lifting drugs would be so awful resonate with modern sensibilities . I mean, certainly, the story gets darker as it goes on, but a show where Jessica Brown Findlay and Kylie Bunbury regularly get glammed up and go to orgies doesn't seem that scary to me, honestly.

b) "The Capture" 
"The Capture," a Peacock show that aired in the UK on BBC One last year, is kind of an interesting surveillance state thriller, where a camera at a bus stop catches a guy committing a crime that he doesn't remember committing and it sets off this whole crazy sequence of events. I haven't finished it yet so I don't know if the story is resolved well yet, but I'm glad they renewed it for a second season, presumably with Holliday Grainger's character working a different case. 

c) "Intelligence" 
Another Peacock show that already aired in the UK a few months ago, "Intelligence" is a comedy where David Schwimmer plays the brash ugly American sent from the NSA to work with British agents at the GCHQ. Even though "Friends" in general and especially Ross Geller have aged really poorly for me, I remember finding it odd that Schwimmer kept relatively quiet in the decade after the show went off the air, while Aniston was doing movies and everyone else starred in multiple series. And his memorable one-off appearance on "30 Rock" made me think maybe he had some more good comedic roles in him, and I was disappointed when he finally did a couple drama series in 2016. So "Intelligence" is kind of the comedy vehicle I at once point hoped to see for him, and it's not bad, the dialogue is at times sharp, but the humor is a little broad and predictable. 

d) "Maxxx" 
In this British comedy on Hulu, O-T Fagbenle plays a washed up former boy band star, and Chris Meloni plays the exec helping him try to make a comeback. It's all a pretty standard broad and silly showbiz satire, but I'm enjoying it, Fagbenle is hilarious. 

This British series about 16-year-old whose mother is mentally ill is good, some nice little comedic moments amidst a pretty dark story, great lead performance from Gabrielle Creevy. 

Another British show about teenagers, but a lighter more stylized one where a group of girls band together to get revenge on bullies. I feel like this show could either go uphill or way downhill from the promising first episode. 

g) "Cursed" 
Katherine Langford in "13 Reasons Why" was probably one of the best performances I've seen in a series that I absolutely abhorred in the last few years, so I'm glad she's the lead of a totally different Netflix series now. "Cursed" is kind of the Arthurian legend told from the perspective of the Lady of the Lake, which is a great idea on paper, but we've found the execution a little underwhelming. We've taken to referring to the show as "moistened bint" or "watery tart." 

Given that ABC's slate of family sitcoms has actually been pretty good the last few years, it's painful just how rote and cliched this one is, I feel embarrassed for Jane Curtin and Guillermo Diaz for being a part of this. And they try to make the humor a little more barbed and edgy here and there, which just kind of makes it worse, especially in the first episode, which partly centers around a young child going to the hospital with a prolapsed rectum. 

My 10-year-old son has developed kind of an impressive ear for recognizing voice actors across different cartoons and movies. And when I put on this new anime-style Transformers series on Netflix for the kids, it took him about 5 seconds of Optimus Prime dialogue for him to declare his disappointment that they didn't get "the real Optimus," and he was right, this is one of the few times someone besides Peter Cullen has voiced Optimus Prime since the '80s. I like the animation style, it's probably one of the better recent Transformers series, but the absence of Cullen and Frank Welker definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. 

This Mexican show on Netflix is interesting, it's kind of a tawdry crime thriller but cleverly written with a lot of meta stuff with characters who are obsessed with true crime. 

This Brazilian show on Netflix had the fortuitous timing, I suppose, of coming out when a horror story about teenagers spreading a fatal disease amongst each other is very relevant. But the mystery disease is like super herpes, someone will catch it from kissing, immediately getting marks on their face, and then die. The tone of the show is a little weird and light but it's a pretty scary depressing premise. 

I thought the most memorable thing about this Polish crime drama is that it's dubbed in English but Netflix decided to subtitle the word "police" every single time "policja" appears on a car or uniform, dozens of times in the first episode sometimes every few seconds. It was really, really annoying. 
 
m) "The Twelve"  
This Belgian series about a murder trial has a pretty novel structure, where each episode is from the perspective of a different juror. I haven't watched enough to see how it holds up over the whole season, but the first episode was good. 

I have very mixed feelings about this show, it kind of feels like it uses so many familiar tropes, about teams of superheroes and coming-of-age stories and time travel, that it's constantly reminding me of other things. But it also feels like they're going for broke with some splashy big moments, and the way the first season ended with the apparent end of the world and the second season kicked off with everyone getting sent back to the early '60s has been pretty entertaining.

I've liked this show more and more as it goes along, I think simply because it takes the story so much further down the road than the movie went. And almost every episode has a big action scene where Hanna just destroys someone or a whole team of people in combat and it never stops being entertaining. I wish there were more of those deadpan funny moments where Marissa and Hanna are out in public and have to blend in and start bickering and acting like a mother and daughter. 

"The Chi" didn't entirely gel in its first two seasons, and then between seasons a bunch of crazy stories came out about Jason Mitchell, who played the lead character Brandon, and they had to fire the star that creator Lena Waithe had hailed as 'the black Tom Hanks.' So season 3 is kind of a light reboot, with Emmett (Jacob Latimore) carrying on Brandon's catering business and hiring new chef Dom (who I didn't realize was La La Anthony for several episodes, she's a better actor than I realized). And it more or less works, they have good chemistry. Waithe has also finally swooped in with her own recurring role, although she's only had maybe 3 minutes of screentime so far in 7 episodes, which is absolutely fine since she hasn't learned to act any more than she could on "Masters of None." 

The big 4 broadcast networks have fully committed to filling their summer schedules with game shows in the last few years, mostly reviving shows that have been around for decades. But I will give ABC credit for slipping this odd little meta game show where Adam Scott is the host, and executive producer Ryan Reynolds keeps popping up as a disembodied voice to comment on the show or interject weird little asides. It still functions as a real game show, there's just a lot of entertaining silliness and fourth wall breaking along the way. If you've seen the Deadpool movies you already know whether you enjoy or hate the Ryan Reynolds brand of snarky humor, I find it moderately amusing. 

This Showtime docuseries is about a pretty crazy case in which a Texas high school football hero was convicted of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old, spent a couple years in prison, and was then exonerated when it turned out the evidence was thin and it seems very likely that the kid's friend who looked eerily like him was really responsible. It's interesting because even though I came out at the end believing he was probably innocent, I still really disliked him and most of the people who campaigned for his case to be overturned, maybe it's just the whole weird Texas high school football culture and how cultlike the activist movement on his behalf was. 

I was a little apprehensive about Netflix doing a show about the relationships and dating lives of people on the autism spectrum. But this was really well done, at least what I've watched so far, really charming and empathetic and shows a range of people with different experiences, some of them incredibly sweet and funny and some of them having a little further to go to have some luck in dating. 

This show has been pretty fun, they've had a nice cross section of different famous show business geeks taking sides in different debates about sci-fi and fantasy and horror, sometimes it all feels a little too structured and scripted, but it works. 

Networks have been kind of casting about for different ways to generate new programming with celebrities that are stuck at home in quarantine. And this TBS show, a bracket competition where comedians compete to make the funniest video shorts, seems like a decent idea on the surface, especially since the "SNL" 'at home' episodes turned out surprisingly good for the most part. But most of the material on here has been pretty dire, the scripted Jason Sudeikis sportscaster-style host segments are often the best part of the show. 

This show has already been around in the UK for a couple years (as "Celebrity Call Centre," natch), but it obviously was a useful idea to pick up right now as, again, networks want to keep churning out content with celebs at home. This show is pretty terrible, though, there were 5 alleged celebrities in the episode I watched but I had to google to figure out who 4 of them were, and executive producer Nick Cannon kind of imploded his career within days of it premiering. 

When I was a kid I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I was interested to watch this show on Discovery. But it's all about how searching for dinosaur fossils out west in places like Wyoming and Montana has become big business, and all these ranchers and non-scientists are super competitive about it now, and the show treats it like "Storage Wars" or something, it's lame. 

This Travel Channel show is about the lore of different regions, hauntings and paranormal activities, they go to Bulgaria and talk about vampire legends, and go to Haiti and talk about voodoo and zombies, but it's all pretty well researched and not too sensationalized, good show. 

A History Channel miniseries about the last days of WWII and the way the Allied nations kind of jockeyed for power amongst each other in the immediate aftermath, I'm not a big history buff but what I watched seemed pretty interesting. 

My wife is a big history buff who knows a lot about European royalty, so this PBS show was fun to watch with her running commentary and her occasional surprise at something she didn't know. Lucy Worsley is a fun host, she kind of manages to make little-known historical tidbits feel like tawdry celebrity gossip, which I suppose it is in a sense. 

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